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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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56 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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agrees to euthanasia and its implementation. It is a
‘can’ and not a ‘must’ order."30 They even claimed that, in some situations,
there were no expert opinions at all and the decision about whether to kill a
child was left to the discretion of the institutional doctor. To be sure, this
kind of later legal testimony was put forward by the program’s organizers
in order to deny or minimize their own responsibility. But that evasion of
responsibility from the top can be said to have been built into the project:
the institutional doctor’s role as triggerman was a way of investing the
actual killing with a “medical responsibility” that was at least
partially his. And the contradictory legal status of the “euthanasia”
program — a defacto law that was not a law — added to the confusion
and contradiction surrounding the question of anyone’s responsibility.
Inevitably, there was great slippage in whatever discipline originally
prevailed — broadening the killing net and fulfilling the regime’s
ultimate purposes. As the age limit of children included moved upward, it came
to include a large number of older children and adolescents and even at times
overlapped with the adult killing project. Conditions considered a basis for
killing also expanded and came to include mongolism (not listed at the
beginning) as well as various borderline or limited impairments in children of
different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile
delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they
were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up
for “minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds” (Mischlinge).
After
1941, the year Hitler officially ordered the general “euthanasia”
project terminated, the killing of children continued, indeed probably
increased, and was conducted still more haphazardly. It is estimated that five
thousand children were killed — but the total was probably much higher if
we include the “wild euthanasia” period (see chapter 4).31
The resistance to children’s
euthanasia came mostly from families of children killed or threatened with
death, later from Catholic and Protestant clergy, and to a lesser extent from
within certain medical circles, all of which I will discuss in chapter 3. But
certain forms of resistance from within the children’s project are worth
mentioning here, if only because they were so limited. There were many attempts
— it is hard to say how many — on the part of doctors either to avoid
diagnoses on children that they knew would lead directly to death, or to
arrange to release children from institutions before they were swallowed up by
the killing, machinery. A Dr. Möckel at Wiesloch is reported to have
refused an appointment as chief of a children’s section because he claimed
to be “too weak” for the implementation of the Reich Committee’s
program. And there were other reports of high-ranking doctors in certain areas
responsible for appointments to these institutions holding back on those
appointments because of the claim that candidates were too young and
inexperienced. One doctor who had been extremely active as an expert consultant
in the adult program refused to kill nine of the twelve children sent to the
children's unit he became chief of because, as he put it, “a therapeutic
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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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Page 56 |
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