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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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479 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Genocide |
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Martin Luther, as “the most German of Germans, the
most pious of the pious,”59 combined
communal and theological forms of anti-Semitism. Significantly, he was first a
defender of the Jews whom he wished to become “of one heart with us.”
But when they failed to convert and become part of the
Christian-Protestant-German spiritual and biological community, he denounced
them as “children of the Devil” who “being foreigners, should
possess nothing,” and were, moreover, profoundly dangerous: “Know, O
adored Christ … that aside from the Devil, you have no enemy more
venomous, more desperate, more bitter, than a true Jew who truly, seeks to be a
Jew.” For Luther, Jews were an intolerable reminder of flawed German
Christian claims to totalized spiritual and communal immortality. By their very
existence, Jews subvert those claims (“These dogs mock us and our
religions!”).60 To be sure, Luther stood
for much else, including the internalization of conscience — what Erik
Erikson called “the meaning of meaning it.”61
But that very achievement deepened the
psychological power of his anti-Semitic message. The development of a
“Nordic Christianity” four hundred years later could then be said to
have “completed Luther’s work,” with Hitler and Luther
“partners in the service of the German people’s welfare.”62 The genocidal principle of destroying the Jews
in the name of healing the Germans is not new.
Thus perceived as an
absolute threat to the continuous life of one’s own people, the victimized
group is seen as the bearer of death and therefore the embodiment of evil. More
than merely nonhuman or heathen, it is dangerously anti-man and anti-God (or
anti-Christ). Its disease takes the form of infecting others with death taint
and deadly weakness: Hitler referred contemptuously to “conscience, this
Jewish invention” and to Judeo-Christian compassion for weakness. Only
genocide, total elimination of the disease, will protect one from that
weakness, and in the very act of genocide one overcomes vestiges of the deadly
weakness-disease already in one, such as (in the case of the Nazis)
“brotherhood … humanity [and] ‘pacifism.’”63 Hence the parallel imagery in genocide: the
bearer of deadly disease threatens one’s own people with extinction so one
must absolutely extinguish him first. |
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| The Genocidal Threshold |
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| There is a threshold in genocide — the step from
image to act. The Nazi evidence suggests no single cause or trigger so much as
a sequence of events and attitudes and problem solving (dealing with
unmanageable ghettos, with rivalries between increasingly dominant SS groups
and other Nazi institutions and between individual Nazi leaders) within an
increasingly murderous atmosphere (“euthanasia” killing, the
expanding concentration-camp system, war fever of early victories, and the
pending invasion of Russia). From early 1941, a series of “demoniac
orders”64 came from high Nazi
authorities that increasingly articulated a policy to |
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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 479 |
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