Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Doctors From Hell, by Vivian Spitz. 2005

German Guilt Diffusion Rejected: No Dichotomy Between Nazis and “Ordinary” German Doctors. Heinrich Himmler: Long-Term Polocaust By Mass Sterilization

The reader of this book quickly learns that the gruesome experiments conducted against helpless victims were not just done by a few “warped” Nazi ideologues, such as the infamous “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, by a large cadre of German doctors. One also quickly realizes that the victims were not limited to Jews, but included members of various nationalities. Every imaginable grotesque experiment was performed. Perhaps the most instructive part of the book is chapter 14, which discusses forced sterilization. The Germans found that physical castration was too slow and costly. X-radiation often made the victims ill or killed them outright. A drug derived from a certain Brazilian plant induced sterility, and was tried on inmates.

THE COMING POLOKAUST BY MASS STERILIZATION

What was said to be ultimately needed was a method of sterilization that could easily be employed en masse and was preferably one in which the victim did not know that he or she was sterilized. Obviously, mass sterilization was intended for a very large target of victims. In fact, defendant Rudolf Brandt cited Heinrich Himmler (pp. 191-192), who stated that forced sterilization was to be used to exterminate not only Jews but also Russians and Poles. So, although the author Spitz does not develop this further, Himmler’s statement adds proof to the fact that after the Jews, most of the Slavs were next in line for genocidal extermination. Mass shootings and gassings were useful for killing a few million people (Jews and Polish intellectuals), but mass sterilization was much more practical for the eventual extermination of tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people (Slavs as a whole).

Slave labor also entered the picture. Just as a small number of  Jews were kept alive for forced labor, so also a remnant of the Slavic peoples would be kept alive as slaves of the German Reich.

CONCLUSION

It is high time that educational Holocaust materials include focus on the fact that the Slavs were also victims of genocide. Only the end of the war spared most of the Slavs from forced sterilization, and eventual extermination.