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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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286 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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central Asians. The relatively high priority of the
project is suggested by Eichmann's having been involved in its
arrangements.42
The whole enterprise,
bizarre even by Nazi standards, was sponsored by the Ahnenerbe
(“ancestral heritage”) office of the SS, which Himmler had created in
1939 to develop “historical” and “scientific” studies of
the “Nordic Indo-Germanic race.” Ahnenerbe brought mystical
concepts to science (“the unity of soul and body, mind and blood”)
and combined the Gestapo mission of controlling Germany’s intellectual
life with Himmler’s visionary ideas. It supported projects in archeology,
German racial consciousness outside of Germany proper, and medical experiments
in concentration camps. Under Himmler’s orders, Ahnenerbe even came
to sponsor a research program making use of Jewish mathematicians in
concentration camps to work out theoretical problems of rocket production.
Experiments in camps that it sponsored included Dr. Sigmund Rascher’s
notorious research in Dachau on the effects of high altitude, in which he
wantonly killed experimental subjects; and the still more murderous work of
Schuler in Buchenwald on typhus vaccines, in which six hundred people were
killed.43
Hirt was said to have been
brought into Ahnenerbe by a man who became his assistant in the
Strasbourg project — Bruno Beger, an SS officer on Himmler’s personal
staff who had been sent to study anthropology in Berlin. Beger tended to
embrace Himmler’s wildest theories, and it was Beger who made the original
arrangements in Auschwitz and perhaps wrote under Hirt’s name the
extraordinary memo I have just quoted.44
A former ardent Nazi, who remembered Hirt as a good friend and
colleague during their days together as young instructors at a leading German
medical center, described him as originally Swiss but a naturalized German,
“a Nordic type with blue eyes and fair hair,” an honorable and stable
man even if at times “a bit impulsive,” and an excellent anatomist
with a promising academic career. A colleague of my own in the United States,
however, who had studied under Hirt, remembered him as a very arrogant and
threatening Nazi. In any case, there is no doubt about either Hirt’s
passionate Nazi involvement or the centrality of the Nazi biomedical vision in
his participation in the “museum” project, even if Beger was its
driving force. (Precisely that centrality was what Hirt’s old friend
wished to deny in his insistence that Hirt’s entire behavior could be
understood as, an expression of the callousness of the anatomist.)
Toward the end of the war, there was apparently some confusion about
whether and how much to continue with research procedures, and eventually the
evidence was ordered to be destroyed. But that process could not be completed,
and French forces liberating Strasbourg found in Hirt’s dissection room
“many wholly unprocessed corpses,” many “partly-processed
corpses,” and a few that had been “defleshed … late in
1944,” and their heads burned to avoid any possibility of identification
— with “special care taken to remove the number tattooed on the left
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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 286 |
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