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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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274 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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the Party’s Golden Badge for meritorious service
— while remaining personally and professionally highly ambitious —
and reached his rank of reserve SS Gruppenführer (lieutenant
general) in 1940.8
That same year, a
meeting with Himmler, arranged by a fellow SS officer, marked the beginning of
a relationship based on a malignant blending of biomedical and political-racial
ideologies — the initiative moving back and forth between the medical man
and the SS leader, with the process culminating in “Clauberg’s
block” in Auschwitz. At this meeting Clauberg told Himmler of his
intention to set up a research institute for reproductive biology, which would
investigate both the causes and the treatment of infertility and the
development of a nonsurgical means of sterilization. Himmler had first learned
of Clauberg’s work through the gynecologist’s successful treatment of
infertility in a high-ranking SS officer’s wife. When Clauberg explained
to the Reichsführer that such treatment required a preparation that
could clear the fallopian tubes by softening any adhesions or substances
blocking them, Himmler, whose real interest here was sterilization, was said to
have suggested reversing that procedure by using agents that produce blocking.
As a result of that conversation (whatever the sequence of who suggested what
to whom), Clauberg redirected his research energies toward the explicit goal of
finding an effective method of mass sterilization.
With financial
support arranged by Himmler, Clauberg began animal experiments; found that a 5
to 10-percent solution of Formalin could produce the desired inflammation and
blockage; sought out the highly viscous (resistant to flow) liquid that would,
when containing Formalin, enable it to remain in the ovarian tubes after being
introduced to the uterus; and worked on X-ray tracing techniques for monitoring
effects.9
A year later Himmler
summoned Clauberg to confer and suggested that he conduct sterilization
experiments at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. But with the help of
Grawitz, the chief SS doctor now involved in the matter, Clauberg eventually
convinced Himmler that Auschwitz would be more practical because of its
proximity to Königshütte, where Clauberg already had his clinical
facilities. On 30 May 1942, three days after their second meeting, Clauberg
wrote a letter to Himmler remarkable in its expression of the German
physician’s active, indeed determined, effort to contribute to the
deadly purposes of the Nazi biomedical, vision.
Clauberg makes clever
obeisance not only to Himmler’s overall authority but to his
“scientific“ concerns, by stating that he (Clauberg) had been told
that “the one person in Germany today who would be particularly interested
in these matters and who would be able to help me would be you, most honorable
Reichsführer. ” By mentioning proposed work on “positive
population policy,” Clauberg ingeniously alludes to the agricultural
dimension so dear to Himmler (“The eventual or most probable importance of
agriculture for the female capacity for propagation demands
clarification”) and then gets to the real point — the question of the
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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 274 |
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