I was hot into my profession. If Hitler walked through the door, he would get the same level of care as everyone else, to the very best of my abilities. It never entered my mind to treat anything but the wounds and diseases. Medicine won’t work any other way. So, I did some compartmentalizing in that area.
I had one guy who I’ll never forget. A Turk, a geriatric case who had such poor lower extremity blood circulation that he had open, running wounds on his feet and legs. He was in his early 90’s and writing his memoirs. This was about 1995. As a young man, he was a soldier in the Turkish army involved in the extermination of Armenians in an attempt to cleanse his land of them. While I did his dressing changes, he would unapologetically talk about going into an Armenian village, shoot every male over puberty, then herd all the women and children into the village church and light them up. He and his buddies would stand around the church, eating their lunch, and shooting anybody that ran out. He called it target practice.
His debridement and bandaging was the best. I never skimped on the painkillers. He got the best care I could offer. This is the way it must be. If these people run free among us, it is our system of justice that has failed. It cannot be up to medicine to mete out justice. That in itself is unethical and criminal.