Darwin paediatrician says holocaust victims found relief in knowing they were going to the gas chambers
Addressing a Bill proposing new procedures governing medical transfers from offshore detention, the Australia Medical Association’s president in NT Dr Paul Bauert told Sky News in the Holocaust gas chambers victims found a sense of relief knowing there was no escape.
Dr Paul Bauert
The paediatrician told Sky News: “The longer these people are there, the worse they are getting. We know that the main, the main reason for the impairment of mental health, as Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist from Auschwitz described very well in his book, Man’s search for meaning, the main problem these people have is the lack of meaning, the lack of any end to what is going on. A lack of certainty.
And this more than anything causes severe mental health damage. Even those that finally knew they were about to be condemned to the gas chamber, at least found some sense of relief in knowing what was happening.
Bauert’s history is totally false. In almost all cases, those who were “condemned to the gas chamber” did not know what fate was about to befall them. The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to assure them that they were lining up for “showers” or “delousing”. Far from “knowing what was happening” and finding “some sense of relief”, they were kept in a carefully planned state of illusion, uncertainty, disorientation and terror right up to the time the sealed doors closed them in to the gas chamber and the hydrogen cyanide Zyklon B pellets were poured through the vents.
In the name of compassion for asylum seekers, Dr Bauert has trampled upon the feelings and memories of Holocaust survivors and demonstrated an appalling lack of understanding of the nature and extent of the traumas they endured. He should apologise unreservedly.
Dr Bauert tweetd:
Is this guy channeling Dr Mengele? Doctors are qualified to practice medicine.
My father was a POW and was in Auschwitz-Birkenau for a time I know what the experience did to him. I am not impressed by this man’s comments. A medical degree does not make you the repository (some would say; the suppository) of all wisdom and knowledge. He should get back to his surgery and and do the work he is qualified to do.
If medics start playing at being politicians by making inane comments then thay can expect to be treated like politicians and deservably be held in contempt by many Australians
It iz very surprising zat de man mit de Bauert name iz very ignorant of the facts of ze Holocaust.
Did you know that he was 2010 NT Australian of ze Year?
I can’t believe that such a famous doktor can be so ignorant yet he seems to have a very different perspektiv on gas chambers than most people I know.
If Victor Frankl survived, how did he know what the people about to be murdered felt? There are records of Jews singing ani ma’amim as they were marched into the gas chambers and there are records of the many attempts at trying to avoid getting gassed. Even the ones half dead on carts being drawn to the ovens wanted to live. Perhaps, those who were deliberately kept without water for days, so their dehydrated corpses would burn better did feel that the gas would end their torture, but they hardly welcomed their fate.
Comparing the suffering that the Nazis inflicted on Jews to the suffering of, in large measure, economic invaders is grossly ignorant, obscene and offensive. It is perhaps the best argument why medicos should not have any authority over who comes to Australia.
This man is a disgrace to the medical profession and should be asked to resign from his position in the AMA. Immediately!
Spot on… let the doctors deal with microscopic bugs. Perhaps this doctor is not “famous” but “INFAMOUS” PS Who said doctors are all smart??
The Humanitarian disgrace is this individual, and the Australian Medical Association for appointing him their head in NT.
Bauert also tweeted:
“Please read “Man’s search for meaning” by Victor Frankl to see the mental health connections.”
and (the follow-up to the tweet included in the article above):
“2/2 I stand by my view that our current offshore detention policies are inhumane and needlessly cruel.”
He doesn’t appear to get it, at all…
What shameful garbage from this man. At least those in the detention centres can enter the shower blocks safe in the knowledge that they will walk out having enjoyed a refreshing shower.