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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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89 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Resistance to Direct Medical
Killing |
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| be expressed, as he put it, “precisely as a National
Socialist doctor [for whom] these measures go directly and decisively against
every conception of a physician’s profession.” He expressed these
views to Martin Bormann, with whom he had a long-standing tie, and spoke of his
concern that the absence of legal basis for the killings would impair “the
ethical concepts of our Volk.” Bormann defended the program by
contrasting the Christian view of wishing to keep alive “even those
creatures least worthy of life” with the National Socialist position that
keeping such people alive was “completely against nature.”26 |
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| The People’s
Resistance. |
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What eventually persuaded Nazi leaders to cancel the
project officially was not psychiatric resistance but rather general resistance
among the German people, articulated and heightened by a few courageous
Protestant and Catholic religious leaders. Family members of patients wrote
letters to institution heads (as excerpted in the epigraph to this chapter)
expressing confusion and pain but also at times accurate knowledge and anger:
references to “strange talk” about the fate of patients, questions
about their dying “so fast,” and resentment about relatives not being
permitted a proper burial and not having a “chance to say
goodbye.”27
The unrest could
reach high places. A provincial probate judge wrote to Franz Gürtner, the
minister of justice, stating that he (the judge) had received formal charges
from the guardians of patients and the personnel of institutions from which
patients had been taken to their deaths at Hartheim. He went on to say to his
judicial colleague, “Man commits an act of ... extraordinary arrogance
when he takes it upon himself to put an end to a human life because, with his
limited understanding, he can no longer grasp the entire meaning of that
life.” In the same letter he also declared, “Everyone knows as well
as I do” that “the murder of the mentally ill is as well known a
daily reality as, say, the concentration camps.”28
And Else von Löwis, a leader in the
Nazi women’s organization and a woman of the highest social standing who
mixed regularly with regime leaders, wrote to a friend, the wife of the
presiding judge of the Party Chancellery Court and a close friend of Himmler,
of her horror at the regime’s attempt to deceive the people in killing
mental patients ("When the farmers of Württemberg see the cars g by, they
too know what is going on — just as when they see the smoke pouring m the
crematory chimneys day and night”); and at the policy of killing mental
patients indiscriminately, including some only slightly ill or those sane for
long periods of time, rather than only those “without the slightest
glimmer of human consciousness” (which, she thought, would be accepted by
the |
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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 89 |
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