A physician in the Nazi camp system
Dr. Josef Burg
Burg has spent years treating the sick. Under the Nazis, he uses that same training on prisoners who cannot refuse him, and finds reasons to continue.
Expertise & responsibility
In the novel
At Heidelberg University Hospital, Burg learns that three wards have run out of morphine. He visits a child whose legs are suspended in traction and promises to find something for the pain. He is forty-five, precise in his movements, and grieving for his family. He keeps a damaged watch in his waistcoat pocket.
Burg knows how to examine a patient, read a chart, and recognize suffering. He also wants to remain useful to the men who control his work. In their offices he must explain himself, obtain supplies, and account for his decisions. He becomes practiced at describing what he has done in terms his superiors will accept.
In the camp, he orders Ionel to assist him. The poet has no authority over the conditions of this work or the people subjected to it. Burg can issue instructions, authorize treatment, and decide what appears in a patient’s chart. He continues to think of himself as a physician while exercising that authority over captives.
World War II and the Holocaust
The historical context
Nazi doctors and medical experiments
Nazi physicians conducted experiments on camp prisoners to study military survival, test drugs and treatments, and pursue racial theories. Researchers subjected people to procedures without consent or safeguards. They killed many of their subjects and permanently injured others. These physicians worked with the support of medical institutions, officials, and camp authorities who supplied prisoners for their use.
The Doctors Trial
Physicians also helped plan and carry out the murder of institutionalized people with disabilities under the Nazi program called “euthanasia.” At the postwar Doctors Trial, witnesses described experiments, injuries, and deaths; prosecutors presented documents showing the defendants’ participation. American judges convicted sixteen defendants in August 1947. The proceedings established individual responsibility for acts committed in hospitals, laboratories, and camps.
Sources
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