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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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249 |
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| Prisoner Doctors: Collaboration with Nazi
Doctors |
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[doc…] tors, and even more so that of the surgical
victims, was overwhelming and decisive. The verdict was technically for Dering
as plaintiff because of the inaccuracies in Uris’s novel concerning the
number of operations* and the use of anesthesia. But, in the British manner,
the award was “one ha’penny” — a severe moral condemnation
of Dering. Not long after the trial, he became ill and died.7
But, in terms of Dering’s overall
behavior in camp, Jacob R., as a Jewish prisoner doctor, made a simple,
accurate observation: “Early in 1943, he was still very subservient. He
was a servile Häftling ["prisoner"]. But ... he changed: he became
more of a comrade with the SS doctors.”
Thus, Dering moved from
terror to servility to identification with the Auschwitz environment and
especially with medicalized power over life and death — a passage for the
most part available only to non-Jews, especially so if they were strong
anti-Semites, and still more so if ethnic Germans. |
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| Physical Violence and “Evil for Evil's Sake”:
Zenon Zenkteller |
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Zenon Zenkteller was a Polish prisoner doctor who became
notorious for physically abusing Jewish prisoner doctors working under him. The
only one of this group legally prosecuted after the war, he was convicted and
imprisoned.
Alexander O., a Jewish doctor who had to work under Dr.
Zenkteller made clear that “there was never any colleagueship” and
that “he was an enemy, a congenital enemy,” and went on to say, with
appropriately mordant humor: |
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Some … like insects. I like cacti ... He
[liked] to beat …. Dr. A. lived — I will use the German expression
— wie Gott in Frankreich [“like God in France”], but he
urinated every hour. We [a group of doctors made to do strenuous manual labor]
were kneeling down or sitting down because we could no longer stand, famished
and weak as we were .... He would go out and urinate on the wall of the block,
usually on the left side .... He would urinate outside because, every time he
would go out, we were busy working, seated or on our knees, and we would be
kicked in the backside. Going and coming back from urinating, he would
distribute his kicks. But those who were a bit out of his way did not get kicks
because he did not go out of his way. He would only take two or three steps to
kick. Otherwise, the others would, only get such compliments as “Asshole!,
Shitpig!” . . . I never saw Zenkteller go and urinate without kicking the
backsides of those he could reach. |
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* The total of 17,000 used
in the novel apparently stemmed from a prisoner doctor who had heard Dering
boast of having performed that number of operations in Auschwitz, most of them
not related to experimental sterilization. We may surmise, then, that the
extremely incorrect number derived both from Dering’s boast and from an
Auschwitz environment so extreme that within it any number of harmful acts,
murders, or criminal operations seemed plausible. |
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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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