The Nazi Doctors
- Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide - 2 volumes
- Robert Jay Lifton
The Nazi doctors at Auschwitz were the leaders of most of the murder of millions of victims of the camp. Doctors selected the victims - both at the camp ramp, among the incoming transports of inmates, and later, in the camps and medical blocks. Doctors monitored the killings in the gas chambers and determined when the victims were dead. Doctors conducted murderous epidemiology, sending to the gas chamber groups of infected victims, sometimes including all the others who were in the same medical block. Doctors commanded and supervised, and sometimes directly conducted the killings of the weak, debilitated patients in medical blocks with injection of phenol into the bloodstream or into the heart. For all these murders doctors were maintaining the illusion of medical legitimacy: they signed false death certificates citing non-existent diseases for the deaths of prisoners in Auschwitz and people brought from outside to be killed.
All in all, we can say that the doctors carried a lot of responsibility for the murderous ecology of Auschwitz - the choice of victims, the mechanics of killing and the maintaining of balance between killing and labour role of the camp. Although doctors did not control the Auschwitz, they gave him a perverse medical aura. As one survivor who had closely watched this process, "killing program from start to finish was led by doctors".
- ISBN: 978-953-7177-96-6
- Year of the edition: 2015
- Number of pages: 648
- Cover: hard cover
- Original title: The Nazi Doctors
- Original language: English
- Translation: Hana Dvornik, Srđan Dvornik
- Dimensions: 155x245 mm
Nacional, April 7th, 2015
Novi list (Jaroslav Pecnik), 17. 10. 2015.
Nacional_Feljton, Feb 25 2020