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| Chapter 5 |
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| Participants |
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Determined ... to
intervene therapeutically to attain healing and health for everyone, full of
the desire to put themselves primarily at the service of the community, and
full of impotent rage over the therapeutic inaccessibility of so many mental
patients, psychopaths and habitual criminals (that is, the Jews!), they [the
psychiatrists] actually moved from the individual to the “national
body” [Volkskörper], to pervert “treatment”
[Behandlung] metaphorically: to make extermination
[Sonderbehandlung] the perfection of healing. |
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—
KLAUS DÖRNER |
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| At the Killing
Center |
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A Psychiatrist Who Stayed: Horst D
Dr.
Horst D. worked at a killing center for about a year and was, at the time of
our meetings, involved in an elaborate, unresolved legal procedure. A bearded
vigorous man in his early sixties, I found him tense, cautious, and limited in
his capacity to express feelings — wishing very much to explain himself
and at the same time conflicted about his own explanation.
He thought
he had been assigned to the T4 program because of a recommendation made to
Heyde by a friend from student days with whom he (Dr. D.) had shared a semester
of psychiatric work. His early enthusiasm for the Nazis together with his
military experience and medical inexperience were also undoubtedly factors in
the assignment. Like others, he had been pressed into military service before
completing his medical thesis, 1 and then was frustrated because he had
virtually nothing to do and “there was no medicine at all.” At that
point, in mid-1940, “I was told I should come to Berlin and present myself
at the Chancellery |
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