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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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74 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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emptied. First fresh air was introduced through
the ventilator, and the gas was forced out. From the beginning of the gassing
until the reopening of the gas chamber took about one hour. The corpses that
were to be dissected were removed to a special room. However the great majority
of corpses were immediately taken to the ovens and burned there.64* |
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Concerning the humanity of this form of killing claimed by
Brandt, another man who worked at Hadamar and looked into the gas chamber
through a side window spoke of “a horrible sight when the patients
gradually collapsed and fell over one another,” and added, “I shall
never get this picture out of my mind.”66
We shall find this sequence, including the doctor’s central role
in it, to be strikingly similar to the killing sequence in Auschwitz.
Given the medical cover-up of killing, every death certificate had
to be falsified. The key principle employed in choosing the false cause of
death was medical credibility: assigning a disease consistent with a
patient’s prior physical and mental state, a disease that he or she could
have contracted. Designated causes of death could include almost anything
— infectious diseases, pneumonia, diseases of the heart, lung, brain, or
other major organs. Skill at this falsification process was an important part
of the “medical experience” of the killing doctors, and younger ones
learned it during their “training” with their medical superiors and
predecessors. To help them, they were given written guides specifying important
details necessary for consistency.
One such guide for instance focused
upon septicemia (bacteria in the bloodstream) as a cause of death referred to
bacterial infection of the skin as a possible source and listed the sequence of
symptoms and therapy to be mentioned. The document included additional useful
tips: unclean mental patients often have boils which they scratch; and “It
is most expedient to figure four days for the basic illness [bacterial
infection of skin] and five days for the resultant sepsis”; and, this
diagnosis should not be used with patients who are meticulously clean but
“is preferable for young strong patients who smear readily.” but in
that case “seven to eight days have to be allowed for the illness to take
effect since their circulation is relatively more resistant.”67
It is no exaggeration to say that the primary
— perhaps the only — medical function of the killing doctors was to
determine the most believable falsification of each patient-victim’s death
certificate.
Maintaining these medical illusions required an extensive
bureaucracy of deception. Every falsification in this “bloated
apparatus” had to be |
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* In addition, as part of
the scientific orientation of the program, “euthanasia” victims were
photographed nude before they were killed. Dr. Friedrich Mennecke (see pages
139-42) had special training in “the photographic representation of
types” during his T4 education in Heidelberg.65 In some centers, the brain was removed for
later study before the corpse was cremated |
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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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