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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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92 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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He speaks also of the systematic creation of confusion: of
patients "so completely mixed up in huge institutions [that] no one knows the
other's fate." He tells how people "pine away in loneliness and die in total
desolation" and offers as evidence the death of a jurist and son of a high
government official. 38 In this way, Braune goes back and forth between
carefully observed details and ringing ethical assertions. He concludes,
“We are dealing here with a conscious, systematic process of eliminating
all those who are mentally ill or otherwise incapable of functioning in a
community” — a process that “severely undermines the faith
placed in ... physicians and [health] authorities.” He notes Germany's
superior history in regard to providing well-run institutions and well-trained
personnel with “unselfish readiness to serve,” and asks whether these
constructive inclinations will be forced "to die out slowly in our people?" He
asks also how far the extermination of “life unworthy of life” can
go, having already been extended to people who were “lucid and
responsible”; and who the next target will be. 'Then he touches a
particularly raw nerve: “What will happen to the soldiers who contract
incurable afflictions while fighting for their fatherland?” He adds,
“Such questions have already arisen among them.”39
He then returns to moral questions
concerning the sanctity of human life and how violation of that sanctity
without legal basis endangers “the ethics of the people as a whole. Whom
if not the helpless should the law protect?” He points out that, after
careful calculation, even if one hundred thousand people were to be killed (the
actual estimate of the number who were eventually killed in the project),40 it would be of no significant help to the
economic well-being of the rest of the population. Braune concludes with a
ringing declaration of the dimension of the danger and an intense plea for
relief: |
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We are confronted here with an emergency that
deeply shocks everyone who knows about it, that destroys the inner peace of
many families, and that above all threatens to grow into a danger whose
consequences cannot even be predicted at this point. May the responsible
authorities make sure that these disastrous measures are abolished and that the
entire problem is first examined from a legal and medical, from the ethical and
political point of view, before the fate of thousands and tens of thousands is
decided. Videant consules, ne quid detrimenti res publica capiat!
(“Let the consuls see to it that the state suffers no harm!”)41 |
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| Of all recorded expressions of resistance to Nazi medical
killing, the Braune memorandum is unique in combining insistent documentation,
compassionate identification with victims, concern for healing and healers,
focus on the moral integrity of an entire people as well as on the broad
ethical principle of the sanctity of life, exposure of the regime’s
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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 92 |
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