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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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265 |
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| Killing with Syringes: Phenol
Injections |
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(see pages 223-24) — a very different situation, but
also a form of Auschwitz medical killing — and probably not unique. We
recall as well Dr. Michael Z.’s refusal to perform intracardiac injections
by insisting upon his technical inability, and Langbein cites a similar episode
involving a Dr. Miklulás Korn who “had to fear the consequences of
refusal much more than any ‘Aryan,’” but was not
punished.”28 Dr. Jan W. also told of a
Polish doctor who was able to refuse and “got away with it.”
At the time they were using prisoners for the task, the Nazis did not
seem to press those who were reluctant but preferred to seek out people whose
psychological and ideological inclinations made them willing or even
enthusiastic practitioners. |
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| “Today I Am the Camp Doctor”: Josef
Klehr |
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Sometime in 1942, phenol killing was essentially taken
over by Josef Klehr, who murdered as a delegate of Nazi doctors:
“[Entress] left the work to Mehr and then went away.”29 A semi-literate laborer and medical orderly from
Upper Silesia, he was intent upon killing as a doctor: “Klehr put on his
doctor’s coat and told the girl: ‘You have a heart condition.’
Then came the injection.”30 His nickname
was “Professor,” and his identification was not just with the
doctor’s role but with the latter's specific Auschwitz killing role. Klehr
conducted selections himself at times and on Christmas Eve 1942, when told that
the camp doctor could not appear, replied immediately, “Today I am the
camp doctor.”31
Klehr took pride
in his medical skills. He is said to have taken over the phenol killings
because one of the prisoners doing it had broken an injection needle. He
devised efficient ways of positioning prisoners for injection into the heart,
and was proud of his speed in killing people, two or three in one minute. He
even took up performing lumbar punctures, or spinal taps — a demanding
procedure, in which a long needle must be injected between the vertebrae. He
usually experimented on prisoners he was to inject with phenol, and if they
cried out (he took no measures against pain), he “was reported to have hit
these victims before their death.”32
Klehr was the ultimate caricature of the omnipotent Auschwitz doctor.
According to one account of a special execution of a Soviet political
“commissar,” the victim, “covered with blood,” was held
down by four prisoners while “Klehr ... [stood] next to him in a white
coat holding a hypodermic, ready to kill.” There are similar descriptions
of Klehr against a background of corpses turning to inject again, with his
sleeves rolled up and wearing either a white coat or “a pink-rubber apron
and rubber gloves” and “holding a 20-cc hypodermic with a long
needle” in his hands.33
When
there was no SS doctor present, Klehr would combine his image of himself as
doctor with that of oriental potentate: |
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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 265 |
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