| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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described, the SS doctor would take a quick look around the
hospital blocks, or have a number of patients brought to him, and select a few
of the weaker ones for phenol injections. With the larger selections, all
prisoner patients would be brought, usually naked, before the camp doctor who,
with a glance, decided which among them could remain and which were to be
killed. These large selections could involve two hundred or three hundred
prisoners; and within a day or two of the selection, the prisoners were loaded
into trucks and taken to the gas chambers.
There were especially large
medical-block selections in connection with typhus epidemics or fear of an
epidemic. The most notorious of these took place on 29 August 1942. Typhus had
been spreading rapidly through the main camp, affecting SS personnel as well as
prisoners, and necessitating that a special wooden barracks be set up
specifically for typhus patients. The decision to “liquidate” those
typhus patients apparently came from Berlin, and Entress selected seven hundred
or eight hundred people, including typhus patients, those suspected of having
the disease and those convalescing. Prisoner doctors and nurses were originally
supposed to be included but were saved apparently by means of some form of
negotiation.20
Dr. Jan W a leading
Polish prisoner physician, pointed to the SS doctor as the one who acted on the
principle that “a person can live only if he works — unless he works
… he must die”; and who together with his assistants “had in
fact the task of speeding up [that] death.”
Skeletons Marching
Prisoner
doctors could observe what those medical block selections were really like. The
highly respected Lucie Adelsberger, who worked on the overcrowded Jewish block*
of the women’s hospital in Birkenau, reported a hospital scene: |
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The sick lie on straw sacks all jumbled together,
one on top of the other, and cannot stretch their sore limbs nor rest their
backs The beds bulge with filth and excrement and the dead and the decomposing
press with their stiffened bodies against the living who confined as they are
cannot move away. Every illness in the camp is represented here: tuberculosis
diarrhea rashes induced by crawling vermin hunger, edema where the wasted
skeleton has filled itself with water to replace the vanished cell tissue,
people with bloodshot weals caused by lashes of the whip people with mangled
limbs frozen feet, wounds from the electric wire or who have been shot at for
trifles by a trigger-happy SS. |
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* Regulations required that
Jewish inmates be treated by Jewish doctors and Aryan inmates by non-Jewish
doctors. How scrupulously this segregation was maintained varied with Nazi
doctors, but seemed to be held to more strictly in the women’s hospital in
Birkenau than elsewhere. |
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