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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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281 |
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| The Experimental Impulse |
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worked on Block 30, in the women's hospital in Birkenau,
in a large room containing two extensive X-ray apparatuses and a small booth
for him, which had a window and was, of course, insulated with lead plates to
protect him from radiation.
Experimental subjects — relatively
healthy young men and women in their late teens or early twenties, who had been
obtained by a previous day’s order from the camps — were lined up in
a waiting room and brought in one by one, often completely ignorant of what was
to be done to them. Women were put between plates that pressed against abdomen
and back; men placed penis and scrotum on a special plate. Schumann himself
turned on the machines, which hummed loudly; and each “treatment”
lasted “several minutes” according to Dr. Stanislaw Klodzinski,
“five to eight minutes” according to Dr. Alma Brewda, another
prisoner physician. Many of the women emerged with what Marie L. called
“substantial burns,” which could become infected and take a long time
to heal; and many quickly developed symptoms of peritonitis, including fever
and severe pain and vomiting. Not long after the X rays, the women’s
ovaries were removed surgically, usually in two separate operations. This was
the operation performed mainly by Dering (see pages 246-49), and the method
often used — a horizontal incision above the pubic area as opposed to a
median laparotomy (abdominal opening) — carried the greater danger of
infection. The ovaries were sent to laboratories to determine whether the X
rays were effective in destroying tissue.30
As Dr. L. wrote, “There were deaths, there were complications,
there were aggravations of pulmonary tuberculosis, given the absence of
preliminary examination. There were pleurisies, long endless
suppurations.” She observed also that the operations were performed
“at a more and more accelerated pace,” so that Dering could
eventually perform ten within two hours.31
Dr. Wanda J. was ordered to comfort the young Greek women being
operated upon (“Greek children, because they were between sixteen and
eighteen, … [already] like skeletons”) one after the other: the girls
screaming and crying (“They called me Mother, [and] they thought I would
save them but I couldn’t”) through the crude spinal tap and rough
ten-minute surgery; the pathetic, childlike victim being carried out on a
stretcher as the next one was brought in for the spinal tap. Dr. J. pointed out
that Dering neglected to take the ordinarily obligatory step of applying a
portion of the peritoneum (the membrane lining the abdominal cavity) as a flap
to cover and protect the “stump” of the tube from which the ovary had
been removed, and thereby contributed to later complications of bleeding and
severe infection: “They were nine months in bed. I was doing the dressing
all the time — and the smell, I can’t tell you. They were in a big
room — only … eight of them, because two died.”
By then
Schumann had lost interest in them (there was nothing more to find out
concerning castration-sterilization), but Dr. J. had to go to considerable
effort to keep them more or less hidden “because if Schu- […mann]
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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 281 |
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