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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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83 |
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| Resistance to Direct Medical
Killing |
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Ewald felt so immediately preoccupied with formulating his
objections that he could not recall what else Heyde said. When given an
opportunity to speak, Ewald stated, “On principle I would not lend my hand
to exterminate in this way patients entrusted to me.” He pointed out that
schizophrenics, the largest patient group concerned, were not as “empty
and hopeless” as claimed, and could well benefit from new forms of therapy
just then being developed. After giving additional arguments and making clear
his refusal to become an expert, he was joined by two other psychiatrists. But
those two reversed themselves, Ewald testified, when Paul Nitsche, Heyde’s
next in command and a man with considerable professional standing, spoke
passionately of having personally lived through the tragedy of coping with a
mentally ill brother-in-law and urged the group not to oppose the extermination
of the mentally ill.* As Ewald said nothing more and clearly had not changed
his position, Heyde “dismissed” him, in a firm but “very polite
and collegial fashion,” even expressing “respect for my point of
view.”8
Immediately after the
meeting, Ewald made notes of what had happened at it, and these became the
basis for a memorandum he sent to the dean of his faculty at the University of
Göttingen, as well as to Heyde, Conti, a regional official in Hanover, and
the psychotherapist Dr. Matthias Göring with a request that he pass it
along to his cousin Hermann, the powerful air marshal.† Written
essentially from a Nazi framework, the memorandum began by raising questions,
not about the rights of patients, but about whether so “far-reaching”
an action would be sufficiently beneficial to the Volk to justify it.
Ewald conceded that, if a people were absolutely besieged, and “needed
every grain (of food) for its healthy members, then ... those unfortunate sick
members would be the first to give their life in favor of the healthy
population.” But without that extremity, doctors should not
“interfere with fate.” |
__________
* One of those two doctors,
Arthur Kuhn (of Reichenau), disputed this and testified that he met the other
man, a Dr. Meusberger (of Klagenfurt), at the train station, having left early
while the rest of the group stayed late to drink and celebrate; but their
overall roles remain obscure. Neither Kuhn nor Meusberger appears on lists of
experts in Nazi documents. (I am grateful to Ernst Klee for a personal
communication [November 1985] on this matter.)
†Matthias
Göring was a psychiatrist and Adlerian psychotherapist who, largely
because of his family connections, was made director of what came to be known
as the Göring Institute in Berlin. Although an ardent Nazi who kept in
constant touch with his eminent cousin and did not hesitate to exploit his
name, Matthias Göring was generally perceived as being relatively benign
(he was known within the institute as “Papi”) and managed to maintain
under one professional roof, with certain restrictions, Adlerian, Jungian, and
Freudian psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as those who were
strongly pro-Nazi, anti-Nazi or somewhere in between. Because he and his
institute enabled psychotherapy to survive as a profession in Nazi Germany, and
because he offered some protection to individual psychotherapists, he has been
somewhat romanticized. Although he never achieved his goal of a “new
German psychotherapy,” he did press German psychotherapy into service to
the regime and maintained active links with the military and the SS. The
Göring Institute is a fascinating story on many levels, but I believe that
Göring is best understood as a prototypical “decent Nazi” —
a genre I shall have much more to say about later; and that he and his
institute served the primary function of Gleichschaltung for German
psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and a small portion of psychiatry (the minority
of the discipline concerned with a psychotherapeutic approach).9 |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 83 |
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