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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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97 |
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| “Wild Euthanasia”: The Doctors
Take Over |
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methods did not have to be changed: drugs and starvation,
and not gas, had been employed from the beginning. The killing of children had
been considerably less visible, taking place as it did on wards in smaller
facilities without the telltale evidence of noxious smoke and odors that
stemmed from large-scale gassing. The program had been based more on presumed
eugenic and scientific grounds than on direct economic ones (the children did
not work and ate less) and had not created the degree of public controversy
that adult killing did. If anything, the reporting methods for ostensible
abnormalities became more systematic. Research efforts, mostly post-mortem
studies, also became more systematic, as sometimes happened in adult “wild
euthanasia.” Not only did the regime remain closely involved, but the
greater part of the killing of children took place after the official ending of
the “euthanasia” project. What did become more “wild” was
the method of deciding which children should be killed. Now even the pretense
of review boards of “expert opinion” was abandoned: any child
considered in some way impaired, and sent through the administrative system to
any of the “special pediatric units” of the original project, was
still fair game. Beyond that, institutional doctors could proceed according to
their own inclinations.
Adult “wild euthanasia” involved more
radical changes for psychiatrists. No longer operators of gas chambers, they
returned to the familiar terrain of syringes, oral medications, and dietary
prescriptions for achieving the same end. From the regime’s medical
bureaucracy came the continuing message that mental patients were “useless
eaters,” burdens on the state and its war effort, “life unworthy of
life.” Permission to kill was clear enough, even if a little indirect. As
one psychiatrist later testified, “In conversation with other participants
in the program I learned that there would be no fuss if some physician or other
in an institution stood ready to kill a patient by injection or overdose, if he
was convinced that the patient’s extinction was desirable.” And there
was a partial merger of child and adult “euthanasia” programs as the
age limit of the children’s program was raised to sixteen years: “to
some extent this expansion was to offer a substitute for the cancelled
program.”² There were, in fact, documented cases of patients of about
that age who had managed to survive the official end of the adult
“euthanasia” program only to be fatally reclassified as a
child.³*
That same psychiatrist added, “Such things would ...
happen without |
__________
* In late 1944, the
directors of several Reich Committee children’s facilities were told at a
Berlin meeting to include adults. No reason was given, but they were told to
omit the usual procedures because they “would take too long.” The
institutions’ doctors were given the power of selection. Dr. Hildegard
Wesse of the Uchtspringefacility recalled, when on trial, that she realized
this was an extraordinary order, but thought that “those in Berlin”
must be acting under pressure of war. Uchtspringe then had twenty-five hundred
patients, with new transports arriving from the East daily. Dr. Walter Schmidt,
head of a small children’s section at Eichberg, recalled a “few
so-called special authorizations [Sonderermächtigungen]”: that
is, severely malformed adults who arrived with Reich Committee documentation,
often including a family request for killing.4 |
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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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