Medical Care at Concentration and Extermination Camps
A Prisoner Doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau: Dr Ella Lingens
Having completed a law degree, the Viennese native Ella Reiner (1908–2002) went on to medical school in 1935 in order to later become a psychoanalyst. Together with her husband Kurt Lingens, she helped Jewish students flee abroad. The couple were arrested on 13 October 1942 after being betrayed by a Gestapo informant. Ella Lingens was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she worked as a prisoner doctor until December 1944. It was later at Dachau Concentration Camp that she was liberated by American forces on 29 April 1945. In March 1964, she testified as a witness for the prosecution at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. In 1980, Ella Lingens-Reiner and Kurt Lingens were honoured for their aid activities as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.
A Doctor at the Mühldorf Subcamp Complex: Dr Erika Flocken
Erika Flocken, née Hosenberg (1912–65), studied medicine in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), Cologne, and Marburg. On 20 June 1944, she became the Todt Organization’s chief physician at the hospital in Schwindegg. Her responsibilities included medical care for prisoners at the Dachau subcamps around Mühldorf, Bavaria.
In 1947, Flocken was the only woman among the fourteen defendants at the “Mühldorf Trial”. The court found that, in addition to extreme overwork, it was also the brutal punishments, unhygienic living conditions, poor nutrition, and inadequate medical care that led to the deaths of at least 1,800 prisoners. It was shown that Flocken had participated in selecting inmates for later gassing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was sentenced to death on 13 May 1947, but after clemency pleas from Flocken and her father, this was commuted to life imprisonment in June 1948. She was released from her sentence by the West German authorities in 1958.
Deciding Over Life and Death
At its internment and extermination camps, the Nazi regime’s racist conception of human worth was realized in its most extreme form. This meant that camp infirmaries provided prisoners with just enough medical care so that their labour stamina might be maintained a little longer. Just as a lighter or heavier labour assignment could decide a prisoner’s fate, whatever happened here could mean the difference between potential survival and near-certain death. For prisoners assigned medical duties, such as Ella Lingens at the Auschwitz extermination camp, everyday work was filled with moral quandaries and a tortured conscience. In contrast, most of the presiding camp doctors revealed a general lack of compunction or moral feeling through their actions.