. NMT05-T0972
Volume V · Page 972
| adopted to dispose of the insane, but it was expanded to include the incurables, the aged, the "idle eaters", the habitual criminals, and finally the political irreconcilables. It was a national Reich-approved plan for deliberate and premeditated murder on a large scale. Elaborate case histories of inmates were prepared and screened at the camps by travelling physicians, who by a process of snap judgment determined whether men and women should live or die. Those whose records happened to fall in the extermination file were shipped, like cattle to market, to an institution at Bernburg where "Action 14 f 13" was applied. This often was done by the injection of phenol or gasoline into the bloodstream, causing immediate death. After the extermination, the victim's personal effects, including the gold in his teeth, were shipped back to the concentration camp, and a report of "death from natural causes" was made out. This program was also extensively carried out directly in the concentration camps by the camp physicians. |
| TREATMENT OF CONCENTRATION
CAMP PRISONERS |
| The only interest which the SS and the Reich had in concentration camp inmates was as productive units. They were regarded as so many machines, not as human beings. The only concern with the collapse or death of an inmate was with the loss of a productive laborer. Their arrogant attitude that all non-Germans were subhumans made them wholly indifferent to the fate of those whose right to live out their lives was as sacred as that of any German. This attitude was epitomized by Himmler when he said: |
"Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished." |
| And later, at Posen [Poznan], in October 1943, he said: |
"At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What, after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger." |
| When grinders or lathes broke down under hard use, they were scrapped; when inmates collapsed from exhaustion or hunger, they were shot or gassed. There was nothing incongruous in this to the twisted Nazi psychology. They talked and wrote frankly and volubly about it. True, there were some who professed a humanitarian interest in the welfare and comfort of the inmates, and who made some effort to alleviate their intolerable condition, but they still |
