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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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447 |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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there, that it was literally a separate reality. That
quality — that absolute removal from ordinary experience — provided
the Auschwitz self with still another dimension of numbing. Even as part of
itself was absorbed in routine, another part could feel the environment to be
so distinct from the ordinary that anything that happened there simply did not
count. One could not believe what one was doing, even as one was doing it.
Marianne F. captured this sense in Nazi doctors around her when she observed,
“The fact is that if you do something that is totally unbelievable, and
you are incapable of believing, you don't believe it. … The gas chambers,
… the houses that the crematoria had, … brick houses, windows,
curtains, white picket fences. … Nobody would have believed that.”
Part of the schizophrenic situation was the ability to mobilize the Auschwitz
self into perverse actions in which it could not itself believe. The feeling
was something like: “Anything I do on planet Auschwitz doesn’t count
on planet Earth.” And what one does not believe, whatever the evidence of
one’s own actions, one does not feel. That is why Dr. Tadeusz S. could
say, of Nazi doctors, with bitter irony: “They have no moral
problems.”
Auschwitz was a staged melodrama in which the authors
had so indulged their wildest fantasy as to render it completely absurd,
unbelievable to its director (Nazi doctors and other officials), to its actors
(inmates) pressed into the melodrama, or to its audience (the local population,
the Germans, the world), all the more so since each group within that audience
had considerable additional motivation toward disbelief. Otto F., the Nazi
doctor who was considerably implicated during his brief stay at Auschwitz,
spoke of the whole Nazi era as “a momentary phenomenon, the coming
together of the most varied elements,… not at all in the mentality of the
German people.”
For the Auschwitz self, that is, the very
bizarreness of its actions — the dimensions of evil it knew —
supported its numbed capacity for that very evil.* |
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| Omnipotence and
Impotence |
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| The Auschwitz self wavered between the sense of omnipotent
control over the lives and deaths of prisoners and the seemingly opposite sense
of impotence, of being a powerless cog in a vast machine controlled by unseen
others. These polarized feelings were undoubtedly, widespread among death-camp
personnel. But they had special meaning for doctors, who ordinarily experience
both extremes of feeling in everyday confrontations with disease and death and
accompanying struggles with their |
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* Hence the statement, made
to me directly by Alexander Mitscherlich, to the effect that most Germans of
the Nazi generation were incapable of confronting their guilt because its
dimensions would be too overwhelming. That is, they could not, then or now,
permit themselves to feel. |
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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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