Series / Charité at War

Charité at War is a 2019 six-part German television miniseries.

It is set in the Real Life Charité hospital in Berlin, from 1943 to 1945, focusing on the drama of the doctors and patients at the hospital. Among the characters are:

• Anni and Artur Waldhausen. Anni is a student at the hospital who is on the verge of getting her doctorate. At the start of the series she's also on the verge of having a baby, being heavily pregnant. Anni supports the Hitler regime in a generally passive way. Her husband is a junior internist at the hospital, having pulled some strings to avoid service in the army.
• Otto Marquardt, Anni's brother. A young med student who served on the Eastern Front and is having difficulties adjusting to civilian life back in Berlin. Different than his sister, he's not blind for the atrocities happening around him, and increasingly less likely to silently condone them.
• Ferdinand Sauerbruch, chief surgeon at Charité, an innovator who has devised new techniques for taking care of the many, many German casualties coming back from the war. Generally anti-Nazi. His wife Margot is his surgical assistant. His son Peter, child of his first marriage, is a Major serving with the army on the Eastern Front.
• Max de Crinis, psychiatrist at Charité. Unlike Sauerbruch he is a true believer in Hitler, supporting both the Nazi regime in general and its evil ideas regarding medicine, such as euthanasia for the disabled.
• Martin Schelling, orderly at the hospital and war veteran with a leg prosthesis. He's constantly at odds with his colleague, Christel, be it because of their conflicting political opinions or because of Martin's friendship with Otto.
• Christel Böhnisch, a pretty blonde nurse at the surgical ward who also happens to be a hardcore Nazi. She's taken a shine to Otto.
• Adolphe Jung, a French medical professor who's conscripted to serve as a doctor for the Germans. The Sauerbruchs strike up a friendship with him, but he obviously yearns for home and peace and is rather openly critical.
• Maria Fritsch, Sauerbruch's secretary, and her boyfriend Fritz Kolbe, whom she regularly helps getting documents he's not supposed to see.
• Käthe, a middle-aged pediatric nurse with a genial, motherly attitude who's friends with the Waldhausens. Also a stickler for Nazi rules.

This series is a sequel to 2017 miniseries Charité, taking place at the same hospital in the 1880s (obviously with a completely different set of characters).

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Tropes:

• Accomplice by Inaction: A major character development for Anni is to recognize this about herself. Many of the Germans we meet in-series aren't exactly Nazis themselves, but they don't do anything and don't say anything when Jews, homosexuals, mentally ill, permanently disabled people and more "undesirables" are systematically sorted out and disappear into the unknown (although even that unknown often is more of a horrible Open Secret). Dissidents like Stauffenberg, Professor Jung, Martin, Otto, and Margot Sauerbruch openly criticize that attitude — even Ferdinand Sauerbruch himself is not innocent of it, as his wife notes. Anni learns to acknowledge her guilt. Artur doesn't, which seals the end of his and Anni's relationship.
• Ambition Is Evil: Artur really, really wants that position as Bessau's successor. So much that he listens to Bessau's advice to get rid of his "genetically inferior" child for the sake of his promotion.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Jung and the Sauerbruchs toast to it, Kolbe and Miss Fritsch are up for dancing when they think Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life was a success — and get bitterly disappointed.
• Armor-Piercing Question / Armor-Piercing Response: Anni becomes pretty good in these once it becomes clear that her baby is a "baggage life" by Nazi standards.
  Anni: And if it were Karin?
  ——
  Artur: Where is she? I'll be made responsible if a child disappears!
  Anni: Oh, yes? So many children disappear.
• Artificial Limbs: Martin lost the lower half of his right leg to a shrapnel in the early years of war. Sauerbruch has fitted him a nice prosthesis; he's barely limping. Also discussed with soldier Lohmann, who has just lost his leg, and Stauffenberg, who delays the fitting of his new hand prosthesis because he has "an important mission to fulfill" before.
• As You Know: The arrival of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's father at the Sauerbruch house gives Peter a chance to give the audience some exposition about who Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi are. Von Dohnanyi soon becomes an important character when he's admitted to Charité.
• The Beard: Discussed Trope between the nurses Käthe and Christel. Christel's Gaydar has been pinging after seeing how much Otto hangs out with Martin. Käthe says there's no reason to care about that: Otto will need a woman for appearances, and she may luck out and get a widow's pension if he's killed in France. She also thinks "lads like that often come around later", which encourages the infatuated Christel to go for it. Otto however is not interested, telling Christel that he intends not to die.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Paul Lohmann, an injured soldier, asks for Pervitin for his pain, aka Crystal Meth. Martin warns him that it's not an analgesic, and soon enough finds Lohmann with an overdose not after an attempt to get high, but after an attempt to kill himself so as not to be executed for "undermining the military force" because he's suspected of having crippled himself, which is exactly what happens to him after that.
  Martin: We should have let him die, Otto. Suicide is still better than being shamefully hanged on a meat hook.
  • Hans von Dohnanyi has made plans like that, too, in case of his arrest as a resistance fighter.
  • It's subtly implied that Martin himself was about to commit suicide in his prison cell.
  • Also a method the Nazis resort to when the war is lost, such as family Goebbels, de Crinis and his wife, and Hitler himself.
• Blonde Republican Sex Kitten: Blonde Nazi sex kitten. Nurse Christel, the pretty young blonde, is an enthusiastic Nazi. Otto has to take her out on a date to stop her from reporting a little boy for randomly picking up an anti-Nazi pamphlet.
• Book Ends: One of the first shots of the series, within the first few seconds, shows a heavily pregnant Anni walking towards the Charité hospital, caressing her belly. The very last shot (except for some period photographies) shows Anni walking away from Charité with her little daughter by her hand.
• Brother–Sister Team: Otto and Anni start out butting heads a lot because Anni is passively and contently system-compliant whereas Otto has long realized what horrors surround them and that a defeat of the Nazis will be for the best. They doubtlessly love each other though and grow to be allies when Anni needs help to protect her daughter and Otto needs help to rescue his lover from the authorities.
• Christmas Episode: The last third of episode 3 is this; Christmas in a Nazi Germany hospital comes with visitors being sneaked in to a patient because he's a dissident and not actually allowed to see his family, with a politically charged song battle (Hitler-ized lyrics sung by the Nazis versus traditional Christian lyrics sung by the dissidents), a Heel Realization, and a forbidden Love Confession.
• Dead Guy on Display: Artur leaves the hospital in the last episode and sees a soldier hanged outside the front gate, with a sign that says "That's how deserters die."
• Defector from Decadence: Otto has rejected Nazi propaganda and methods for a long time in private, but Martin getting arrested is the last straw for him — he deserts from the Wehrmacht and goes into hiding.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Somewhat surprisingly, Nurse Christel gives the hard-boiled Soviet soldier who's taking her out for execution quite a fight.
  • Nurses grow physically strong from their work, so it is somewhat justified.
• Dramatic Drop: Nurse Christel dramatically drops her tray of surgical instruments when Margot bursts into the OR on July 20, 1944, and reports that there has been an attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Otto gets terribly drunk at his sister's belated wedding party and begins to loudly condemn the situation on the front and the horrors he and other soldiers have been through. Artur makes him leave because he's unsettling the other guests, and Martin later finds him crying in the hallway.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When the end is near and a Nazi official declares that the entire medical staff will be armed, violating the Geneva Conventions that demand them to remain neutral, even de Crinis looks appalled.
  • And there is one time when he looks truly, utterly shaken: When Magda Goebbels asks him for cyanide to poison her children.
• Everybody Smokes: Fairly common in this time and setting; with the exception of Anni, Artur, and the nurses Christel and Käthe, we see all named characters smoking sooner or later. Magda Goebbels and Margot Sauerbruch are occasionally using a cigarette holder.
• Evil Mentor: De Crinis for Anni. They're very warm with each other, Anni regards her doctoral advisor's words highly and he obviously keeps her close to the state ideology, and de Crinis goes great lengths to help her dissertation. Anni grows more distant from him after Karin's condition becomes obvious, but she still takes advantage of de Crinis' fondness of her to help Martin.
• Family Versus Career: Initially a source of conflict between Anni and Margot as the latter tries to scare Anni away from her patient Lohmann by noting she's probably more of a candidate for a motherhood award than a dissertation. Contemptuously, Anni replies that Margot is not the rolemodel she'll take — Margot has one daughter who's currently in a boarding school, and doesn't plan on having more whereas Anni wants to quit working in a few years to raise a whole bunch of babies. They get over this when Margot empathizes with Anni's concerns about her baby. Anni winds up raising an only daughter by herself and thus supports herself.
• Faux Affably Evil: De Crinis is usually seen with a big smile on his face, his manners and tone as cordial as can be while he unapologetically threatens people, in one case resorts to physical abuse of a patient, and makes sure that everyone who's not a Nazi conformist will suffer an awful fate. This trait reaches its biggest extents during the scenes in which he taunts Karl Bonhoeffer and Martin, respectively.
  • With Martin in his cell, he calls him "Sauerbruch's show pony", making it obvious he thinks he's only kept around to show off how great Sauerbruch is with his prosthetic, insinuates that his relationship with Otto was clearly seduction on his part and not really wanted on Otto's whom he calls Martin's "catamite", and implies that his death is the best thing for the world at large, all while seeming perfectly pleasant and calm. He even offers Martin a cigarette.
• Foreshadowing: Artur the Nazi doctor gives a lecture to the nurses about Nazi eugenics and how things like euthanasia and forced sterilization are necessary to prevent bad genes from being passed on. Artur is a new father. At the end of the episode Artur and Anni realize that their newborn Karin may have hydrocephalus.
  • In the same episode, Otto talks to Christel and she brings up a relationship between a German actor and a Jewish woman which she disapproves of. Otto asks jokingly: "Can love be a sin?" We soon learn that he's gay and in love with Martin — the upcoming relationship is very much illegal and liable to prosecution in Nazi Germany.
  • Sauerbruch's failure during Karin's brain surgery and him having to ask Jung to stand in for him foreshadows something that's only mentioned in the series' epilogue, but is still tragic: His beginning dementia.
• Gayngst: Of course; there is Paragraph 175, offering homosexuals two alternatives: concentration camp or castration. When Martin was younger, he and his lover were arrested; the latter was sent to a concentration camp, and Martin is under stringent supervision since. When he and Otto fall in love, he's terribly frightened, both for himself and for Otto.
• Good Doc, Bad Doc: A rather unusual political version of this trope. Sauerbruch the good doc is anti-Nazi and tries to avoid handing over soldiers with self-inflicted wounds to the army for court martial, and he firmly protects resistance fighter von Dohnanyi and is disgusted with and horrified of the eugenics programme. De Crinis the bad doc is an evil Nazi who fully supports the entire eugenics ideology and denounces wounded veterans.
• Good Stepmother: Margot Sauerbruch is closer in age to Peter, her husband's son from his first marriage, than to her husband, but instead of issues resulting from that, the two of them obviously have a warm relationship.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Anni doesn't seem like it at first, but she turns out to have a heart of gold indeed. Subverted with Christel, who seems nice enough at first, but is pure evil.
• Happily Married: The Sauerbruchs, and also Hans von Dohnanyi and his wife. Artur and Anni start out as this, but Karin's affliction becomes a major source of conflict.
• Hate Sink: Professor de Crinis is a homophobic, racist, arrogant, system-loyal Nazi and a bully with a disgustingly self-satisfied attitude and no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He defames an injured soldier, gives homosexuals a choice between concentration camp and castration, and generally thinks "substandard" people should be sterilized or, better yet, euthanized.
• Heroic BSoD: A woman who's rescued from a bombed house goes into a stupor when she hears that her son has not been found and is most likely dead. Her state leads to de Crinis having her deported off to get euthanized, but luckily, Anni can snap her out of it before that happens when she finds the boy, alive and well, on the pediatric ward where he'd been brought before the raid.
  • Otto has one when he's ordered back to the front.
• Historical Domain Character: Half of the main characters. Other real life characters appear in supporting roles, like Magda Goebbels, Max Planck, and Claus von Stauffenberg.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Yes, Professor Sauerbruch can yell at his employees and students and belittle them. He can do that. You can't. Especially not when you're a Nazi official.
• I Didn't Mean to Turn You On: When an oblivious Otto helps Martin with his prosthesis, which includes applying ointment to his sore thigh stump, Martin is... well, mildly flustered.
• Informed Attribute: Anni says Karin cries a lot during the air raids, but we see Karin three times in the protection cellar during the raids, twice of which she's sound asleep, and the third time she's awake but perfectly calm. She's indeed a remarkably Cheerful Child, even hidden in the attic during the fall of Berlin, which is kinda loud and frightening.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Lullabies are a recurring theme. What a drunk and depressed Otto bawls out into the nightly streets on his way home from Anni's party is actually one, only Otto inserts new lyrics that refer to his war experience and trauma. At the end of the third episode, Anni sings a sad lullaby to her disabled baby, the lyrics roughly translate to "things we can laugh about carelessly because our own eyes do not see them", marking her Heel Realization regarding her passive support of the Nazi regime and the eugenics programme. Sweetly subverted later on when Otto says that, during the air raids, he just sings lullabies for Karin to calm her.
• Justified Criminal: In the last days of war, both Anni and Martin resort to theft to feed their hidden loved ones — the supply situation has broken down entirely as the city's shot to shreds, and Artur doesn't seem too surprised when he catches Anni in the act, so it seems to have become fairly commonplace.
• Lady Drunk: Magda Goebbels, wife of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. In episode 2, she and Anni share a hospital room, Anni after delivering a daughter, Magda after a miscarriage. Magda drinks heavily from a carafe of wine while in her hospital bed, and talks bitterly about how her husband didn't even care enough about the miscarriage to send her flowers.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Stauffenberg discusses this with Sauerbruch, referring to his planned attempt on Hitler's life. On the one hand, he has sworn an oath on the man, on the other, without Hitler, the entire rotten system of Nazi Germany and the war will come to an end.
  Stauffenberg: One wrong has to be done. That of action, or that of inaction.
• Love Confession: Otto makes one to Martin in the third episode, kicking off a loving but also very star-crossed Secret Relationship.
• Mean Boss: In the first few minutes of the series, Martin warns his colleagues that the boss is in a cranky mood, and soon enough, Professor Sauerbruch is yelling at his assistants and belittling his students, generally presenting as obnoxious and full of himself. In the OR, even his wife becomes a victim of his foul temper. Afterwards, it becomes clear that he's one of the most decent among the hospital's authority figures, A Father to His Men, a Secret-Keeper for people who are persecuted by the regime, and that his wife Margot knows very well how to handle him.
• Medical Drama: A hospital in Berlin During the War, and how the Nazi regime impacted the practice of medicine.
• Meta Casting: Sneaky and season-overlapping, but it's there: Resistance fighter Hans von Dohnanyi's grandson Justus von Dohnanyi is a German actor these days — and he played Robert Koch in the first season of Charité. Is given a Shout-Out in the second episode of this season: When Artur tells Sauerbruch of his tuberculosis vaccine research, Sauerbruch comments he's "on the trails of our great Robert Koch". Koch's tuberculosis project was a major plot point of the first season.
• The Mole: It's implied that Kolbe, the Foreign Ministry guy who is dating Sauerbruch's secretary Miss Fritsch, is a Gestapo spy. It turns out he's actually a spy for the Western allies. Margot agrees to take a secret letter to Switzerland to pass to an Allied agent.
  • Nurse Christel becomes this for de Crinis, denouncing von Dohnanyi to him whose recovery has been kept a secret, and then Martin, simply because she hates him. When the Sauerbruchs catch on to her activities, they don't bother to hide their disdain for Christel.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Professor Sauerbruch shows a very specified and limited version of this when his wife asks him to stay in Switzerland instead of returning home: He wants nothing to do with the Nazis and supports the resistance as much as he can, but hell if he'll let Charité down. Not much about loyalty to his country, more about saving lives as a doctor.
• Never My Fault: Nurse Käthe. She has the gall to say she's glad nothing happened to Karin — after she reported her as a disabled child, knowing that Karin would be euthanized. When Artur angrily points that out, Käthe goes into a rant over how she hasn't made the rules, that she doesn't have a problem with disabled people, and that she has always treated the children well.
  • Subverted with Artur, who very well knows he has blood on his hands and is desperately looking for a way to avoid taking responsibility if he's charged for his participation in the eugenics programme. He claims to be a Jew to get sympathies, and hopes that having a disabled child himself will make people believe he never approved of the euthanasia of disabled people. His attempts to get out of this are successful, but they make Anni lose all respect for him she has left, and they end up divorced.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Otto's lie for Paul Lohmann to save him from prosecution doesn't match Lohmann's own report of how he got his wound; as such, Otto almost gets himself in trouble and gives further reason to doubt Lohmann's honesty.
• Oh, Crap!: Margot Sauerbruch when she realizes that Martin and Otto have been arrested by the department for the persecution of homosexuals, and her statement regarding Otto's non-existent relationship with Christel, despite being truthful, has possibly done more harm than good for them.
• Over-the-Shoulder Carry: Martin when he finds Otto with a bullet wound. With Martin's leg prosthesis and carrying a man his own weight down a ladder and through a half-demolished staircase during the fall of Berlin, it's nothing short of a feat of heroism.
• Plausible Deniability: Anni's (and, by extension, Artur's) compliance largely rests on this — the full extent of the euthanasia programme is too terrible to be lawfully authorized, so of course there's no such thing. Nurse Käthe points out later that, in truth, they all knew to some degree, only nobody ever talked about it. For a long time, not even Professor Sauerbruch can face the truth about the ongoing methodical murders of patients.
  Otto: Anni, wake up! They're gassing the patients there!
  Anni: That's enemy propaganda! Of course they'll take care of a traumatized person.
• Pregnancy Scare: Maria Fritsch has that, confiding in Margot Sauerbruch and insisting that she cannot have a child in the current situation. Luckily, Margot can appease her soon; the pregnancy test was negative.
• Preserve Your Gays: Otto survives his bullet wound.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Briefly alluded to. When Berlin falls, Margot says she'll greet the first Soviet soldier she sees with a kiss; her husband angrily snaps at her to keep away from them, and Professor Jung says they should better lock the young nurses away before the Soviets get into the Charité bunker. Luckily, once they do, nothing of the sort takes place.
• Reading The Enemy's Mail: Jung is not happy that the Nazis are reading his letters to and from home. It's not just enemy's mail, though — Otto has to codify his professions of love to Martin in his letters because he knows the censorship is also in place for soldiers.
• Red Scare: Played with. The Soviets are seen as the main menace, all of Berlin fears them when they march in, and the unit that occupies the Charité bunker is not a pleasant bunch. That has less to do with communism though and more with them being in a deplorable state — dirty, half-starved and brutish from the war, several of them drunk beyond inhibitions after the victory (one shoots wildly into the group of unarmed medics), and their commanding officer is obviously angry at their behavior and tries to keep them under control so he can begin negotiations with the doctors for medical aid for their wounded. Ultimately, the situation can be saved, and Charité is delivered to the occupiers without much resistance.
• Screaming Birth: Anni screams on top of her lungs when she gives birth to Karin — justified since she has a partial placenta praevia that hinders Karin from going into the birth canal smoothly, and the responsible doctor exerts massive pressure on her womb to help it out.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Famous!: Sauerbruch exploits this for all it is worth, though not for his his ego but to protect people, especially dissidents, from the Nazis. He's not happy to find his influence dwindling.
  Sauerbruch: They won't go near the son of the great Sauerbruch.
  Margot: They're already going near the son of the great Max Planck.
• Screw the War, We're Partying: During an air raid in Berlin, Hans von Dohnanyi and his wife turn on the radio and dance, ground-shaking noise and flickering lights be damned. They have gotten so used to the permanent bombings that they might as well share some quality time as a couple while waiting out whether or not they have to die that night.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Otto isn't the same after coming back from the war. He drinks a lot, and also clearly resents his brother-in-law for avoiding service.
• Shout-Out: Christel tries and fails to get Otto to come to see Münchhausen with her.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Anni, the Nazi conformist who's collected, careful, and thinks before she acts, and Otto, the impulsive dissident who'll risk himself to save someone else and is prone to criticizing the regime way too loudly when he's upset.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Maria Fritsch and Fritz Kolbe act as this to cover up for Kolbe's spy work and Miss Fritsch helping him. They're even bigger dorks when they actually are all lovey-dovey over each other.
• The Social Darwinist: A major theme, as the medical profession is perverted to kill the disabled in accordance with Social Darwinist theory. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime are a bunch of Social Darwinists. Everyone is aware that the regime kills the disabled and the mentally ill, although Sauerbruch believes that such activities have been stopped. Artur is perfectly fine with testing a tuberculosis vaccine on mentally handicapped children. A mother is distressingly okay with sending her Down Syndrome daughter to a Nazi institution, even after Anni hints as broadly as she can that the girl may not come back alive.
• Stepford Smiler: Otto acts as a carefree, sunny young man when he returns home from the front. He's actually miserable and broken, and his pretense doesn't fool Martin or Anni.
• Stepford Snarker: Martin has a background similar to Otto's, but he copes with sarcastic remarks.
• Stock Footage: On occasion scenes are linked with period footage of Berlin during the war.
• Together in Death: In the last episode, when de Crinis and his wife are stopped by a Soviet checkpoint, they kill themselves. De Crinis' wife takes a cyanide capsule, and he holds her hand for a moment while she spasms, until he takes one too.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Artur started out as a fairly nice, if a bit snooty passive-Nazi who cared about his patients on the pediatric ward, had a very affectionate relationship with his wife and did all he could to help his baby. Later, he signs Karin off for deportation and lies to Anni about it, and gets pissy when he finds out that she protected her daughter, because what will people say about their "genetic inferiority". He snaps back somewhat during the last episode, saving lives while Berlin falls, accepting Anni's decision regarding Karin, and protecting a Jewish father and son from being found out, but not enough to save his marriage.
• Trust Password: In Switzerland, Margot recognizes the Allied spy by the brand of cigarettes he carries.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Triples as Age-Gap Romance and Tiny Guy, Huge Girl — Margot Sauerbruch is a great deal younger than her husband, several inches taller (even in flat shoes), and a very attractive woman whereas he is average-looking at best and already going bald. She couldn't care less.
• Undying Loyalty: Both Sauerbruch's secretary Miss Fritsch and his driver. The former insists on staying with her bosses during the fall of Berlin instead of trying to escape with her lover, the latter brings Sauerbruch crucial information, even at that time, and asks that he and Margot join him to hide in their house instead of staying in the city.
• Villainous Breakdown: The Nazis, most prominently de Crinis and Nurse Christel, slip into this once Germany's defeat becomes increasingly clear.
• War Is Hell: The recurring silent horror of waiting out the air raids and the victims of those were never pretty, but the trope is played up in the last episode for all it is worth.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Otto snaps at his sister because of how she handled the Lohmann case; in trying to save her brother from being charged for giving a false testimony, she sent Lohmann himself to his doom. Their ensuing argument is interrupted by Anni going into labor — and starting to bleed.
  • Sauerbruch gives Professor Jung what for when the Soviet soldiers have taken the hospital and Jung thinks the first thing he must do is make sure to be recognized as a French war prisoner and let go — while they have people dying on the surgical table. Luckily, Sauerbruch does snap him out of it.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: The entire series plays in Berlin, but de Crinis speaks with a distinctly Austrian accent; only Professor Sauerbruch, Martin and Nurse Käthe have a Berlin accent, and Anni, while she and Otto usually speak High German, slips into a Bavarian dialect when she talks to her (also Bavarian) mother on the phone. Professor Jung, from Alsace, has a subtle French accent.
• What You Are in the Dark: There's a moment when Anni is alone with Karin after the latter's permanent disability has become clear, and Anni considers a Mercy Kill — after all, Karin is now in real danger to end up as a test subject or victim of euthanasia in the system. For a moment it looks like she would suffocate her, but then Anni starts crying and gently cradles her baby, deciding to fight tooth and nail for her instead.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: In the series' epilogue, Anni narrates how life went on for her and Karin, Artur, Otto and Martin, Jung, the Sauerbruchs, Kolbe and Miss Fritsch, and the Charité hospital.
• Woman Scorned: Nurse Christel was never the most pleasant person to be around (at least if you didn't fit her idea of a good German and servant of your country), but after Otto declines her quasi-proposal, she becomes outright nasty. Having caught on to Martin and Otto, she denounces Martin as a "seducer" to the department for the persecution of homosexuals.
• Would Hit a Girl: Martin claws at Christel's throat and threatens to strangle her if she says one more wrong word. Considering what she has done to him, she definitely had it coming.
  • Although there's also a subversion later on: When Christel actually is beaten up, they make sure that it's a female Soviet soldier with whom she's fighting.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Artur initially protests against his boss Bessau sending an ill, blind child away to a place where she can't be treated and is thus sentenced to death, but he still tests his tuberculosis vaccine on disabled children.
  • A mother is willing to send her own daughter to almost certain death because the kid has Down Syndrome.
  • Both Professor Bessau and Nurse Käthe think it'll be for the best if little Karin will be "sorted out" and the Waldhausens just make new, healthy children.
  • Subverted with Anni, who passively went along with the Nazi horrors for long, but snaps out of it when she realizes the extent of the eugenics measurements and tries to save a bus load of children from deportation.
  • There's also Nurse Christel who willingly allows a group of Volkssturm Child Soldiers (fanatically indoctrinated boys of 13 to 15 years) to prepare for an armed fight in the hospital during the fall of Berlin, though Martin is there to stop that from happening.
  • Magda Goebbels poisons herself together with her children when the war is lost.
• Yandere: Nurse Christel. All Otto has done was flirt a little bit with her and take her out for a movie once, which was never followed up by anything. She falls in love with him and tries to get him to propose to her, telling him in the meantime who she thinks is no good company for him and, when he turns her down, denouncing his boyfriend Martin to the authorities in the hopes that they'll take care of the rival for her.