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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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295 |
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Contents |
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| The Experimental Impulse |
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then prisoners suffering from this disease were placed on
the operating table."60
Here again Auschwitz
becomes a medical caricature: now of doctors hungry for surgical experience. In
the absence of ethical restraint, one could arrange exactly the kind of
surgical experience one sought, on exactly the appropriate kinds of
“cases” at exactly the time one wanted. If one felt Hippocratic
twinges of conscience, one could usually reassure oneself that, since all of
these people were condemned to death in any case, one was not really harming
them. Ethics aside, and apart from a few other inconveniences, it would have
been hard to find so ideal a surgical laboratory. |
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| Prisoner Doctors and
Research |
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Inevitably, prisoner doctors were drawn into
Auschwitz’s experimental world. “I do not believe that there was one
single SS doctor who did experiments without the help of prisoner doctors in
some form or other, willingly or not” was the way that the French prisoner
doctor Frédéric E. put it. Usually that involvement was no more
than helping to treat victims “because they were sick after those
experiments,” but it could extend to performing the experiments or
“research.”
In the latter case, there were important
distinctions to be made in the inmate professional’s relationship to the
work. For instance, Dr. Lottie M. referred to a Polish prisoner anthropologist,
Teresa W., who took measurements for. Mengele in his study of twins. Though Dr.
M. and others thought highly of this woman, other inmates resented her because
Mengele favored her (her own room, sufficient food, special treatment
arrangements when she was ill) and also because “she did real work”:
that is, made accurate measurements in accordance with her own professional
standards. In contrast, Dr. M. told of her own response to a request from Dr.
König that she take blood from a particular patient every two hours over a
twenty-four-hour period in order to follow the sedimentation rate. Because Dr.
M. did not wish to be up every two hours during the night and was “not
interested in his work,” she simply drew the total amount of blood
required, distributed it evenly into twelve containers, went to bed, and
presented him with the containers the next day: “I didn't mind that this
was not [authentic] and … just sabotage.” That Teresa W. “did
not have this attitude” suggests a morally problematic scientific
integrity. An inmate was most likely to try to be accurate, as this Polish
anthropologist did, when working regularly with an SS doctor, (who might well
be able to detect falsifications) in what seemed a relatively innocuous
enterprise (and thereby inviting to one’s own professional identity), such
as W.’s measurements. At the same time, she claimed to know nothing about
what was well known to many: namely, that Mengele would occasionally
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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 295 |
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