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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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118 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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ordinary person ... . [whom one] would never have thought
. . .,capable of doing such things.” Originally a ward physician and
eventually a clinical “chief doctor” (Oberarzt) in a psychiatric
hospital, he enhanced his career by his standing as a Nazi (he joined the Party
on 1 May 1933), and he became a full professor at Würzburg in 1939. In
1935, he became leader of the Würzburg Office of Racial Politics.
His SS career could be said to have begun as early as 1933 when he
formed a close relationship to Theodor Eicke, who was first his patient and, in
June of that year, became commandant of Dachau before being appointed overall
inspector of concentration camps. Eicke, who became the architect of much of
the concentration-camp system and mentor for many camp commandants, did much to
institutionalize systematic physical and psychological brutality. It is not
impossible that Heyde contributed to some of these conceptions (see page 153).
Heyde had joined the Party on Eicke’s urging. Through this
connection and then through that with Ernst Robert Grawitz, the notorious SS
chief physician, Heyde joined that organization in 1936, was immediately made
captain, and in 1941, 1943, and 1945 he was promoted to major, lieutenant
colonel, and colonel. Among his SS assignments, were the creation of a
neuropsychiatric division and supervising “psychiatric-neurologic
and heredity research” on concentration-camp prisoners. This latter
assignment was deemed “particularly urgent” because of its potential
for “scientific applications.” Heyde was also a consulting
neuropsychiatric expert for the Gestapo in Berlin. This last assignment
involved secret activities of which Heyde wrote in his Nazi vita,
“naturally I can only hint,” and which probably included advice on
torture methods to induce prisoners to provide information as well as
psychiatric evaluations useful to the Gestapo.16*
Heyde was a central figure, and the
embodiment of medical legitimation, in the “euthanasia” mass-murder
program. He played a large role in the planning of the entire structure of
deception and overall killing procedures and, until replaced by Nitsche, was
the main “chief expert” on ultimate decisions about who was to be
killed. At the same time, as |
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* Walter Schellenberg, the
head of the German Foreign Intelligence Service, paraphrased a report Heyde
wrote on Georg Elser, the carpenter-electrician who nearly succeeded in
assassinating Hitler in 1939, describing it as the “best analysis”
made at the time, and revealing to us how far psychiatric corruption could go:
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[Heyde] said that the assassin
was a typical warped fanatic who went his own way alone. He [Elser] had
psychotic compulsions, related especially to technical matters, which sprang
from an urge to achieve something really noteworthy. This was due to an
abnormal need for recognition and acknowledgement which was reinforced by
thirst for vengeance for the alleged injustice which had been done to his
brother [who had been arrested as a communist sympathizer and sent to a
concentration camp]. In killing the leader of the Third Reich he would satisfy
all these compulsions because he would become famous himself, and he would have
felt morally justified by freeing Germany from a great evil.. Such urges,
combined with the desire to suffer and sacrifice oneself, were typical of
religious and sectarian fanaticism. Upon checking back, similar psychotic
disorders were found to have occurred in Elser’s family.17 |
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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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