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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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153 |
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| The Auschwitz Institution |
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charge of the. Death's Head Units* — quixotic
brutality was replaced by a policy of impersonal, systematic terror. Earlier,
because of his own violent acts, Eicke had been imprisoned on orders from
Himmler and then transferred briefly to the Würzburg University
Psychiatric Clinic where, as we have noted, he was Heyde’s patient; it was
upon his release that Eicke was assigned by Himmler to run Dachau. Whatever
happened between psychiatrist and patient, this sequence suggests that very
early Heyde contributed significantly both professionally and medically to
concentration-camp policies. In any case, those policies under Eicke grew into
what Rudolf Höss, who trained at Dachau for his post as commandant of
Auschwitz, later called a “cult of severity” and a “Dachau
spirit” according to which all inmates were enemies of the state;
and camp guards were to be trained in cruelty and to dispense it with
pitilessness (or “hardness”), detachment, and incorruptibility.³
In fact, corruption was endemic to such a system.
During the middle and
late 193o5 categories of camp inmates were extended to include people
considered “habitual criminals”; “antisocial elements”
(beggars, vagabonds, Gypsies, vagrants, “workshy” individuals,
idlers, prostitutes, grumblers, habitual drunkards, hooligans, traffic
offenders, and so-called psychopaths and mental cases); homosexuals;
Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose organization was outlawed because of its
absolute pacifism); and — especially from the time of Kristallnacht
(10 November 1938) — Jews. A system of identification was instituted,
according to which each prisoner had a rectangular piece of material sewn onto
his or her uniform, upon which was imprinted a colored triangle: red for
political prisoners, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for asocials
(for example, prostitutes), green for criminals, and pink for homosexuals. Jews
wore a triangle (usually red), under which an added yellow triangle was sewn on
to form a hexagram (Star of David). Late in 1944 this “Jewish Star”
was abolished and replaced by a horizontal yellow bar above the classification
triangle.4
The legal and social
theory of the camps, as articulated in 1936, had a distinctly biological and
therapeutic hue. Werner Best, Himmler's legal authority, identified the
"political principle of totalitarianism" with the "ideological principle of the
organically indivisible national community," and declared that "any attempt to
gain recognition for or even to uphold different political ideas will be
ruthlessly dealt with, as the symptom of an illness which threatens the healthy
unity of the indivisible national organism, regardless of the subjective wishes
of its supporters."5† Thus, the
disease-cure imagery was extended to the concentration camps — a still
larger reversal of healing and killing. That reversal dominated the |
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* The Death’s Head
Units (Totenkopfverbände) were created by Himmler at Dachau under
Eicke’s command and became the general concentration-camp guards. They
took their name from their skull-and-crossbones insignia.
†At
issue was the Prussian law on the State Secret Police of February 1936, which
removed the Gestapo, particularly its use of protective custody, from judicial
restraint. |
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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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