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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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443 |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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as Auschwitz. Numbing was fostered not only by this
knowledge and culpability but by the admired principle of "the new spirit of
German coldness.”41 Moreover, early Nazi
achievements furthered that hardness; and it is often the case that success
breeds numbing.
In discussing patterns of diminished feeling, Ernst B.
told me that it was the “key” to understanding what happened in
Auschwitz. In also pointing out that “one could react like a normal human
being in Auschwitz only for the first few hours,” he was talking about how
anyone entering the place was almost immediately enveloped in a blanket of
numbing. And there was similar significance to the prisoner doctor Magda
V.’s rhetorical question: “I mean, how can you understand the horror
of it all?” |
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| Transition to Group Numbing |
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There has to be a transition from feeling to not feeling
— a transition that, in Auschwitz, could be rapid and radical. It began
with a built-in barrier toward psychologically experiencing the camp’s
main activity: killing Jews. The great majority of Jews were murdered upon
arrival, without having been admitted to the camp and achieving the
all-important status of having a number tattooed on one's arm, which in
Auschwitz meant life, however precarious. Numbing toward victims was built in
because, in Auschwitz terms, those victims never existed. The large selections
brought about that massive non-existence; and the selections themselves became
psychologically dissociated from other activities, relegated to a mental area
that “didn't count” — that is, both derealized and disavowed. In
that sense, there was a kernel of truth to Dr. B.’s claim that selections
were psychologically less significant to Nazi doctors than the problems of
hunger they encountered from moment to moment.
But only a kernel, since
Nazi doctors knew that selections meant killing, and had to do the
psychological work of calling forth a numbed Auschwitz self in order to perform
them. While Nazi doctors varied in their original will, or willingness, to
perform selections, they tended to have to overcome some “block” (as
Dr. B. put it) or “scruple” (as Nazi literature has it). With the
actual performance of one’s first and perhaps second selections, one had,
in effect, made a pledge to stay numbed, which meant to live within the
restricted feelings of the Auschwitz self.
For this transition, the
heavy drinking I have referred to has great significance on several levels. It
provided, at the very beginning, an altered state of consciousness within which
one “tried on” the threatening Auschwitz realities (the melodramatic,
even romanticized declarations of doubts and half opposition described by Dr.
B.). In this altered state, conflicts and objections need not have been viewed
as serious resistance, need not have been dangerous. One could then explore
doubts without making them real: one could derealize both the doubts and the
rest of one’s new Auschwitz life. At the same time, alcohol was central to
a pattern of male bonding through which new doctors were socialized into
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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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Back |
Page 443 |
Forward |
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