|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
170 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
| |
in a slaughterhouse from which there was no escape and
everybody clung to his own life,” and also because “it was better to
save the victims from ... tortures” (the previous policy of exposing Jews
to beatings, vicious dogs, and fiendish shouting); thus, “by taking over
the task of the SS men, they rendered a last service to the death
candidates.”
This same witness went on to say that when
Sonderkommando Jews did tell arrivals that they were going to be gassed,
“they became insane, so that we later preferred to keep quiet”5
He then described the sequence of the
killing: |
| |
After the arrivals were taken to the location
next to the crematorium, they had to undress entirely because they were told
they would have a shower. Then they were chased — often with beatings
— by the SS into the so-called bath, which in reality was a gas chamber.
This was a hermetically sealed room about 80 square meters large and about 2.25
meters high. There were two doors — one was the entrance, the other one
served to take out the corpses. Through two little windows which were located
right under the ceiling the Zyklon-B gas was thrown into the room by an SS man.
The death agony of the people lasted about fifteen minutes* ....
Our
task consisted of taking corpses on a stretcher to the ovens and to throw them
into them. Every ten minutes four corpses were thrown in. When there were
enough ashes gathered in the oven, we had to take them out (about once a week),
pulverize them, and load them on the trucks. The ashes were then taken to the
river Wisla and thrown in.6 |
| An SS judge investigating “corruption” in
Auschwitz noted that the crematoria did not attract much attention: |
| |
A large door led to the so-called undressing
rooms. There were numbered seats and even wardrobe tickets. Arrows on the wall
pointed to the shower rooms. The lettering was in six or seven languages
Everything was shiny, as a mirror in this huge crematorium. Nothing pointed to
the fact that only a night before thousands of people we gassed and burnt
there. Nothing was left of them, not even a tiny piece of dust on the oven
armatures.7 |
| The Sonderkommando worker explained further that,
when relatively few people were to be killed, and “it didn’t pay to
gas them,” an Unterscharführer (or sergeant) named Georgi
“had the duty . . . of shooting the people personally.” Victims would
be “brought out by two of us” to Georgi, who then “shot him or
her from the back with a shot in the neck.” And later, when bodies were
burned in open trenches because the crema- […toria] |
__________
* Most probably died a
little more rapidly. |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 170 |
Forward |
|
|
