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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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10 |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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died of natural causes years before, having been for the
most part relatively senior at the time of their crimes. But the ones I did
see, as I shall describe, were hardly free of evil, sometimes murderous,
behavior.
I decided not to mention my Jewishness in preliminary
correspondence with these doctors. Some undoubtedly suspected I was Jewish,
though none asked me directly. On the one occasion when the matter came up
specifically, the doctor concerned (during an interview near the end of the
work) referred to an article in Time magazine describing the research
and mentioning the fact that I was Jewish. His unctuous reference to the
“tragic history” of our two peoples tended to confirm my impression
that, had I emphasized my Jewishness from the beginning, this information would
have colored and limited responses during the interviews and caused a much
higher percentage of former Nazi doctors to refuse to see me. Whether talked
about or not, however, my Jewishness was in some way significantly present in
every interview, surely in my approach and probably in perceptions at some
level of consciousness on the part of the German doctors.
Concerning
the interview sequence, I first described briefly the purpose, method, and
ground rules of the research, including a casual reference to my policy of
recording interviews. Upon obtaining a doctor’s agreement to proceed, I
asked a few factual questions about his immediate situation, but essentially
began by asking him to trace his educational, especially medical, background.
Because those experiences were relatively less emotionally loaded than
subsequent ones, he could establish a pattern of fairly free discourse along
with a kind of medical dialogue with me. It would also usually require him to
describe the impact of the early Nazi period on his medical study and work and
on his life in general. I would then usually ask more about the man’s
family and cultural background, before examining in detail what he did and
experienced during the Nazi years. The doctors knew that this was what I had
come for, and many plunged energetically into those experiences. They tended to
be less ready for detailed questions about feelings and conflicts — and
about images and dreams, aspirations and self-judgments. But over the course of
the interviews, the doctors came to reveal a great deal in these areas as well.
With a little encouragement, these doctors — like other people I have
interviewed in different research — entered readily into the
interview’s combined pattern of focused explorations on the one hand, and
spontaneous associations on the other.
The atmosphere tended to vary
from uneasy to cordial. There could be periods of genuine rapport, usually
alternating with tensions, various forms of distancing, and reassertion on the
part of both the Nazi doctor and myself of our essentially antithetical
existences. I shall have more to say later about the worldviews these doctors
expressed; but generally most adopted a rather characteristic post-Second World
War, conservative political and social stance which included criticism of Nazi
excesses but support for relatively authoritarian elements in German society
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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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