Jewish Doctors and the Holocaust by Halpin Ross;

Author:Halpin, Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Selections

Selections were the bane of every Jewish doctor who worked in the hospital system. Although selections have been referred to above the subject needs more attention for the doctors’ participation in such a process represented in many cases the death not only of a Jew but the death of the soul of the doctor as a human being and as a healer. In most cases the Nazi doctor did little more than tell the prisoner doctor how many prisoners were required. Lifton writes of a Jewish doctor who admitted that the practice of selections haunted him more than anything else. Patients who were very weak and showed no improvement after days of hospitalization would sooner or later be recognized as unable to work and ‘we were unable to help. So they went off ...to the gas chambers – controlled (selected) by the SS doctors. And we would have to decide who he (the SS doctor) would see’ (Lifton 2000, 221). Jewish doctors had no alternative but to co-operate. They knew that left to their own devices, the Nazi doctors would select any prisoner irrespective of fitness or health. Thus healthy prisoners or even orderlies or nurses could be selected merely to make up the numbers. Selections in the main took place under two circumstances; in the hospital wards as shown in Fig. 18 and at roll call as illustrated in Fig. 19. The Jewish doctor was intimately involved in the selections in the hospital and infirmaries but played no part in roll call selections.

By co-operating in selections, Jewish doctors could select patients who would not survive another hour or day and thus prolong healthy prisoners’ chance at life even if it was only for a short period. This was considered a ‘good’ selection. A prisoner doctor told how Dr Fritz Klein kept demanding more information about sick patients in order to meet certain quotas for the gas chambers. He confessed:

It’s not honest in life to ask from a man such things. Maybe you have to be a holy man to say no. I’m not optimistic about my own behaviour, you see. And still I am not a bad man. Really not! But life asks me, You or me? And I say, Me!. (Lifton 2000, 221)

Prisoner doctors were usually told in advance of an impending selection. This information could come from various sources including the Schreibstube, friendly Kapos and even SS guards. This gave the doctors the opportunity to hide patients, to prepare patients for selections by ensuring they appeared healthy (pinching the face of the prisoner to bringing colour to the cheeks), releasing certain prisoners back to their blocks and re-admitting them after the selection, falsifying records, and by saving the life of healthy prisoners by concentrating only on those who were hopeless cases, close to death’s door.

Fig. 18: Selection taking place in a hospital ward. David Olère (1945). Fig. 19: Selection taking place during roll call. David Olère (ca 1989). Rosenzweig reported the following conversation between himself and the

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