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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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476 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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In the case of the Turks, whatever their attitude toward
science, they did put forward a mystical vision of pan-Turanianism (or
“Turkification”) “which alleged a prehistoric mythic unity among
Turanian peoples based on racial origin.”43 And one cannot doubt the experience of
transcendence of Turkish nationalists in their reversion to fundamentalist
Mohammedanism as a call to an anti-Armenian-Christian crusade — all on
behalf of a new vision of Ottoman glory.
The experience of
transcendence, then, anticipates the genocide, and to a considerable degree
prefigures a state of transcendence that can become associated, directly or by
proxy, with the killing itself. |
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| Killing as Therapy
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| The “disease” with which the Nazis were
attempting to cope was death itself, death made unmanageable by “the
modern necrophilia” of the First World War. Thus Hugo Ball wrote of
“death, working systematically, counterfeiting life … bestial
monstrous yet unreal.”44* One way to
deal with a death-saturated historical environment is to embrace death itself
as the means of cure. The Nazis did this in a variety of ways in a romantic
worship of death and the creation of “an ancestor cult where the dead were
more important than the living”; in an art “deeply tinged with
death” (Nordic heroes, for instance) as “a prelude to initiation into
the community”; and especially in remobilizing the martyred dead of the
First World War in the claim of carrying out for them an immortalizing survivor
mission of annihilating enemies of the German state. Hitler, as prophet and
savior, came to represent the martyred dead and serve as their link with the
new community of the living. The “healing” vanguard was the Waffen
SS, whose “supreme duty was to deal out and accept death”; to seek
out the most dangerous missions, to seek out death itself if necessary, and to
kill with complete hardness. Also part of a vision of healing was the policy of
individual SS members serving as models of racial purification.46 Having met the ultimate test of health and cure,
the SS could represent the sacred dead and be licensed to kill without
limit. |
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| The “Deadly” Victim |
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| Genocide requires both a specific victim group and certain
relationships to that group. While their biological focus enabled the Nazis to
extend their genocidal efforts to Gypsies, Russians, and Poles, the Jews
remained the central target and the most specific psychological victim of the
Nazi genocidal dynamic. Nazi perpetrators had to see their victims as posing
absolute danger, |
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* Ball was attacking
materialism and the machine, and declared that “belief in matter is a
belief in death.”45
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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 476 |
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