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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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439 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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their annihilation is only a millimeter long.” The
anti-Jewish ethos, that is, was everywhere.
But Jewish doctors one had
actually known, sometimes as close colleagues or respected teachers, interfered
with the ethos. One former Nazi doctor, for instance, recalled “the great
figures [with whom he had studied] — Wasserman, Morganroth — and also
Blumenthal, the man from whom I learned most about serology,” and told me
how the Jews “disappeared” from his institute.* While this doctor
pleaded helplessness, and held to his ardent Nazi views, his sense of guilt
here was palpable, and the pattern was true for other Nazi doctors as well.
There could be parallel tendencies even in Auschwitz: Wirths, for instance, was
“correct” and even “gentlemanly” to individual Jewish
doctors, helping them and putting them in responsible positions, while at the
same time holding to a strongly anti-Jewish Nazi ethos. He kept the faith
— on one level by maintaining separate hospital blocks for Jews and
non-Jews, and much more malignantly by his active role in the medicalized
killing of Jews. In virtually all cases the Auschwitz self sought to block out
potentially guilty images of actual Jews in favor of an ideological vision of
constructive purpose in eliminating Jews or of “solving” the
“Jewish problem.” There were conflicts in that combined stance, as we
know; but mostly of a kind that did little to interrupt the work of the
Auschwitz self. |
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| Deadly Logic and Sacred Science |
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| Highly important to the German-Nazi ethos was the claim to
logic, rationality, and science. In Auschwitz that claim had special
significance in its very grotesqueness. Consider Ernst B.’s description of
“rational” Auschwitz discussions among the doctors concerning the
necessity of killing all the Jews — providing a “real” solution
to an intractable problem rather than the unfeasible solutions of the past (the
Madagascar Plan, ghettos that “leaked,” etc. [see pages 205-6]). It
was this claim to rational thought that made Dr. B. so irate when I raised the
question of possible similarities between Auschwitz attitudes and those of the
Jonestown mass suicide-murder of 1978 (see page 330): the latter was a form of
idealism and stupidity, while he and his Auschwitz colleagues carefully
considered questions of logic and theory. Here one thinks of Hitler’s
“ice-cold logic,” operating so that (as one scholar put it):
“from insane premises to monstrous conclusions Hitler was relentlessly
logical” and in this way “derived the conclusion that he who loves
the human race must destroy the Jews.”32
This deadly logic has an important relationship |
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* August von Wasserman
(1866-1925), serologist, developer of Wasserman reaction for the diagnosis of
syphilis, and, for a time, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin-Dahlem; Julius Morganroth (1871-1924), bacteriologist, who worked with
Paul Ehrlich; and Franz Blumenthal (1878- ), leading dermatologist and
serologist who worked with Wasserman and emigrated to the United States in 1934
(and therefore was the only one of these doctors to “disappear”).
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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 439 |
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