|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
139 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Bringing “Euthanasia ” to the
Camps |
| |
camps. Morgen distinguished between illegal and legal forms
of killing in them. As legal, he mentioned “those cases where physicians,
upon their personal decisions, relieve incurably ill patients from their
suffering by administering a drug for mercy killing.” And, in the next
sentence, he added, “The same applies to those cases where physicians
acted in a state of emergency where they killed victims of epidemics and those
who could be suspected to have been infected, and killed them painlessly, in
order to prevent mass deaths.”20 Such
murder could be easily juxtaposed with “mercy killing” in that both
were perceived as medical functions. (In part II, we will observe how such a
“preventive” approach to epidemics was systematically pursued as part
of mass murder.)
With the exception of Auschwitz, all camps where 14f13
was operative (for example, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück) were of
the standard kind, within which prisoners were beaten, starved, subjected to
slave labor, and often killed; but the overall function of the institution was
not mass murder per se. By providing these ordinary camps with killing centers
as well as with a corrupt selections process for facilitating mass murder,
14f13 transformed them into functional equivalents of extermination camps. The
arrangement could be temporary, or sustained as in the case of Mauthausen and
Hartheim. T4 doctors made extensive selections at Mauthausen during the early
part of 14f13; subsequently, Mauthausen camp doctors did the selections for
people to be killed at Hartheim. The connection continued until the center was
dismantled, when the order came not from the SS but from Hitler’s
Chancellery, specifically from Viktor Brack, central administrator of the
“euthanasia” program.21
Ultimately, then, 14f13 provided for virtually unlimited application of
the “euthanasia” program — especially to Jews, but also to
Gypsies, Russians, Poles, and other Germans. The Nazi message — for
victims, for possible observers, and mostly for themselves — was: all our
killing is medical, medically indicated, and carried out by doctors. The 14f13
project is thought to have killed more than twenty thousand people, but the
concepts and policies it furthered contributed to the death of
millions. |
| |
| |
| An Inside View of 14f13:
Friedrich Mennecke |
| |
The series of letters Dr. Friedrich Mennecke wrote to his
wife (herself a T4 laboratory assistant) from the various concentration camps
he visited provide an inside view of 14f13; appropriately enough, these letters
were often written on the back of printed “euthanasia”
questionnaires.
Mennecke was an ardent Nazi, having joined both the
Party and the SS in 1932 and served as a deputy Party leader in his area —
somewhat unusual for a medical man, as was his background as the son of a
bricklayer. He claimed, in Party correspondence, strong professional
involvement in “hereditary biology” and sterilization. He had just
three years of |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 139 |
Forward |
|
|
