Seventy years since Kristallnacht

A doctor's betrayal of his ethics lit the spark for the inferno.

By GEORGE MOSHE WEISZ
Many Nazi doctors were charged with various crimes against humanity. Their contribution to the regime's four 'E-steps' eliminatory policy was voluntary, was substantial and was, at times, essential. As Adolf Hitler told them: 'I can not live without you for one day, not for one hour.' The doctors' contribution lay in the program of forced sterilization, driven by eugenic theories; extended further into euthanasia; then their part in the extermination process, namely the selection of victims on arrival in the camps and then in their being killed; and participation in a long list of cruel and totally unscientific experiments. Karl Brandt, a Berlin surgeon and private physician to Hitler, was in charge of the medical side of the euthanasia ('T4') program, which resulted in the deaths of close to 500,000 physically disabled, mentally defective or emotionally disturbed persons, mostly of German origin. His active contribution was his order: 'The syringe belongs in the hand of the doctor,' emphasizing repeatedly that 'only doctors were meant to perform the [monoxide] gassing operation.' Indeed, he gave the very first fatal injection to a child victim, as a demonstration to the participants at the initial euthanasia course. For the rest of the many injected, starved or gassed victims, he was a 'passive,' order-giving, desk criminal. His reward was a large surgical practice, luxurious lodgings and a professorship. ADDITIONALLY, THIS intellectual, knowledgeable about Greek philosophy and Roman architecture, visiting Bayreuth's (Wagner) Opera Festival yearly, had a contributing role in the tragic Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the first, nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom was unleashed, intending to coerce Germany's Jewish community into emigrating. The Nazi Party had, for some time, been contemplating a nationwide burning, looting, beating and killing pogrom. Its chance came following the shooting, by an angry Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, of Ernst vom Rath, secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. The motive for the shooting was Herschel's anger over the status of his parents, expelled from Germany as being of Polish origin, but refused entry to Poland and thus abandoned at the border. Vom Rath, shot in the abdomen, recovered after his bleeding spleen was surgically removed, but died two days later. Hitler had sent Brandt to Paris to supervise his recovery. Brandt, with the tacit silence of the two operating French surgeons, after consultation with Hitler, suppressed the true diagnosis of vom Rath's terminal disease, the real reason for his failure to recover after the operation. THE WORLD heard that vom Rath's death was a result of a Jew shooting a German. The next day, 8/9 November 1938, the already prepared authorities throughout Germany, at the order of Josef Goebbels, unleashed Kristallnacht. The Germans wanted to show the world what would happen to Jews if they dared to challenge the regime. Brandt confessed in 1942 that, but for vom Rath's systemic disease, he could have been saved. Was this political fraud or deliberate negligence? Brandt was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial in 1947 and executed for his role in the euthanasia program. His contribution to the vom Rath case was not mentioned. His betrayal of medical ethics, offering an excuse for Kristallnacht, with its tragic and criminal consequences for the Jewish community, warranted just as harsh a sentence as the rest of his crimes.