A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

TWENTY-TWO

  Erich, Görden

  The village people called them “the crazies,” and some maybe were, but most weren’t. They were just trying to figure out how to get along in a crowded world that was way too full of dos and don’ts. For the most part they were pitifully silly people who ran around shaming their family, so they were told. It didn’t matter, though, whether they were just silly or insane, all of the crazies would be swept up and tossed into the Chancellery’s new cleansing machines for dirty genes. Maria saw their machine first, leaving the hospital after a tiresome day doing little. Taking the short way to her apartment through the grounds of the old abandoned city prison, she came upon a crew of SS laborers working feverishly around a rear exit door. Inquisitive by nature, she stopped and questioned one worker for answers about the new construction, only to be greeted with stone silence. No one else would look at her, so she left, reminding herself to ask Erich in the morning about the strange work taking place in a building no longer in use.

  Erich knew nothing about the work at the old penitentiary. For some unknown reason, the muted voices of the construction workers had bothered her throughout the evening, as if some new unexplainable event was just over the horizon. With his ward empty of children, Erich had busied himself helping Dr. Bracht dissect and study the few remaining brains of children still stored in the hospital’s laboratory. They had learned nothing, but the work was exciting and reaffirmed a sense of purpose in what they were about as doctors. Someday, somewhere, someone would find the soul’s portal to the brain, the link to our immortality, they believed. The pineal gland had been Descartes’s secret connecting door, but he was terribly wrong, Erich knew. And since then, no one really thought about it anymore or cared. Except for a few psychiatrists, science had lost its taste for the metaphysical.

  Badgered into visiting the construction site by Maria, Erich went with her to the old prison after they ate lunch together again in the rose garden. She had not exaggerated. Workers were busily cleaning the grounds and planting new grass and flowers along the walkway leading to a freshly painted exit door that was now the entrance. The prior dreary starkness of the area had been replaced by groupings of benches and chairs, each with a small religious statue standing in their midst. Even the ten-foot wall along the rear of the prison looked bright and new with its rusted iron gate removed, providing a pleasant and unguarded openness to the entire scene. Erich could not help but be impressed by the prison’s renaissance. He might seek his own quiet moments there; however, he wondered what had moved the state to prettify such a dismal place.

  Inside everything was surprisingly new also. The dingy and mildewed walls of the dark hall leading into the prison’s quarters were colorfully coated with a mixture of shades and hues, giving a welcoming brightness to anyone entering. To the left was a large and long rectangular room with three workers busily installing telephone lines and new light fixtures. Two large tables with chairs sat at the front, with the remainder of the room empty. Two large pictures of Hitler next to a smaller one of Jesus adorned the walls.

  But it was the room directly across the hall that intrigued Erich the most, where a shower room approximately nine by fifteen feet, and nine feet high with aqua tiled walls had been constructed for arriving inmates to bathe in. A pipe was fitted along the walls running to several showerheads, mounted high on the front wall. Nothing seemed strange to Erich until he noticed that the pipe was dotted with two rows of holes almost invisible to the naked eye, running the length of the pipe. He also noticed that the wall was empty of the necessary fixtures for turning on the showers. He supposed that the controls could be elsewhere, but that would be odd. Could there be a different purpose for the room, he wondered, other than as a shower room? While he didn’t know the full truth behind this moment, he felt the reality of it, and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Are you okay?” Maria asked.

  “We should leave now,” he said in a weak voice. “We probably shouldn’t be here.”

  Following Maria from the room, Erich closed the door, which seemed unusually heavy to him. Pausing for a moment, he saw a small glass peephole for observing all that was to happen inside the room. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen, Erich knew. No one would ever take a shower there.

  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 the
ir 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 lat
er, 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.

  Cremation troubled Erich deeply, though. The idea of death and burial and rising when the given day came, was as real to him as the breaths he took. And the burying of ashes was not the same as a whole body, which God expected to see. He had come by this belief from his grandfather, who told him God didn’t have time to run around trying to put together thousands of pieces of burnt bones and flesh in order to have a man ready for Judgment Day. And ever since those words, Erich believed that only a wholeness of one’s body would get you into heaven. He had tried to discuss it with Julia several times but got nowhere because she always thought he was preaching to her, trying to scare and convert her. How she would look before God was as insignificant to her as a single blade of grass. So her answer to him was always the same: “Remember the closing lines of Psalm Twenty-Three, Erich. That is all I will ever need to know about dying: ‘that I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ ”

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