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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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452 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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[for Nazi doctors] in Auschwitz consisted only of
selecting people for the gas chamber.” Among the elements required for the
function of a doctor’s Auschwitz self was the assertion of medical
identity.
Hermann Langbein sensed the importance of that identity in
developing a policy of addressing them as “Doctor,” instead of by
military rank as one was supposed to do, because he noted that it created a
softer, more informal tone. The title also confirmed a man’s sense of
himself as physician and not merely SS officer and thus undoubtedly helped
Langbein in his efforts on behalf of the prisoner population, mostly concerning
matters in the medical blocks. We know that Nazi doctors’ medical identity
had been permeated by the Nazi ethos before their arrival in Auschwitz. They
were heirs of a great medical tradition with an abiding concern for medical
ethics, including long-standing restriction among German doctors on the use of
drugs with unknown effects on human subjects and the frequent practice of
trying out such drugs on themselves. They were also heirs of considerable
medical-political infighting, and of a profession that could encourage to the
point of caricature the idea of the physician-scientist who focused exclusively
on a disease entity to the point of being oblivious to the humanity of his
patient, and whose position, especially if a professor, gave him a claim to
unerring wisdom. While individual doctors varied in their relation to this
stance-there were, of course, many dedicated healers among them — they had
available to them, long before the Nazis, the model of the “medical
Führer.” This heritage of a great professional tradition in
decline — highly uncertain of its standing among the professions
52 — made Nazi doctors especially
responsive to promises of professional, no less than personal and national,
revitalization.
The Nazis courted, bullied, flattered, threatened, and
above all “coordinated” physicians in accordance with their
relentless Gleichschaltung policy (see pages 33-35). At the same time
they expanded the doctor’s identity into that of the militarized
medical Führer. Kurt Blome, who became deputy to Leonardo Conti, chief
physician of the Reich, captured the spirit of this medical identity in an
autobiographical book, Arzt im Kampf (“Physician in Struggle”
[1942]), in which he exuberantly equated medical and military power in their
battle for life and death.53 The
militarization of medicine began at universities, where, as Dr. Otto F. tells
us, “most students became soldiers,” as did many professors; and it
became a matter of pride for medical students to undergo training with weapons.
Many senior Nazi medical leaders had fought in the Freikorps, and one could not
in Nazi Germany achieve full medical prestige without a prominent military
background.
There could be considerable confusion about the new
identity. For one thing, many of the medical “old fighters,” such as
Lolling and Blome, could be looked down upon by other doctors as lacking in
medical skills, as more Nazi than physician; and they were surely medical
versions of the characteristically Nazi “deeply half-educated man”
(see pages 492-93). The term was used by Joachim C. Fest for ideologue Alfred
Rosenberg.54 |
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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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