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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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209 |
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| Socialization to Killing |
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as one SS doctor recalled years later: “One could
react like a normal human being in Auschwitz only for the first few hours. Once
one had spent some time there, it was impossible to react normally. In that
setup everyone was sullied.” And SS doctors, as a survivor added, were
“doing what the society wants you to do.”
Dr. Henri Q, noting
angrily that doctors “who are to care for the sick” instead
“participated in such a massacre without resisting,” pointed out that
only one SS doctor (and there is actually some doubt about him) asked to be
sent to the Russian front instead. Dr. Q. contrasted that record with
consistent resistance by prisoner doctors who risked their lives changing lists
and protecting people from selections in various ways. And he observed closely
the relationship between routinization and extreme moral blunting — the
“relaxed” manner of “gentlemen who came and went” described
in the epigraph to this chapter. And the prisoner doctor Magda V. pointed out
(as did the SS doctor Ernst B.) that, whatever the difference in the Nazi
doctors’ attitudes toward selections, they did them as “part of their
job” — with such compliance that “I think those bastards knew
what they came for.”
But Dr. V. nonetheless noticed that doctors
could behave differently from one another. One factor was fear. Of Dr.
König, she said that he took more people from the medical blocks in
selections than he need have taken “because he was scared,” and
added, “[Among SS doctors] there [weren’t] ... many brave men there
.... We didn’t get the cream of . . . humanity.”
The doctors
were affected as well by the impending German defeat. Some became considerably
more pleasant and helpful, looking for the support from liberated prisoners
they knew they would soon need. But some had a reverse reaction, selecting
people to die all the more energetically; as Dr. Lottie M. observed, “it
seemed to them more necessary to believe that they [were] right .... Somehow
you felt them say, ’We are still right.’” Individual
psychological attitudes toward women and men could also be important in ways to
be discussed. Dr. M. told me, for instance, that Rohde was relatively
considerate to women prisoner doctors — and, in fact, was especially
active in arranging release from the camp of pregnant non-Jewish women inmates
(made possible by later Auschwitz rules) — but was at the same time
“an awful man toward the men.”
Another element was their
education and general knowledge. The Polish doctor Tadeusz S. stressed that
they were “not educated doctors,” “did not understand either
human beings or medicine,” and sometimes resembled medical students whose
basic ignorance enabled them to think of “fantastic experiments,” all
the more so when combined with Nazi ideology. This ignorance was greatest in
older SS doctors who had been early Nazis, the medical version of the “old
fighters.” But Dr. S. was referring to the overall Nazi impairment of the
profession and to medical versions of the Nazi pseudo intellectual: the
half-educated visionary, |
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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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