The needs and rights of individual patients—the subject of the extensive medical training every doctor who participated in the Nazi killing campaigns had received—got lost. Doctors became desensitized to what they were doing. Uplifting euphemisms covered ugly realities. Euthanasia became a “therapeutic cure” for the national body. (One scholar, who reviewed tens of thousands of medical documents related to the euthanasia program, never saw the word ‘killing’ used once.) Nazi doctors conceptualized the human beings they euthanized or experimented on as—in every sense but one—
already dead. Yes, these people still breathed. Their hearts were still beating. But that was all. Since disabled patients were defined as life unworthy of life (
Lebensunwertes Leben), what was life to them? Life unworthy of life was a mistake, nothing more. Since the prisoners who fell into the hands of concentration-camp doctors were doomed anyway, what could it possibly matter what happened to their bodies in the mean time? Besides, didn’t the doctors have a
responsibility to use these walking corpses to advance medical knowledge? Nothing was off limits.
Medical experts focused narrowly on technical questions, enabling them to ignore human questions: How could certain procedures be conducted more efficiently? What cocktail of drugs or gases brings about the desired outcome with a minimum of complications? (As G. K. Chesterton
put it in
Eugenics and Other Evils, “they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying.”)