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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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63 |
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| “Euthanasia”: Direct Medical
Killing |
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| The decree itself was brief: |
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Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt* are charged
with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be
designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to
the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state
of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].35† |
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Actually issued in October, the decree was backdated to 1
September, so that it could relate directly to the day of the outbreak of the
Second World War. While the backdating is usually attributed to Hitler’s
conviction that a wartime atmosphere would render the German population more
amenable to such a project, there was a deeper psychological relationship
between “euthanasia” and war. As the fanatical Dr. Pfannmüller
in the Nazi program put it: “The idea is unbearable to me that the best,
the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that
feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in
the asylum.”37
The Nazis viewed
their biomedical vision as having a heroic status parallel to that of war.
Hitler’s concept that the state in itself was nothing, and existed only to
serve the well-being of the Volk and the race, applied also to the major
enterprises of the state, especially its transcendent enterprise of war. Rather
than medical killing being subsumed to war, the war itself was subsumed to the
vast biomedical vision of which “euthanasia” was a part. Or, to put
the matter another way, the deepest impulses behind the war had to do with the
sequence of sterilization, direct medical killing, and genocide.
Yet
Hitler and other Nazi leaders were aware that they were embarking on a
draconian, though in their eyes necessary, measure for which the German public
and even the official state bureaucracy were not quite ready. Hence, the decree
was written on Hitler’s private stationery, as though he “considered
the death of many thousands of sick persons as his private matter, not ... a
decision of the head of state.”38 Or, we
may say, he understood himself to be a prophet whose racial vision outdistanced
the state’s structure, making it necessary for him to avoid the
bureaucratic apparatus and proceed directly to the matter at hand.
His
way of doing that was to go straight to the doctors. Inevitably, he ended up
creating an elaborate new bureaucracy, one that was both medical and murderous.
In his decision to turn the program over to Karl Brandt rather than to Conti
(who, as health minister and Reich Health Leader, was the logical person to run
it), Hitler was choosing his own |
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* Conti and Lammers were
soon replaced as heads of the “euthanasia” program by Philip Bouhler
and Karl Brandt.
† There was apparently
some disagreement about the wording. The final draft was probably written by
Dr. Max de Crinis, whose role will be discussed later. Note the broadened
“incurable” criteria in this decree: Brandt later claimed that Hitler
substituted “best available human judgment” for “nearly certain
possibility.” 36 |
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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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