| Prisoner Doctors: Collaboration with Nazi
Doctors |
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In 1943 he was given unprecedented authority for a
prisoner doctor when appointed by Wirths to be block elder at the infirmary,
making him not only chief prisoner doctor but a leading capo as well.
During this period, he was enlisted by Horst Schumann (with the aid of Wirths)
to perform surgery in connection with sterilization experiments. Dering removed
ovaries and testicles of about two hundred Jewish inmates after these organs
had been subjected to radiation, to make them available for pathological
examination to determine whether the radiation had been effective. He
administered spinal anesthesia in a crude and painful manner (rather than
following the usual procedure of first anesthetizing the track of the main
injection), often while patients were forcibly restrained. Operations were done
without sterile procedures for hands and instruments, were performed extremely
rapidly, and were followed by hasty and rough suturing. The entire procedure
took about ten minutes. (Dr. Wanda J. recalled Schumann telling her — when
she, pleading lack of surgical facility, resisted his request to perform the
same operations — “I'll show you a surgeon who’ll do it in ten
minutes each.”)
Although Dr. J. who had known Dering from medical
school days in Poland, knew that “he wasn't very ... pro-Jewish,” she
was at first pleased to learn he was block elder in the infirmary because she
thought, “He will help me.” But he rebuffed her dietary request for
very, sick patients because, she thought, he believed that “we [Jews] are
condemned to death.”
Since she was asked to calm the young women
Dering operated upon, she witnessed much that went on. She told me with some
bitterness how during an operation she asked Dering in Polish, “Do you
realize what you are doing?” to which he answered, “Of course. I have
to remove the ovaries … because, you know, Schumann is here.” She
added that “he did ten girls in one day ... one afternoon” under
conditions that were simply “septic” (meaning infectious and
non-antiseptic). In subsequently taking care of these women, she observed the
extensive tissue destruction and infection resulting from the combination of
deep X rays, crude surgery, and general Auschwitz conditions. She had to
struggle not only to keep these patients alive but to find ways to protect them
from official scrutiny since, as “bearers of secrets”
(Geheimnisträger — secrets, in this case, of the surgical
experiments), they were always in danger of being sent to the gas chambers.
Other prisoner doctors observed Dering’s. increasing
brutalization. Dr. Jacob R. told how once, when making rounds together, Dering
looked at a patient he had operated on, and remarked, “Sterilization
magna” — an intentional double entendre, since the same term,
“great sterilization,” referred in medicine to the discovery of
sterile procedures to prevent infection. Dering also made a tobacco pouch out
of the scrotum of one of the testicles he had removed from Jewish prisoners,
and sometimes displayed it to other inmates.4
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