paralyzed by horror

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A research team in Austria has uncovered evidence that hospital personnel horribly mistreated "unworthy" patients during World War II. Anthropologists, psychologists, physicians and historians found themselves drawn away from their cool, scientific distances while examining the remains from a hospital cemetery in Hall.

This was horror.

But as one psychiatrist was kind enough to say:

It is easy for us now to point the finger and say, 'what have they done?' But ... I am not sure that I would have acted differently. We were simply paralyzed.

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