|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
148 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
| |
of a special group of “disinfectors,” or
Desinfektoren, from within the Sanitätsdienstgrade or SDG)
and the gas pellets, to a gas chamber adjoining one of the crematoria. As
Führer, or “leader,” of the team, the doctor had
supervisory responsibility for the correct carrying out of the killing process,
though the medical technician actually inserted the gas pellets, and the entire
sequence became so routine that little intervention was required. The doctor
also had the task of declaring those inside the gas chamber dead and sometimes
looked through a peephole to observe them. This, too, became routine, a matter
of permitting twenty, minutes or so to pass before the doors of the gas chamber
could be opened and the bodies removed.
SS doctors also carried out two
additional forms of selections (chapter 9). In one, Jewish inmates were lined
up on very short notice at various places in the camp and their ranks thinned
in order to allow room for presumably healthier replacements from new
transports. The other type of selections took place directly in the medical
blocks in a caricature of triage. Rather than simply permitting those closest
to death to die — in order to use limited medical resources to treat those
who might be saved — as in traditional medical triage (the meaning given
the term as originally used by the French military), the Nazis combined triage
with murder by sending to the gas chamber those judged to be significantly ill
or debilitated, or who required more than two or three weeks for recovery.
Medical triage-murder became a standard SS policy, influenced both by
the vision of the Final Solution and by I. G. Farben’s economic
arrangements. But an additional factor also of great importance was the
residual influence of the 14f13 “euthanasia” action in the camps. In
other words, the principle of killing the weak, the sick, and the generally
undesirable had been established in medical circles, extended specifically to
concentration camps, and then institutionalized (still within medical circles)
in Auschwitz, and Auschwitz alone, on a phenomenal scale. That 14f13 influence
involved both the mentality and the legality of a medical form of a triage
murder, so much so that the Frankfurt court could view medical-triage killings
as probably derived from 14f13 policies. In other words, the Nazi versions of
“euthanasia” and the. Final Solution converged on Auschwitz
medical blocks, thereby rendering them an important agency of the Auschwitz
ecology of murder.4
SS doctors also
conducted murderous forms of “epidemiology”: prisoners with a
contagious disease, usually typhus but also scarlet fever or other conditions,
would be sent to the gas chambers, sometimes together with the rest of the
patients on that medical block (many of whom might have been free of the
contagious disease) so that the empty block could then be completely
“disinfected.” (Nazi doctors played a similar role in Jewish ghettos
in Poland, where they contributed to oppressive policies in the name of
controlling epidemics, especially typhus.)5
|
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 148 |
Forward |
|
|
