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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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481 |
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| Genocide |
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| [se…] crecy tinged with shame and pride of achievement
as the genocidal radius moves outward into an increasingly enveloping system of
order and policy, of bureaucratic and technological arrangement. The grand
triage is always present: in Himmler’s juxtaposition of “annihilation
of the Jewish people,” with painstaking programs “to select the
Nordic-Germanic blood” in order to promote “the creative, heroic and
life-preserving qualities of our people.”68 That image of absolute revitalization applied to
both genocidal rehearsal and larger act. |
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| Purification and Human Sacrifice |
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The Nazis tapped mythic relationships between healing and
killing that have had ancient expression in shamanism, religious purification,
and human sacrifice, and evoked all three in ways that reveal more about their
psychological motivation. Thus, the shaman of central and northern Asia, though
mainly a healer-making use of ecstatic rites, is also a “psycho-pomp”
or conveyor of the souls of the dead to the underworld. Some cultures
distinguish “white” shamans, who have relations with the gods, from
“black” shamans, who may be involved with “evil spirits”
and are consequently dangerous.69 Generally,
the white shaman applies healing magic; and the black shaman, killing magic.
German culture, with its tendency toward death-haunted, apocalyptic
historical visions, is more likely than most to seize upon this relationship
between killing and healing and between the dead and the living. The Germans
developed a particularly strong “cult of the fallen” after the First
World War, stressing the continuing contribution of the dead, as soldiers who
fight and kill, to the Fatherland. The German War Graves Commission contrasted
the sea of flowers and modest acknowledgment of the dead in British, American,
and French cemeteries with the German “tragic-heroic” motif and
“celebration of heroic sacrifice.”70 But since death had to be conquered, one Nazi
educator deplored photographs of the dead and wounded because these
“cannot show the joy they felt in making the final sacrifice.”71
As a sixteenth-century version of a good
shaman, the Nazis had available both the historical figure and the mythology of
Paracelsus. In one Nazi version, the Swiss-German physician-alchemist overcomes
great suffering, severe illness, and despair on behalf of a utopian
völkisch vision. And in another, he struggles valiantly, his
struggles “centered upon the overcoming of death” (see page 31).72 As biological soldiers, all Nazi physicians were
to be in the front line in the struggle to kill death. All Nazi doctors, that
is, were to become shamans, many of them black shamans in their ritualistic
participation in killing processes in the name of healing the tribe or people.
Genocide is a response to collective fear of pollution and defilement.
It depends upon an impulse toward purification resembling that given collective
expression in primitive cultures. But it brings to that impulse |
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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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