| Killing with Syringes: Phenol
Injections |
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| Doctors as Phenol
Executioners |
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For a doctor, phenol injections were the most literal
example of the entire healing-killing reversal. Although most of the injections
were given by nonphysicians, SS doctors initiated them in Auschwitz, maintained
responsibility for their administration, and sometimes continued to perform the
injections themselves.
An early practitioner of phenol killing was Dr.
Franz von Bodman, whom Langbein described as having shown considerable
“initiative” in this form of murder. Although at Auschwitz only
briefly, Bodman managed, as chief doctor (Standortarzt) during the
summer of 1942, to inject many inmates by vein, resulting in slow and painful
deaths. Once two girls who had been shot by SS men, one in the stomach and the
other in the thigh, were brought to the medical block; Bodman prohibited anyone
from treating the wounds and then personally injected both girls with
phenol.19 It is likely that this man’s
zeal in phenol killing was related both to especially strong Nazi involvement
and to psychological inclinations toward omnipotence and sadism.
\
Josef
Mengele injected phenol on several occasions — though not as regularly as
Bodman — with his characteristic combination of detachment and flair (as I
shall discuss on page 347). But the individual doctor most associated with
phenol injections in Auschwitz was Friedrich Entress. Entress was a Polish
ethnic German (from eastern territories lost to Poland after the First World
War), who had been educated in German grammar and secondary schools and joined
pro-German and pro-Nazi student groups at the university in Poznan. He entered
the SS early and went quickly into the concentration-camp system immediately
upon completing his medical training (indeed without having to write his
dissertation), first at Gross-Rosen and then at Auschwitz, in December 1941, at
the age of twenty-seven. Langbein, with considerable justification,
characterized Entress as the “most notorious of all camp
doctors.”20 In setting up the
experiments with various substances that eventuated in phenol injections, into
first the vein and then the heart, Entress was maximizing the murderous
elements in the central directives he received. His interpretation of such
directives generally followed that of the Political Department, and he was
personally close to the extraordinarily brutal head of that department,
Maximilian Grabner. Like Grabner, Entress was in conflict with Eduard Wirths,
who arrived in Auschwitz in September 1942 and advocated a less draconian
interpretation of these directives.
For instance, Wirths could accept
the directive that tuberculosis patients had to undergo “special
treatment” because they were a danger to others and could not be medically
treated in Auschwitz, but wished to limit the policy to such patients, while
Entress and Grabner “interpreted the order from Berlin as blanket
permission to inject all Muselmänner and patients who were unlikely to
return quickly to work.” We recall Entress’s |
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