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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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277 |
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| The Experimental Impulse |
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also a doctor, referred to Clauberg as “one of the
worst characters I ever met.”*
Clauberg’s assistant in
Auschwitz, Dr. Johannes Goebel, worked on producing the necessary caustic
substance as well as improved X-ray tracing material and, although not a
physician, was given the prerogative of performing many of the injections.15 The number of women these two men are believed
to have sterilized in this fashion has been estimated from seven hundred to
“several thousand.”16 According to
the nurse Sylvia Friedmann, when a woman died after injection Clauberg
“showed absolutely no interest, no reaction, as though the matter didn't
concern him at all.” There were a number of such deaths.17
As Russian troops approached
Königsshütte, Clauberg fled to Ravensbrück and arranged for some
of his research victims to be sent there as weil; despite the extreme chaos, he
continued with his sterilization experiments. But with the approach of the
Allied armies three months later, he fled again, this time to
Schleswig-Holstein, seeking to join the last group of loyal SS leaders
surrounding Himmler, the only Auschwitz doctor to do so. But Himmler was
captured and committed suicide; and Clauberg too was captured by the Russians
on 8 June 1945. Imprisoned in the Soviet Union for three years before being
tried, he was then convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty-five
years’ imprisonment. But following Stalin’s death (in 1953), and
various diplomatic agreements, Clauberg was repatriated with other Germans in
October 1955. He was not only unrepentant but grandiose and bizarre: he listed
on his professional card various Nazi medical organizations, including the
“City of Mothers” he had run as part of his involvement in
“positive eugenics,” and advertised for a secretary under his own
name. When interviewed by the press, he spoke proudly of his work at
Königsshütte and Auschwitz and claimed, “I was able to perfect
an absolutely new method of sterilization ... [which] would be of great use
today in certain cases.”18
After
various pressures from survivor groups and others, Clauberg was arrested in
November 1955; but for a considerable time, the German Chamber of Medicine, the
official body of the profession, resisted action against him that would divest
him of his title of doctor of medicine. A group of former prisoner physicians
of Auschwitz issued an impressive declaration condemning Clauberg’s
actions there as being “in total disaccord with the sworn duty of every
doctor,” and bitterly decrying the fact that “such medical
practitioners who … put themselves at the service of National-Socialism to
destroy human lives … are today in a position to practice once more the
profession which they have profaned in such a scandalous manner.”19 The German Chamber of Medicine finally did
remove Clauberg’s license. But when he died, suddenly and mysteriously, in
his prison cell on 9 August 1957, the general belief was that he was |
__________
* He added, “it was
said he [Clauberg] was a Jew himself [of course, he was not]: at any rate he
looked like it. And [also] because he was extremely careful to obscure his
traces.” |
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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 277 |
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