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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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258 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| Marek P., vividly described how deadly injections were
given in the same hospital room where he routinely assisted with surgical
operations: |
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This time there was a table prepared with
syringes. The phenol was in a bottle. There was cotton — everything you
needed for an injection. There was also alcohol, as with ordinary injections
— and rubber tourniquets. There was just one table … and the right
hand [of the victim] was put out on a kind of support table [to hold the arm
steady], as with a regular intravenous injection, [and] the rubber tourniquet
on the arm to apply the pressure to make the vein visible — all in the
usual way. … Mengele [who performed this killing] then rubbed
alcohol on the spot, just under the elbow, that he was using for the injection,
and then injected the phenol. … He did it as though he were performing
regular surgery. |
Before long the technique was changed to injecting the
phenol directly into the heart. Some witnesses thought that the change was made
because the veins were sometimes hard to locate, but the real reason seems to
have been the greater killing efficiency of a direct cardiac injection.
Patients injected by vein might linger for minutes or even an hour or more.
“It took them a long time to kill by intravenous injections, so they
invented a faster method” was the way Dr. P. put it. (According to some
testimony, many women prisoners continued to be injected by vein, after they
were told that they were to receive “an inoculation.”)
Then a
place was decided upon: “Room 1,” which became notorious; and later,
as a Polish prisoner doctor told me, an innocuous-appearing room used as a
laboratory by the Hygienic Institute (“It wasn't a special room [of] which
the prisoners about to be injected needed to be suspicious”).
The
“concentrated aqueous solution of phenol” that was developed proved
“inexpensive, easy to use, and absolutely effective when introduced into
the heart ventricle,” so that an injection of ten to fifteen milliliters
into the heart caused death within fifteen seconds. The solution was put in a
bottle resembling a thermos flask, and the person giving the injection poured
it into a small bowl from which he filled the hypodermic. A large syringe and a
long needle were employed, and the execution was performed by driving the long
needle into the fifth [rib] space."12
At the Frankfurt trial, Dr. Klodzinski recalled the scene:
“Sometimes it was still morning, sometimes noon, when those selected were
taken to Block 20. Wearing a shirt, with a blanket and in wooden clogs, they
were led into Block 20 through a side door. Those who could no longer walk were
carried there on a stretcher. They were put in a corridor.” Then the order
to close the block was given (Blocksperre), and there was “dead
silence” on the block: “All the patients on the block knew what was
going on.” Although Klodzinski stated that “most of those selected
themselves |
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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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