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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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290 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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[chemi…] cals.” He explained that the Gestapo
was dissatisfied with its results in torturing people in the camp, mostly
Poles, in order to extract confessions and information about comrades in the
underground. “So the next question was, Why don't we do it like the
Russians, who have been able to get confessions of guilt at their show
trials?” Since it was thought that those confessions had been obtained by
means of drugs, Weber was enlisted to investigate the matter; and he, according
to Dr. B., “played along with them [the Gestapo].” Weber worked with
Rohde and Capesius, the chief SS pharmacist, in trying out various barbiturates
and morphine derivatives. On one occasion they were observed to feed a
coffeelike substance to four prisoners, at least two of whom were known to have
died that night, and the other two possibly later. Upon being notified of these
deaths, Rohde is said to have commented that they had died a pleasant death
— which, in that setting at that time, an ordinary SS doctor could well
have said.48*
Dr. B’s response
to learning about his chief’s experiments tells us much about the
Auschwitz atmosphere. He said that his affection and respect for Weber changed
“not at all” because “within the context of Auschwitz,†
what difference did two or three people make — people who were in the
hands of the Gestapo and so already dead anyhow?” Dr. B. provided a
“psychological explanation” for his chief's behavior: the
latter’s considerable ambition and high intelligence in a man seriously
ill with kidney disease (from which he died soon after the war), which gave him
the feeling “I must do everything now.” Dr. B. added that Weber
worked closely with Mrugowsky, the chief physician of the central Hygienic
Institute of the Waffen SS in Berlin — an ideological and medical
collaboration that may have been the more important influence. For Mrugowsky
was a key figure in the planning and carrying out of destructive medical
experiments in many concentration camps. The Nuremberg Tribunal found him
guilty of planning fatal experiments with typhus vaccine in Buchenwald (carried
out mostly by Schuler); of conducting fatal experiments with “poison
bullets” in Sachenshausen (together with Schuler and Dr. Albert Widmann,
the SS chemist involved in T4 gassing); of assisting Gebhardt in fatal
sulfanilimide experiments at Ravensbrück in which infections were
artificially induced; and of planning and ordering of gas edema experiments,
also fatal, in Buchenwald, including further experimentation with injected
phenol. Mrugowsky undoubtedly coordinated many additional experiments as chief
of all Hygienic Institutes. In that capacity, moreover, he was a central figure
in the maintenance and distribution of Zyklon-B for use in Auschwitz and
elsewhere.49
One of the more benign
institutions in Auschwitz turns out to have |
__________
* Related experiments
described at Nuremberg and elsewhere may have involved mescaline.
† Throughout our interviews, he repeatedly used this phrase —
unter dem Aspekt von Auschwitz — to make similar points.
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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 290 |
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