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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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Page
147
[Page 146 is blank] |
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| Introduction to Part
II |
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Had the Nazis named their “euthanasia”
institutions according to their concepts, they might well have referred to the
“Hartheim [or Grafeneck] Center for Therapeutic Genetic Killing” and,
correspondingly, to the “Auschwitz Center for Therapeutic Racial
Killing.”
It was a Nazi doctor, Heinz Thilo, who gave Auschwitz a
much more appropriate name — anus mundi, “anus of the
world” — a term meant to characterize what another Nazi doctor,
Johann Paul Kremer, described as “the most horrible of all horrors ”:
“the particularly unpleasant. . . action of gassing emaciated
women.”¹
An astute Polish psychiatrist has suggested that the
term anus mundi accurately reflects the Nazi vision of “the
necessity to sweep clean the world,” a vision “of the Germanic
superman .... of a world where there would be no place for sick people,
cripples, psychologically immoral people, contaminated by Jewish, Gypsy or
other blood.”² All these, he is saying, were for the Nazis biomedical
waste material. In Auschwitz, that especially meant Jews.
While
Auschwitz genocide came to encompass Gypsies, Poles, and Russians, only Jews
underwent systematic selections.* For the primary function of Auschwitz, once
it had been reconstituted, was the murder of every single Jew the Nazis could
(in Himmler’s words) lay their hands on anywhere.
The SS doctor
did no direct medical work. His primary function was to carry out Auschwitz's
institutional program of medicalized genocide.³ Consider the SS
doctor’s activities in Auschwitz. He performed initial large-scale
selections of arriving Jewish prisoners at the Birkenau camp (chapter 8). These
selections were usually conducted according to formula: old and debilitated
people, children, and women with children all selected for the gas chamber;
while relatively intact young adults were permitted to survive, at least
temporarily. The victim’s experience, with which we begin, gives the
truest picture.
After the selection, the presiding doctor was driven in
an SS vehicle, usually marked with a red cross, together with a medical
technician (one |
__________
* Poles and others underwent
limited selections, conducted within the camp, early in Auschwitz history. And
the Gypsy camp was selected en masse for death in 1944 (see pages 185-86). But
institutionalized selections for the gas chambers involved only Jews.
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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 147 |
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