| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| “official deputy” in Auschwitz but later actively
pursued typhus trials himself, in which four Jewish inmates, artificially
infected with typhus because there were no active cases available, were killed.
These were apparently an extension of Vetter’s work. Vetter represents the
Nazi research functionary, in whom ordinary medical vanities became lethal. He
found in Auschwitz a testing area where he need not be restrained either by
compunctions about harming — or killing — research subjects, or by
rigorous judgments about therapeutic effects. |
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| Fresh Samples and Numbed Detachment: Johann Kremer
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The same was true of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, who had
intense career goals he attempted to achieve in Auschwitz. He was fifty-nine
years old when he arrived there in August 1942, and thus belonged to an older
generation than most camp doctors. Since 1935 an anatomy professor at the
University of Münster, he was the only university professor to serve as an
SS camp doctor.51
Kremer had a
long-standing research interest in problems of starvation, which he pursued by
seeking debilitated inmates selected for death, whom he later termed “the
proper specimens.” After he had a patient “placed on the dissection
table,” where he took a history focused on weight and weight loss, an SS
orderly injected phenol into the person's heart: “I stood at a distance
from the dissection table holding jars, ready for the segments [organs] cut out
immediately after death … segments of the liver, spleen and
pancreas.”52 On some occasions, Kremer
arranged to examine these patients or have them photographed prior to their
murder. We may say that he made maximally pragmatic use of the death factory
for his own scientific aims. Dr. Jan W. told how, if Kremer spotted a prisoner
whose cranial shape seemed unusual, or who interested him in any way, he would
order that prisoner photographed and injected with phenol for his collection of
“fresh corpse samples of liver and other organs,” and concluded that
“Kremer looked upon the prisoners as so many rabbits.”
Dr.
Kremer became notorious for a diary he kept (which was eventually discovered
and published), with such sequences as: |
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September 4,
1942 … present at a special action [selection] in the women's camp …
The most horrible of horrors …. |
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September 6
… Today, Sunday, an excellent dinner: tomato soup, half a chicken with
potatoes and red cabbage (20 g. of fat), sweet pudding and magnificent vanilla
ice cream .... |
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October 10 ...
I took and preserved ... material from quite fresh corpses, namely the liver,
spleen, and pancreas …. |
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October 11
… Today, Sunday, we got for dinner quite a big piece of roast hare with
dumplings and red cabbage for 1.25 RM.53
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