|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
122 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
| |
| in its proud 250 years of existence, no other physician had
been guilty of crimes approaching the magnitude of de Crinis's.25 |
| |
| |
| Psychiatric Idealist: Carl Schneider |
| |
Carl Schneider (1891-1946), also an Austrian, exemplifies
the moral descent of a distinguished academic psychiatrist into the Nazi
worldview and a key role in the “euthanasia” killing project. Most
striking about Schneider is the impressive record of empathy and rehabilitation
measures for patients that he brought to his commitment to direct medical
killing.
A woman psychologist I talked to who had worked for Schneider
stressed his idealism, his and others’ sense that a “euthanasia”
project could end the horror — the “hidden crime ... the black side
of medicine” — of profoundly regressed, isolated, backward
psychiatric patients. She thought Schneider unusually sensitive to
psychological symptoms, and “not a bad man.”
He was
later described by a younger colleague as an “excellent psychiatrist ...
very sensitive ... very impressive to younger psychiatrists.” Schneider
“detested force and cold routine,” permitted psychiatrists to have
lunch with patients, and disseminated principles of empathy, especially toward
epileptic patients, he had learned from having spent some time at the Bethel
Institution where he — a pastor's son — had been chief physician
until 1933.26*
Schneider left Bethel
to become director of the University Clinic at Heidelberg. He had joined the
Party in 1932; and after the Nazis assumed power, associates observed his
transformation from “a modest scholar with an umbrella and briefcase,
occupied with the most subtle kind of investigation of schizophrenia,” to
a man who, as “a leader of German psychiatry, took on the mission of
preaching National Socialism and offering his own enlightened program of work
therapy as a National-Socialist approach par excellence.”27 Ironically, precisely that program of work
therapy by Carl Schneider was referred to by Professor Ewald (see pages 83-85)
as an extremely hopeful development in the treatment of schizophrenia, a
development that argued strongly against subjecting schizophrenic patients to
“euthanasia” killing, and against such killing in general.
His former associate, Walter Ritter von Baeyer, thought of him as
“an ambivalent man.” And Schneider himself, when discussing many
patients, would put forward “two possible ways to help” — one of
them work therapy, and the other sterilization and medical killing. Von Baeyer
also felt that Schneider was the kind of “sensitive and weak person”
who could be readily transformed by National Socialist convictions into “a
very |
__________
* Despite his position at
Bethel, Schneider had been involved in Nazi intrigues against Bodelschwingh for
control of the Protestant church. |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 122 |
Forward |
|
|
