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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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330 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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principle of everyone’s having “dirt on his
walking stick,” he moved closer not only to the heart of Auschwitz but
also to his own connection with the camp and its functions. In other words, by
probing more deeply and becoming increasingly candid, he was forced to reveal
aspects of his involvement that would no longer fit into the comfortably
controlled narrative a part of himself wished to construct. That is why he
seemed more tense during this interview than in others; and at the end he tried
to retreat from his own impasse by focusing on the issue of Auschwitz
overcrowding on how there were as many as 140,000 prisoners in the camp at
times, and how scientific experiments with mice in crowded cages revealed
extreme behavior, including cannibalism.
The fourth interview took
place nine months after the third, the delay caused by a number of factors, but
mainly by reluctance on his part, apparently due to his wife’s continuing
objections. As a compromise we met in a small university office I had access to
in Munich requiring that he drive several hours to meet me. Although still
affable his tone was significantly different. He told me that his attitude
about Auschwitz and related issues had hardened. He now insisted upon
recognizing what was good about the Nazis as well as what was bad and upon
looking at other forms of cruel behavior in history and thereby seeing the
Nazis as by no means unique.
He had in fact hardened toward me and the
interview situation as well becoming increasingly assertive in expressing the
Nazi point of view at the time in ways that left doubt about how removed he was
from that point of view, then and even now. There was an element of contempt in
his dismissal of any possible comparison between violent contemporary cults (in
particular the one led by Jim Jones, which culminated in the mass suicide
murder of more than nine hundred of its followers in 1978) and the Nazi
Auschwitz structure. And there was a tone of defiance in his stress on the
“logic” of the Nazi killing in Auschwitz for those doctors who
believed in the vision of National Socialism as a “world blessing”
(Weitbeglückung) and Jews as the fundamental evil
(Grundübel). His language became more crude — for instance in
his use of the term “home-baked problems” (hausbackene
Problemen) to describe routine problems. He seemed assertively
unapologetic, at times almost enthusiastic, as he took me on a journey through
the foulest Auschwitz realms. And in stressing that Nazi doctors saw such tasks
as offering advice on the burning of bodies as not an ethical problem at all
— just technical, he seemed to be rejecting any moral perspective on
Auschwitz. At the end of the interview, when comparing Nazi times with the
present, he, said that, despite the “full liberalization” today,
there is an absence of “ideals for youth a lack of commitment which leads
to chaotic conditions and the absence of "a coherent community.” The Nazis
“overdid it” in the opposite direction, he acknowledged, but in
Hitler’s admittedly “primitive methods” there was
“something right,” something that “was good with the
Nazis.” |
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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 330 |
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