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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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78 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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medicalized treatment ended. The trains arrived in Lublin,
an area where Polish Jews were being concentrated and where Jewish confiscated
goods were processed with slave labor. The precise fate of these patients is
unknown and probably varied, except for the final outcome — their
extermination in such camps as Sobibór and Belzec.80
The T4 office set up a Jewish camouflage
operation: on “Cholm Insane Asylum” letterheads, statements of
condolence and death certificates were sent out. Couriers took the mail to
Chelm (the Polish spelling), near Lublin, where they were mailed with the
proper postmark. As far as can be determined, the “Cholm Insane
Asylum” was a fiction.81
From September 1939, when the war began,
with German troops pushing eastward, the SS began to shoot inmates (of whatever
race or nationality) of mental hospitals to empty them for the use of soldiers.
For example, a hospital in Stralsund, an eastern German city on the Baltic Sea,
was emptied by December 1939, and its patients were taken to Danzig to be shot.
Their bodies were buried by Polish prisoners, who themselves were then shot. In
Chelm-Lubielski, in the General Government of Poland, patients were shot en
masse by SS troops, sometimes after having been chased through the asylum, and
then buried in mass graves. Once Germany invaded Russia, in June 1941,
Einsatzgruppen under Heydrich liquidated hospital patients as well as Jews,
Gypsies, and Communist functionaries. Reports from the field mentioned the need
for beds for injured soldiers, as well as “the German view” that
these were lives unworthy of life.82
More closely related to T4, the Germans set up two psychiatric
extermination facilities at Meseritz-Obrawalde and Tiegenhof, both in the old
Prussian territory of Pomerania. The policy was first to massacre Polish
patients, then bring German patients into the emptied facility, and finally to
kill them as well by such methods as shooting, gassing, injection, starvation,
or drugs given with food. Standard T4 letters of condolence were sent to
families. There is some evidence that physically or mentally impaired German
soldiers were also given “euthanasia” in both institutions.83
Concerning the technology of murder, there was diminished reliance on
shooting because of psychological trauma to Einsatzgruppen troops. Explosives
were tried — as in Russia, in September 1941, when mental patients were
blown up. This method proved ineffective in that too much cleaning up was
required and more than one charge was sometimes necessary. Gas was clearly
preferable.
Carbon monoxide gas was increasingly resorted to —
first in canisters (which became ever more expensive to bring from Germany as
the troops moved east), and then, after further technological innovation, from
the exhaust of vans. During two weeks in May and June of 1940, 1,558 mental
patients from East Prussia were gassed in vans at a transit camp in Soldau. The
killings were carried out by “the itinerant euthanasia squad known |
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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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