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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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137 |
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Contents |
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| Bringing “Euthanasia” to the
Camps |
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[absolute…] ness: the minutes of the 1 January 1940 SS
conference on race-related immigration questions state that an individual
judgment on “special treatment” was to be “incontestable, like
that of a physician” (see also pages 430-33).12
Although the code name had originated
from the office of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, orders and
directives came only from T4 headquarters, and doctors reported from the camps
back to that headquarters for appointments with Heyde or Nitsche and to drop
off completed forms. for processing; transfer lists were prepared there, so
that inmates on the lists could be sent directly to one of the still-operative
killing centers (such as Bernburg and Hartheim) where they were, gassed in the
same manner as patients in the T4 program. One variation from T4 procedure was
that death notices were sent out from the camps rather than centrally, though
with similarly contrived causes of death. (By early 1942, no notices were sent
out.) The continued pseudo-medical “euthanasia” idiom was reflected
also in Nazi documents in their reference to “prisoners’
euthanasia” and in camp inmates' references to “invalid
transports.”13 |
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| Medical Bridge to Genocide |
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The 14f13 program went through several changes in focus
over its period of operation. Its emphasis shifted almost immediately from the
mentally ill (if that emphasis ever actually existed) to political prisoners,
Jews, Poles, draft evaders or those deemed militarily unsuitable, those guilty
of “racial” crimes, habitual criminals — until the mentally ill
became hardly relevant. Yet in March 1942, an SS directive went out to camp
commandants emphasizing that prisoners capable of work were not to be included
under 14f13. (The decision to keep workers may have been somewhat affected by
the fact that remaining T4 facilities were full.) And in April, as more camp
inmates were being pressed into armaments work, commandants were even told that
only the truly mentally ill were to be selected for “mustering out”
(Ausmusterung). Even the bedridden could be given appropriate tasks. As
we shall see in the discussion of Auschwitz, the camps were always involved in
conflict between two factions, both of which could be found within the SS
bureaucracy. One faction wanted maximum extermination; the other, exploitation
of slave labor.14
According to Dr.
Hans-Günther Seraphim, an expert witness at several postwar trials,
“ruthless extermination” was more likely to have been pushed by the
14f13 physicians’ committees, with their bureaucratic location in
Hitler’s Chancellery, than by the concentration camp administration.15 This may well have been true through most of the
program’s history. In early 1944, however, 14f13 entered something of
another phase as the war continued to take its human toll. The camp at
Mauthausen near Linz, for example, had become severely overcrowded and suffered
from increasingly unsanitary conditions. The assistance of the |
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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 137 |
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