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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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| Page
172 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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civilized and sent trucks for the sick, the old,
the children and the women. They actually thought the Germans were not that
bad. But the healthy went to the camp and the trucks to the gas. People chased
the trucks [saying they had] diabetes or a heart condition. They should have
gone into the camp but they, thought the trucks were better. |
| Even Dr. Q. and fellow prisoner physicians could be
deceived: “It took us a while to realize that the doctors ... took part in
it all.” |
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| SS Doctors: Professional
Arrangements |
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Selections were conducted, from within a medical
hierarchy, by camp physicians (Lagerärzte) under the direct
authority of the Auschwitz chief doctor, or garrison physician
(Standortarzt). The latter — who was Eduard Wirths (see chapter 18)
for most of the period we are concerned with — operated within two
separate chains of command. He was subordinate to the chief concentration-camp
physician of the SS Economic and Administrative Department, or WVHA. This
position was held from 1942 by Enno Lolling, who was stationed in Berlin but
came frequently to Auschwitz and other camps. At the same time, Wirths was also
subject to the authority of the camp commandant, with whom he dealt regularly
on a day-to-day basis.*
Other doctors had different duties and
different chains of command and were not expected to perform selections. These
included the troop physicians (Truppenärzte) who took care of SS
personnel; doctors who were sent to Auschwitz specifically to do experiments on
inmates (notably Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann) and tended to have more
direct ties with Himmler; and doctors who belonged to the local camp Hygienic
Institute, located outside the main camp and part of a chain of command
separate from either that of the camp doctors or the camp commandant. The
Hygienic Institute was officially concerned with questions of epidemiology and
bacteriology and was installed in Auschwitz after an extensive typhus epidemic
in 1942.
“Medical activity in Auschwitz consisted only of
selecting people for the gas chamber” was the way that Dr. Ernst B., who
had been there, expressed the matter to me. (I discuss Dr. B. at length in
chapter 16.) Certainly what was called “ramp duty” was a central
function of Auschwitz camp doctors. Generally about seven SS doctors shared
that duty, and their performing selections was considered a matter of military
jurisdiction: within the military-institutional structure, selections were a
medical task only they were considered competent to perform.
The
principle — established from above — that only doctors should se-
[…lect] |
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* This double chain of authority was
characteristic of Nazi bureaucracy — often involving the hierarchy of both
one’s immediate institution and the Party itself for an affiliate
structure. |
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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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