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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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297 |
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| The Experimental Impulse |
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| spreading, ulcerative, gangrenous condition of the face and
mouth, which is often fatal and was prevalent among Gypsy children and
adolescents in the camp. Mengele agreed, and very quickly a “Noma
office” (Nomaabteilung) was established, where forty-five to
seventy children were kept and given a special, nutritious diet, vitamins, and
sulfa drugs, as requested by Professor Epstein and arranged by Mengele. The SS
doctor also had the children photographed before, during, and after treatment
and brought other SS doctors to the ward to observe the work. A considerable
number of the children made good recoveries.61 Whether or not every detail of this recollection
is correct,* it shows that the SS doctor could, out of his own ambition, allow
prisoner physicians to take research in a genuinely therapeutic direction (see
also pages 360-61). |
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| Ways of Resisting |
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I have discussed situations where prisoner doctors were
pressured into participating in clearly harmful experiments that they could in
no way view as legitimate research (chapter 12). Some, like Dr. Samuel and Dr.
Dering, succumbed to those pressures; but other prisoner doctors resisted them,
often indirectly and always cautiously.
Dr. Wanda J. called forth her
status with Wirths, who respected and needed her on Block 10, in order to avoid
involvement with Schumann and Clauberg. Concerning Schumann, she told me,
“Not that I was a heroine [but] I wasn’t his property” —
which enabled her to make the false claim (which Schumann probably knew was
false) that she was “not a surgeon.” With Clauberg as well as
Schumann, Dr. J. managed to limit her participation essentially to therapeutic
help to victims. With Wirths she had to be more indirect and even vague, and
when he suggested that she remove (as Samuel had done) the cervix of women
thought to have pre-cancerous growths, she vacillated and stressed the fact
that “first of all I organized the hospital” (see pages 237-38).
A French prisoner physician with strong Protestant religious
convictions became known for her direct opposition to Nazi requests. Dr. Lottie
M. remembered how Dr. Marie L. had shared the general view that none of them
was likely to survive Auschwitz: “So the only thing … left to us is
to behave for … the short time that remains to us as human beings.”
When pressed by Wirths to do culposcopic examinations of the cervix (to detect
pre-cancerous changes), Dr. L. initially did so, but recognizing first that the
examinations were entirely inaccurate, and second that the work had potentially
harmful consequences (surgical removal of the cervix), |
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* Langbein corroborates the
story, adding that the prize patient was a girl of about ten whose cheeks,
through which her teeth had been visible, grew together with scar tissue. He
also reported that before the noma was under control, Mengele had the heads of
children who died of it severed and preserved in glass containers.62 |
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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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