Teaching the Holocaust and other Genocides

Bernhard Hartung

Dr. Bernhard Hartung (1904-1993) was a German physician during the Holocaust. According to his autobiography and letters written on his behalf during the denazification period, he actively protested the treatment of prisoners and hospital patients at each of his assigned places of employment. The Nazi authorities transferred him six times in eight years to silence him. This case study gives students an opportunity to explore Dr. Hartung's work and efforts to speak up against the inhumane treatment of prisoners and those deemed "incurable" by Nazi law. The information on this page comes from his autobiography.

Bernhard Hartung, „Durch Licht und Finsternis – Ein Arzt erzählt sein Leben“ (Through Light and Darkness - A Doctor tells his Life Story), Vechta 1986.

Bernhard Hartung

Early Life and Career through 1933

Born in 1904, Dr. Bernhard Hartung, the oldest of three children, grew up with his two younger sisters in a conservative Catholic family of restaurant owners in Bremerhaven, a port city on the North Sea. After a strong humanistic-idealistic upbringing and a Roman Catholic education, he studied medicine at Würzburg, Hamburg, Vienna, and Freiburg universities, including clinical training at the Bremerhaven, Bielefeld, and Herdern hospitals.

On December 28, 1928, while still a student in Freiburg, he married Anneliese, and on July 4, 1929, she gave birth to their first daughter, Ilse. Bernhard finished his university studies in the spring of 1930, and in August 1931, their second daughter, Sigrid was born, and that fall he started his required one-year medical internship.

Bernhard then applied for a position as an assistant doctor at the hospital in Marienwerder (nowadays Kwidzyn, Poland) and started the new position July 1, 1931. Although the salary was not great, he could at least support his family. In December 1931, their third child, a son named Christoph, was born. In 1932, as Bernhard said, “...not only because of my early interest in psychiatry, no, to be clear, also to secure and consolidate the family's existence, I now applied for a position as a hospital doctor with a civil servant's salary at the East Prussian ‘sanatorium and nursing home’ in Kortau near Allenstein“ (nowadays Kortowo, near Olsztyn, Poland). He liked the position; the colleagues seemed nice; the institution was progressive, and it provided his family a nice company apartment.

Bernhard may have been the only Catholic among his colleagues, but he did not hide his views.

The Kölnische Volkszeitung [a newspaper from Cologne] was on my desk in the conference room every day, not as a provocation to my older Protestant and German nationalist colleagues, but to show my political colors. To 'show my colors', I also occasionally picked up the Germania, the newspaper of the [Catholic] Center Party. With the political developments in the Reich and in the Reich capital Berlin now [1932] 'becoming more and more recognizably threatening', this seemed to me to be a necessary duty to inform myself.

With Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933 the situation changed, and pages from Der Stürmer, an antisemitic Nazi propaganda weekly newspaper, and from the Schwarzes Corps, the newspaper of the SS, appeared on the bulletin board in the hospital. One day the director of the hospital wore an SA-brown shirt even though Bernhard had known him to be a Communist.

Now the former red director sang the praises of the new era, while the older colleagues held back their statements and opinions, the younger ones followed the bad example.

During the spring of 1933, not only were the civil servants, labor unions, Catholic associations, and other institutions of society restructured and renamed, but also the doctors’ association. It became the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Ärztebund (National Socialist German Doctors' Association). Nevertheless, in March 1933 Bernhard authored an article that the local newspaper published with the headline “Zentrum und Katholizismus” (Center Party and Catholicism). In this article, he emphasized “the absolute equation of patriotic spirit and the political stance of the Centre Party.” He then applied to become a member of the Zentrum, the Catholic party of Germany.

Therefore, when the alleged 'self-dissolution' of the party was announced on July 5, this shameful coercive measure infuriated me so much that I spontaneously declared in front of witnesses that even if active resistance were no longer possible, passive resistance could still be offered.

These words caused him trouble. The director of the hospital suspended him from his employment duties and prohibited him from entering the hospital. Furthermore, he was “expelled from the civil servants' association ... for disparaging the NSDAP….” As Bernhard remembers,

Today I no longer remember whether I added further indignant remarks to the above-quoted statement of July 5, 1933, which could have justified a 'disparagement' of the party, I only know that this message hit me like a shock and weighed heavily on me mentally, because after all I had to fear for my family. ... In this situation, I sought protection and help from the current district president, Dr. Büttner, with whom I was acquainted as a Cartellbruder [a person who was part of the same student fraternity]. I soon heard that he had succeeded in preventing the Gestapo, the secret state police ... from taking me into protective custody.

Rather than risk additional measures by the authorities, he volunteered to take part in a three week paramilitary education for civilians in order to counter the acknowledgment of Nationaler Unzuverlässigkeit [national unreliability].

A brief time later, the authorities transferred him to a mental institution in Rastenburg (nowadays Ketrzyn, Poland) and then again to the small town of Tapiau (nowadays Gwardeisk, Poland). His new colleagues were all older, and Bernhard had the impression that he still had to “reckon with constant surveillance and spying.” At this point, he wanted to escape the harsh political situation in East Prussia, so he sent several letters of application to psychiatric clinics in the western Reich, hoping that life there would perhaps be a bit freer and less dangerous. Quite unexpectedly he received a request from the local Tapiau SS-division to examine young SS-applicants. Bernhard agreed “because I saw this as an opportunity to refute the accusation of 'national unreliability' again.“

Front row from left to right: Hildegard (Hilla, Bernhard's wife), Agnete (the youngest, the 7th), Bernhard, Sigrid, the nun (second oldest), Gabriele (Gabi, the 6th), Omi.
Back row from left to right: Christoph (the 3rd), Roswitha (the 5th), Ilse (the oldest, the 1st), Michael (the 4th), and Bernhard's sister Elisabeth (Aunt Lisa, the older of his two younger sisters)

1934-1939

On April 1, 1934, he began another position at the Ellen sanatorium and nursing home in his hometown of Bremen, where he soon realized that the political situation had also changed. A few days after he started working, the director, who was wearing a golden party patch, asked him if he was a party member. “After I said no, he advised me to join them now.” He did not want to join; Bernhard had different political beliefs and did not want to give them up, but he knew that he had to be extremely careful. Luckily, just two weeks after the start of the job in Bremen,

I received an offer of a doctor's post at the Westphalian provincial hospital St. Johannesstift in Niedermarsberg, in the beautiful and Catholic Sauerland region. I grabbed this lifeline without hesitation and gave up my “guest” appearance in Bremen after 20 days.

From May 1, 1934, onwards, Bernhard worked at St. Johannes-Stift in Niedermarsberg as the deputy head doctor. They provided him with a nice and modern company apartment, opposite the main building. He moved his wife and children, who had remained in Taipiau, and hoped that “that National Socialism was at least still Catholic-diluted, and not as aggressive as elsewhere in the Fatherland.” Further, he hoped that the Nazi authorities, who had observed him in East Prussia would lose track of him. In the beginning, everything seemed fine; he made new contacts and became friends with the Catholic priest at the sanitorium, and with the local pharmacist, who was the head of the Marsberg Catholic Academics' Association, and his wife. Bernhard became a member of the Association, too. He also got to know the only Jewish doctor in town, who was forced to leave the country and emigrated to the United States. His personal life was shattered when only three months after he had settled his family, his wife Anneliese died giving birth to their fourth child, who also died a few days later. Bernhard, now a widower, supported by his sister and the nuns of the institution continued to live and work in Marsberg with his children.

Sometime later, the exact date is not known, he met Hilla Reichardt, the sister of one of the patients at the sanatorium, who regularly came to visit. Eventually they got to know each other better, fell in love, and married in May 1936.

In the meantime, in January 1936, the authorities forcibly transferred Bernhard, this time to the Sanatorium and Nursing Home Lengerich in North-Rhine-Westphalia. This happened again most likely because of his Catholic, conservative political views, which he still expressed, and which did not fit with the Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, according to Bernhard, there was no explicit incident or reason he knew of, for the transfer.

They put him under surveillance in Lengerich because in March 1937, he had spoken out against the nationalization of a Catholic school, had attended several Catholic pilgrimages, and went regularly to Sunday services in the local church. So, one day he was confronted with the accusation, “...that my greater love obviously belonged to the Catholic Church, not to the state today …” As a result, in April 1938, he was transferred again, but this time surprisingly with a promotion:

In the interests of the public service, you will be transferred to the Eickelborn Sanatorium on May 1 of this year. Your appointment as a senior physician with a lifetime appointment as a civil servant is planned for the same date.

Bernhard wrote in his autobiography about this transfer:

I am convinced that they wanted to place me into a new and, as it turned out, far more unpleasant environment. They worked with carrots and sticks! ... This 'village' of Eickelborn ... could only be seen as a place of isolation from my point of view, in the sense: 'The guy must be able to be brought down’ ... .

Among his colleagues in Eickelborn was another senior physician, who turned out to be the local NSDAP party leader. So, now he was under even closer surveillance than before.

Therefore, he began to think more about how he could escape the surveillance of his Nazi colleagues and the Gestapo. He wanted to end his work in the psychiatric system, as the Nazis had passed the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” which justified forced sterilization; they had also issued various “Hunger Decrees” in the previous years regarding new ways of dealing with physically, mentally and psychologically impaired people, which Bernhard did not want to support. As early as January 1934, he asked Maximilian Kaller, the Bishop of Ermland in East Prussia (nowadays partly Polish and partly Russian), where he was living during that time,

...what a Catholic doctor's position should be on the forced sterilization of ‘hereditarily diseased’ people.” In Bernhard’s opinion, this was morally indefensible, and so he began even before Hitler's ‘Euthanasia’-Authorization of 1939 to look for a new job: “... [I] knew, however, that I could be forced into intolerable situations if I remained in the psychiatric ward of the ‘Third Reich’.

The question became where he could go without losing his status as a civil servant, which provided him with both a steady income and a job viewed as indispensable to avoid military draft. Because of these concerns, Bernhard applied for a position as a doctor in a regular prison in the city of Celle in Lower Saxony; they hired him. Bernhard thought “… to go into the lion's den, if he needs you, he will not eat you. [and] Maybe I could do something for the prisoners, especially political ones, that another doctor would not do.”

By December 1, 1938, he started his work; he liked his new job and living in Celle:

...the construction of the detention center … did not make an oppressive impression, nor did my workroom in the infirmary, even though it was primitively furnished. The infirmary was bright, sunny, and reasonably well equipped, although I recognized the need for modernization.

The director was a nice person; he did not ask about Bernhard’s political opinion, and he did not interfere in Bernhard’s work as a doctor. Bernhard and his wife made new contacts, found like-minded friends and for the first time in a prolonged period, he felt relaxed and enjoyed life again.

In March 1939, he received a conscription order but was able to avoid the draft because he found a civilian medical examiner who classified him as only partially fit for military service and because he was the only doctor at the Celle prison. As a result, the Nazis classified him as “indispensable,” a status he maintained throughout the entire Second World War.

That summer, this same doctor asked Bernhard if he could help with the examination of SA-applicants and thus relieve him of some work. Bernhard didn't want to refuse this request, and he examined a number of them, seeking “...to avoid being suspected of ‘political unreliability’ again.” He also feared renewed repression, interrogations, transfers, etc., as he had in the past if he would refuse the job. For this reason, he also agreed to be the SA accompanying doctor for the Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg on September 11, 1939.

But that meant joining the SA. I now found myself in a difficult dilemma. Refusing could have had the consequences I feared. Therefore, I declared my entry with the Reservatio Mentalis [mental restraint], which was in line with my previous attitude and rejection of the regime.

In the end the party congress did not happen because World War II had begun; so, he did not have to go.

Late 1939-1944

With the start of WWII, authorities sent Bernhard’s colleagues to the eastern front, and he feared the same could happen to him, even though he was officially “indispensable.” So, in addition to his work at the prison, he picked up other jobs such as working as company doctor for different local businesses.

But at the end of 1939, the situation at the prison changed because a new director who was a loyal Nazi arrived. In addition, in January 1940 the block leader came to Bernhard’s house with an application form for him to become a Nazi party member. This created a tricky situation; on one hand, he did not want to join the party, but on the other hand, if he refused, he and his family would suffer. So, after a couple of days he signed the application. He could now counter the repeated accusation of political unreliability by showing his party membership.

When Bernhard started his work at the Celle prison, the food supply for the prisoners was still quite good, and even after the beginning of the Second World War the situation was still acceptable.

The prisoners' diet in 1939/40 was still considered adequate. Dietary food and food bonuses were also available on medical request. They were not yet cynically refused. - The same applied to the work and satellite detachments in the vast moorland area of Lower Saxony, in Mulmshorn, in Hänigsen, in Lührsbockel and in Großenhain and other smaller satellite work sites. These commandos were under the authority of the judicial administration, the Attorney General, while several camps in Emsland were converted into concentration camps.... The prisoners in these camps were subjected to 'special treatment' that would only come later in the judicially administered labor camps.

But, by 1941, the situation had worsened.

As was generally the case, food became increasingly scarce for the prisoners. - I therefore repeatedly pointed out their poor nutritional status in the face of the high workload required. - This made my relationship with the prison director ... increasingly tense. - He had long since realized that I was using my party membership as a cover without being able to prove it. My petitions 'through the chain of command' to the Attorney General ... were a nuisance to him.

Bernhard repeatedly wrote letters to the Attorney General and to other offices of the judicial administration.

[I used] … deliberately my (blackmailed) party membership as a protective shield, but also observed and adhered to the utmost limits, ...

He demanded not only better food supply, but also better medical equipment and medicine, and in addition applied that prisoners he found not fit for work were not sent into work details. In addition, he pointed out that the prisoners, especially those placed in the nearby work camps, were not only suffering from malnutrition, but also faced heavy physical abuse by guards and other staff members and he also reported about an increase in cases of unexpected death without pre-existing conditions.

His petitions and submissions were partly successful, leading sometimes to an increase in food rations or better medical treatment.

With this and the previous petitions to the Attorney General, I had brought a criminal case against the prison officers and auxiliary officers who had been guilty of mistreating or killing prisoners.

These actions were, of course, not well received by the new director of the prison.

My submissions to the Attorney General reinforced Mr. Flöther's [the director of the Celle prison] aversion. After I had brought a criminal case against officers of the Mulmshorn satellite camp for mistreatment of prisoners, he said very angrily: 'I suppose you are intent on eliminating officers?' When I, on an official trip to a satellite camp - in different motor vehicles, of course -arranged for the weights of some prisoners to be checked in his presence, he said: ‘Do you have any other wishes, demands or complaints?’ The weights had been falsified for some time.

In September 1942, Bernhard was called into the office of the First Public Prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court and told that there were plans to transfer him to a detention center in Rawitsch (nowadays Rawicz, Poland) in the occupied eastern territories, but he avoided the transfer for a time and continued his work. But, in the end, because of his continuous ‘trouble making,’ the authorities forcibly transferred him to Schieratz (nowadays Schieradz, Poland) for a three-and-a-half-month work assignment. The director of the prison, Mr. Flöther played a role behind the scenes, as he had signed one of the decrees about his transfer to the East.

On January 15, 1944, Bernhard started his new position at the Schieratz prison camp with about 3500 inmates and attached satellite camps. On January 16, he made a note “’The prison holds 14 to 16-year-old long-term ‘criminals’.” The prisoners in Schieratz were Polish and many of them, according to Bernhard, were convicted of minor offenses, such as illegal distilling or drunkenness. Their sentences could be up to six months. Two days after his arrival, Bernhard had to go on an inspection trip to the Selow and Herbetow satellite camps.

With a total number of 1000 Poles, two hundred prisoners were held in a dormitory with three wooden bunks built on top of each other at about 40 cm from each other. On another inspection trip to Burzenin, I found the same conditions as on the previous day.

A few days later he discovered,

...that the Polish prisoners had to lie locked in a room on the wooden floor for eight days and nights - this was supposedly done as a preventive measure against typhus and was extended up to 20 days - I immediately wrote to the head of the prison: ‘The inmates of Schieratz Prison must lie on the floor or on wooden planks for eight days and nights. As neither the prison regulations nor hygiene considerations justify such a measure, I request that forty straw sacks be ordered to be made. P.S.: The last arrivals have already spent three nights in what would otherwise be considered a punitive measure. Signature Dr. Hartung

Being completely on his own, he thought that it would be important to get to know some locals as soon as possible and visited the local hospital to connect with the head physician who, as it turned out, had also been forcibly transferred there from Vienna. Then, he went to see the only other German doctor running a private practice in town. According to Bernhard, there was no Polish doctor in town anymore.

Bernhard found that the prisoners' rations were extremely poor.

When I inspected the kitchen and the food prepared for the prisoners, I found that it was a soupy lunch with no nutritional value whatsoever, with hardly any meat fibers visible, but inferior turnips and cabbage. The bread ration was also extremely small and there was only a small amount of fat. In contrast, the catering for officials in the casino was exceptionally good.

Further he saw as one main problem the spread of Tuberculosis in the camp. Besides that, he saw “prisoners with the most severe mistreatment by the Gestapo … and severely weakened prisoners.” Also in his new position he wrote submissions and petitions demanding better food, better medical care, more human treatment, and similar improvements. He justified this with the necessity of maintaining or restoring the prisoners' ability to work, as they would be performing work essential to the war effort. In many cases his efforts were not successful, but he continued.

Bernhard’s time there was supposed to end in April 1944 but was first prolonged for a week and then again. In the end, he could only return to Celle by July 8. He attempted to leave his old position and planned to work as a company doctor in an industrial company. But instead, they ordered him to stand in for the prison doctor at the Brandenburg-Görden prison;

Here I was to experience a very extreme chapter in my career as a prison doctor. … To my surprise and to my severe psychological distress, I received during this second week the ... order ... which obliged me to be present at the execution of the death penalty. … A former garage in the courtyard served as the place of execution. A senior public prosecutor, a senior inspector and ... the Protestant clergyman was present that day. I was assigned a place behind a standing desk on which death certificate forms lay, and the respective procedure began ... with two executioner's assistants leading one of the death row inmates from an anteroom into the guillotine room. … I signed the death certificate of the person concerned more mechanically than consciously, because the pace of the individual procedures was high. The eighteen executions took about 25 minutes. ... This experience was depressing and shattering.

When he returned to Celle, he received an approval on his application for discharge and placed on leave to work in a company important for the war effort. On July 20, 1944, he started working at Rheinmetall-Borsig AG in Unterlüss, about 30 km away from Celle as a company doctor. There he was responsible for the forced laborers from Poland and Ukraine, but later also Italian prisoners of war, who also had to work there.

1945-1993

Beginning in April 1945, when British planes had already bombed the company area and the surrounding cities, Bernhard left the company job and traveled to Celle to be together with his family. On July 12, British troops entered Celle and on July 15, they liberated the nearby Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Many liberated forced laborers and concentration camp inmates made their way to Celle. They were often weak and sick, and therefore the city had to establish additional temporary hospitals. The city administration and the local doctors’ assembly appointed Bernhard to be director of one. They also asked him to provide medical care at the Hannover prison, and by September, ordered him back to his old position as the doctor of the Celle prison.

During April and May 1945, he had to fill in two questionnaires about his past during the Nazi time as part of the so-called denazification process. He truthfully stated that he had not been a member of the SS but had been a member of the SA and a member of the NSDAP on one of the forms, but somehow checked off that he was not a member of the Nazi party on the other. In an enclosed letter, he explained his background and his anti-Nazi stance. In October, a representative of the British military government questioned his anti-Nazi stance, which is why he felt compelled to explain his background again. He listed witnesses who could confirm his anti-Nazi stance and asked them for letters of confirmation. All of this did not help because his official personnel file included an application letter for the position in Marsberg in which he claimed that he had worked as a doctor for the SS. It was true that he once examined SS-applicants, but he was never employed by the SS nor was a member. He had written this application to increase his chance of getting the job at Marsberg, but now it created doubts about his political views and if he really had not been a Nazi. This led to the decision to dismiss him as a civil servant. He appealed this decision, contacted various authorities, and collected many letters of exoneration. For example, the people in Schieradtz attested that he had always done his best for the Polish prisoners in the camp and tried to improve their lives. Finally, he succeeded, and at the end of June 1946 he received the letter confirming that he remained a civil servant.

At the instigation of the military government, I am informing you that you have been left in office.

Nonetheless, the Military Government did not allow Bernhard to continue working in the Celle prison. As of August 1, 1946, they assigned him to work as doctor in the Westertimke internment camp in Lower Saxony, which was to be set up by the German administration as a training and prison camp. Bernhard himself did not oppose this new job assignment, even if it seemed like a demotion to send him to a small village 120 km northwest of Celle without his family. He saw it as an opportunity “to get into calmer waters for the time being and wait and see” how things would develop. This former labor camp, which was under British management at the time, was used for Germans sentenced by British courts.

Bernhard's wife, Hilla, together with her mother, once again had to look after a family of seven children between one and 17 years old, just as she had done when Bernhard went to Poland and during his time as a company doctor in Unterlüss.

He stayed at the camp until April 1947 when they transferred him again, this time to become the doctor for Hamelin prison. He was back at a position he had in Celle and saw this transfer as a promotion, or as he wrote in his autobiography, “a retrieval of his honor.” In addition, the new job came with a company apartment. Nevertheless, he and his family were not overly optimistic when they moved to Hamelin.

This new move resulted in a number of time-related difficulties for the family and for me. In the years 1946/47, the Germans were now hit by the hunger that the oppressed, 'defeated' peoples had already had to endure in the years before: hundreds of thousands of prisoners and prisoners of war, forced laborers and concentration camp inmates to the point of death. That spring, only people with special connections had enough to eat. The others, including us as newly arrived foreigners, only had cornmeal in the morning, dried vegetables with a little fat and a minimum of meat for lunch and little else for dinner. No merchant made a point of including us in their 'customer list'. There was only malt coffee ... there was no comforting tobacco and heating fuel was in short supply. ... Photographs from this time show haggard children and very thin parents.

This job was not easy, but in a vastly unique way than before. The Hamelin prison was under British management, and the prisoners

....were mainly Poles, forced laborers who had been freed, but had committed crimes, had become robbers, rapists, manslayers, murderers and arsonists in the months after the war. Their mentality was, accordingly, their attitude of hatred towards the German staff was extremely fierce and their highly critical and negative attitude naturally included the prison doctor.

Furthermore, the prison in Hamelin was “the execution site for German war criminals sentenced to death by allied courts.”

The living conditions were harsh, and the work in the prison was not easy, but Bernhard and his wife liked Hamelin and found new friends in a brief time. They would have liked to stay, but Bernhard was forcibly transferred again due to a Polish prisoner’s accusations that he didn’t treat him well. Bernhard and his family moved to Sandbostel on February 1, 1949, living in a former Nazi prisoner of war camp which the British had turned into a Nazi internment camp and an auxiliary prison of the Lower Saxony Administration of Justice.

In the spring of 1951, the authorities assigned Bernhard to temporarily replace a colleague who had fallen ill at the prison in Vechta. This would eventually become a permanent position, and by December 1953, Bernhard moved his family into a spacious apartment. He held this position until his retirement in 1967. During this time, he became the head doctor of all three prisons in Vechta (men's, women’s, and adolescents) and a forensic surveyor, an activity that he had repeatedly conducted since the Nazi era and continued to do for a few more years after his retirement.

He wrote his autobiography Durch Licht und Finsternis – Ein Arzt erzählt sein Leben (Through Light and Darkness - A Doctor tells his Life Story) published in 1985. Dr. Bernhard Hartung died in 1993 at the age of eighty-nine.

Discussion Questions

1. How did Bernhard's conservative upbringing, Catholic beliefs and political stance impact his professional life?

2. What were Bernhard’s reactions to the growing Nazi influence in the medical field, particularly in psychiatric institutions?

3. How did his article “Zentrum und Katholizismus” reflect his political stance, and what were the consequences of its publication?

4. How did Bernhard navigate the increasing political pressures he faced in psychiatric institutions? What were the challenges of balancing his moral convictions with the Nazi regime’s demands?

5. What factors influenced his decision to participate in the examination of SS applicants, and how did this align with his goal of avoiding persecution?

6. How did Bernhard view the policies of the Nazi regime regarding forced sterilization and euthanasia, and what steps did he take to distance himself from these practices?

7. What ethical dilemmas did Bernhard face regarding his membership in Nazi organizations like the SA and NSDAP? Do you think he had a choice as to joining?

8. What were the conditions like for Polish prisoners in Schieratz, and what actions did Bernhard take to improve the conditions of prisoners?

9. How did Bernhard attempt to navigate the dangers of political suspicion while still trying to help prisoners? What were the risks Bernhard faced when advocating for better treatment of prisoners?

10. What does Bernhard’s experience witnessing mass executions in Brandenburg-Görden reveal about the role of prison doctors in the Nazi system?

11. How did Bernhard rebuild his career after the war, and what obstacles did he face?

12. Would you view Bernhard as an Upstander? Why/Why not?

Source

Bernhard Hartung, Durch Licht und Finsternis – Ein Arzt erzählt sein Leben (Through Light and Darkness - A Doctor tells his Life Story), Vechta 1986.