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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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235 |
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| Prisoner Doctors: Struggles to
Heal |
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than a human life. It is not. necessary to treat
a patient well, but one has to mention on the observation form [medical chart]
that he received all the medication required for his condition, so that the
Germans can prove to the world afterward, black on white, that if he died, it
was because he was weak and not as a sequel of the poor treatment he was
subjected to. |
| Prisoner doctors were especially drawn into the illusion of
medical authenticity in their connections with Nazi doctors, as Dr. M. has made
clear in describing her working arrangements with Mengele: |
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I act[ed] as if it were a normal hospital, though
I kn[e]w it [was] not. But ... when Mengele entered the block, J said,
“May I show you this patient? ... Could I take this one to the men’s
camp for [an] operation because we have no surgery but the men's camp ha[s]
….” I showed him ten of these patients. He said yes or no and went
away. And it all had the forms of the normal head doctor’s
visit. |
Lottie M. had a certain standing as a German non-Jew.
Gerda N., a Jewish doctor, told me of her own pain concerning questions of
“responsibility” and described as a “farce” her and other
inmates’ attempts at medical work. With virtually no medication (“We
got ten aspirins a day for a block of thousands”), they were expected to
treat patients with the most severe and debilitating symptoms. The resulting
sense of helplessness was magnified and infused with guilt and frustration by
expectations that could not be fulfilled: “What can a doctor do... with
nothing in his hands? . . . There's even no water ... but we still had to ...
do [things] as if we were responsible for something . . . . [To] be responsible
for something you cannot take the responsibility [for], . . . . it's sort of
... schizophrenic, . . . very schizophrenic.”
Like Dr. Ernst B.,
Dr. N. used the term “schizophrenic” to describe the reversals and
confusions of healing and killing — of attempts at, and claims for, the
former in the face of the latter. But she went further in revealing the
terrible psychological consequences of those healing-killing paradoxes for a
prisoner doctor, clinging to a sense of medical responsibility. Without
directly saying so, she suffered from the Nazi doctors’ sinister extension
of the idea of responsibility to encompass culpability and blame: they accused
prisoner doctors of being “responsible” for patients’ deaths as
a way of exonerating themselves and other camp authorities. This pattern of
“blaming the victim” (in this case the physician-healer-victim) was,
as we shall see, psychologically important to Nazi doctors; but here we may
note especially its potentially devastating psychological impact on prisoner
doctors, even when they were consciously aware that the accusation was absurd.
A related contradiction was the experience of providing, with SS
doctors’ encouragement, extensive and ultimately successful treatment for
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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 235 |
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