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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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493 |
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| Genocide |
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[psychopa…] thy) as well as doubling and numbing.
These half-educated men abound among both the killing professionals and the
professional killers.
As we have learned from Nazi doctors and their
assistants, functions can be reversed: killing professionals can murder
directly, and professional killers can contribute to planning and technology.
Everybody can join the killing. As we evoke images of Dr. Pfannmüller
demonstrating to visitors an emaciated infant he was starving to death, of
Mengele utilizing scrupulous medical technique as he injected phenol into a
victim’s heart, or of Klehr performing the same injection without benefit
of a medical education — we are hard put to distinguish one killer from
another.
Indeed, the two groups are drawn together by the shared secret
that is not quite a secret; by a mix of ideology, ethos, corruptibility; and by
accumulated evil. Together they constitute a killing élite. They are
given special privileges and take on a more-than-natural aura. Even as they
kill they can be looked upon as the standard for the endless purification
justifying the killing, as the “children of the gods.” The SS, for
instance, was to constitute the ideal Nordic type as well as to take
responsibility for eliminating. virtually all others. And should more of
one’s own people be included in the genocidal project, always a
possibility, the élite killers would be expected to survive, or at least
be the last to die. On the one hand their taint of death and evil is likely to
increase, in their own as well as in others’ eyes. But on the other hand
they become the carriers of the immortal racial-cultural substance. Only by
either dying heroically or endlessly surviving — the two patterns are
closely related — can they promote and articulate the immortalizing
project they serve. |
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| The Technology of
Genocide |
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One cannot say that any particular level of technology is
required for genocide: the Turks killed about one million Armenians by means of
shooting, clubbing, beating, slave labor, starvation, and other forms of
torture. The Nazis killed millions of Jews by the same crude methods, even
without benefit of gas chambers.
Higher technologies render the killing
more efficient, in time and numbers, and in easing the psychological burden of
the perpetrators. A clear example is the Nazi sequence from face-to-face
shooting to fatal injections and carbon monoxide gas chambers to cyanide gas:
the sequence, to paraphrase Ernst B., from pre-craftsmanship to craftsmanship
to modern technology. The sequence helps eliminate the impediment of empathy,
of experiencing one’s victims as fellow human beings.
As Auschwitz
achieved its peak function of killing more than twenty thousand Jews in one
twenty-four-hour period, with their bodies burned either in crematoria or open
pits, “the capacity for destruction was approaching the point of being
unlimited.” Now after years “ in constant |
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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 493 |
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