YMMV / Charité at War

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Artur. Is he a cold-blooded Nazi with no conscience who's willing to sacrifice his own child for the sake of his career and reputation as a genetical showcase model, or is he so tangled up in the system propaganda that he actually believes that there's no such thing as the mass euthanasia?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: What is that artist lady doing in the last episode? Does Sauerbruch really need a sculpture of himself right now when he's in emergency surgery 24/7 because it's doomsday in Berlin? Thing is, Yrsa von Leistner was a real-life artist, she was at that time in Berlin around the hospital, and she did strike up a friendship with Sauerbruch and make a bust of him. Problem is that the writers utterly failed to integrate her into the story properly. She shows up, her detached behavior doesn't make any sense, and she leaves again without having any impact whatsoever. Even other characters (namely Martin and Artur) react to her as a completely random "WTF" moment. More bizarrely, she walks out of the hospital pulling her little cart with the bust on it completely calmly and safely, going past Artur who is getting shot at fetching water.
• Catharsis Factor: Nurse Christel finally getting some comeuppance is this for many viewers.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Otto and Martin are overwhelmingly popular, seeing as they are gay characters whose very emotional but realistic main conflict revolves around their love story, but still manage to be Rounded Characters who have distinct personalities and arcs that are not exclusively about their relationship.
  • Also, when you have a gay couple in Nazi Germany, where gay men were rounded up for being "sexual deviants," you expect certain... endings to befall them both. Instead they both live and you find out they were in a happy, committed relationship for seemingly the rest of their lives, which certainly adds to the appeal.
• Even Better Sequel: On the one hand, there have been complaints about the series not having the same focus on the history of medicine that Charite had, but on the other — the characters are better developed, transitions are filled with period Stock Footage to establish the setting instead of superfluous slow-motion shots, the petty rivalries of the doctors in the first season have been replaced by subtle power struggles that belong into a large, ideological context, and thanks to more recent and as such more detailed sources, the new season can work much better with accurate representations of Historical Domain Characters. The fact that, different than in the first season, every episode passes The Bechdel Test helps, too.
• Ho Yay: Martin and Otto aside, Stauffenberg and Peter Sauerbruch are kind of affectionate with each other. When the former comes for a visit to hepatitis-afflicted Peter, Peter sounds damn near rapturous to see him alive, Stauffenberg's first impulse is to take Peter's hand, and there's more than one Held Gaze. Later on, Stauffenberg asks Professor Sauerbruch about his son, sounding very concerned.
  • Some Les Yay between Miss Fritsch and Margot Sauerbruch when the latter agrees to smuggle documents for Kolbe. The two women sound almost flirty as they discuss the risky business, and Miss Fritsch puts a film roll (that she just retrieved from its hiding place under her skirt, no less) in Margot's hand and closes her fingers over it, holding her hand for a moment longer.
• Iron Woobie: Martin, both because of his past and his current situation. Hans von Dohnanyi, Otto and Anni also qualify.
• Moral Event Horizon: You wouldn't think it's such a common occurence in a series that takes place in Nazi Germany anyway, but since it plays with Black-and-Gray Morality so much...
  • Professor Bessau establishes pretty early on what kind of guy he is when he decides that the blind little girl will be deported for euthanasia instead of getting the surgery that would save her life.
  • Not that de Crinis needs to bother, with his overall disgusting behavior, but his treatment of Hans von Dohnanyi is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
  • Nurse Käthe passes it when she reports Karin as a disabled child and thus makes sure she'll be deported to euthanasia.
  • Nurse Christel passes it when she denounces Martin as a homosexual "seducer" to the authorities, although arguably, her attempt to report the little boy who had unwittingly picked up the wrong pamphlet in the second episode already counts.
  • Artur is gone beyond redemption when he signs his own baby daughter off for deportation.
  • Magda Goebbels seemed merely unpleasant and seriously troubled the first time around, but in the last episode she goes and poisons her children because "they're too good for what's to come".
• The Scrappy: Nurse Käthe is almost universally loathed for her condescending behavior and massive Never My Fault attitude — in comparison, at least de Crinis somewhat managed to Face Death with Dignity; at least Christel, while she was a psychotic Nazi, was willing to fight for her convictions and was Defiant to the End; at least Artur, while he didn't want to face responsibility for his crimes in the eugenics programme, was aware that he was guilty of a crime. Nurse Käthe seriously seems to think that she doesn't deserve punishment after having handed children over for euthanasia despite knowing what's going on, and all the while is presented as this well-meaning, motherly figure who is allowed to reproach others and dishes out encouraging words and advice... on how one can be the most self-serving, that is.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Can happen in a series where the main protagonist and destined sympathy figure is Anni, a passive, never-questioning-anything Nazi conformist who only opposes the system around herself when she's personally affected. To a lesser degree, the same can be said about Sauerbruch, the other central protagonist.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Because hydrocephalus is perfectly well treatable nowadays, Karin is played by healthy children, which is good and fine — except no one bothered to fit them a head prosthetic, possibly because a fully developed hydrocephalus could have looked somewhat unnerving. But the result is that Karin, whose ostensibly obvious disability is a major plot point, is all the way through played by various darling babies and toddlers who don't look at all like there's a problem with their heads.