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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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XII |
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of contagion but an assumption that Nazi or any other evil
has no relationship whatsoever to the rest of us — to more general human
capacities. While Nazi mass murder and brutality tempts one toward such an
assumption, it is nonetheless false and even dangerous. As for the strong
stomach, I was by no means without fear about what I was getting into; but
decisions of that kind, in my experience, are made from one’s deepest
intuition about oneself, about what is appropriate and right for one to do.
That inner inclination to go ahead did not, however, relieve me of painful
awareness that whatever I did would be considerably less than full moral and
intellectual justice to the subject.
As I pursued the work, it became
clear that the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil. One
need only look at the role of Soviet psychiatrists in diagnosing dissenters as
mentally ill and incarcerating them in mental hospitals; of doctors in Chile
(as documented by Amnesty International) serving as torturers; of Japanese
doctors performing medical experiments and vivisection on prisoners during the
Second World War; of white South African doctors falsifying medical reports of
blacks tortured or killed in prison; of American physicians and psychologists
employed by the Central Intelligence Agency in the recent past for unethical
medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation;
and of the “idealistic” young physician-member of the People’s
Temple cult in Guyana preparing the poison (a mixture of cyanide and Kool-Aid)
for the combined murder-suicide in 1978 of almost a thousand people. Doctors in
general, it would seem, can all too readily take part in the efforts of
fanatical, demagogic, or surreptitious groups to control matters of thought and
feeling, and of living and dying. I have had professional or personal concern
with all of these examples, and they bear some relationship to destructive
patterns of the “medicalization” I will discuss.
But I found
that Nazi doctors differed significantly from these other groups, not so much
in their human experimentation but in their central role in genocidal projects
— projects based on biological visions that justified genocide as a means
of national and racial healing. (Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their
participation in genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later
suggest.) For this and many other reasons, Nazi doctors require a study of
their own, and although I deal more broadly with patterns of genocide in the
last section, this book is mainly about them.
Yet I make no claim to a
comprehensive historical study of all Nazi doctors, or of the medical
profession in general during the Third Reich. I often wished I had had access
to such a study, as it would have greatly lessened the extensive digging into
archives and trial documents in various parts of the world that my assistants
and I had to undertake. What I have emphasized is the relationship of specific
groups of Nazi doctors, and particular individuals, to mass murder — as
well as the broader “healing” claim of the regime. This reversal of
healing and killing became an |
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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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