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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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424 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of
consciousness involved.* By means of doubling, Nazi doctors made a Faustian
choice for evil: in the process of doubling, in fact, lies an overall key to
human evil. |
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| Varieties of Doubling |
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While individual Nazi doctors in Auschwitz doubled in
different ways, all of them doubled. Ernst B., for instance, limited his
doubling; in avoiding selections, he was resisting a full-blown Auschwitz self.
Yet his conscious desire to adapt to Auschwitz was an accession to at least a
certain amount of doubling: it was he, after all, who said that “one could
react like a normal human being in Auschwitz only for the first few
hours”; after that, “you were caught and had to go along,” which
meant that you had to double. His own doubling was evident in his sympathy for
Mengele and, at least to some extent, for the most extreme expressions of the
Nazi ethos (the image of the Nazis as a “world blessing” and of Jews
as the world's “fundamental evil”). And despite the limit to his
doubling, he retains aspects of his Auschwitz self to this day in his way of
judging Auschwitz behavior.
In contrast Mengele’s embrace of the
Auschwitz self gave the impression of a quick adaptive affinity, causing one to
wonder whether he required any doubling at all. But doubling was indeed
required in a man who befriended children to an unusual degree and then drove
some of them personally to the gas chamber; or by a man so
“collegial” in his relationship to prisoner doctors and so ruthlessly
flamboyant in his conduct of selections. Whatever his affinity for Auschwitz, a
man who could be pictured under ordinary conditions “as a slightly
sadistic German professor” had to form a new self to become an energetic
killer. The point about Mengele’s doubling was that his prior self could
be readily absorbed into the Auschwitz self and his continuing allegiance to
the Nazi ideology and project probably enabled his Auschwitz self, more than in
the case of other Nazi doctors, to remain active over the years after the
Second World War.
Wirths’s doubling was neither limited (like Dr.
B .’s) nor harmonious (like Mengele’s) it was both strong and
conflicted. We see Auschwitz’s chief doctor as a divided self because both
selves retained their power. Yet his doubling was the most successful of all
from the standpoint of the Auschwitz institution and the Nazi project. Even his
suicide was a mark of that success: while the Nazi defeat enabled him to equate
his Auschwitz self more clearly with evil he nonetheless retained
responsibility to that |
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* James S. Grotstein speaks
of the development of “a separate being living within one that has
been preconsciously split off and has an independent existence with independent
motivation separate agenda etc and from which can emanate evil sadism and
destructiveness” or even “demoniacal possession.” He calls this
aspect of the self a “mind parasite” (after Colin Wilson) and
attributes its development to those elements of the self that have been
artificially suppressed and disavowed early in life.26 |
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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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