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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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171 |
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| Selections on the Ramp |
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[crema… ] toria could not handle the number of
arrivals, Georgi “became braver and more brutal” and at times had
victims brought “by the Sonderkommando to the burning trench,
[where] they were ordered to lie down, and [he] shot them one after
another.”8
The mass killing was
done systematically, with elaborate organization: |
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There were five crematoria where about 800
prisoners worked. The crematoria consisted of four rooms especially built for
them, as well as a converted room that had been a farmhouse before. In each
crematorium about 180 prisoners worked ....
In each oven about 800
corpses could be burned within 24 hours. That was not sufficient. Further mass
graves were dug, which were about 2 meters deep, 10 meters long, and 5 meters
wide, to burn humans ....
When the four crematoria were no longer
sufficient to exterminate the growing transports, . . . we had to throw the
corpses into burning trenches. There the Germans found out that, to save
benzine, human fat could be poured on the corpses and drained into a lower
trench. We poured the human fat from pails on the people so they would burn
faster. Here we worked from May 1944 to October 1944. We worked 12 to 16 hours
daily; four SS men were next to each crematorium and were helped by 180
prisoners. The fire burned continuously — day and night.
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No wonder that "the horrible screaming of these people I
still hear in my mind to this day and I cannot get rid of it."9
Hilberg has pointed out that the four
Birkenau crematoria could burn a maximum of about 4,400 bodies a day. But in
May and June, Hungarian Jews alone were being gassed at nearly 10,000 a day, so
that the added trenches were required for burning bodies. When those trenches
had to be dug, the four Jewish Sonderkommando units contained a force of
between fifteen hundred to two thousand men, and by August 1944, over twenty
thousand corpses were burned on certain days.10
The doctors were central to the
elaborate medical subterfuge, as Dr. Henri Q. stressed: |
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The [Nazi] doctors’ . . . collusion in
deception ... was a real staging; ... a Red Cross truck to reassure people, and
in that truck was the prussic acid that was to kill them. There was a Red Cross
ambulance when transports arrived. Those details were meant to appease people.
When one sees an ambulance, one thinks there is medical care. It was a
deliberate psychological manipulation to keep people from reacting ....
There were trucks where sick and old people, children and pregnant
women were told to get on. People believed that the Germans were
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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 171 |
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