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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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55 |
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| “Euthanasia”: Direct Medical
Killing |
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were available for children thus affected by fate
facilities where “the best and most efficacious treatment is
available,” and then declaring that “neither a delay nor a
cancellation of the transfer is possible.” Should the parents continue to
oppose it, “further steps, such as withdrawal of your guardianship, will
have to be taken.”28 This threat to take
away legal guardianship usually sufficed, but if it did not there could be the
further threat of calling a parent up for special labor duty. The coercion here
was in the service not only of the killing policy itself but also of
maintaining its medical structure.
That structure served to diffuse
individual responsibility. In the entire sequence — from the reporting of
cases by midwives or doctors, to the supervision of such reporting by
institutional heads, to expert opinions rendered by central consultants, to
coordination of the marked forms by Health Ministry officials, to the
appearance of the child at the Reich Committee institution for killing —
there was at no point a sense of personal responsibility for, or even
involvement in, the murder of another human being. Each participant could feel
like no more than a small cog in a vast, officially sanctioned, medical
machine.
Before being killed, children were generally kept for a few
weeks in the institution in order to convey the impression that they were being
given some form of medical therapy. The killing was usually arranged by the
director of the institution or by another doctor working under him, frequently
by innuendo rather than specific order. It was generally done by means of
luminal tablets dissolved in liquid, such as tea, given to the child to drink.
This sedative was given repeatedly often in the morning and at night —
over two or three days, until the child lapsed into continuous sleep. The
luminal dose could be increased until the child went into coma and died. For
children who had difficulty drinking, luminal was sometimes injected. If the
luminal did not kill the child quickly enough — as happened with excitable
children who developed considerable tolerance for the drug because, of having
been given so much of it — a fatal morphine-scopolamine injection was
given. The cause of death was listed as a more or less ordinary disease such as
pneumonia, which could even have the kind of kernel of truth we have
noted.29
The institutional doctor,
then, was at the killing edge of the medical structure, whatever the
regime’s assurance that the state took full responsibility. Yet he
developed — in fact, cultivated — the sense that, as an agent of the
state, he was powerless: from his vantage point, as one such doctor reported,
“these children were already marked for killing on their transfer
reports,” so that “I did not even bother to examine them.”
Indeed, whatever examination he performed was no more than a formality, since
he did not have the authority to question the definitive judgment of the
three-man panel of experts.
Yet later, program administrators countered
with the insistence that the if, when, and how of carrying out a mercy death is
up to the judgment of the doctor in charge, who voluntarily and out of
conviction |
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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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