|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
119 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Participants |
| |
we have seen, he could be impressively reasonable,
professional, and professorial in “guiding” other doctors, especially
younger ones, in their participation. This activist psychiatrist-organizer and
administrator of direct medical killing extended his participation in killing
to the camps in the 14f 13 program (see chapter 6).
After the war,
Heyde escaped from custody; he obtained false papers and worked at a number of
jobs. Finally he obtained a position as a sports physician in a school
near Kiel, where — under the pseudonym of Dr. Sawade — he began to
give expert medical legal opinions in various cases including psychiatric ones.
As he earned a lot of money and lived flamboyantly, his true name and identity
began to be known to leading political and judicial figures in the area, as
well as to psychiatrists and other physicians. He was finally exposed by
Professor Creutzfeldt, who recognized Heyde’s hand in what the elderly
anti-Nazi considered an objectionable forensic opinion, and one that countered
his own; when Creutzfeldt wavered, his two physician sons pressed him to see
the matter through. The court prepared an impressively detailed pre-trial
dossier; but, in 1961, Heyde was found dead in his cell, a suicide, before the
trial could begin. The episode resembled earlier SS suicides at the end of the
war, and there remains widespread suspicion that Heyde was helped, perhaps even
pressured, to kill himself by people with ties to the SS, possibly including
other doctors, who had infiltrated the guards and did not want the trial to be
held.18
Heyde was ä relatively
ordinary psychiatrist whose passionate involvement with German nationalism and
the Nazi vision of change led to near-absolute willingness to subsume
professional principles to the Party, the SS, the Gestapo, the overall Nazi
project. It may be that men like him held to the visionary Nazi principle of
killing in the name of healing, while at the same time they had some awareness
of being involved in filth and killing. But by means of psychological
mechanisms I shall explore throughout this study, he was able to minimize that
awareness and to continue to feel justified in what he was doing. He also
undoubtedly had psychopathic and sadistic tendencies, but these need not have
been exceptionally prominent until called forth by his involvement with the
Nazis. His career reveals to us how far certain doctors could go, propelled by
ideology and by institutional arrangements, in abnegating a prior professional
self and applying their medical skills to killing. |
| |
| |
| The Brutalized Physician: Hermann Pfannmüller
|
| |
| Hermann Pfannmüller (1886-1961) — who, like
Heyde, joined the Party in May 1933 — is another example of the corrupted,
Nazified psychiatrist. It was this senior psychiatrist who, in his late fifties
and director of an institution, held up by the legs a starving, nearly dead
three-year-old child and declared, laughing: “This is the most simple
method” (see |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 119 |
Forward |
|
|
