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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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426 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| to respect human life [that is, to develop a highly
functional Auschwitz self] or to be weak and to get to the point of a nervous
breakdown [that is, to hold onto one’s prior self, which in Auschwitz was
nonfunctional] ”28 But in the Nazi
doctor, the doubling was particularly stark in that a prior healing self gave
rise to a killing self that should have been, but functionally was not, in
direct opposition to it. And as in any atrocity-producing situation, Nazi
doctors found themselves in a psychological climate where they were virtually
certain to choose evil: they were propelled that is, toward murder. |
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| Doubling — Nazi and Medical |
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Beyond Auschwitz, there was much in the Nazi movement that
promoted doubling. The overall Nazi project, replete with cruelty, required
constant doubling in the service of carrying out that cruelty. The doubling
could take the form of a gradual process of “slippery slope”
compromises: the slow emergence of a functional “Nazi self” via a
series of destructive actions, at first agreed to grudgingly, followed by a
sequence of assigned tasks each more incriminating, if not more murderous, than
the previous ones.
Doubling could also be more dramatic, infused with
transcendence, the sense (described by a French fascist who joined the SS) of
being someone entering a religious order “who must now divest himself of
his past,” and of being “reborn into a new European race.”29 That new Nazi self could take on a sense of
mystical fusion with the German Volk, with “destiny,” and with
immortalizing powers. Always there was the combination noted earlier of
idealism and terror, imagery of destruction and renewal, so that “gods
… appear as both destroyers and culture-heroes, just as the Führer
could appear as front comrade and master builder.”30 Himmler, especially in his speeches to his SS
leaders within their “oath-bound community,”31 called for the kind of doubling necessary to
engage in what he considered to be heroic cruelty, especially in the killing of
Jews.
The degree of doubling was not necessarily equivalent to Nazi
Party membership thus, Hochhuth could claim that “the great divide was
between Nazis [meaning those with well-developed Nazi selves] and decent
people, not between Party members and other Germans.”32 But probably never has a political movement
demanded doubling with the intensity and scale of the Nazis.
Doctors as
a group may be more susceptible to doubling than others. For example, a former
Nazi doctor claimed that the anatomist’s insensitivity toward skeletons
and corpses accounted for his friend Hirt’s grotesque
“anthropological” collection of Jewish skulls (see pages 284-87).
While hardly a satisfactory explanations, this doctor was referring to a
genuine pattern not just of numbing but of medical doubling. That doubling
usually begins with the student’s encounter with the corpse he or
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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 426 |
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