| “Wild Euthanasia ”: The Doctors
Take Over |
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related preparation) was usually given at night; those
patients not dead the next morning. were given lethal morphine-scopolamine
injections. Over time, the method became routine, with greater reliance on
injections and greater self-reliance on the part of nurses who increasingly
came to decide upon necessary dosages of barbiturates or injected
morphine-scopolamine for patients whose names were placed on the special
“list.”18*
As he involved
himself in the process, Dr. Wahlmann discouraged one chief nurse from
questioning it. And with the arrival, in 1944, of Polish and Russian workers
mostly diagnosed categorically as “tubercular,” the killing procedure
became automatic. The only examination performed on them by Wahlmann or any
other doctor was done, after they had received their lethal drugs, for the
purpose of confirming their death. At his trial, Wahlmann justified that
situation by explaining that the Russians and the Poles had been “sent to
us by specialists who stated they were incurably diseased and were to receive
the euthanasia on the same day”; and said that he was “not a [T.B.]
specialist.”20 To gain the
patients’ cooperation for the injection, according to a former male nurse,
“We told them that it was for treatment of their lung disease.”21† The records of these laborers were then
brought to Wahlmann’s morning conferences, where his task was to decide
upon a false but plausible cause of death in order “to write in the end to
those case histories,” as he later put it.23
In his legal testimony, he stressed
medical principles concerning such things as the criteria used to determine the
killing dosage of injections: “That is very different [for different
people]. If I have a very strong person, then I have to use more. If I have a
person who is used to morphine, then I have to use very much. If I have a very
weak person, then I need very little.” He could not remember the exact
origin of the injections — whether “I ordered [initiated] it at that
time or whether it was generally done then”; but he did stress that
“injection is a completely painless method, and the term euthanasia comes
from the Greek eu, which means beautiful.”24 Killing with drugs, then, was the most
“medical” form of all. There could be “conferences” where
doctors discussed “therapy,” the ordering of “medication,”
and further “clinical” decisions depending upon the effect of that
medication. With the onset of “wild euthanasia,” the doctor could
share his syringe with a nurse, but he took on greater authority than |
__________
* Several nurses and
nonprofessional employees, who sometimes also gave out the tablets, experienced
anxiety about what they were doing, but most seemed to remain at their jobs and
to consider themselves to be following orders. One employee experienced what
was described as a “nervous breakdown” and was given six weeks’
leave but then reassigned to the undressing room (which had so disturbed her in
the first place) with the explanation that this was to “harden” her;
she remained there a while and then succeeded in resigning by claiming to be
pregnant.19
†At one of the trials, the chief female nurse, when asked
whether she considered the Russians and Poles to have been murdered, answered,
“Murder? How do you want me to understand murder? They died from
injections.” But pressed further whether in her opinion that was murder,
she answered, “Yes.”22
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