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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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143 |
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| Bringing “Euthanasia” to the
Camps |
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central moment in the sequence from T4 to genocide.
“The day before yesterday,” he wrote, “a large team from our
Operation left for the East under the leadership of Herr Brack to help save our
wounded in the ice and snow.” This mission was “top secret! Only
those who could not be spared from carrying out our Operation's most urgent
work have not come along.” The team, consisting of twenty to thirty
doctors, nurses, and office personnel, drawn particularly from Hadamar and
Sonnenstein, apparently crossed the Russian border and went somewhere in the
area of Minsk. On the face of it, there is no reason such an ostensibly
humanitarian and patriotic mission should have been kept secret. The camouflage
was apparently twofold. First, some observers believe that this team carried
out “euthanasia” on German soldiers, whether severely wounded,
particularly brain-damaged, or simply rendered psychologically unfit to
fight.29 Such killings would, of course, have
been publicly taboo. Second, this project apparently related to the setting up
of death camps in Poland, for which some of the mission personnel stayed in the
East. Key figures were Christian Wirth (see pages 71-72), whose technical
knowledge of T4 gas chambers was now to be used in the East (Belzec was then
being built); and Dr. Irmfried Eberl, who would soon become commandant at
Treblinka.30*
Another doctor from the
mission, Horst Schumann, would soon complete his trajectory from the Grafeneck
and Sonnenstein killing centers to Auschwitz (see pages 278-84).
The
previous summer Dr. Ernst Grawitz had recommended the use of gas chambers to
Himmler as the best way to go about mass killing. The carbon monoxide method
developed for “euthanasia” was subsequently used in all death
camps, with the exception of Auschwitz.
All of these developments were
expressions of an evolving genocidal mentality. The Nazis were moving toward
violently carrying out Lorenz’s vision (quoted in the epigraph to this
chapter) of replacing the evolutionary forces of selection.31 For, as Raul Hilberg and others have emphasized
(and as I shall discuss in part III), Nazi genocide seems not to have been the
end result of a clear, long-standing plan but rather to have evolved from
shared imagery in the minds of Nazi leaders.32 A crucial period for the evolution of this
genocidal mentality was early 1941, when restraints were increasingly abandoned
and bold action was first countenanced, then demanded.. This was the period of
preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union, of activation of the
Einsatzgruppen, of the extension of the T4 program to 14f13, and of the
conversion of the biomedical vision into the Final Solution. The actual
invasion of the Soviet Union in June had extreme importance. It enormously
strained all German resources, including those necessary to maintain large
numbers of Soviet prisoners. The invasion also brought about the increasing
con- […centration] |
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* Many of those originally
sent to the East were returned to Germany before being assigned to the death
camps. |
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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 143 |
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