A Perfect Madness (32 page)

Returning to the ward, he said nothing
to Maria, who was innocently pleased at the partial renovations to
the old prison. Walking home through the grounds would be much more
pleasant for her now. For Erich, though, what he had seen produced
a fearsome dread that numbed his body, and he would wait until
these fears were confirmed before confiding in her. When night
came, he would try again to reach his father, the only source of
truth he knew. But even then there was always left behind the
bitter taste of a lingering suspicion about what his father had
revealed.

Having been successful in reaching his
father this time, Erich told him what he had seen earlier and
pressed him hard for an acceptable explanation. None came, though,
only a promise that Dr. Heinze would in time disclose an exciting
new health plan called T4 to the hospital staff and he should make
no further inquiries. Then his father quickly shifted back to the
shallow and empty words that had defined their relationship for so
long. Still, to Erich, T4 was a strange name for a health program,
and the fact that it was a code name left him more anxious than
ever about what new role might be expected of him, should there be
one. Pressing his father further for answers brought nothing but
angry responses. “You will know when the time comes,” were his
father’s last words before he hung up.

The next morning, and for a number of
days after, nothing new came to Erich other than what his father
had partially revealed. The time to learn more came a few days
later, when Dr. Heinze ordered Erich and Maria to accompany him to
the old prison. As they arrived, a large gray touring coach pulled
to a stop by the walkway, where several SS guards were waiting. The
patients disembarked, forming a line from the bus to the doorway.
When several patients refused to leave the bus and stayed in their
seat yelling obscenities, the guards brutally dragged them from the
bus, slammed them to the ground, and forced a sedative upon
them.

Erich followed Dr. Heinze into the
building and to the long rectangular room that he had visited with
Maria. At the far end of the room stood Franz and two other
doctors, next to one of the two tables there. On the table was an
array of instruments used for perfunctory medical examinations,
stethoscopes and tongue depressors and the like, nothing intricate.
To the far side of Franz were two nurses, one holding a heavy black
marker, the other a stamp with rotating numbers. Located further
down from them towards the doorway was a photographer, dressed in a
white coat, too, with his paraphernalia carefully arranged on a
small table so that a full-length photograph could be made of
whoever stood before him.

Behind the second table sat two
medical clerks with a roster of patient names listing what mental
hospital they were from. It was here the crazies would start their
short journey through the Chancellery’s new health plan.

Seeing Erich, Franz motioned for him
to come forward and, after handing him a stethoscope and a handful
of tongue depressors, directed him to stand next to the two other
doctors. Minutes before the deluge of mental patients would begin
to fill the room, Dr. Heinze spoke quietly to Erich and the other
doctors, reminding them of the sacred mission they were about to
undertake to save the health of the Third Reich. His final words
were, “You must be as soldiers, with your duty only to the Third
Reich and no one else.”

There would be no physician/patient
relationships anymore, insofar as the crazies were concerned, only
that of the physician and the state. Erich’s thoughts turned back
momentarily to the movie
I Accuse,
which had brought such a
positive emotional response from all those watching it. He had been
right in seeing the real message hidden in the tender love story:
the state becomes the surrogate when a person can no longer speak
for himself. Clearly it would be the state’s values, he knew, that
would determine the outcome of any given case, not the values of
the patients or their families. There would be no arguments offered
of compassionate euthanasia, as used with the young crippled
children, where one could, at least, rely on a Christian virtue to
seek moral reconciliation with his soul, as he believed he had
done. What Dr. Heinze had left them with was one specific criterion
in determining whether a mental patient’s life was to end: was he
capable of productive work, nothing more. Erich believed otherwise,
but said nothing. To him, an economic evaluation was the boldest of
lies. There was only one single truth to be told, and it had been
carefully painted over with patriotic tones: the cleansing of the
German race of all that the state saw as weak and impure. He had
gradually come to some kind of understanding with his inner self
over the killing of the malformed babies and children because he
had fashioned a moral handrail to hold on to in the ancient virtue
of compassion. Every doctor understands compassion, or should, he
believed. Instead, what was before him now was a believable
ideology conceived in evil, yet nurtured by science until it
blossomed to full life.

The crazies waiting anxiously were a
mixture of every labeled mental illness known in psychiatry,
running from schizophrenics to untreatable syphilitics. Even
epileptics with their momentary spasmodic attacks that often
frightened people were cast into the huge melting pot they called
insanity. As patients entered the room, their clothes were taken
from them after their names were checked off on the roster. Those
that objected were forcibly stripped. Young and old, male and
female, waited naked in a line before Erich and the other doctors
for their muscles to be felt and their hearts listened to and their
orifices probed. Then their teeth were examined to see if they had
any gold fillings. Those patients that did were marked with a large
cross on their back by one of the nurses while the other nurse
stamped an identifying number on their naked body. They were then
pushed to a red line in front of a waiting camera to have their
last living image etched in film. From there they were forced to
stand bunched up against each other at the end of the room, until
all the patients who arrived on the bus had completed the brief
journey through the receiving line, as it was laughingly referred
to by Franz and the other doctors, though not by Erich.

As they waited, some began to stir
anxiously, especially the young women, uncertain as to why they
were even here, having their flesh pressed and their naked bodies
looked at by everyone around them. Three or four cried out for
their distant mothers and were quickly injected with tranquillizers
to calm them before their crying could disturb the others. There
was a growing stench of urine where some had relieved themselves,
urinating from the fear that gripped them. From the time of the
patients’ arrival, sixty minutes had elapsed, less than three
minutes of medical attention for each of the twenty patients,
though Erich had taken longer with his patients at first. Franz’s
watchful eye had made him nervous, much like in the first days of
his clinical years in medical school, when every move he made was
criticized by the professor. And it was so now, but for a different
reason, one far removed from the wish to be a good
doctor.

After the last patient had been
photographed and shoved in among the crowd of other patients, Franz
nodded to an SS guard. “Follow me,” the guard announced. “A
pleasant, hot shower is waiting for you.”

As they filed out of the room, still
naked, one young woman, whose only illness was epilepsy, asked,
“Shouldn’t we take our clothes with us?”

One by one, they entered the newly
painted and tiled room, all facing the showerheads protruding from
the front wall. Once inside the room they were pressed tightly
together, making it difficult for many to breathe, and the airtight
door shut and locked. Some tried to look around, seemingly puzzled
by where they were. Others looked only at the back of the person’s
head in front of them, or to the side.

When the last patient left the
examining room, Franz directed Erich and one of the other doctors
to bring their stethoscopes and follow him. As the door was shut
behind the patients, he instructed Erich and the doctor to take
turns looking through the small glass peephole in the closed door.
Then he nodded to the staff to turn the valve releasing carbon
monoxide gas through the pipes circling the room. As Erich looked
on, he grew sick and nauseated. The way the patients were dying
seemed so full of suffering, he wanted to cry out at the top of his
lungs to stop it. Some had fallen to the tile floor coughing and
gasping for air, with a multitude of legs around them kicking and
stamping on their naked bodies. The young woman who had asked about
her clothes was the first to fall. Others soon followed. Some stood
with their mouths open, desperately searching for a pocket of air
to breathe. Some tried to claw their way up the tile walls to where
the gas was steadily hissing from the pipes. Strangely though, only
a few cried out, the rest silenced by their desperate struggle to
exist another day. In ten minutes, all lay unconscious in a twisted
heap of naked arms and legs and bodies on the floor, making it
difficult for the guards to tell which arm or leg belonged where
and to whom. After twenty more minutes all were quite dead.
Satisfied with the results, Franz returned to the examining room
with the other doctors to discuss what had taken place, to
determine if there were any procedural weaknesses they could
improve.

No one spoke at first. In watching the
unbelievable, macabre scene unfold, the beautiful young woman who
fell first quickly became Julia in Erich’s eyes, and he believed
with certainty, at that very moment, she had already suffered such
a death. The staggering grief he felt was overwhelming and he
struggled to keep from crying. The doctor watching with him had
been brutally shocked, too, but maintained his composure, knowing
Franz’s standing with Dr. Heinze and the Chancellery.

“
Perhaps more than twenty
patients, maybe thirty, would fit into the room, should there be
others,” he said in a professional manner, very pleased with his
self-control in light of what he had just witnessed.

Franz nodded approvingly, but waited
still for Erich’s words. It was as if he knew what Erich was
thinking, and his mouth curled in a sinister smile.

“
No doctor pulled the gas
lever, Erich. As doctors, we did nothing more than examine the
patients, as it should be. Now you must check each of the patients
to verify their deaths,” he said, smiling at him.

Erich heard Franz’s words and he
realized they made some sense to him, at least as a momentary
release of the emotional web he found himself trapped in. Though
there was no compassion attached to the killing of the “crazies” to
relieve them from a horrible existence, as there was in euthanizing
the little children, what he had done was still that of a doctor,
nothing more. But Julia’s face was still there in the shadows of
his mind. The “new German physician” he had read about was no
longer a hypothetical entity to him. Any hint of compassion in the
killing of these people was rapidly being replaced by a pseudo
medical standard imposed by the state: the ability to perform
productive work for the Third Reich. Such standard was window
dressing to many of the doctors, although, like him, they said
nothing. Whether or not you could work at the required level was of
no consequence, when the slightest manifestation of mental illness
sent you to die.

After Erich verified the deaths of the
twenty patients, three men entered the room and began tossing the
lifeless bodies around like hundred-pound bags of chicken feed,
looking for the cross marked earlier on some of their backs. Each
time one was found, their gold teeth and fillings were quickly
knocked out with a peen hammer and placed in a small holding bag to
be given to Dr. Heinze at the day’s end. One old man’s mouth
produced the biggest bounty, six gold teeth, which brought whoops
from the staff, as if the mother lode had been struck. The young
woman’s body had been laid aside, not only for gawking purposes by
the staff, but to be taken later, because she was an epileptic, to
the research laboratory, where Erich’s neurosurgeon friend would
dissect and study her brain and body. This would become a common
pattern for the future “crazies” brought in to suffer similar
deaths.

When the staff was finished robbing
the dead mouths of patients, the bodies were placed on a half truck
and hauled to the crematory to be reduced to ashes.

Some two hours later, Erich found
himself examining a second group of patients who had arrived like
the first in a gray touring bus. And then, two hours more in
passing, a third and final group came, ending the long day. Nothing
was different and nothing changed, except that thirty terrified
souls came to die this time. In all, seventy mentally afflicted
patients had been permanently erased this day from the gene pool of
the German race.

“
A very good beginning,”
Franz would write in his report to Dr. Heinze and the Chancellery,
saying nothing of Erich and the other doctors.

As it was with the children, Erich
wrote the kin of each patient he had supposedly treated, explaining
their unexpected demise. Heart attacks and anaphylactic reactions
to medicine given became the favorite causes listed in the letters.
It was the ending part of this task that would keep him awake for
many nights to come. Along with each condolence letter, he packaged
a small brass urn purportedly holding the cremated remains of the
deceased patient. Whether they were was anybody’s guess. At best,
they were a probable mixture of several cremated bodies shoveled
without care from the furnace after each grouping of patients was
burned and dumped in a row of waiting urns. Blanketed in ignorance,
the grieving family would ask no questions because it was the state
that had cared for their loved one, who was there with them in the
urn.