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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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96 |
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Contents |
Index |
Home
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| Chapter 4 |
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“Wild
Euthanasia”:
The Doctors Take Over |
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For quite a number of doctors ... Hitler not only had the power of a
commander in chief in a political sense, but was also the highest ranking
physician. |
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— Victor von Weizsäker |
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What was discontinued was only the visible dimension of the
project: the large-scale gassing of patients. T4 officially ceased as a
program, but that turned out to be still another deception. Widespread killing
continued in a second phase, sometimes referred to in Nazi documents as
“wild euthanasia” because doctors — encouraged, if not directed,
by the regime — could now act on their own initiative concerning who would
live or die.¹
While the regime ordered most of the gas chambers
dismantled (to be reassembled , as it turned out, in the East), it did nothing
to stop the ideological and institutional momentum of medical killing. The
regime’s clear message, in fact, was that the killings were to go on, but
more quietly.And more quiet killing meant more isolated, individual procedures.
Doctors acted on their personal and ideological inclinations, along with their
sense of the regime’s pulse. That pulse emanated no longer from the
Chancellery, which bowed out along with T4 itself, but from the Reich Interior
Ministry and its national medical subdivision. There were changes in
geographical location, but the regime continued to make transportation
arrangements, required that patients’ deaths be recorded centrally, and in
some cases maintained T4 experts in a partially supervisory role. Patients were
now killed not by gas but by starvation and drugs, the latter method in
particular rendering the killing still more “medical.”
The
children’s program was not icluded under the T4 “halt.”
Killing |
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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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Page 96 |
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