A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

SIXTEEN

  Erich, Brandenburg, 1941

  When Erich arrived at Görden Hospital, the maddening rush of activity he had expected to see in such a large, prestigious state institution seemed strangely absent to him. Empty patient rooms lined the long, dimly lit halls, and the flurry of nurses and orderlies scurrying about was missing. Everything was dirty, not spotless as one would hope to find in a hospital. Nothing was as it should be, and that greatly bothered him. Walking to the nearest ward station where a lone nurse stood busily arranging and rearranging a small stack of medical files on an otherwise empty desk, Erich introduced himself.

  “I am Herr Dr. Erich Schmidt. Where is the administration office, please?”

  “Yes, Herr Doctor, we were expecting you yesterday. The office is at the end of the hall, to the right. I believe some of the staff are meeting there now.”

  Erich nodded and turned to leave, but stopped after a few steps and looked back at the nurse and the small number of file folders on her desk.

  “Where are your patients? You have so many empty beds?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Herr Doctor, we do have a few, some new ones will be admitted tomorrow. That’s all I have been told.”

  Erich nodded again to the nurse and walked down a narrow hall to his right, counting as he went the number of empty beds and those with patients. Twelve and two, he mumbled, opening the office door. A secretary, sharply dressed in a newly pressed brown uniform blouse and skirt and wearing the Nazi arm band, stood up stiffly when he entered.

  “I am Dr. Schmidt, and—”

  “You were to report yesterday, doctor,” the secretary said brusquely, interrupting Erich.

  “I know, that’s the second time I’ve been told that. Is there a search party out looking for me?” Erich said teasingly. The woman was not amused and remained silent for a moment, looking at him with disgust.

  “You are to go in Dr. Heinze’s office now. There is a staff meeting.”

  “Dr. Heinze?”

  “Yes, Hans Heinze. He has been appointed to direct our new special psychiatric youth department,” the woman said proudly before walking to her desk, indicating their conversation was over.

  The name Heinze meant nothing to Erich, but Karl Brandt’s did, who was the first person he recognized among the large group of men gathered in the office. The second was his father, who was sitting to the left of Brandt. To his right sat Dr. Catel and then Dr. Schneider, who had witnessed the killing of the Knauer child with him in Leipzig. None of the other men were known to him, other than they were probably doctors newly assigned to Görden. Counting himself, Erich guessed twelve men crowded the room, as he moved to one of two empty chairs near where his father sat. Twelve, an unlikely biblical number for an unlikely purpose, he would later recall, thinking back on all that took place at the meeting.

  No one acknowledged his presence, not even his father. Everyone sat staring straight ahead, their eyes focused on a strange-looking man sitting alone away from the group, Philipp Bouhler, the Reich Head of Hitler’s Chancellery. Erich quickly became fascinated by the uncommon strength in the man’s face. From the beginning, Bouhler intimidated him and everyone else in the room, except Karl Brandt, who was Hitler’s personal physician, a unique position that seemed to give Brandt carte blanche wherever he went among doctors. Without saying a word, Bouhler circulated among the group in dramatic fashion, the original authorization for euthanizing the Knauer baby, which was written on Hitler’s personal stationery and signed by him. In doing so, he was essentially placing Hitler in the room with them, directing all that was to come in the weeks and months ahead. No one escaped his mystical presence, including Erich, who was mesmerized for a minute by seeing Hitler’s writing and signature. He remembered Hitler’s hypnotic eyes searching his own the day they stood facing each other at the doors of Prague’s great castle. He was disturbed then, but only for a short moment, by the ancient Germanic aura Hitler could project by simply standing still and silent and looking nowhere else but straight at you. There was no silence in his signature, though. Its metaphysical power was there for all to see and feel, as Erich did.

  What followed afterwards from Bouhler’s lips only verified and reinforced the uneasiness Erich felt for even being here among such leaders in Hitler’s Chancellery. Everything that was to be done in Görden Hospital, beginning in one week, was to be kept secret from the public. How was that to be possible, Erich wondered, when so many bold announcements had been made with great fanfare that Görden was to be the leader, the crown jewel among hospitals treating children suffering from hereditary diseases? It was here at Görden where these lucky children would be treated with the most advanced scientific therapy in the world. Knowledge of such miraculous therapy, if there were to be any, should be spread gloriously by Germany before the entire medical world, not kept in secret. The idea of secrecy tore away the curtains that had been protecting the reason he had so treasured. The medical protocol outlining the advanced therapy to be administered at Görden was to come from the Chancellery. It would be an extension of Hitler’s original directive authorizing the killing of the Knauer baby, and was to be followed without exception by the doctors and the hospital. No one in the audience listening to Bouhler misunderstood what the ultimate end of the advanced therapy was to be. Erich was to say hours later that Bouhler’s shocking recitation was like a page torn from Dante’s Inferno, much to the displeasure of his father who was dining with him.

  Out of respect for his father’s presence, Erich sat quiet during the tense meeting, seeking no answers from Bouhler regarding the final therapy, though they were there to be explored. Later, while the others mingled and fawned over Bouhler and Brandt, trying to show their unwavering loyalty to the Chancellery, he remained seated, isolated in thought over the startling disclosures that had been carefully laid out before him, and which he and the other doctors were expected to follow. He quickly concluded that the only saving grace for him as a doctor would be found in the way the medical decision to treat or not treat a child was to be reached. No longer would it originate and come from within the ancient sanctified boundaries of the inviolable physician-patient relationship, even though it was he who was to be in the sacred relationship. Instead, the final decision to treat or not treat a child in a given case would come from a special committee separated by distance from the ultimate outcome. He would be much like a pilot disconnected from all beneath him as he soars away high in the sky, seeing nothing of those lying dead from the bombs he has dropped. His only duty then, he believed, was to care for a patient according to the orders of the committee, nothing more. Yet he knew, from what few shreds remained of his conscience, that the final therapy to be given to a sick child would come from his own hands, destroying, as it did, any pretense that somehow he was not a part of the end solution.

  When Bouhler first mentioned the committee’s decision-making authority over each patient’s case, it was the bold presence of his father’s name on the committee that both stunned and heartened Erich at first. There would be a back door opened on every case, if his father would listen to him. Bouhler had said that a unanimous decision would be required by the committee in each case before a plus mark indicating “no available therapy” could be placed on a child’s file. A simple dissent from his father, nothing more, could be the grace he sought. What Erich didn’t hear, though, were the brief disturbing words being exchanged between Bouhler and his father, as he was leaving.

  “Your son Erich concerns me, Dr. Schmidt. We don’t want any trouble from him,” Bouhler said.

  “I assure you, he will follow orders and perform his duty. He was involved with the Knauer child, you know,” Dr. Schmidt responded meekly.

  “I do know, Doctor, and he and Dr. Schneider voiced an objection.”

  “As I said—”

  “It is only because of you that he’s not fighting now on the Eastern front, or worse, given to the Gestapo. Talk with him and report back to me at once, if he will become
a problem,” Bouhler said harshly.

  “I understand,” was all Dr. Schmidt could say before Bouhler turned his back to him and began talking privately with Dr. Heinze.

  Later in the evening, Erich sat with his father at a small sidewalk café close to the hospital. He had selected the café because most of the patrons chose to dine outside in the cool night air, hungrily smoking their cigarettes like they were a part of each dinner course, leaving the inside area mostly empty. Privacy was available at the very back tables, where lovers could go and dine in secret. Their greeting at the meeting in Dr. Heinze’s office had been cordial, but not warm. Even now, both sat in silence waiting for the other to speak. It was as if they had just been introduced to each other for the first time and were struggling for words that might impress the other. After a glass of wine, Dr. Schmidt stared hard at his son’s troubled face.

  “Philipp Bouhler is concerned about your political philosophy,” he uttered in a low voice, unsure whether the Gestapo might be secreted unseen somewhere in the empty café.

  “I would think so, Father. It’s difficult to change what you are and have always been. You should know that as a psychiatrist.”

  “It’s not whether you want to change, Erich—you must, or you will be transferred to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians.”

  Erich grew silent for a moment, looking at the strange darkness now covering his father’s face. Once it had glistened with unbounded excitement when simply looking through a microscope in his laboratory at life he had seen many times before. Before this war is over, no one will be spared such a terrible darkness, Erich believed.

  “What happened to you, to us, Father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are not monsters, we’re people, human beings. And the sick children are too. You should know that.”

  “You are wrong, Erich. Tell me, do you think God would waste a good soul on idiots like the Knauer child? He’s not that dumb,” his father said loudly, becoming red in the face and thumping the table with a fist.

  “Perhaps He has hopes. That’s all a soul has anyway,” Erich answered, surprised by his father’s outburst.

  “You are speaking rot now. I am talking medically, as a doctor. These children are nothing, absolutely nothing. They are already dead. A garden slug would find more delight in life then these creatures.”

  “Perhaps we have an inflated concept of humanity—or is it a life unworthy of life,” Erich said facetiously, mocking the credo being put forth by the Health Ministry.

  “I would be very careful how you use those words, if I were you. The Chancellery has ears and knows of your close affair with the Jewish woman in Prague. They are watching to see where your loyalty lies.”

  This time Erich had no ready answer for his father. But he felt his sharp rebuke. The same cold fear that paralyzed him in the Black Forest when confronted by the soldiers began creeping through his veins again as if he had suddenly been given a transfusion of ice water.

  “You’ve changed, Father. It’s as if we’re no longer of the same blood.”

  “No, it is you who should return to your roots. I am a scientist first, and my passion for cleansing the German race is here before me. A sick Germany can become healthier by removing the misfits. We should embark on this great voyage together as father and son.”

  Moved by his father’s words, Erich reached out to touch his arm but stopped short when he abruptly arose from the table.

  “I must return to Berlin now, to another meeting. And then to Dresden to spend a few days with your mother,” he said.

  Then he came around the table and stood next to Erich, looking tenderly at his face.

  “You must do your duty, you have no choice.”

  With those words, he turned and left the café, leaving Erich to wonder if he would ever see him again. They were more distant than ever now, it seemed. Watching his father disappear into the night was no different than what he had always done, suddenly appearing in his life from the shadows for a few minutes, then quickly disappearing like a phantom into the night. Most people travel far to find out what they are, only to find they had become what they pretended to be all along. But not his father. He had never pretended. Fact and fiction were wedded in him for as long as Erich could remember. His father was the complete package now with no ambiguities, able to carry out that which he had theorized for so long in eugenics. The passion he had nursed since childhood for biology and Darwin’s survival of the fittest had become the ruling voice of German medicine. His rapid involvement in the National Socialist Party first began with a mesmerizing speech by Rudolph Hess declaring National Socialism to be nothing more than applied biology. Unknown to Erich, who was studying medicine then in Prague, his father’s zeal as a missionary for eugenics had brought him quickly into the inner circle of the Health Ministry. There he became a powerful intellectual voice for euthanasia as the final therapy for the misfits in society, joining the rising chorus of Brandt and Bouhler and others. Still, in doing so, he would insist that any such program must always remain in the hands of the doctor, as it has through the ages.

  How his father had come to this place in his life would stay a mystery to Erich. His father fervently embraced the Hippocratic Oath, yet felt, like most German psychiatrists, that mental patients lacked ordinary human qualities, were not persons, and should not be allowed to propagate. Sterilization was the grand solution, he would argue, as America was so busily doing, always stopping short when the idea of eliminating them as a cure was placed on the table for discussion. Why his father changed, Erich knew he would never know. Their lively discussions and debates and games of the mind, always as intellectuals, never father and son, no longer mattered to his father. They did to Erich, however. The small warmth and intimacy they brought to him was all he had ever enjoyed with his father, all that had seemed real and normal to him as his son.

  Leaving the café, Erich stopped and gazed for a still moment at the night skies above him, as he often did. There were no stars, only an empty blackness with no end wherever he looked, much like the quickening turns in his life. It seemed to him that he had been chasing the wind all his life, hoping to catch it one day and ride on it far away to a bright new world. But now, the fabric of his tomorrows that he had so carefully woven was unraveling, and he didn’t know why. Nothing was real anymore.

  ***