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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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280 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE
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Underlings like Brack and physicians like Clauberg
suggested projects they knew to be consistent with Himmler’s ideas and
policies. Brack’s passion for sterilization and castration could also have
been related to his own experience as a patient who had undergone X-ray
treatment, and had consulted a medical authority about his fears that the
treatment might have caused bodily harm, specifically to his genitals. Brack
was also the son of a gynecologist, and a failed medical student with medical
aspirations of his own. By June 1942, at the height of the German military
penetration into Russia, Brack became more specific and programmatic. Referring
to consultations with his superior and with the head of the area in Poland
where the greatest number of Jews was concentrated, he spoke of the necessity
of carrying through “the whole Jewish action [the Final Solution]”
but estimated that two million to three million of the ten million Jews in
Europe were fit enough to work and therefore should be “preserved”
but at the same time “rendered incapable of propagating.” Ordinary
sterilization methods being used for hereditary diseases would take too much
time and be too expensive, but “castration by X-ray ... is not only
relatively cheap, but can be performed on many thousands in the shortest
time.” He referred to “completed experiments”* and declared
himself ready, even eager, to initiate such a project. But Himmler, ever the
scientist, insisted that “sterilization by X-rays ... [be] tried out at
least once in one camp in a series of experiments.”28 Schumann was chosen for the task and by late
1942, was at work on X-ray castration on Block 30 in Birkenau.
Schumann
did not have Clauberg’s extraordinary standing in Auschwitz, but his
experiments were, if anything, even more sinister. Comparing the two, Dr.
Tadeusz S. understood Schumann to have been “ordered by somebody to do
… experiments … not original. Clauberg was the only one with his own
ideas …. Schumann was inspired by … ideologists.” Dr. Marie L.
went further in declaring that Schumann’s “manner of proceeding
revealed a total absence of knowledge of gynecological anatomy.”
Schumann’s appearance was also the opposite of Clauberg’s:
tall, broad-shouldered, elegant in his Luftwaffe uniform, his face
described by some as handsome and others as “brutish,” and thought by
Dr. L. to be “a representative of the new German racist ideal.” Some
inmates described him as correct but a prisoner secretary added that he was
“cold” and “revealed no human feelings in regard to the
prisoners.”29 Over all, these
descriptions suggest a quiet, undistinguished version of Nazi-style hauteur,
along with an attitude of detachment and absence of concern. His experimental
policies were brutal and unrestrained. He |
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* In his Nuremberg defense,
Brack claimed that, in referring to these nonexistent experiments, he had been
manipulating Himmler by seeking to plant in his mind an alternative to the
Final Solution as a way of stalling the whole process.27 The evidence is that Brack was
manipulating Himmler, but in order to press ahead at full speed with the
castration-sterilization project. Such a kernel of truth could have enabled him
to utter his false testimony with something approaching conviction.
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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 280 |
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