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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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269 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Chapter 15 |
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| The Experimental
Impulse |
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I have no words. I thought we were human beings. We were living
creatures. How could they do things like that? |
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—
Auschwitz survivor |
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Nazi doctors are infamous for their cruel medical
experiments. And no wonder: those experiments killed and maimed; as tangible
medical crimes, they were given considerable prominence at the Nuremberg
Medical Trial. Yet they were no more than a small part of the extensive and
systematic medicalized killing. And it is that aspect of the experiments —
their relation to the Nazi biomedical vision — that I shall mainly
discuss.
Generally speaking, Nazi medical experiments fall into two
categories: those sponsored by the regime for a specific ideological and
military purpose, and those that were done ad hoc out of allegedly
scientific interest on the part of an SS doctor.
For example, extensive
sterilization and castration experiments in Auschwitz, conducted mainly by
doctors Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann, were encouraged officially as a
direct expression of racial theory and policy; the experiments with typhus
contagion (injecting people with blood from others with active typhus) and with
the effectiveness of various preparations of sera (in treating experimentally
induced cases of typhus) were connected with military concerns about typhus
epidemics among German troops and civilian personnel in the East;* while the
study of pre-cancerous conditions of the cervix reflected a scientific interest
of Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS Auschwitz doctor, and his gynecologist
brother Helmut. But the categories overlapped. (Mengele’s research on
twins, which we shall discuss in chapter 17, grew out of his specific
scientific interest but was also strongly affected by Nazi ideology.) Here we
shall focus on the extensive sterilization and castration experiments, in which
Auschwitz more or less specialized, and which were a |
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* Typhus experiments were
conducted only to a limited degree at Auschwitz, but on a much wider scale at
other camps. |
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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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