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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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54 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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[Psychiat…] ric Youth Department.” Görden
and a few other centers were exceptional in their degree of specialization.
Since Görden was considered to be scientifically advanced and its
psychiatrist head Dr. Heinze had special credentials in that area, a grotesque
half-truth reinforced the deception in the announcement by the minister of the
interior on 1 July 1940 that at Görden “under the direction of
specialists, all therapeutic possibilities will be administered according to
the latest scientific knowledge.” 25
Eventually a network of some thirty killing areas within existing institutions
was set up throughout Germany and in Austria and Poland. They could thus handle
the volume of children designated for killing and at the same time provide the
service close to the homes of the families involved — a saving in money
and transportation and a means of rendering parents more amenable to accepting
the necessary transfers. The heads of all these institutions were fully
informed and worked closely with the Reich Committee. In various correspondence
concerning transfers, it was announced that "the child would receive the best
and most modern therapy available.”26
Medical “As If”
All of this falsification, then, was in the service of medical
claim. Everyone proceeded as if these children were to receive the
blessings of medical science, were to be healed rather than killed. The
falsification was clearly intended to deceive — the children’s
families, the children themselves when old enough, and the general public. But
it also served psychological needs of the killers in literally expressing the
Nazi reversal of healing and killing For example a doctor could tell a parent
that “it might be necessary to perform a surgical operation that could
possibly have an unfavorable result,” or explain that “the ordinary
therapy employed until now could no longer help their child so that
extraordinary therapeutic measures have to be taken.” Dr. Heinze, who used
such phrases with parents, explained in court testimony that there had been
truth to what he said: “A very excitable child completely idiotic . . .
could not be kept quiet with the normal dose of sedatives,” so that
“an overdose. . . had to be used in order to ... avoid endangering itself
through its own restlessness.” At the same time, “we physicians know
that such an overdose of a sedative, for children usually luminal … could
cause pneumonia, . . . and that this is virtually incurable.”27 It is quite possible that Dr. Heinze not
only was consciously lying, but was enabled by the medicalization of the
murders partly to deceive himself: to come to believe, at least at moments,
that the children were being given some form of therapy, and that their deaths
were due to their own abnormality.
In the same spirit, the policy was
to gain “consent” from the parents for the transfer. Those who showed
reluctance to give that consent received letters emphasizing the seriousness
and permanence of their child’s disability, telling them that they
“should be grateful” that there |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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