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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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161 |
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| The Auschwitz Institution |
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especially if the rooms were kept dry and gastight and
closely packed with people, and provided they were fitted with as large a
number of intake vents as possible.”34
Mass killing of Jews began either in late 1941 or early 1942. The
Auschwitz administration had procured Zyklon-B indirectly from the
manufacturer, DEGESCH, an acronym for German Corporation for Pest Control.
DEGESCH, largely controlled by I. G. Farben, distributed the gas through two
other firms — in Auschwitz’s territory, through TESTA.35 In 1942, its distribution within the SS became
centrally regulated by the SS Hygienic Institute in Berlin under Dr. Joachim
Mrugowsky. Given its extensive prior use against rodent and insect spreaders of
disease, we might say that Zyklon-B was always considered a form of medical
equipment. Yet it was placed under stricter medical supervision only as the
prime chemical of extermination, and was even stored in the Auschwitz pharmacy
for a period of time.*
Another change took place as well. In the past,
Zyklon-B had by law been combined with a small amount of an irritant gas
designed to warn of the presence of the dangerous substance when premises had
not been sufficiently ventilated after fumigation. Sometime in 1943, the gas
began to be distributed to Auschwitz without the irritant, and bore the
warning: “Attention! No irritant!” Removing the irritant clearly
expedited the killing process, but that step itself presented a greater danger
for those handling this lethal gas. Special training had always been required
for that purpose. The group handling the gas had originally been drawn from
personnel associated with the manufacturer, but the responsibility was
transferred to a special group of “disinfectors” from among the SS
medical corpsmen These Desinfektoren became a noncommissioned
élite, and part of the duty of the doctor on the Auschwitz ramp was to
take necessary measures to protect them from exposure to Zyklon-B and to be
prepared to treat them should such exposure occur. We can say, then, that
Zyklon-B became a dangerous “killing medicine,” to be handled only by
medical personnel.36† |
__________
* One doctor I interviewed,
who held a senior advisory position within Nazi civilian and military
structures, told me of serving as chairman of a high-level committee on
allocating scarce medical equipment to civilian and medical groups, including
the SS. After the war, he claimed to be horrified and chagrined to learn what
the SS had used Zyklon-B for. The story tends to confirm the medical status of
the gas. Concerning the doctor’s claim of ignorance, I would say that he
had demonstrated in a variety of ways an extreme capacity for invoking the
psychological defenses of denial and numbing, of the will not to know. In his
case, those defense mechanisms would have to have been extreme — one
suspects that in at least part of his mind, he knew — given the
increasingly large amounts of gas the SS required for Auschwitz for example,
for fumigation, camps got delivery about every six months; Auschwitz got one
every six weeks.
† The manufacturer opposed the removal of the
irritant because its patent had been on this irritant addition, rather than on
the gas itself. Involved in this change was Kurt Gerstein, then chief
disinfection officer in the SS, who worked under Mrugowsky in Berlin. Gerstein
had an engineering background as well as a certain amount of medical training.
Few figures have been as confusing to historians and biographers, given his
intense SS involvement at the center of mass murder, along with his
fanatical SS demeanor; yet also his Protestant evangelical anti-Nazi
connections and desperate efforts (including a dangerous conversation with a
Swedish diplomat) to inform the outside world about the Final Solution.
Gerstein later claimed — and was believed by one biographer — that he
had proposed that the irritant be discontinued on the grounds that, without it,
death was more humane, and that by rendering the gas undetectable, he could
find a pretext for destroying consignments with the claim of dangerous leakage.
Most observers — notably Rolf Hochhuth in his 1964 play The Deputy
— have emphasized Gerstein’s extraordinary acts of resistance;
others, such as Hilberg, are primarily impressed with his role in the mass
murder process. There is a sense in which both groups are correct: I believe
Gerstein to have been the most extreme example of the doubling process
encountered in this study.37 |
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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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