Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Pro Memoria
Angaben zur Quelle:
28 (2008) 18-26
Keywords:
Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
;
Jewish women in the Holocaust
;
Nazi concentration camps
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
World War, 1939-1945 Medical care
;
Human experimentation in medicine
Abstract:
Argues that the hospital in the women's camp in Birkenau was part of the Nazi system of mass murder. Selections of prisoners, including Jews, were conducted in the hospital, and its medical staff participated in them. The conditions in the hospital were dreadful and were conducive to a greater mortality rate rather than to recovery. From December 1942 to March 1943 Jewish women were not admitted there; at other times, SS physicians carried out medical experiments on Jewish women, as a result of which many of them died. In 1943 a group of Polish prisoner physicians transferred to the Birkenau women's hospital tried to improve the conditions, but in vain: the institution remained a hospital in name only. The camp hospital was a kind of shelter for some women prisoners unfit for hard work; some of them could have a rest from labor, and others could work as nurses and orderlies. Some of the latter became part of the machinery of mass murder.
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