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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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133 |
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its culmination and bitter frustration in the First World
War; the overwhelming death immersion of that war and the degradation of
defeat, remarkably reversed in the glorification of the “front
experience” and the “stab in the back” explanation through which
German resurgence becomes a survivor mission and debt to the dead who “are
not really dead at all ... [but] climb out of their graves and visit us at
night in our dreams”; 48 the violence of
the collective redemptive-revitalizing impulse as expressed through militarized
male bands (the Freikorps and the SA) with ambivalence that could become
murderous toward their homoerotic tendencies; 49 the combination, within a single mystical
constellation, of those elements of völkisch romanticism, the
warrior ethos, and national revitalization with visionary biologism,
Nordic-centered racism, and passionate anti-Semitism; and a vision of
physician-philosopher kings with mythical medical-alchemist powers (see pages
481-84) who both exemplify and serve the “Führer
principle” in bringing about immortalizing racial revitalization.
Dr. S.’s decision for purification in battle could well have been
an effort to fend off perceptions of overall failure, wrongness, even evil,
having to do with the entire Nazi project. (A somewhat parallel purifying
impulse may have motivated Hitler in his effort to destroy all of Germany at
the end of the war.) Whatever S.’s front experience served, he emerged
from it regretting nothing. He knew the Nazis had been excessive in their
killing of Jews, but purported to prove that the numbers were exaggerated, that
much of it was done not by Germans but by Ukrainians, and that “numbers
don't count anyway,” as he struggled (successfully) to hold on to his Nazi
religion. His conclusion was not that National Socialism was wrong or bad but
that “the time was too short”; that for its purposes to be achieved,
it “will take many generations”; and that Hitler, presumably like
Moses, “opened the gate into a new century but did not cross the
threshold” and essentially “was a man of the nineteenth
century.” And, finally, “National Socialism failed because we could
not develop enough biological teaching — it was not possible to educate
people sufficiently in biology” — so that “the tragedy of
National Socialism was that it was never realized.”
While Dr.
S.’s swings between modes of logic and madness could be attributed to
senility, they were characteristic of someone caught between an elaborate
belief system with a certain internal coherence and that system’s larger
intellectual absurdity and moral madness. Crucial was the extensive sharing of
the project, so that the most bizarre ideas and policies “seemed normal to
all concerned.”50 Johann S. demonstrates
how Nazi doctors could combine certain logical structures with flamboyant and
murderous expressions of that moral madness and continue to function in the
process. |
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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 133 |
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