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| Chapter 14 |
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Killing with Syringes:
Phenol Injections |
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But then instead of doing it for medical purposes, it was for killing
…. It was very much like a medical ceremony …. They were so careful
to keep the full pecision of a medical process — but with the aim of
killing. That was what was so shocking. |
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— Auschwitz prisoner doctor |
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The most medical of all Auschwitz killing methods was the
phenol injection, which was institutionalized during the relatively early
phases of Auschwitz. A patient was brought to a treatment room
and there administered a drug by a physician or (in most cases)
his assistant, who wore a white coat and used a syringe and needle for the
injection In camp jargon, there were the active verb spritzen (“to
inject, squirt, spray”), the passive verb abgespritzt (“to be
injected off,” or killed), and equivalent noun forms meaning
“syringing” and “phenoling.”¹
Phenol
injections were associated, in their early phase, with the direct medical
killing of the “euthanasia” project. Thus Dr. Friedrich Entress, who
organized the injections in Auschwitz, testified in 1947 that he had received
what he called an order on euthanasia from Dr. Enno Lolling, chief of SS
concentration-camp medicine, stating that “incurably mentally ill persons,
incurable tuberculosis patients, and those permanently incapable of work”
were to be killed. Later that order was expanded to include “sick
prisoners whose recovery was not possible within four weeks.” The order
probably arrived in mid-or late 1941, when the Nazis were searching for
efficient killing methods; in early 1942, at least two hundred prisoners with
tuberculosis had been killed with phenol on Entress’s orders.²* |
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* Entress remembered the
first order as arriving in May 1942, but Langbein is convinced that he was in
error concerning the date, since the phenol killings were under way in fall
1941. Dr. Jan W. told me that “every day in 1942, twenty to
thirty or more were killed this way.” Most victims were Jews, but other
prisoners were also murdered by phenol. |
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