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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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188 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE
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| economics of slavery” (where the slave is
“capital equipment to be maintained and serviced for optimal use”
with gradual “depreciation” over a full lifespan) and
instead |
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reduced slave labor ro a consumable raw material,
a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted. When
no usable energy remained, the living dross was shipped to the gassing chambers
and cremation furnaces of the extermination center at Birkenau, where the SS
recycled it into the German war economy — gold teeth for the Reichsbank,
hair for mattresses …. Even the moan of the doomed became a work
incentive, exhorting the remaining inmates to greater effort.13 |
The whole process was consistent with the official Nazi
policy — applicable to all “asocial elements” (including
Auschwitz inmates) — of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“destruction
through work”) which in practice meant literally working people to
death.14
Although I. G. Farben was
forced to expand its hospital facilities in Monowitz, it established a rule
that no more than 5 percent of the inmates could be kept in those facilities at
any one time. And within that 5 percent, patients had to be able (in the
estimate of doctors) to return to work within fourteen days — or else be
sent to the gas (I.G. Farben records used the euphemism nach Birkenau,
or “to Birkenau”). The two-week criterion carried considerable weight
because I. G. Farben was able to establish a policy of ceasing payments to the
SS for a particular prisoner after that perion. The arrangement functioned as a
kind of “health insurance” that I. G. Farben provided to the
institution that, so to speak, owned the slave laborers.15
In coming to these arrangements and
carrying them out, I. G. Farben officials mixed with their counterparts in the
SS in such pastimes as hunting and ceremonial dinners and the like: for
instance, “on December 20 [1941], representatives of the I. G. took part
in a Christmas party of the Waffen S.S. which was very festive and ended up
alcoholically gay."16 It is likely that SS
doctors were involved in some of these fraternal activities.
In late
1942, the Lolling order that all prisoners unable to work were to be killed was
extended to include sick prisoners who could not be expected to recover within
four weeks. In practice, however, the period of illness permitted was usually
no more than two or three weeks. And the number of prisoners in the hospital
(in the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau, as opposed to Monowitz where I. G.
Farben set a still more stringent policy) was not to exceed 7 percent of the
camp population in the summer and 10 percent in winter.17* |
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* Sometimes the figure is
given as 6 percent. It seems to have been somewhere in the range of 5 percent
to 7 percent and there were constant efforts on the part of prisoner doctors to
circumvent the rule by surreptitiously keeping in hospitals more than the
permissible percentage of inmates. |
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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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