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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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206 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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to be eliminated, whether that meant sending all Jews to
Madagascar, forcing most Jews to leave Germany while permitting a small
well-established minority to remain and undergo complete assimilation, or
murdering every last one of them. By clinging to this ambiguity, Nazi doctors
had an additional means of avoiding the psychological reality of the decision
for mass murder and its implementation. And by viewing the whole matter as a
problem that needed to be “solved,” by whatever means, that pragmatic
goal could become the only focus. The very term Endlösung, or
“Final Solution,” served both psychological purposes: it stood for
mass murder without sounding or feeling like it; and it kept the focus
primarily on problem solving. So given a minimum agreement on the necessity of
solving the “Jewish problem,” doctors and other Nazis could come to
accept, even to prefer, the mass-murder project, because it alone promised a
genuine solution, a clearing up of the matter once and for all, and a
final solution.
But there were different combinations of
ideology and attitude. Even older career doctors — for instance, Hans
Wilhelm König — could be in accord with SS principles but retain a
measure of humanity so that (as Dr. Jacob R. stated) “As long as a person
is allowed to be alive, he could be treated as a person.” It was
König who was friendly with a woman prisoner artist (pages 232-33) and Dr.
R. told how König had, on the forced march out of Auschwitz, saved his
life by helping him up when he found it difficult to continue and was in danger
of being shot.
Friedrich Entress, in contrast, was consistently
perceived as brutal. According to Dr. R., “he was only, interested in the
system and had no interest in patients, and Jewish doctors were
non-persons.” Polish prisoners had their own special reasons to be
terrified of Entress (see pages 262-63).
But, for Dr. Lottie M.,
“the fanatic was Klein.” It was he who insisted upon maintaining
separation between the Aryan and the Jewish medical blocks, who considered the
Jews a “gangrenous appendix” to be removed, and was at one with the
selections process. “He felt that the right thing to do was to kill these
people, . . . [that] it was right to do so,” Dr. M. stated, still with a
certain degree of incredulity. More generally, Nazi doctors, as a Czech doctor,
Erich G., observed, would “treat Jewish people as having a human form but
not a human quality” and as “potential polluters of the German
race” — which was why a Nazi doctor “became a killer instead of
a healer,” a phenomenon “I saw daily.”
Careerist concerns
became bound up with ideology in ways that reinforced one another. From the
standpoint of career, the Auschwitz assignment was of mixed value. Its
advantage lay in the likelihood of official recognition, including promotion
and future advantages, for performing difficult duty, all the more so for a
doctor identified as efficient and zealous in his work. But in terms of useful
medical experience, always important for one’s career, Auschwitz offered
very little. Dr. Lottie M. observed that Nazi doctors wished to be always
professionally “on top of |
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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 206 |
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