| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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3. Patients who are in custody as criminally insane.
4. Patients who are not German citizens, or are not of German or
kindred blood, giving race and nationality.
There are added instructions
about filling in the section on work, including that of noting “patients
in the higher diet categories [who] perform no work though they might be able
to do so.” (The original questionnaire, translated, is reproduced on pages
68-69.) By mid 1940, these report forms were required not only on patients who
came under the four categories but on all inmates of these institutions.46
The process was haphazard from the
start. It was required that forms be returned quickly, and one institutional
doctor had to fill out fifteen hundred questionnaires in two weeks. Early
confusion about the purpose of the form led some doctors to exaggerate the
severity of patients’ conditions as a way of protecting them from what was
assumed to be a plan to release them from institutions in order to send them to
work. The extent to which psychiatrists could continue to disbelieve what was
happening — especially when they did not want to believe it — is
suggested by a leading professor of psychiatry’s later description of his
response to a rumor he had heard that patients were being
“euthanized”: |
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I considered the rumor completely unbelievable
… Thinking that the questionnaire did not give the slightest cause to
suppose such an action, . . . I imagined the intended action was a way of
separating the curable patients, or those able to work, from those who were
incurable, in order to provide better food for the first group and to provide
the second group . . . only the amount of food necessary to keep them alive . .
. [My staff] was persuaded by my argument, and we all worked innocently on the
questionnaire project.47*
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| The “expert evaluation” differed from the
children’s program in that the three medical (usually psychiatric)
authorities, drawn from among the leaders of the project, did their reviewing
independently. Of every questionnaire collected, four or five photocopies were
made in the Reich Interior Ministry, one for each of these three
“experts” (Gutachter) the other one or two for the later death
procedure with the original usually kept in the central files. Each of the
experts wrote in a special thick black frame at the lower left-hand corner of
the form, “+” in red pencil meaning death “-” in blue
pencil meaning life or “?” sometimes with a comment, which was most
often “worker.” He then initialed the mark. If anything, their work
was even more mercurial and superficial than the initial filling out of the
forms. Each doctor was sent at least 100 photocopied questionnaires at a time
during one seventeen-[...day] |
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* This statement is
especially significant as having been made by Dr. Gottfried Ewald who, as I
discuss in chapter 3, became one of the very few significant psychiatric voices
of dissent. His initial disbelief could have been due partly to his then ardent
Nazi sympathies. |
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