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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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93 |
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| Resistance to Direct Medical Killing
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vulnerability to general fear of “euthanasia”
among the military, and passionate personal protest grounded in a spiritual
tradition.
The Nazi leaders must have recognized the power of his
statement, since Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, was said to have
informed Hitler of it, then told Braune that the program could not be stopped.
And about one month later, Braune was arrested under a warrant signed by
Heydrich charging him with having “sabotaged measures of the regime and
the Party in an irresponsible manner.” Braune was held at the Gestapo jail
on Prinz Albrecht Strasse for about ten weeks and then released (probably
through Bodelschwingh’s intervention) on the promise that he would
undertake no further actions against policies of the government or the
Party.42
While Bodelschwingh and
Braune expressed their resistance essentially through official channels,
certain local ministers spoke out directly from their churches, and could be
sent to a concentration camp as a result. Ernst Wilm did so from a Westphalian
village, and was denounced and sent to Dachau where he spent three years.43
The most ringing Catholic protest
against “euthanasia” was the famous sermon of Clemens Count von
Galen, then bishop of Münster.* It was given on 3 August 1941, just four
Sundays after the highly significant pastoral letter of German bishops had been
read from every Catholic pulpit in the country; the letter reaffirmed
“obligations of conscience” at opposing. the taking of
“innocent” life, “even if it were to cost us our [own]
lives.” 44 The first part of
Galen’s sermon explored the Biblical theme of how “Jesus, the Son of
God, wept,” how even God wept “because of stupidity, injustice ...
and because of the disaster which came about as a result.” Then, after
declaring, “It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man
opposes his will to the will of God,” Galen quoted the pastoral letter of
6 July and made clear that the “catastrophic thing” he had in mind
was the killing of innocent mental patients and “a doctrine which
authorizes the violent death of invalids and elderly people.”45
He further declared that he himself had
“filed formal charges” with police and legal authorities in
Münster over deportations from a nearby institution. He went on in words
that every farmer and laborer could understand: |
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It is said of these patients: They are like an
old machine which no longer runs, like an old horse which is hopelessly
paralyzed, like a cow which no longer gives milk.
What do we do with a
machine of this kind? We put it in the junkyard. What do we do with a paralyzed
horse? No, I do not wish to push the |
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* The Catholic Church as a
whole was traditionally less identified with the German state than were the
Protestant churches. Although Catholics were a majority in some areas of
Germany, German Catholics still bore traces of “outsider” status.
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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 93 |
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