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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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373 |
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| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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Mengele could also explode with condemnation and rage. His
form of blaming the victim was usually, a matter of blaming the inmate
“colleague.” In his agitation about the annihilation of the Gypsy
camp, Mengele called together a group of prisoner doctors and berated them for
wrong diagnoses, threatening, “You'll pay for it!” should autopsies
reveal further mistakes. As one prisoner doctor commented, “That is when
he ceased to be a colleague, since he called us dogs and pigs.” At that
time Dr. Marek P. remembered Mengele saying specifically that “it was our
fault” that he had to liquidate the Gypsies. P. believed that Mengele was
upset because he had taken such pains with work on Gypsy twins and
“suddenly it was all liquidated,” creating a need in him to
“find a group on whom he could release [project] his feelings of being
responsible for it.”
Similarly, Dr. Lengyel told
how, just before the camp’s liberation, Mengele came to the women's
medical block and “declared that because of our negligence, the typhus
epidemic had reached such proportions that the entire region of Auschwitz was
menaced.” In the subsequent rush to prepare serum and vaccinations,
Mengele “accused us of sabotaging the vaccinations,” and “in
fact discontinued them.” He would sometimes accuse prisoner doctors of
“not seeing enough patients” and at other times of “giving the
sick too much care and wasting scarce medicines.”54 While the pattern of blaming the victim was
present in many SS doctors, with Mengele both the accusation and the anger were
especially required for his way of interpreting and experiencing.
Thus,
Dr. Gerda N. told how Mengele, in a sudden rage, “nearly wanted to choke
this lady doctor — actually put his fingers around her neck, accusing her
of treating patients poorly and shouting: ‘They will die. Then we Germans
will be responsible!’ ” Dr. N. added, “He wanted to give us a
show … [so] that we should believe that the Germans are really caring
… for the people here” — and also, I would add, so that his
imagery of Nazi virtue could be sustained.
Dr. N. also spoke of
Mengele’s brandishing a pistol as he entered a room to talk to the chief
prisoner physician of a women’s medical block, demanding that she select a
large number of typhus patients for the gas chamber. She added that, even,
without a drawn gun, whenever Mengele went into her room with a prisoner
doctor, he was metaphorically holding a gun to that person’s head. He
could make his threats, direct or indirect, while mostly maintaining the
illusion of colleagueship by behaving considerately toward prisoner doctors.
Another prisoner doctor expressed the anguish of being manipulated by
Mengele in a series of cruel deceptions. He asked her to make a list of
pregnant women so that he could “feed them milk” and get them to a
better camp so they could have “healthy babies”; after she had
acceded to the request despite a certain skepticism, they were transferred to
the “H-block,” or “Heaven block” (Himmeblock), from
which they inevitably went either to the crematorium or to a research block. An
example of |
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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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