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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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487 |
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| Genocide |
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in individual psychology, but … it willfully
experiences cosmic-spiritual laws.”99
Genocidal projects are likely to seek strong psychological connections
with such. “cosmic-spiritual laws” rather than utilize an exact
psychological system or approach. Indeed the Nazis were on guard against the
kind of experimentation with the self — what I call Protean man or woman
(see page 499) — that psychology is likely to document or even
encourage.100 Moreover, both psychology and
experimentation with the self were associated in their eyes with Jewish
influence, as well as being antithetical to the monolithic vision of self,
people, and polity.*
The proposed cure is impossible to achieve, but
genocide can appear, at least for a time, to be approaching that cure and
solving important problems. The Nazis, for instance, did solve the problem of
the “leaking ghettos” and did enable large numbers of people to
internalize the idea of the Reich as a mystical community.101 Within that mystical frame, the killing of most
of the Jews could re-create for Hitler and other Nazis a quality of experience
reminiscent of the shared transcendence at the time of the beginning of the
First World War. While none of this was enough to render the cure continuously
successful, it helped the Nazis in general and Auschwitz doctors in particular
to sufficiently overcome conflicts they experienced to be able to continue with
their contribution to the killing.
Was the therapeutic killing aimed
ultimately at all Germans no less than at all Jews? This is the issue contained
in the question of whether Hitler’s path, from the beginning, included a
Götterdämmerung — a “twilight of the gods” or
massive self-destruction — of his own people.
Certainly Hitler
ordered such a Götterdämmerung at the end, the demolition of
all industrial, transportation, communications, and supply facilities; and had
not Speer and others intervened there would have been death on so massive a
scale as to approach self-genocide.102 Hitler
had always totalized the genocidal cure: either the Aryan or the Jewish race
would be destroyed. He told Speer that, if the war were lost, the German people
too were “lost” so one need not worry about their needs for survival.
That is, the cure had failed: they had shown themselves weak and unworthy. In
that light, the final words of his testament reasserting the necessity of
destroying the Jews was a defense of correct therapy proven not quite good
enough. Hitler’s own suicide could be understood as part of the necessity
he felt for the entire German people to share a similar sacrificial fate,
possibly on behalf of future political resurrection.
The perpetrator of
genocide kills to cure himself as well as his people. As complete cure eludes
him — he can never quite kill them all or eliminate the source of the
infection — he must use his own people and himself to continue the flow of
victims. His vision of cure then becomes still more confused; he may turn his
violence inward to act on a deserved fate as a final purification. Now
collective suicide (actually the leader taking his |
__________
* Yet perpetrators of
genocide may themselves take on Protean characteristics as they. experiment
with limitless human manipulation and violence. |
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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 487 |
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