| “Wild Euthanasia”: The Doctors
Take Over |
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health of the working asylum-inmates," it was no longer
justified to feed everyone equally, “whether they contribute productive
work or are in therapy or whether, on the other hand, they are merely being
cared for. . . without accomplishing any useful work worth mentioning.”
The henceforth privileged patients were to be those performing useful work or
in therapy, children capable of education, war casualties and those with senile
diseases. Directors were ordered to institute such a program "without
delay.”9
It should be said that
the number of patients included in this program was a fraction of the total
hospital population. Their deaths would have made little difference to the
state of nourishment of the German population, which, in any event, was much
less affected than it had been by the First World War and its blockades. Yet in
the Eglfing institution, for example, the Second World War mortality from
starvation-related causes was twice that of the earlier war. Moreover, the
exceptions, notably war veterans and the elderly, reflected those areas where
popular disapproval was greatest.10
Pfannmüller and his colleagues had carte blanche on whom to
choose for starvation. There were no forms or questionnaires. Indeed, this
“pseudo-nourishment,” in the words of Gerhard Schmidt, who took over
as director at Eglfing at war’s end, was a “method of killing ...
that in the classic sense is no killing, no one-time action with a recognizable
cause or conclusion.”11 Pfannmüller
often chose patients who had been considered insufficiently ill to be sent to
the gassing centers. The motto at Eglfing was: “We give them no fat, then
they go on their own.”12 The diet
basically duplicated the Kaufbeuren model, with the addition of a slice of
bread a day. When this proved ineffective at times — and, indeed, the
kitchen staff sometimes added fat or meat to the soups against orders rations
were cut.13
When Dr. Schmidt took
over the directorship at Eglfing-Haar at the end of the war, he encountered (as
he told me) a total of ninety-four survivors on the two wards and a scene he
would never forget: “Huge, dark halls ... silent. No noise. Nothing....
The people showed no sign of life. A few stood. They said nothing. Like
half-corpses.”*
Doctors treating these surviving patients found
that they experienced hallucinations of ghosts coming at night and eating their
food; feelings of guilt over having done something bad for which they were now
being punished; and dreams and fantasies of food of every kind in limitless
amounts. The slow starvation method led many patients to believe they were
getting the same wartime rations as everyone else, and few if any seemed to
understand they had been singled out for starvation. On the basis of records,
it was estimated that 444 Eglfing patients had died directly or indirectly from
malnutrition, often from pneumonia, tuberculosis, or some other infection.14 |
__________
* That image was the
beginning of Schmidt’s study of Nazi medical killing, a study that can be
said to serve as the personal survivor mission of an anti-Nazi physician.
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