“I Will Use Treatment To Help The Sick…”

I picked up Robert Jay Lifton’s “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” for two bits in a second-hand store recently. It was his 13th book and had been published 20 years ago, but I was fascinated by his subject, even if the book looked as if it had never been opened. A Christmas present perhaps, forever doomed to a basement bookcase or back on the market in the 25-cent paperback section at a thrift store. On the back it was advertised as “the renowned psychiatrist’s most powerful and important book—a brilliant analysis and history of the critical role that German doctors played in Nazi genocide.”

I have read William L. Shirer’s “The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany”, published in 1959, a 1600-page tome (at $1.65!) considered to be the definitive, popular history of the beginning of what was to be a thousand-year “Fourth Reich.” I have read about Auschwitz, Anne Frank, the Bitch of Buchenwald, Dr. Mengele, the Warsaw Ghetto, and dozens of other books about the Holocaust, but never one about the role of schooled, intelligent, highly trained agents of mercy in history’s greatest mass murder.

I think it is necessary to print the Oath of Hippocrates (edited) which doctors vow to follow in their practice of medicine, to place it next to what they really did to further the Holocaust: “...I will carry out…this oath and this indenture…I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm…Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain forever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.”

“Merrily Whistling ‘The End Of A Perfect Day’”

If Nazi doctors took this oath after completing medical school, then how could they react to prisoners as this SS doctor did while “treating” patients under his care at Buchenwald? This shocking episode was described by Eugen Kogon, a prisoner-secretary to the chief doctor: “This SS doctor finished off a whole row of prisoners with injections of sodium evipan and then strolled from the operating room, a cigarette in hand, merrily whistling ‘The End of a Perfect Day.’”

Before I continue describing Nazi doctors, I don’t want to leave the impression that only SS doctors violated their oaths. You may want to examine these cases: Soviet psychiatrists diagnosed dissenters to Joseph Stalin as crazy and stuck them in mental hospitals for life. Chilean doctors served their administration by torturing dissenters. Japanese doctors performed medical experiments and vivisection on prisoners during WW II. White South African doctors falsified medical reports of black prisoner deaths when they were tortured or killed in prison. Young doctors who followed Pastor Jim Jones and the People’s Temple cult in Guyana mixed cyanide and Kool-Aid and killed almost a thousand people. And let’s also remember that American doctors and psychiatrists are employed by our CIA and have used torture and illegal drugs against prisoners.

In this book Lifton attempts to answer the question, “How did they become killers?” He interviewed hundreds of Nazi and Jewish doctors who served in the death camps and described them this way: “Neither brilliant nor stupid, neither inherently evil or particularly ethically sensitive, they were by no means the demonic figures—sadistic, fanatic, lusting to kill—people have often found them to be.” Actually, the frightening thing is that he found them pretty normal. He quotes an Eastern European survivor-doctor: “The professor (Lifton) would like to understand what is not understandable. We ourselves who were there, and who have always asked ourselves the question and will ask it until the end of our lives, we will never understand it, because it cannot be understood.”

“The Killing Program Was Led By Doctors”

Over one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, every death supervised or presided over by a medical doctor. Doctors selected the workers who would live—for a short while—and those who would die by gas or bullet. They supervised the use of gas in the chambers and determined when the victims were dead. They signed false death certificates. SS dentists supervised the collection of gold teeth and fillings before the victims were removed from gas chambers. Doctors supervised the shaving of all hair from victims so it could be used in mattresses. They argued about how to burn the tremendous number of bodies stacked up in the crematoria and burning pits.

Adolf Hitler was the fuehrer-philosopher who outlined the goals for his master race: “The volkisch state must see to it that only the healthy beget children…Here that state must act as the guardian of a millennial future…..It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on.”

Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that it was the “sacred racial mission” to assemble and preserve the most valuable and pure racial stocks. He defined “modern medical means” as the right to sterilize those who did not measure up to Aryan standards. And he added this deadly clause: “If the power to fight for one’s own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends.” Soon it was against German law to have any sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews. Lawmakers endorsed Hitler’s position that “German blood is a precondition for the continued existence of the German people.”

Choosing Life Or Death While Whistling A Melody

This chilling paragraph by Lifton described the system used to fill the crematoria in several death camps: “When the transport trains came in, the arrivals had to pass before the camp doctor.. He pointed his thumb either to the right or to the left. Left meant death by gas. From a transport train consisting of about 1,500, about 1,200 to 1,300 went to the gas chambers…At these selections Drs. Josef Mengele and Heinz Thilo made their selections while whistling a melody.

Those elected for the gas chambers had to undress in front of the gas chambers and were then chased into them with whip lashes, then the doors were closed and the gassing took place. After about eight minutes (death occurred after about four minutes) the chambers were opened and a special Kommando for this purpose had to take the corpses for cremation to the furnaces, which were burning day and night. There were not enough ovens…so that large trenches had to be dug to burn the corpses. Here the wood was sprayed with petroleum. Into these trenches the corpses were thrown. Often living children and adults were thrown into the burning trenches. These poor ones died a terrible death by burning. The necessary oil and fats for the burning were obtained partly from the corpses of the gassed in order to save petroleum.”

Even with the billowing, smoking chimneys and the terrible smell, the Nazis attempted to hide the crematoria by putting white picket fences in front of them and curtains in the windows.

A Room Filled With Baby Shoes

Every society has its share of psychopaths who love killing. We probably have more than our share. German psychopaths, most of them already Nazi Party members, volunteered for killing services in death camps and often refused to take vacations from the daily killing. Josef Klehr was a political prisoner serving time at Auschwitz who turned himself into a killing machine for the SS. He earned the reputation among doctors of a person who “could kill a few hundred people the way a shoemaker rips a rotten sole off a shoe.”

We have had many examples of genocide and mass killing machines since the Holocaust. Witness Josef Stalin, the Russians, and the gulag archipelago. Witness Mao Ze-Dong and the killing of an estimated 70 million in China. Witness Pol Pot, the Cambodians, and the “killing fields.” Witness Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Srebrenica. Witness the killing and rapes by the Jangaweed militia and Sudanese military in Darfur.

But when we see a huge room at Auschwitz filled with the shoes of babies who died with their mothers in the gas chambers, we know the Holocaust sunk to levels never reached by man before. And it raises a question. What kind of society would store baby shoes as silent witnesses to its depravity?