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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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260 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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haemorrhages took place under the skin, the conjunctiva
[exposed surface of eyeball] were bloodshot. Rigor mortis set in with a delay
of several hours."16
One of the
Jewish assistants was a man named Jean Weiss, who described perhaps the most
unbearable sequence I encountered: |
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It happened on September 28, 1942. I don't know
how many were lined up ahead of my father. The door opened and my father came
in with a[nother] prisoner. Klehr talked to my father and told him: “You
will get an anti-typhus injection.” Then I cried and had to carry out my
father myself. Klehr was in a hurry. He injected two prisoners at a time
because he wanted to get back to his rabbits [which he raised as a
hobby]. |
The next day, Klehr asked Weiss why he had cried, and
Weiss told him. Klehr said that, had he known who it was, “I would have
let him live.” When a judge later asked Weiss why he had not told the SDG
man at the time, Weiss answered, “I was afraid that Klehr would make me
sit down next to [his father]” — and be killed along with him.17
Supplies of phenol were, like other
medical drugs, kept in the Auschwitz pharmacy and were obtained as all medical
supplies were obtained — by means of requisitions to Berlin. According to
a survivor who worked in the pharmacy, the requisition would read
“Phenol pro injectione” (“phenol for injection”).
At first, relatively small quantities of phenol were ordered but later
between four and ten pounds (two to five kilos) per month. The chief
pharmacist, Dr. Viktor Capesius, explained to his underlings that the phenol
was to be used in eardrops in combination with glycerin, a legitimate medical
preparation. As a judge in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial remarked, “With
that quantity [of phenol] the ears of whole armies could have been
treated.”18 The medical pretense, if
less than fully convincing, was nonetheless psychologically required, and was
retained to the end.
Phenol killing turned the hospital into a place
for mass extermination. Klodzinski's estimate that twenty thousand people were
killed in the Auschwitz main camp (where most of the phenol killing took place)
is especially impressive in that these killings occurred during the twenty
months from August 1941 through April 1943 — that is, over five hundred
days, since injections were usually not given on Sundays or holidays. Killings
averaged thirty to sixty a day, though on some days as many as two hundred were
done. |
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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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Page 260 |
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