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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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The Expefimental Impulse  
 
a motor … from five to eight minutes,” after which he “had a general ill feeling”); to the collection of sperm (“Dr. Dering came with a sort of club and put it into my rectum …. Some drops came out of my member”); to beginning arrangements for the operation (“I said, ‘Why are you operating on me? I am … not sick.’[And Dering] answered, ‘… If I take not the testicle off you they will take it off me’”); to the painful spinal anesthetic and the operation itself (“After some minutes I saw Dr. Dering when he had my testicle in his hand and showed it to Dr. Schumann, who was present”). To another man asking the same question before the operation, Dering replied, “Stop barking like a dog. You will die anyway.”32

Schumann’s brutalization in Auschwitz is revealed by a lesser research project he conducted on a fungus condition of the face, a form of ringworm spread by large numbers of men being shaved with the same brush. Although experience had shown that the condition could be readily treated with various medicines, Schumann seized the occasion to try the efficacy of his X rays. These caused severe skin eruptions and infections, and in many victims impairment of salivary and tear-duct functions along with paralysis of face and eyes, which in turn caused a number of men to be sent to the gas.35

In addition to these Jewish victims, a group of young, healthy Polish men were subjected to the X-ray castration experiment. They were probably given an unusually high dosage because, as the former orderly in the ward reported, “Their genitals started slowly rotting away” and the men “often crawled on the floor in their pain.” Ointments were tried, but the men did not improve; and after a long period of suffering, they were ordered by Thilo to the gas chamber.34

Dr. Klodzinski writes of as many as 200 men being subjected to X-ray castration, and of about 180 of those to amputation of at least one testicle, 90 of these operations taking place on one day, 16 December 1942. While overall statistics are uncertain, the general estimate is that approximately 1,000 prisoners, male and female, underwent X-ray sterilization or castration, and about 200 of these were subjected to surgical removal of testicles or ovaries. Whatever statistics are available derive from the Auschwitz policy of keeping relatively accurate surgical records of these experiments.35*

Like Clauberg, Schumann continued his experiments in Ravensbrück, there victimizing thirteen-year-old Gypsy girls.

After the war he managed to live obscurely in Germany — although recognized at Nuremberg as a war criminal — until an application for a license for a hunting gun led to his being identified. He fled Germany
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* At the Dering trial, the surgical register was summarized as follows: “There was a list of 130 numbered lines, each having a date between March 1943 and 10 November 1943; an individual prisoner’s number and name; and the nature of an operation in Latin, such as castratio, sterilisatio, amputatio testis sin. left, amputatio testis dex. right, amputatio testis utriusque bilateral, ovariectomia sin., and ovariectornia dex.”36   
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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