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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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81 |
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| Resistance to Direct Medical
Killing |
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potential capacity for improvement, work, and eventual
contribution to society. There could be unspoken cooperation among colleagues
in these maneuvers, sometimes with the help of medical, psychiatric, and
non-medical administrators who were not fully enthusiastic about the program.
Psychiatrists engaging in these attempts at evasion varied in their attitudes
from ambivalence toward the program to strong condemnation, and their evasions
tended to be accompanied by what they considered necessary cooperation with the
project.
Nurses and ward workers could also contribute to evasive
maneuvers, either by warning patients to leave the hospital before it was too
late, or even on occasion helping them to hide. A former patient in a
church-run institution told of how fearful she and other patients were upon
hearing that cars were coming to take them to their deaths: |
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We went through the forest, ran around,,.,
because we did not know where to go .... When the sisters [nurses], came to
fetch them, many [patients] started to run again . . . . We hid in barns a few
times .... One was safe nowhere .... As soon as a car came, the head nurse
called: “Get up, march, hide yourself. If someone comes, don't stand
still.”² |
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These nurses and hospital workers could, like the doctors,
express such resistance at one moment and carry out their part in the killing
at another.
Expressions of discomfort could come from psychiatrists who
wanted things to be more forthright and more legal. “If the government
actually wishes to carry out the extermination of these patients ... should not
a clearly formulated law be proclaimed — ... as in the case of the
[Sterilization] Law,” was the way the head of a mental hospital expressed
his view to the Ministry of Justice.³
Crucial to whatever
psychiatric resistance existed was the influence of a few leading psychiatric
humanists of the older generation, such as Karl Bonhoeffer. These men became
known as opponents of medical killing and, in varying degree, of the Nazi
regime in general. In 1939, the politically suspect Bonhoeffer was replaced in
the prestigious psychiatric position of the chair of Berlin University and
Charité Hospital by Max de Crinis, Party and SS member. Bonhoeffer then
became more active in helping his two sons and his son-in-law, all of whom were
eventually killed by the regime for their opposition to it. He involved himself
specifically in the struggle against medical killing by helping his son
Dietrich, later a celebrated Protestant martyr, in the latter’s contacts
with church groups seeking authoritative psychiatric grounds for refusing to
turn over their patients to the project.4
The unusual degree of respect accorded Bonhoeffer in the profession,
together with his well-known opposition to medical killing, provided at |
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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 81 |
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