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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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441 |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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practitioners of the science of life and life processes
— as biologically ordained guides to their own and the world’s
biological destiny. Whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudo
science and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves
with the science of their time.
They drew upon that, science, however,
in an apocalyptic, wildly romantic fashion. Hence the merging of the
death-haunted, Wagnerian “twilight of the gods” with the most
absolute positivism. Whatever the visionary absurdities in projected killing
and. healing, the logic of science was always, at least in Nazi eyes, close at
hand. This combination, apparently manageable in the abstract, required
considerable mental effort when acted upon in places like Auschwitz. That
combinatory effort was an important struggle of the Auschwitz self, a struggle
made possible by the claim of return to the solid ground of science from the
most far-flung, romantic stratosphere. The insistence upon rationality and
science was as vehement as it was precarious.
The contribution of the
actual scientific tradition to this ethos was exemplified by the
quintessentially German figure of Ernst Haeckel, that formidable biologist and
convert to Darwinism who combined with ardent advocacy of the Volk and
romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism.* He was to become
what Daniel Gasman has called “Germany's major prophet of political
biology.”35 Nonscientific visionaries
could combine their Haeckel with occultist racial views of a kind that
undoubtedly inspired Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. Haeckel himself moved
in the latter direction when he embellished his own anti-Semitism with a claim
that Christ’s merits derived from the fact that he was only half
Jewish.†
Haeckel embraced a widely held nineteenth-century theme
(found in the English naturalist Alfred Wallace, though not as specifically in
Darwin) that each of the major races of humanity can be considered a separate
species. Haeckel believed that varied races of mankind are endowed with
differing hereditary characteristics not only of color but, more important, of
intelligence, and that external physical characteristics are a sign of innate
intellectual and moral capacity. He, for instance, considered
“woolly-haired” Negroes to be, “incapable of a true inner
culture and of a higher mental development.” And the “difference
between the reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that of the
lowest savage … is much greater than the graduated difference between the
reason of the latter and that of the most ‘rational’ mammals, the
anthropoid apes.” Haeckel went so far as to say, concerning these
“lower races,” that since they are “psychologically nearer to
the mammals (apes and |
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* Haeckel was a constantly
cited authority for the Archiv für Rassen- und
Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archive of Racial and Social Biology), which was
published from 1904 until 1944, and became a chief organ for the dissemination
of eugenics ideas and Nazi pseudo science.
† More precisely, Christ’s true father was, according to
Haeckel, a “Roman officer who had seduced Mary.”36 |
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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 441 |
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