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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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112 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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Psychiatrists in academic centers tended to be slightly
more removed from the process than those in state hospitals. As one of the
former put it to me: “We had to send them patients ... but it [the
killing] was done there.”* Yet in academic centers no less than
state hospitals, psychiatrists made constant compromises, sending some patients
and saving others, and at times even — according to the principle
expressed to me by one such psychiatrist — “taking part in the
selections [for the project] in order to prevent worse things from
happening.”
There was a generational factor, as a psychiatrist who
took active part in the program made clear to me: “The younger ones [among
whom he identified himself] were more in favor of it”; and it was only
from among one of the older ones [that a psychiatrist would occasionally] raise
. . . his voice in warning .. . . [and] point out to us that you can’t do
that, where do you want to draw the line?” Younger psychiatrists tended to
identify, themselves more with both the regime and the war effort, and might
come to believe (as the same man went on to explain), “If the enemy is
killing our healthy youth, than this [‘euthanasia’] is not such a
crime.” Moreover, the term “unworthy life” was bandied about in
discussions among psychiatric colleagues no less than in official documents, so
that psychiatrists found themselves accepting it in varying degree, feeling
that at least in certain cases “perhaps they [those running the program]
are right after all,” because “back then we were not unequivocally or
clearly opposed.” For, as he further explained, “in a dictatorship
... the authoritarian regime takes responsibility away from [the
individual]” so that rather than struggling over whether to act in one way
or another, one feels, “I must act this way, . . . not get into a conflict
situation,,. . . which may be wrong ... but ... does have its advantages.”
For the psychiatric rank and file then participation in direct medical
killing was a way of going along with a regime one tended to be either in
sympathy with or at least not opposed to. Whether one plunged into the project
enthusiastically, made numerical compromises (gave up some patients to the
killing process in order to save a few others from it), or focused on
professionalism, one ended in some measure divesting oneself of responsibility
for one’s actions.
Concerning the specific mentality of
psychiatrists, there are two aspects of their ideology I have only, touched
upon, having to do with their perception of psychiatric patients, psychiatric
illness, and psychiatric hierarchy. First, many German psychiatrists (and
psychiatrists working elsewhere, in similar traditions) were committed to the
idea of schizophrenia as an organic incurable disease, whose natural course was
deterioration. Indeed, for many, professional pride depended on that view. Any
effort to penetrate the psyche of a schizophrenic patient as a means of
understanding and a form of treatment was viewed by these psychiatrists as |
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* Killing centers were
created from state hospitals, from large church-run institutions that had been
expropriated by the state or, in one case (Brandenburg), from a prison.
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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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