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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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80 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Chapter 3 |
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Resistance to Direct
Medical Killing |
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There is strange talk in Munich about the fate, of mental
patients.
How come he died so fast? I enclose a stamp so that you will
tell me about his last hours.
Why was my brother's body burned? I
would like to have buried him in a grave.
We have to reproach you about
not having given us chance to say goodbye . . . . We are really bitter and do
not understand your measures. I expect you will tell me your reasons for such
behavior. |
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— Excerpts from letters of family members of
patients killed
in the euthanasia program |
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| Resistance within
Psychiatry |
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Some psychiatrists resisted medical killing — but
mostly in limited, isolated, and indirect. ways. Though insufficient, that
resistance was not without significance.
What was undoubtedly the most
widespread form of resistance is the most difficult to evaluate: the
“silent resistance” in the form of actions taken by individual
psychiatrists to enable patients to evade the lethal bureaucracy.¹ These
measures included diagnosing patients as severely neurotic rather than
schizophrenic, or minimizing mentally deficient patients' inability to work;
releasing patients to their families or keeping them in university clinics or
on general medical services, rather than transferring them to state hospitals;
and generally emphasizing patients’ |
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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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Back |
Page 80 |
Forward |
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