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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE 
 
precipitately, traveled extensively, and eventually settled in Khartoum in the Sudan as head of a hospital. There for about seven years he apparently became something of a Good Samaritan, working night and day treating Africans and conducting research into sleeping sickness; he described himself to a visiting journalist as having “found the serenity and the calm necessary for the moral balance of a human being.”37 But he was identified by an Auschwitz survivor on the basis of the photograph accompanying that article. He fled to Ghana, from where he was eventually handed over (in November 1966, after the death of Kwame Nkrumah who, as prime minister, had protected him for some time) to representatives of West Germany. By then, he had become weakened from chronic malaria and other illnesses. In custody for several years, he was convicted for his involvement in direct medical killing or “euthanasia”; but because of his heart condition and generally deteriorating health, he was released without having stood trial for his sterilization and castration experiments.38 He died in Frankfurt in 1983.

There were some reports of his having shown regret and even contrition, and he was quoted as having admitted to his “euthanasia” activities at Grafeneck and his Auschwitz experiments and saying, “It was terrible what we did.”39 But at other moments, in the courtroom and elsewhere, he was much less than contrite, defending or denying his actions. It is doubtful that he ever morally confronted his own past actions, but it is possible that his work in Africa, though undertaken primarily to avoid justice, eventually served, in a partial psychological sense, as a form of penance.

Schumann has great importance for us because of what he did — intense involvement in both direct medical killing and unusually brutal Auschwitz experiments — and what he was — an ordinary, but highly Nazified man and doctor.  
 
 
Anthropological Research: Specimens for a Museum 
 
Block 10 played an important part in a form of  “anthropological research” that was among the most grotesque expressions of the Nazi biomedical vision. Dr. Marie L. tells of its Auschwitz beginnings: 
 
There appeared [on Block 10] a new protagonist of racial theories. He chose his material by having naked women of all ages file … in front of him: He wanted to do anthropological measurements …. He had measurements of all the parts of the body taken ad infinitum …. They were told that they had the extraordinary good fortune to be selected, that they would leave Auschwitz to go to an excellent camp, somewhere in Germany … [where] they would be very well treated, where they would be happy.  
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

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