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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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267 |
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| Killing with Syringes: Phenol Injections
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imposed, only Klehr immediately spoke up and said he would
not accept the sentence; the other defendants were silent. In his closing
statement, Klehr claimed to have had nothing to do with gassing or independent
selections: “As a little man in Auschwitz,” or “a soldier under
orders,” he “only carried out the orders of the doctors and only with
deep inner reluctance.”38
In
sum, Klehr brought to Auschwitz enormous psychopathic potential, which the
environment readily evoked (as it also did with some of the prisoners who
regularly injected phenol). Every society has a pool of Klehrs to draw upon for
its killing assignments, and the medicalized dimension gave particular form to
his extreme combination of sense of omnipotence, paranoid sadism, and schizoid
numbing. (As one prisoner put it, “[He] could kill a few hundred people
the way a shoemaker rips a rotten sole off a shoe.”) Klehr found a
powerful métier in Auschwitz: while other SS men returning from
leave would complain about having to come back to “this den of murderers
[Mörderhöhle],” he seemed at home in the camp and his
work in it.39
The Auschwitz Klehr was
to a considerable degree a creature of the SS doctors, of Entress in
particular: he was their psychological delegate who could perform the murderous
acts they initiated. Because his hands were so dirty, the SS doctors could
almost — but just almost — feel that theirs were clean. |
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| “Decent” Killers |
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Two other SDG people, Herbert Scherpe and Emil Hantl, gave
phenol injections but were seen by prisoners as very different from Klehr, as
more or less “decent” killers. As one former prisoner nurse put it,
they “behaved like saints compared with Klehr. They never beat anyone
…. They acted politely. And most important of all, they said ‘Good
morning’ when they came in, and ‘Good-by’ when they left. For us
who had been so degraded, these were small tokens of humanity.”40
It was these men who were assigned to
the killing of the 120 Polish children from Zamosc between 23 February and 1
March. When the killing was completed, Hantl emerged “in a state of total
collapse” and “completely went to pieces, cursed the war,” and
lost his SS demeanor. While prisoners were impressed with his breakdown, one
commented that he had been “too cowardly to refuse to carry out the orders
to kill.”41
Scherpe reacted even
sooner, emerging from the room in the middle of the killing muttering “I
can’t any more.” The word in the camp was that he, too, had
“broken down.” He was observed, “pale and agitated,”
telling the chief doctor that he could not kill children, and was promptly
transferred to an outer camp — and even promoted.42
Yet Scherpe and Hantl did a lot of
killing: the court convicted Scherpe of complicity on at least 200 occasions of
the killing of at least 900 people; and Hantl of complicity on at least 42
occasions in the killing of a total |
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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 267 |
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