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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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446 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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it at least experienced the security of being part of a
larger, inexorable flow of human events.
In equating Auschwitz with an
ordinary “civilian enterprise” such as a “sewerage
project,” Dr. B. reflected the intense psychological requirement of the
Auschwitz self to hold to that image, to feel nothing more. The attitude
resembled that, described by Raul Hilberg, among officials of German railroads
responsible for transporting Jews from ghettos to death camps, who both
“realize[d] what they were doing” and “coped with it finally in
the most ingenious way by not varying their routine and not restructuring their
organization, not changing a thing in their correspondence or mode of
communications.”44 The Auschwitz self
did continuous psychological work to maintain that internal sense of numbed
habituation in order to fend off potentially overwhelming images of its
relationship to guilt, death, and murder. It could largely succeed, as Dr. B.
told me, because dead bodies did not have to be viewed* but “only
smelled,” and one got used to the smell.
Insofar as it took in
some of the actual atrocity, the Auschwitz self may have moved quickly to a
resigned, “above the battle” stance: Dr. B.’s view, for example,
that it was no different from other destructive events except “for the
dimensions. … and that is clearly a technical question.” Or Dr. Otto
F.’s insistence, concerning the Nazi era, that one “see the good as
well as the bad and … evaluate … what really happened.” The
Auschwitz self may have come to view its own survival in the midst of so much
death as proof of virtue, of (as Dr. F. went on to say) “having an
absolutely white vest,” or pure conscience. And that claim to virtue was
maintained by clinging to a sense of “status honor” (in Max
Weber’s term),46 of good standing within
the mores of one’s group.
When Ernst B. spoke of the
extraordinary “Auschwitz atmosphere” as determining all
behavior, he was suggesting the sheer power of the numbed habituation of
Auschwitz routine. That power was manifest in the eventual contributions to
Auschwitz of both Wirths and Delmotte, whatever their inner conflict and
residual humanity. |
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| “A Separate Reality” |
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| Nazi doctors discussing Auschwitz seemed to me to be
messengers from another planet They were describing a realm of experience so
extreme so removed from the imagination of anyone who had not been |
__________
* As routines became
established, an assistant could look through the peephole to confirm that
people inside the gas chamber were dead. Or even if the doctor himself looked,
he would not necessarily “see” the victims — that is, experience
them as human beings. Virtually the only SS personnel in Auschwitz who seemed
to experience themselves as killers were some of those most directly involved
in the gassing, including medical Desinfektoren. Not all “poured
out” their hearts to Höss; some exhibited sadism, and just one was
“calm and relaxed, unhurried and expressionless” (that is, absolutely
numbed).45 We could
say that these men for the most part took over the burden of guilt feelings for
Nazi doctors and other higher-ranking Auschwitz officers, including Höss
himself. |
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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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