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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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264 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| The
Doctors’Surrogates |
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The brutalized prisoners and the SS men who did most of
the injecting tended to maintain the medical aura — in fact, to see
themselves as doctors.
There was a hierarchy of phenol injectors, from
a German political prisoner named Peter Welsch to four Polish prisoners to the
leading SDG injector, Josef Klehr, and two others in his unit. Those in the
sequence who injected most enthusiastically were likely to “play the
doctor.” A Polish prisoner orderly named Mieczyslaw Panszczyk, for
instance, who “bragged that he killed 12,000 people with his own
hands,” not only injected but “also liked to do smaller surgical
operations although he had no medical training whatsoever. It didn't matter to
him that he sometimes cut tendons and vessels when he cut open
abcesses.”25
Other prisoners,
with good cause, considered such men to be psychopathic in their enjoyment of
killing. They also, as a Polish prisoner doctor made clear, derived personal
advantages from what they did they had a “secure” job, did not have
to work as hard as others, were given better food and generally preferential
treatment. The injector “was under the protection of the Political
Department, ... the camp Gestapo,” and “the other prisoners were
afraid of this man.”
Dr. W. told of one Polish injector, who
identified closely with Nazi anti-Semitism and wanted the prisoners to be as
frightened of him as of the SS people. One morning this man told Dr. W.,
“I had an interesting dream — a dream that after my death I would
live in a special place where I would rule where I would be sent thousands of
people to kill personally with phenol injections. It was a wonderful
dream.” Jan W. commented that the dreamer thought it “a very positive
dream — the murdering of people,” and that the task was not something
imposed on him but one “he chose for himself, and he enjoyed it.”
This dream epitomizes the ultimate Auschwitz vision: heavenly immortalization
and absolute omnipotence via constant, institutionally arranged, medicalized
(the dream mentioned only phenol injections) killing.
There were Polish
prisoners who injected but had scruples: one man refused to kill a group of
children and saved a number of sick people from injections before being
enlisted to do them himself; and another man, despite injecting, continued to
save the lives of people and also used his power as phenol executioner to do
away with dangerous informers.26
Prisoner doctors besides Dering appear to have occasionally performed
the injections. While German or Polish inmates were most likely to be called
upon to perform phenol injections, Jewish prisoner doctors were asked to do
them at times. One of Langbein’s sources refers to a Dr. Landau, probably
a Jew, who was said to have administered injections.27 Further, a prisoner doctor injected mental
patients with insulin, |
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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 264 |
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