Charité at War ****

As a child growing up in 1950s England I was told that there was no such thing as a good German. Memories of the War were still raw and rowdier boys than myself ran round with wooden sticks pretending they were rifles for shooting Krauts. But as I grew older and read more I realised that of course there were people in Germany who opposed the Nazis, often sacrificing their lives or liberty as a result. On 20 July 1944, Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, the leading figure in a group of conspirators, narrowly missed assassinating Adolf Hitler, triggering terrible retribution. Other dissidents, less brave, kept their heads down and waited for the nightmare to be over. This is the background to the German TV series Charité at War, available on Netflix. The story is based on the reality (with a sizable degree of poetic licence) at the Charité hospital in Berlin during the War, up to the time the Russian forces arrived in May 1945.

The key figure in the series is the esteemed surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who is shown with his wife as being part of a cultivated circle that included von Stauffenberg, as well as the anti-Nazi Hans von Dohnanyi and the (by then deceased) Jewish painter Max Liebermann, who indeed painted Sauerbruch’s portrait in 1932. Sauerbruch in real life did oppose the NS-Euthanasia T4 programme that exterminated handicapped children and other “undesirables”, which features in Charité  at War. But what is not shown in the TV series is that as a member of the Reich Research Council he supported medical “research” on inmates of concentration camps. Nonetheless, after the War the Allies dropped charges against him for lack of evidence. The actor Ulrich Noethen (who incidentally has twice played Heinrich Himmler in other contexts) makes Sauerbruch an essentially sympathetic character, above all motivated by his medical vocation and loyalty to the Hippocratic Oath. Many of the other characters in Charité at War do fall neatly into “good” and “bad” categories, though others are tormented by the moral conflicts and personal safety issues involved in the deteriorating environment and are accordingly far more ambiguous. Dilemmas are heightened when people are revealed to be Jews or homosexuals. Much of the work of the hospital is realistically portrayed and there are occasional snatches of original colour newsreel films of the time to give one a greater feeling of what life in wartime Berlin was actually like.