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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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Page
21
[Page 20 is blank] |
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| Introduction to Part
I |
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Prior to Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Nazis
established a policy of direct medical killing: that is, killing arranged
within medical channels, by means of medical decisions, and carried out by
doctors and their assistants. The Nazis called this program
“euthanasia.” Since, for them, this term camouflaged mass murder, I
have throughout this book enclosed it within quotation marks when referring to
that program. The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on
the simple concept of “ife unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes
Leben). While the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to
its ultimate biological, racial, and “therapeutic” extreme.
Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the
principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the
first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in
hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly
collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon
monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to
“impaired” inmates of concentration and extermination camps and,
finally, to mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps
themselves. In part I, I discuss the first four steps, in relation to the
Nazis’ overall biomedical vision and as a prelude to Auschwitz and the
other death camps. |
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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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