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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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283 |
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| The Expefimental Impulse |
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a motor … from five to eight minutes,” after
which he “had a general ill feeling”); to the collection of sperm
(“Dr. Dering came with a sort of club and put it into my rectum ….
Some drops came out of my member”); to beginning arrangements for the
operation (“I said, ‘Why are you operating on me? I am … not
sick.’[And Dering] answered, ‘… If I take not the testicle off
you they will take it off me’”); to the painful spinal anesthetic and
the operation itself (“After some minutes I saw Dr. Dering when he had my
testicle in his hand and showed it to Dr. Schumann, who was present”). To
another man asking the same question before the operation, Dering replied,
“Stop barking like a dog. You will die anyway.”32
Schumann’s brutalization in
Auschwitz is revealed by a lesser research project he conducted on a fungus
condition of the face, a form of ringworm spread by large numbers of men being
shaved with the same brush. Although experience had shown that the condition
could be readily treated with various medicines, Schumann seized the occasion
to try the efficacy of his X rays. These caused severe skin eruptions and
infections, and in many victims impairment of salivary and tear-duct functions
along with paralysis of face and eyes, which in turn caused a number of men to
be sent to the gas.35
In addition to
these Jewish victims, a group of young, healthy Polish men were subjected to
the X-ray castration experiment. They were probably given an unusually high
dosage because, as the former orderly in the ward reported, “Their
genitals started slowly rotting away” and the men “often crawled on
the floor in their pain.” Ointments were tried, but the men did not
improve; and after a long period of suffering, they were ordered by Thilo to
the gas chamber.34
Dr. Klodzinski
writes of as many as 200 men being subjected to X-ray castration, and of about
180 of those to amputation of at least one testicle, 90 of these operations
taking place on one day, 16 December 1942. While overall statistics are
uncertain, the general estimate is that approximately 1,000 prisoners, male and
female, underwent X-ray sterilization or castration, and about 200 of these
were subjected to surgical removal of testicles or ovaries. Whatever statistics
are available derive from the Auschwitz policy of keeping relatively accurate
surgical records of these experiments.35*
Like Clauberg, Schumann continued his experiments in Ravensbrück,
there victimizing thirteen-year-old Gypsy girls.
After the war he
managed to live obscurely in Germany — although recognized at Nuremberg as
a war criminal — until an application for a license for a hunting gun led
to his being identified. He fled Germany |
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* At the Dering trial, the
surgical register was summarized as follows: “There was a list of 130
numbered lines, each having a date between March 1943 and 10 November 1943; an
individual prisoner’s number and name; and the nature of an operation in
Latin, such as castratio, sterilisatio, amputatio testis
sin. left, amputatio testis dex. right, amputatio testis
utriusque bilateral, ovariectomia sin., and ovariectornia
dex.”36 |
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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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