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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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263 |
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| Killing with Syringes: Phenol
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expression. For instance, I never saw him laugh. …
Actually for me he is one of the cruelest doctors I ever met in my entire
life.”
Dr. Tadeusz S. also stressed Entress’s extreme
coldness and distance (“He just didn't see me. I was like the air, not a
person”), as well as the danger emanating from him (“I was extremely
afraid of him”).
Jan W. emphasized Entress’s Nazi ideological
intensity and his need to “shut himself off completely from his Polish
influences” — the combination producing the “excess zeal”
with which he treated prisoner doctors and other prisoners: “In camp he
was eye to eye with former friends — Poles who were now prisoners. He
would not help them or talk to them in Polish … and pretended that he did
not know Polish. He was even aloof from former colleagues who graduated from
the same university. He wanted to have his friends finished off as soon as
possible.”
Dr. W. thought that Entress had to “present this
iron personality” in order to resist any suspicion of softness toward
Poles, and that if he were to speak Polish “he might appear too
friendly.” This young Polish prisoner saw Entress as “completely true
to his ideology,” with an attitude toward Poles that “they either
should be strong enough to work or if not should be liquidated instantly”
and with “no psychological scruples.”
To Dr. W., Entress was
“an especially fanatical Nazi with the zealousness of the convert,” a
man who believed that Nazism “was the only path, and for that path it was
necessary to sacrifice the lives of other people”: "He treated Germans as
Übermenschen [“supermen”]; Poles as Untermenschen
[“subhumans”]; and Jews as not being humans at all.”
Langbein suggested that Entress’s “decidedly unathletic
appearance, his sickly nature” might have contributed to his need to be
“‘harder,’ more cruel, than others.” And Dr. W. believed
that Entress’s status as an ethnic German required him to “compensate
for that deficiency by exaggerated, murderous zeal.” Langbein and Dr. W.
seemed to me to be psychologically accurate. For a man like Entress, the
embrace of Germanism and Nazism can become so intense and so desperate as to be
perceived as the only path to life itself — in his case to medical life as
well. In addition, he had known no other assignment as a physician than the
murderous one of concentration-camp doctor. He combined the absolute
ideological passion of the healing-killing reversal with probably the most
extreme numbing and doubling of any SS physician. He may well have consciously
believed that his behavior in Auschwitz was the highest expression of the true
Nazi physician. In 1946 Entress was tried and convicted by a United States
court, and hanged. |
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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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