| “Euthanasia”: Direct Medical
Killing |
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In other words, he and other doctors could follow a
pattern that recurs throughout this study: the immersion of themselves in
“medical science” as a means of avoiding awareness of, and guilt
over, their participation in a murderous project.
Moreover, some years
after the war Hans F. returned to the same institutional complex and began to
make more systematic studies of this “pathological material.” As he
explained to me, all brains of autopsied children, whether they were killed in
the “euthanasia” project or not, were kept at the institute, and
“among them were some of scientific interest.” He compared his
decision to study those brains to that of any contemporary medical scientist:
“So just like today, when a patient dies, where I say, ‘Yes, this is
an interesting illness,’ .. . . I should like to know what was going on
there and then I have the brain kept and I receive it for examination. Just
like it was back then, right.”
When I asked him whether, when
doing these later dissections, he had any thoughts about what had happened to
children during that earlier time, his answer was equivocal. He admitted
“some. . . thoughts ... about individual cases one remembered — that
was this or that child.” While he denied that one could tell whether the
brain came from a child who had been killed, he did acknowledge that “one
could assume that with severe cases that were, let's say, diagnostically and
prognostically in the range of the [‘euthanasia’] program, that some
of these cases of course did suffer a forcible death.”
Dr.
F.’s political and biomedical ideology, together with his relationship to
specific political and medical authority, contributed crucially to his
psychological responses and, ultimately, to his participation in the killing
program. Contributing also to his behavior was the prevailing stance of German
— and not only German — psychiatry of that time toward mental
patients in general and radically impaired children in particular, a stance of
great distance and a limited perception of these patients as human beings. More
than distance, former child patients later described a cruel, even sadistic
institutional environment, including corporal punishment for misbehavior and
electric shocks for bed wetting, all of which was undoubtedly intensified by
the institution’s killing function. Dr. F. was especially susceptible to
this ultimate medical corruption because of the intensity of his relationship
to the regime, but other doctors less involved with Nazi ideology did similar
things within a structure that maximized whatever psychological potential one
possessed for joining in the reversal of healing and killing.
“The Most Simple Method”:
Hermann Pfannmüller
Finally, there were the extremes in the
killing of children. The following is a description by a nonmedical visitor, in
the fall of 1939, to an important Reich Committee institution at Eglfing-Haar,
where the direc- […tor] |
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