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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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124 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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[organ…] izing special transports of Jewish patients
to his killing institution at Brandenburg; a pocket diary of his denoted the
various Jewish transports with the letter “J,” together with the
number of people and the names of the towns in which institutions sending
transports to Brandenburg were located.33
Eberl’s enthusiasm for “euthanasia” killing was
expressed in his intense advocacy of the law that would openly legitimate the
project as well as mercy killing on request. He pointed out that, whatever the
existing reservations on the part of doctors, “the number of ideologically
unacceptable medical officers will indeed shrink from year to year, since the
new generation presumably will be ideologically correct to an overwhelming
extent.” 34
Eberl was appointed
commandant of Treblinka at the camp's opening in July 1942. An engineer from T4
had helped construct the gassing apparatus; and the personnel, as in the other
death camps in Poland, came heavily from SS men earlier involved with
“euthanasia.” Ukrainian guards with dogs were a new feature. The fact
that Eberl was the only physician known to have headed a death camp suggests
that the Nazis had good reason to feel that he was indistinguishable from a
nonphysician in his attitude toward killing Jews. It could also mean that the
Nazis were at the time considering wider use of doctors as commandants of death
camps, thereby extending the principle of medicalized killing.
If Eberl
was a test case, he failed. An SS inspection visit to Treblinka a few weeks
after the arrival of the first transport exposed a chaotic situation. Decaying
corpses were piled up as new trains arrived, giving incoming Jews an all too
clear idea of what awaited them, and making them difficult to handle; trains
could not keep their schedule as one was held up behind another. Eberl was
dismissed in short order. He had not been able to cope with the new dimension
of murder, although his inefficiency in no way slowed down the process. At the
peak in late August, trains were bringing in 10,000 to 12,000 Jews a day; by
the end of that month, some 215,000 had been killed. (In comparison, as a T4
doctor, Eberl had killed “only” 18,000 patients in a little over a
year and a half.35)
During his brief
tenure, Eberl was said to have worn his white physician’s coat when
walking about the camp. Whether or not he actually did, he became, for a brief
period, the ultimate healer-turned-killer — even if he did not quite make
the grade. Whatever his prior psychological propensity for omnipotence, sadism,
and violence, he apparently experienced the kind of total immersion into Nazi
ideology that would |
__________
in the interest of successful
cooperation to refrain from using this diagnosis in such great numbers,
especially if there have been no previous symptoms. I also must reject the
advice of your office chief because, as a nonphysician, he is in no position to
judge the facts properly, and I agree with him when he says that this question
is a purely medical one and therefore is only to be decided by doctors.32 |
| His consistent principle was that one needs
a careful medical lie. |
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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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