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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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62 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”:
THE GENETIC CURE |
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| [direc…] tor, Dr. Hermann Pfannmüller, developed
a policy of starving the designated children to death rather than wasting
medication on them: |
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I remember the gist of the following general
remarks by Pfannmüller: These creatures (he meant the children) naturally
represent for me as a National Socialist only a burden for the healthy body of
our. Volk. We do not kill (he could have here used a euphemistic
expression for this word kill) with poison, injections, etc.; then the foreign
press and certain gentlemen in Switzerland would only have new inflammatory
material.. No, our method is much simpler and more natural, as you see. With
these words, he pulled, with the help of a ... nurse, a child from its little
bed. While he then exhibited the child like a dead rabbit, he asserted with a
knowing expression and a cynical grin: For this one it will take two to three
more days. The picture of this fat, grinning man, in his fleshy hand the
whimpering skeleton, surrounded by other starving children, is still vivid in
my mind. The murderer explained further then, that sudden withdrawal of food
was not employed, rather gradual decrease of the rations. A lady who was also
part of the tour asked — her outrage suppressed with difficulty —
whether a quicker death with injections, etc., would not at least be more
merciful. Pfannmüller then praised his methods again as more practical in
view of the foreign press. The openness with which Pfannmüller announced
the above-mentioned method of treatment is explicable to me only as a result of
cynicism or clumsiness [Tölpelhaftigkeit]. Pfannmüller also
did not hide the fact that among the children to be murdered ... were also
children who were not mentally ill, namely children of Jewish parents.33 |
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| The Killing of
Adults |
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| Extending the project from children to adults meant
rendering medical killing an official overall policy — a policy Hitler
enunciated in his “Führer decree” of October 1939. A few months
earlier, he had called in Leonardo Conti, secretary for health in the Interior
Ministry, as well as the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, and told
them (as recalled by the latter) that “he considered it to be proper that
the ‘life unworthy of life’ of severely mentally ill persons be
eliminated by actions [Eingriffe] that bring about death.” Hitler
went on to cite “as examples . . . cases in which the mentally ill could
only be bedded on sand or sawdust because they continually befouled
themselves,” and in which “patients put their own excrement into
their mouths, eating it and so on.” Hitler pointed out that in this way
“a certain saving in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel could be
brought about.” 34 The caricatured
mentally ill would come to symbolize all that threatened the purity of the
Volk. |
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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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