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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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239 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Chapter 13 |
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Prisoner Doctors:
Collaboration with
Nazi Doctors |
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We would accept being mistreated by locksmiths, barbers, common
criminals, etc .... but that a fifty-year old [prisoner] physician could strike
younger colleagues in the most brutal manner, and that he would send them to
the gas chamber, that seemed to us a monstrosity. |
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— Auschwitz prisoner doctor |
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A few prisoner doctors came to identify themselves
sufficiently closely with Nazi doctors and camp authorities to be viewed as
collaborators. Such collaboration could be related to the anti-Semitism of
various national groups and to antagonisms between ordinary criminals and
political prisoners, and among Jews themselves.
Long-standing Polish
anti-Semitism loomed especially large; Dr. Jacob R., a Jew with much
understanding for others, spoke of the “nationalistic and
anti-Semitic” Polish doctors and the even worse prisoner orderlies, who
“really abuse[d] Jews ... in a way that caused people to suffer and to
die.” While some Jews had their own antagonisms to Poles, it was the
latter who arrived first in Auschwitz and who were given inmate positions of
relative authority, including medical authority. While the Poles suffered
grievously, their intelligentsia being a particular target for direct and
indirect Nazi killing, they were “Aryans” (although Slavs) and
certainly not an anti-race like the Jews. Some Poles could make common cause
with Nazi authorities in being (as one prisoner doctor put it) “so
anti-Semitic they didn’t care about Jews being gassed or getting
[fatal] |
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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 239 |
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