| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| Confession,” tells how, when he was in charge of a
“lunatics’ room,” one of them escaped into the camp and caused a
disturbance, leading the SS commandant to issue a warning that such things had
better not happen again. Cohen’s reaction, which he shared with a prisoner
friend who worked with him, was that if they could not keep things quiet on the
ward “we'll all be for the gas chamber.” Since this mental patient
was extremely difficult to control, the friend responded by questioning his
“sacrificing 600 people for one lunatic!” The two men cooperated in
the killing by injecting an overdose of insulin, and Cohen later wrote:
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On that occasion I ... yes, I infringed the
ethical rule that one is a doctor not to murder people, but to try to keep them
alive, to try to cure them, help them. And ... it's always the first step that
counts. For a few weeks later, it happened again. But by that time I had far
fewer moral scruples about going upstairs again and saying to V., . . .
“Same old thing. We’ll have to do it again.”
And we did
too, and that man died as well. |
| There was no problem about reporting the matter: |
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It was quite simple, of course, for you just
filled in something on the deceased’s cards. Pneumonia ... anything you
liked. For it was all a farce in that room. I kept a very neat chart for each
patient, showing his temperature and even the medicines we were giving him. Or
were not
giving him rather, even though they were entered
on his chart.5 |
Auschwitz could thus impose upon certain prisoner doctors
some of the elements of the direct medical killing, or “euthanasia,”
program discussed in part I.
Cohen and other prisoner doctors struggled
against the overall brutalization of an environment in which, as a former
prisoner, orderly told me, “the corrupting of all human and ethical
standards took place so rapidly ... that one had to be very stern to prevent
the somewhat stronger prisoners hastening death of the weaker fellow
prisoners.” The extreme example was the behavior of hardened criminal
psychopaths who joined with SS personnel in killing people on work
Kommandos, after which prisoners would be sent out to bring back the
corpses to fill in the necessary “rows of five” and obtain the proper
count — sometimes taking place while the prisoner orchestra played the
tune (mentioned earlier) of “That’s How We Live Every Day”
(So leben wir alle Tage).6
There was a third form of killing that certain prisoner doctors engaged
in: abortions performed during various stages of pregnancy, and the killing of
newborns after secret deliveries. These abortions and killing of newborns were
done because women (especially Jewish women) discovered to be pregnant or to
have given birth to an infant were killed by the SS. There have been many
reports of these clandestine events. Dr. Gerda |
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