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On April 23rd 1999 Hilde Steppe died aged 51 years old. Hilde was well known internationally as the first woman who researched the situation of nursing during the Third Reich. Her book on the murder of thousands of mentally handicapped and of psychiatric patients, first published in Germany in 1980, shocked German nurses, especially German nurse teachers. It was an important initiative awakening awareness for our moral responsibility as nurses. `We should accept that nursing has always had a political dimension; and we must discuss our own societal position, reflect it and partake in decisionmaking'. This sentence, from the fifth edition of the book Krankenpflege im Nationalsozialismus (a possible translation of the title would be `Nursing in National-socialist Germany), aptly describes Hilde's personal and professional responsibilities.
Hilde Steppe, bom on October 6th, 1947, trained as a nurse between 1965 and 1968. She...