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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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189 |
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| Selections in the Camp |
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The medical block was not only the locale for selections
but also the place where records were kept. A Polish woman survivor who had
done clerical work on a medical block, told how “we had files … a
record of every person’s death — when the death machine was operating
full blast. We knew everything.” This woman’s medical block kept a
file on all female inmates of the camp, and inmates responsible for it
“were ordered to cross out … those women [designated for the
crematoria] as ‘transferred.’” In other words, the medical block
was the final common pathway for Auschwitz death control, and the book in which
all was written.
It was also an autonomous unit within the camp,
technically subject only to the authority of the camp doctor and his SDG
assistants, and not even to command authority.
But the authority of the
SS doctor could be quickly murderous, as Dr. Robert Levy described in a later
article: “On January 21, 1944, in my surgical block, because of the
irrevocable decision of SS physician Thilo, I lost in a few instants 96 of my
100 patients.”18
At the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963-64, the sequence of a selection on the
medical block was accurately summarized: |
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Between 8:00 and 9:00 A.M. the SS camp doctor
[Friedrich Entress] appeared … [and] went to the doctor's room in Block 21
…. After his correspondence was taken care of, he went with [Josef] Klehr
[a notorious SDG noncommissioned officer, implicated in murder on many levels
(see pages 265-67)] to the outpatient room in Block 28. There he had new sick
patients brought to him …. The prisoner doctor stated his diagnosis. The
camp doctor just looked at the sick person quickly and with a glance at the
index card given him by the prisoner doctor or nurse, saw whether the person
was Jewish or not. Then he decided immediately what was to happen to the
prisoner; either to keep him in the hospital or send him back to the barracks,
or for “Sonderbehandlung” (“special handling”) which
meant killing by phenol. Only Jewish prisoners were given
“Sonderbehandlung” and especially those who looked weak
(Muselmänner) or had a sick condition that made it unlikely they
would be able to return to work soon …. Sometimes Dr. Entress put the
cards of the “examined” prisoners in various piles. Everyone in the
know [SS assistants, prisoner doctor, etc.] … understood which pile
contained the cards of the prisoners destined for Sonderbehandlung …, Many
[of the prisoners selected] suspected nothing …. Others had an idea that
they would be killed because despite strictest secrecy, it leaked through the
camp that prisoners were murdered in Block 20 with phenol injections given by
Klehr. That's why many Jewish prisoners only reported sick in extreme
emergency.19 |
| Some commentators differentiated between “small
selections” and “large selections” on the hospital blocks. In
the smaller kind, as just |
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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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