|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
123 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Participants |
aggressive person" with new energy and confidence. He could
have enormous impact upon younger psychiatrists because they "would first
identify with this sensitive man, and then with his more aggressive side as
they joined him in National-Socialist ideology."28
That new confidence could take the form
of grandiosity — plans, never realized, for a vast research institute that
would focus on hereditary influences in “idiocy” — and, more
than that, would create a new “biological anthropology,” which would
“finally put an end to the old ideas about mankind.” Schneider did
succeed in obtaining large sums of, money for a research institute where he
initiated some of this work, using mainly brains obtained from the "euthanasia"
project. 29
Schneider’s path of
corruption was his psychiatric idealism. But, once on that path, he felt
beckoned as well by immortalizing professional power. Whatever conflicts he
experienced, he could connect his unusual empathy for psychiatric patients with
the Nazi biomedical vision and its humane claim to end suffering and strengthen
the race. A previously sensitive man’s deep immersion in Nazi ideology in
general enabled him to function as both empathic psychiatrist and medical
executioner. |
| |
| |
| The Ultimate Healer-Turned-Killer: Irmfried Eberl
|
| |
Finally, there is Irmfried Eberl (1910-48), unique among
doctors in that he went from being head of major T4 gassing facilities to
become, at age thirty-two, commandant — not chief doctor but overall
commander — of a death camp.
Another Austrian, Eberl belonged to
the younger generation of highly politicized early Nazi doctors, having joined
the Party at the age of twenty-one. At the time of the test demonstration at
Brandenburg in 1940, he was one of the first to be shown how the poison-gas
killing technology worked. He made use of that knowledge extensively as head of
that killing center and, when it closed down, as head of Bernburg. And, in
addition to serving in the inner circle of psychiatric experts, he was given
special authority to enter various psychiatric institutions and investigate
their attitudes toward, and willingness to work energetically in, the
“euthanasia” killing project.30
Eberl served as a special deputy to Heyde in supervising the
all-important area of false causes of death, with the task of establishing
consistency in the various killing centers and policies that could convincingly
maintain the subterfuge.3l* Eberl was
actively involved organ- […izing] |
__________
* In this role, Eberl wrote
a long, carefully argued letter to Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, director at Hartheim,
objecting that one of his assistants had cited lung tuberculosis as a cause of
death, because that disease was not likely to be suddenly fatal; moreover,
tuberculosis necessitated such mandatory legal-epidemiological procedures as
isolation and the closing of wards or institutions. The letter concluded with a
remarkable paragraph: |
In summary, I should like to
state that because of all the cited reasons, the frequent diagnosis “lung
tuberculosis” as practiced by you (about 40 to 50 percent of all cases
that we have received come under this diagnosis) is not unobjectionable, and I
ask you |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 123 |
Forward |
|
|
