Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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Chapter 6 
 

 
 
Bringing "Euthanasia"
to the Camps: Action
Special Treatment 14f13 
 
 
  [I]t must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today .... We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural and free life .... In prehistoric tithes of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise, humanity will, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.   
   — KONRAD LORENZ (1940)  
     
 
It was probably inevitable that the T4 killing project would be extended to the concentration camps, but the program under which that was done, bearing the code name 14f13, has always been something of a mystery. From the standpoint of this study, we may view this program as a key means of linking the direct medical killing we have been discussing with the medicalized killing in the concentration camps — that is, linking the Nazi version of  “euthanasia” with genocide.

The SS did not run T4, though it had close ties with the program. We have seen how it provided the means for killing: the carbon monoxide gas chamber, as developed by the SS officer Christian Wirth, as well as other personnel and. equipment necessary for transportation and for murder. Equally important was the SS’s tie to leading T4 psychiatrists and
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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