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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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491 |
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| Genocide |
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the social sciences in particular can be ideologized in
lethal directions, again in the name of science.
While the collective
dynamic is working, individual professionals can feel themselves to be doing
something earthshaking, “creating something new.” The most grotesque
violation of reason can be hailed as admirable innovation, especially in the
case of scholars of international standing, such as Erich Jaensch (who claimed
to “demonstrate” the psychology of the “Jewish
anti-type”).117 The dynamism of genocide
offers considerable temptation to the professional to become the "spiritual
engine" of change, revolution, renewal.
Professionals and intellectuals
have additional susceptibilities: to the call of the Führer
principle as an antidote for isolation and weakness; to romanticized violence
and a cult of hardness, as a denial of effeteness, softness, and
“scruples”; to the crude and primitive, as a way of disowning
sophistication and worldliness. Most of these susceptibilities involve claims
to omnipotence in the name of humility, calls to sacrifice in which the
sacrificial group is made up of the regime's designated victims. These
contradictions can be maintained, lived with, through the professional’s
special talent for doubling. Only he or she can become a murderous sorcerer
while claiming to be a healer, as did the talented Nazi bacteriologist —
“in his early thirties … very self-assured” — who lectured
to high Nazi officials on a bacteriological serum he had prepared, “a drop
of [which] … would suffice to kill a man … and … leave no
trace,” and presented these and other details “as clearly and calmly
as though he were addressing a class on the most ordinary matters.”118 One would have to be a professional to engage
in the Auschwitz style of medical activity which (in Dr. B.’s words)
“consist[ed] only of selecting people for the gas chamber.” Worse,
one may do these things with the conviction that they are “in accord with
the natural history and biology of man,” and that one is acting as healer
and savior. |
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| The Professional Killers |
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The second, less educated group is likely to make up the
“hit men” on the front line of the killing. They do the shooting or
insert the gas pellets and their role, however diminished, is not eliminated in
potential nuclear genocide. Rather than formulate principles or technology of
killing, they act on these formulations and carry out the work. Limited in
opportunities, they are likely to make killing their only profession; they
become the artisans of killing, or the technologists of mass murder.
They can have most of the susceptibilities of the more educated group,
and can certainly embrace ideologies that render mass murder a form of
cleansing or healing. But rather than viewing themselves as scientists applying
higher knowledge, they draw from a “corps spirit,” the sense of
shared combat of the most demanding kind. Their hardening is enormously
stressed and related to cultural principles of masculinity (or |
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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 491 |
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