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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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228 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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who had some knowledge of electroshock therapy, then quite
new, demonstrated to Fischer an apparatus he had constructed with the help of
the electrical section of the Monowitz subcamp. Fischer arranged for women
considered to be in need of the therapy (because they were “mad” or
emotionally disturbed in some way) to be brought to the professor for shock
treatments. Again, Fischer was a conscientious student, attending most or all
of the therapy sessions conducted by the professor, while the other prisoner
doctors of the hospital attended only the first two (see pages 298-300.) .
While collaborative efforts like these were unusual, the kind of
medical bond they suggested was common enough. And however these bonds were
tainted by the existence of selections, they meant a great deal to prisoner
doctors and served a purpose for Nazi doctors as well.
There was
sometimes even a suggestion that the bond was intensified by their having
survived together the unpleasantness of the selections procedure. One prisoner
doctor told of getting to know Dr. Klein, who performed selections every
fortnight but “was very kind,” and emphasized the bond they formed:
“If you see a man every week and especially at the moments of the
selections,” you come to know him “very, very well..” Dr. Magda
V. clarified the matter: “It was something like what you read about the
way victims of terrorists can feel about the people who took them
prisoner.”
The bond, that is, is formed by extreme coercion and
includes elements of a sense of shared fate, at least temporarily. The bond
required the prisoner doctors to move into realms of numbing and derealization
inhabited by the SS doctors. Dr. Magda V., for instance, demonstrated
considerable skill both in medical areas and in handling pressures from Nazi
doctors; but when I asked her about her knowledge of phenol injections (see
chapter 14) she said that she was so numb that she did not “take in
details … Somebody said something, but it was … unreal.”
Similarly, about selections and other aspects of experience: “The whole
thing was utterly unreal, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who had the
feeling that you were in a kind of ivory tower and it [was] not
happening.”
Dr. Jacob R., who spoke of Nazi doctors as being at
times “on a certain level collegial,” also told me that for him and
other prisoner doctors, “it was impossible to live in Auschwitz without a
sort of emotional anesthesia.” Not until almost twenty years later, when
called to testify at a trial taking place in England, did he overcome that
anesthesia: “It was a terrible shock to be confronted with [Auschwitz
victims], ... their life stories, ... the experimentations .... (At that time]
my faculties were restored.”
Dr. Erich G spoke of a psychic immune
reaction which was like wearing an asbestos jacket, so that if there is a fire
breaking out the fire |
__________
* She refers here to the
kind of bond — known as the “Stockholm syndrome” — that has
been observed to develop between hostage takers and hostages, in which the
shared death encounter can be a central factor. |
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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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