| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| [deriva…] tives in the “euthanasia” of
children and the later “wild euthanasia” of adults. Injections of
phenol and other lethal substances were widespread in other camps. Early
experimentation with phenol in Buchenwald was ordered by Mrugowsky, the overall
Berlin chief of the SS Hygienic Institute, after it had been noted that tiny
percentages of carbolic acid (phenol) preservative in serum was implicated in
the accidental medical deaths of several German soldiers. Erwin Schuler (alias
Ding), a camp doctor at Buchenwald who explained that “neither [he] nor
Mrugowsky had ever seen a case of death by phenol,” went ahead with the
experiments considered “urgent for the fighting troops.”6 But in Buchenwald, too, phenol was mainly used to
kill sick inmates, though it was also used for killing various kinds of
political prisoner. Dr. Waldemar Hoven testified that on one occasion he was
observed in the act by his colleague Schuler: “[He] said that I was not
doing it correctly, [and] therefore ... performed some of the injections
himself."7* There would seem to be a certain
psychological significance in the progression from claimed German military
(life-death) requirements to mass murder of members of a “dangerous”
group or “race.” |
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| Phenol and Jews as Spreaders
of Epidemics |
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| In Auschwitz, from about September 1941, phenol injections
served mainly as the end point of selections. When patients became debilitated
or a medical block was considered overcrowded, the SS doctor in charge
“selected a row of prisoners who were immediately. . . killed by phenol
injections.” Those who had been on the medical block for relatively long
periods were most vulnerable, as were tuberculosis patients (in accordance with
the Lolling order). The euphemism of “euthanasia” or “mercy
killing” combined with the principle of preventive medicine, and
“Jews suspect of [spreading] epidemics” (seuchenverdächtige
Juden) had to be, as Rudolf Höss said, destroyed. A prisoner doctor
told how “Dr. Entress decided to fight the spotted fever [typhus] by means
of phenol injections”: an SS physician “decided whether the patient
was to be admitted to the infirmary, given a phenol injection, or sent back to
the camp.”8 Another prisoner doctor told
how the camp doctor observed a group of emaciated prisoners and made a
“lightning decision” by placing each patient’s card in one of
two piles. |
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* Hoven tried to imply that
the only phenol killings he did were at the request of prisoners who asked him
to help get rid of threatening inmates. There were such killings at Buchenwald,
having to do with the struggles between political and criminal prisoners and
various other factions. But Hoven and other SS doctors clearly did most of
their direct medical killing (with phenol or sodium evipan) with sick inmates,
including tuberculosis cases. Hoven himself was arrested by SS officers
investigating corruption at Buchenwald — partly because he poisoned a
material witness against the former camp commandant. |
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