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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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138 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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nearby T4 facility at Hartheim was thus requested. Since
the need here was simply for space, there were no questionnaires or experts.
Camp personnel made selections, and those killed included slave laborers from
the East, Russian prisoners of war, Hungarian Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and above all Muselmänner.*
Hartheim also received
shipments from Dachau and Ravensbrück. Even prisoners who might have
worked were eliminated in this situation. Gold dental work was removed and sent
to the T4 center. Apparently so many prisoners were designated for killing that
gassing was resumed at Hartheim. The facilities there were finally dismantled
in December 1944, at which time the turn-of-the-century Renaissance castle
became a children’s home, intended to camouflage what had happened there.
At Hadamar this was the point at which slave laborers from the East, diagnosed
categorically as “tubercular,” were being injected on SS orders (see
pages 100-102).17
A close observer
notes that 14f13 was initially aimed at exterminating those in the camps who
had psychiatric disturbances; and that, given the crudeness of the deceptions
employed it is difficult to understand why Himmler did not trust his own camp
doctors to execute the selections, since with the criteria applied any SS
sergeant could have acted with the same competence .. . . [and] the expert
professors could have put on their signatures in Berlin18. The answer I believe, lies in the powerful Nazi
impulse sometimes conscious and at other times inchoate to bring the greatest
degree of medical legitimation to the widest range of killing.
The
14f13 project provided two crucial bridges between existing concepts and
policies and unrestrained genocide There was first the ideological
bridge from the killing of those considered physiologically unworthy of
life to the elimination under the direction of doctors of virtually anyone the
regime considered undesirable or useless: that is, from direct medical to
medicalized killing The fraudulence of the process was clear enough even to
those carrying it out — even one of the 14f13 doctors put quotations
around the word “examination” when writing to his wife19 — but the continuing medical idiom served
ideological and psychological purposes for individual participants.
The
second is the institutional bridge from the T4 project to the concentration
camps (these had been established in 1933 [see chapter 7]). The camps
themselves became connected with a principle of medical-eugenic killing. The
sequence in managing the killing was from T4, to the central offices and
inspectorate of the camps in general, to ever-enlarging greater initiative from
individual doctors. In that way, camp doctors increasingly took over the
function of “euthanasia,” and that function merged with their
participation in mass murder. This sequence was made clear in an investigative
report by the SS judge Konrad Morgen on corruption in the |
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* “Musselman” or
“Moslem” was camp jargon for the living corpses who were so named,
according to Hermann Langbein, because “when one saw a group of them at a
distance, one had the impression of praying Arabs”16 |
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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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