| “Euthanasia”: Direct Medical
Killing |
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say, sick people.” Here he expressed both the Nazi
view of the unacceptability of the wartime burden created by mental patients as
well as the actual. death anxiety he and other doctors experienced at the time.
The situation was aggravated by his strong personal conflict about whether to
leave work in a mental hospital in order to rejoin the military at a time of
war, a conflict that could lead to profound fear and guilt either way —
over what he was doing and avoiding if he stayed with the mental hospital, and
over what he was leaving and what he was facing if he rejoined the military, as
he eventually did. For a time, he had been protected from military duty because
his work in “euthanasia” placed him in the category of
“indispensable.”
Despite some control over that decision, he
felt himself essentially in a closed system of authority and policy: his chief
called the doctors together and told them of the Hitler decree on
“euthanasia” and the work of the “medical commission” in
making final decisions about children, all of which, it was emphasized;
constituted “a secret matter of the Reich [Geheime
Reichssache].” Both chiefs he worked under were part of that closed
system and “were convinced that it [the killing project] was right”;
and that was a time when, unlike today, “one was afraid to do something
not in accord with the chief.” Nor was there any communication between
colleagues about the policy, once it was initiated: “It was only the chain
of command from high to low, but no discussion,” because it was
“taboo” to talk about the program to anyone. As an inexperienced
doctor and human being in his mid-twenties, he felt alone and anxious and
experienced stirrings of disillusionment (“I did not believe it possible
that a Reich I had wished for . . . was capable of ordering something like
that”), along with a sense of there being “no exit.” His way of
coping was to comply, to do what was expected of him.
One of his means
of adapting was to throw himself into medical work. He spent twelve to fourteen
hours a day on the wards “trying to grasp the whole thing, at least
scientifically, . . . to examine . . . all factors that were ... important for
the development of the condition, . . . to examine the relatives, the whole
family, . . . working with the patients, examining them precisely.” This
permitted “the physician to break through,” but it also helped him
solidify for himself his own medical “as if” situation: that is,
helped him maintain a partial illusion of medical authenticity.
But he
was also aware that he was involved in something dirty, in the killing of
children — as when he asked himself why a particular child was sleeping so
much (“That one did indeed think”) — and aware also that it was
“not the legal way” for orders to come from above concerning what
doctors should do. Dr. F. was later to admit publicly that the chief doctor
told him of the order to kill the children, and that he (F.) was aware that the
forms he filled out led directly to killing. He frequently spoke of the
deceptions as “diabolical” and added, with retrospective wisdom, of
course, but with significance for his feelings at the time as well:
“Either |
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