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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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223 |
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| Prisoner Doctors: The Agony of
Selections |
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feel imminent. A prisoner doctor told how the SS doctor
Fritz Klein kept demanding more information about sick patients in order to
send larger numbers of them to the gas chamber, and so then added in his
characteristically pained tones: “It's not honest in life to ask from a
man such things. Maybe you have to be a holy man to say no. I’m not
optimistic about my own behavior, you see. And still I am not a bad man. Really
not. But life asks me, ‘You or me?’ and I say, ‘Me.’”
Apart from selections, prisoner doctors had to engage in a certain
amount of triage (in their case the actual medical kind) of their own. For
instance, when Jan. W., a young Polish doctor, could obtain a limited amount of
invaluable typhus vaccine from his underground contacts, he did not simply
dispense it on a “first come, first serve” basis. He avoided giving
it to inmates whom he considered “too, weak to recover” or who were
in general elderly and infirm (precisely the people one would give the vaccine
to under ordinary circumstances), and instead chose “people who were young
and who would be helped by the vaccine.” Moreover, Dr. W. favored his own
“network of acquaintances,” meaning Polish political prisoners like
himself: “A friend from school in Krakow ... is much closer to me than a
Dutch Jew whom I saw for the first time in my life.”
Another
doctor, a Dutch Jew, had the same inclination toward favoring his own kind. He
told of giving all twenty sulfa tablets he possessed to a man with erysipelas,
and of thereby curing at least one person. But, this doctor added, “[He]
was a Dutchman, of course. It was easier for me and for him. We could speak to
each other and we understood each other. Should he have been a Pole, I don't
know.”
Aside from the question of one’s own group, there was
the constant moral and medical question of whether to spread the twenty or
thirty tablets of sulfanilamide or other medication among ten people, and use
up one’s supply in a day without any effect; to two or three people, and
perhaps give each a full day’s dose but no more after that; or to one
person, whom one could treat effectively over the several days necessary. As
Dr. Erich G. put it: “This [was] the dilemma for doctors ... every
day.”
There were at least three kinds of situation in which
prisoner doctors felt it necessary to participate in killing. First, the
killing on medical blocks of capos who murdered and beat other
prisoners, as described by Dr. Fejkiel (pages 186-87). Such killing saved
numerous lives — but was killing nonetheless: someone, usually a
resistance leader or group, had to decide that a particular capo was
“dangerous,” and agree with others that he should be killed; and
someone had to do the killing, usually a cooperative effort between a prisoner
doctor and other inmates working on the medical block.*
Second, there
were situations in which prisoner doctors felt certain patients had to be
killed. Dr. Elie Cohen, in a book whose subtitle is “A |
__________
* There were resistance
networks in Auschwitz, the most prominent of which was Communist-led. (See
pages 388-90). |
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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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