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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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459 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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| by species evolution. At the same time, we are
meaning-hungry creatures; we live on images of meaning. Auschwitz makes all too
clear the principle that the human psyche can create meaning out of anything.
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| The Force of Routine |
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The meaning derives partly from routine as such. The daily
happenings and environmental rhythm at Auschwitz became (as the word’s
derivation suggests) a route or path, a direction of the inner as well
as the outer being. To report to an office, to speak to colleagues, to make
one’s rounds on the medical block, to spend a bit of time at one’s
research, to confer with camp officials and prisoner functionaries on diet and
sanitary procedures, to issue medical and disciplinary orders, to here and
there exchange an amusing anecdote or tell a little joke, to conduct selections
for an arriving transport, to have meals and evening entertainment with fellow
officers — all these came together as a life form, within which the mind
could build coherence and significance. The whole vast institution was on the
same “route,” including coerced activities of prisoner doctors as
well as other inmates. It was in that sense a total mission —
everyone’s — though the nature of the mission may have been kept more
hazy than the sense that there was one.
Through the blur of the medical
mystification of the “as if” situation, selections themselves took on
meanings for the SS doctor: he was saving a few Jews; the “Jewish
problem” was being “solved”; he was improving the health of the
camp, diminishing the danger of epidemics, lessening the danger of
overcrowding.
For the Auschwitz self, the daily routine, including
notably selections, was totalized: meaning came to lie in the
performance of one’s daily tasks rather than in the nature or impact of
those tasks. Then, however, “topsy-turvy” things became in Auschwitz
(as one survivor put it), “nothing seemed strange there.” Auschwitz
could even come to seem a place whose very extremity permitted freer and
franker discussion of meaning — as in Dr. B.’s descriptions of
spirited discussions with Mengele concerning the pros and cons of the Final
Solution. At the same time, by not contesting the Auschwitz project, one
maintained one’s meaningful organizational ties, one’s “status
honor.” And if one were a prime mover in Auschwitz, as were Wirths or
Höss, one derived enormous meaning from one’s work. But, even as he
killed, every doctor’s Auschwitz self could retain some sense of mediating
between man and nature and thereby serving life. |
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| The Ultimate Biological Soldier |
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| Nazi ideology lent considerable support to all meaning
structures. Underneath the absolute routinization, for instance, the Auschwitz
self could have the unspoken sense of being part of a purification process, in
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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 459 |
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