A lot of "useful" prisoner, like doctors and nurses, were used by the nazis to treat other prisoners in the concentration camps. These doctors were killed every six or so months and new ones replaced them. The nazis had endless waves of people that they murdered.
I fucking hate nazis. We should make them all afraid again.
Strangely enough The Strain (a show about vampires) portrayed it very well.
If you were "useful" you could basically sell your soul and help with some part of the extermination of people just like you. When you stopped helping you were killed and replaced.
Modern republicans ignore every subtlety and act like some of them were treated like humans and implying the reason everyone else was brutally executed was because they were worthless.
It's because a lot of modern republicans openly identify with nazis these days.
Behind the Bastards covered this on their Mengele episode, which I highly recommend. Robert Evens had a more sympathetic outlook towards the jewish doctors who were useful to the nazis.
Basically, they were put in a terrible situation, and they were able to use their relative privilege to help other internees. And it isn't like they were living the life of luxury, they were all murdered on a regular basis so that they individually wouldn't become to important to the death machine. We shouldn't judge those people too harshly given the choices they were given essentially.
And, I am terrible afraid of the right wing in the US. They aren't even hiding their intent to do a genocide anymore. I live in a progressive enclave of a deeply red state. Needless to say, I'm armed and I encourage all my progressive friends to get armed.
The Nazis actually had a policy of killing their slave doctors every 6 months. There was no, "until they stop being helpful". It was mandated to be 6 months. (but some camps were slightly more lax about it)
It was all pretty horrific, and the worst part is, the Nazis themselves never had very competent doctors, which is why they forced actually competent Jewish doctors to carry out the twisted experiments.
There are very few books written by people who survived the camps, and the one by Miklos Nyiszli is likely the best account of what these doctors were subject to.
That's a weird use of the term these days. Usually when people use that it's to talk about recent things that have happened or changed. Republicans have been devoted in large chunk to the Nazis for over a hundred years. Almost 100 years ago they got caught plotting a fascist overthrow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the time a large number of Republicans synthesized with Adolf Hitler. And it didn't change in any extreme measure even after Hitler lost. It just got quieter. But they still collected the memorabilia to remember what could have been. Republicans like Harlan Crow for instance. You have a huge group of useful idiots who might not ascribe to this. But just willingly let themselves be used by the troop Republicans who revere Hitler and even the plantation owners.