Why were Jews allowed to get medical access to the Auschwitz hospital? Wouldn't Nazis just want them to die?

by BeatlesLists

I didn't find this question when I searched, so sorry if this actually came up before and I didn't see it.

I'm currently reading Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and I came to the part in which Levi gained the "right to forty days' isolation" in the hospital. My question is why would they want Jews to have rest and get better? I thought if a prisoner is sick or unable to work they were automatically killed.

EDIT: I understand the part about Mengele. Nevertheless, people wanted to go sometimes for medical problems and they got relatively better and then released. Talking about avoiding hospitals isn't related to my question.

Brad_Wesley

Aushwitz was a major industrial encampment and Germany had a manpower shortage. It was only later that a part of the Aushwitz complex was turned into an extermination camp. Even then the able-bodied workers were not exterminated.

Oliebonk

Auschwitz was an extermination facility right from the beginning. It was the research facility for the first gas chambers and the last extermination facility to close.

Next to that it was also an Industrial facility were forced labourers were made to work. The selection procedure was done at arrival. There SS doctors would decide whether a person was fit enough to work or were send to the gas chambers immediately. When you were chosen to work in one of the camps that formed Auschwitz-Birkenau or in one of the Aussenkommando's, you received a Matricle number that was tattooed on the prisoners. After the war the issuing of Matricle numbers was the only way to verify that you were not gassed right away from the trains.

After being chosen as a slave labourer you had a certain value for the Nazis. Hospitals in camps were important for the Nazis because they were very scared of infectious diseases and epidemics to spread to their ranks or the civilian population. So hospitals in Auschwitz were used to contain epidemics like typhus and dysentery that would otherwise decimate the slave population. They tried to keep up the numbers of slave labourers in the factories to full fill their industrial output targets. In the end it was only the Nazis self interest that allowed prisoners to go to hospitals, that were mostly manned by prisoners who as a free person were once medical personnel. There was no humanitarian interest at all...

otokononakaotoko

Most people in concentration camps would actively avoid the hospitals. I cannot speak to why they would seek out these hospitals, but I know for a fact that often the horrors one might face in these hospitals (specifically the Auschwitz hospital, run by Dr. Joseph Mengele) were greater than those they faced in the camp. Though I have no evidence to prove this, I was always under the impression that the hospital served the dual purpose of being a staging ground for Dr. Mengele's experiments (in the case of Auschwitz) and serving as a front during Red Cross visits to show that it was indeed a work camp.