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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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aggressive person" with new energy and confidence. He could have enormous impact upon younger psychiatrists because they "would first identify with this sensitive man, and then with his more aggressive side as they joined him in National-Socialist ideology."28

That new confidence could take the form of grandiosity — plans, never realized, for a vast research institute that would focus on hereditary influences in “idiocy” — and, more than that, would create a new “biological anthropology,” which would “finally put an end to the old ideas about mankind.” Schneider did succeed in obtaining large sums of, money for a research institute where he initiated some of this work, using mainly brains obtained from the "euthanasia" project. 29

Schneider’s path of corruption was his psychiatric idealism. But, once on that path, he felt beckoned as well by immortalizing professional power. Whatever conflicts he experienced, he could connect his unusual empathy for psychiatric patients with the Nazi biomedical vision and its humane claim to end suffering and strengthen the race. A previously sensitive man’s deep immersion in Nazi ideology in general enabled him to function as both empathic psychiatrist and medical executioner. 
 
 
The Ultimate Healer-Turned-Killer: Irmfried Eberl
 
Finally, there is Irmfried Eberl (1910-48), unique among doctors in that he went from being head of major T4 gassing facilities to become, at age thirty-two, commandant — not chief doctor but overall commander — of a death camp.

Another Austrian, Eberl belonged to the younger generation of highly politicized early Nazi doctors, having joined the Party at the age of twenty-one. At the time of the test demonstration at Brandenburg in 1940, he was one of the first to be shown how the poison-gas killing technology worked. He made use of that knowledge extensively as head of that killing center and, when it closed down, as head of Bernburg. And, in addition to serving in the inner circle of psychiatric experts, he was given special authority to enter various psychiatric institutions and investigate their attitudes toward, and willingness to work energetically in, the “euthanasia” killing project.30

Eberl served as a special deputy to Heyde in supervising the all-important area of false causes of death, with the task of establishing consistency in the various killing centers and policies that could convincingly maintain the subterfuge.3l* Eberl was actively involved organ- […izing]
__________
* In this role, Eberl wrote a long, carefully argued letter to Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, director at Hartheim, objecting that one of his assistants had cited lung tuberculosis as a cause of death, because that disease was not likely to be suddenly fatal; moreover, tuberculosis necessitated such mandatory legal-epidemiological procedures as isolation and the closing of wards or institutions. The letter concluded with a remarkable paragraph:
In summary, I should like to state that because of all the cited reasons, the frequent diagnosis “lung tuberculosis” as practiced by you (about 40 to 50 percent of all cases that we have received come under this diagnosis) is not unobjectionable, and I ask you  
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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