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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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284 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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precipitately, traveled extensively, and eventually settled
in Khartoum in the Sudan as head of a hospital. There for about seven years he
apparently became something of a Good Samaritan, working night and day treating
Africans and conducting research into sleeping sickness; he described himself
to a visiting journalist as having “found the serenity and the calm
necessary for the moral balance of a human being.”37 But he was identified by an Auschwitz survivor
on the basis of the photograph accompanying that article. He fled to Ghana,
from where he was eventually handed over (in November 1966, after the death of
Kwame Nkrumah who, as prime minister, had protected him for some time) to
representatives of West Germany. By then, he had become weakened from chronic
malaria and other illnesses. In custody for several years, he was convicted for
his involvement in direct medical killing or “euthanasia”; but
because of his heart condition and generally deteriorating health, he was
released without having stood trial for his sterilization and castration
experiments.38 He died in Frankfurt in 1983.
There were some reports of his having shown regret and even contrition,
and he was quoted as having admitted to his “euthanasia” activities
at Grafeneck and his Auschwitz experiments and saying, “It was terrible
what we did.”39 But at other moments, in
the courtroom and elsewhere, he was much less than contrite, defending or
denying his actions. It is doubtful that he ever morally confronted his own
past actions, but it is possible that his work in Africa, though undertaken
primarily to avoid justice, eventually served, in a partial psychological
sense, as a form of penance.
Schumann has great importance for us
because of what he did — intense involvement in both direct medical
killing and unusually brutal Auschwitz experiments — and what he was
— an ordinary, but highly Nazified man and doctor. |
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| Anthropological Research: Specimens for a
Museum |
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| Block 10 played an important part in a form of
“anthropological research” that was among the most grotesque
expressions of the Nazi biomedical vision. Dr. Marie L. tells of its Auschwitz
beginnings: |
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There appeared [on Block 10] a new protagonist of
racial theories. He chose his material by having naked women of all ages file
… in front of him: He wanted to do anthropological measurements …. He
had measurements of all the parts of the body taken ad infinitum …. They
were told that they had the extraordinary good fortune to be selected, that
they would leave Auschwitz to go to an excellent camp, somewhere in Germany
… [where] they would be very well treated, where they would be happy.
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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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Back |
Page 284 |
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