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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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300 |
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| AUSCHWITZ THE RACIAL CURE |
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| future publications. He was surely defending both his
colleagues’ integrity and his own. But the overall episode once more
reveals the tendency for the Auschwitz environment to subsume virtually any
medical effort to its relentless destructiveness. |
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| Medical Witness |
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There is still another kind of research, much more rare,
conducted solely by prisoners as a means of investigating what they were being
subjected to — that is as a form of medical witness Frédéric
E and a distinguished prisoner colleague studied the blood of twenty-six other
Auschwitz (Monowitz) inmates, falling into five groups ranging from new
arrivals in relatively good condition to inmates in advanced states of
emaciation and edema These doctors eventually prepared a careful scientific
report published in 1947, which Dr. E. told me with some pride was the only
published medical research done [by inmates] under the Germans.”64
He and his friend were interested in the deprivations of the diet and the
physiological effects of these deprivations: “You see it was in 1944, and
we could understand that Germany was going to lose the war, and we wanted to
know what we were being fed.” But in order to get König’s
approval, which they needed to do the research, they spoke of studying
“inmates’ weight loss from a medical point of view,” rather than
admit that they were evaluating the camp diet.
König probably let
them go ahead because he envisioned the possibility of publishing the results
“under his [own] name in the German medical literature”: “It
would have been perfectly possible for him to omit the fact that it had been
done in Auschwitz …. There are always people who lose weight, who are in
misery.”
Just before evacuating Auschwitz, Dr. E. prepared two
copies of a chart summarizing the results of the research, so that he and his
collaborator could each carry one of them His was lost through a search but his
collaborator managed to retain the other copy, and there was a discussion with
a physician from the Hygienic Institute in Buchenwald of the possibility of
resuming the work there. While that did not happen the status achieved by E.
simply through the discussions with the SS doctor was instrumental in
preventing his being sent elsewhere and “may have saved my life.”
In the paper itself, there are descriptions in dry medical language of
“cachetics without edema,” “moderate emaciation … with
moderate edema,” and “extensive edema [with] lowered plasma total
proteins and albumin.” But underneath those words is a passionate
expression of the survivor mission of bearing witness and giving meaning to the
Auschwitz experience by revealing some of its cruel medical dimensions. While
even they might have had moments of self-questioning concerning whether they,
too, were making other inmates into “guinea pigs” (all the more so
since the work required the approval of an SS doctor), these prisoner
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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 300 |
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