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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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116 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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extinguished life” and was motivated “not by
brutality, but by a certain idealism . . . inherent in his conception of
life.”11
Yet there were other sides to Brandt. François Bayle, a French
psychologist who interviewed him repeatedly at the time of the Nuremberg Trial,
described him as “a rich personality, vigorous . . . [but] undisciplined
... pugnacious and childlike ... made vulnerable by his ambition ... [and]
pride".; possessing "vivid intelligence ... [but] little logical clearness, and
much imagination which can be easily influenced and disordered” "his
character . . . equally easily influenced."12
Bayle’s stress on this combination of intense ambition and vulnerability
to influence is consistent with Brandt’s extraordinary attachment to
Hitler and the latter’s continuous hold on him. There was also a strongly
dissenting opinion from a Nazi doctor at the fringe of the Hitler circle, who
described Brandt to me as dazzled by Hitler, deeply attracted to “the
feeling of possessing power,” but “a complete failure” in almost
everything he did, including his attempt to have a network of military
hospitals built in various parts of Germany This doctor also felt that Brandt
was criminally guilty, as judged at Nuremberg, for his responsibility not only
for “euthanasia” but for various lethal medical experiments done in
camps. This susceptibility to power is revealed as well in Speer’s
recollection of his friend Brandt’s remaining for years at a relatively
low SS rank until “suddenly he was jumping much more [in rank] than the
others, . . . suddenly he was . . . a high SS man.”
While Brandt
was not viewed as strongly anti Semitic, a story was told by a Dr. Hirsch of
Tel Aviv of how a fellow medical student in Munich in 1925 once asked to see
his notebook and returned it to him with a drawing of a gallows and a hanged
man with the inscription: “The end of Hirsch: 19—?” The fellow
student’s name turned out to be Brandt.13
At Nuremberg, Brandt could well have expressed a genuine
conviction concerning the value of “euthanasia” for incurable
patients. But from what is known about Brandt’s role in the “test
demonstration” at Brandenburg comparing the killing effects of carbon
monoxide gas and morphine injections, he surely became brutalized and numbed in
equating that process with “major advances in medical history.” A
doctor who worked as Brandt’s assistant told me that some of the
psychiatrists went much further than Brandt thought they should have gone in
“condemning ... many people to death who should not have been,” and
that Brandt was angry when he found this out and wanted the practice stopped
immediately. His attitude here was similar to his willingness to allow certain
groups of patients to be saved, while in no real sense altering the basic
killing project. Rather, he was the kind of Nazi who wanted such projects
carried out as “fairly“ and “humanely” as possible.
Of the greatest importance is the fact that, Brandt never in any way
disowned the German state, the Nazi regime, or Hitler himself. No wonder that
the presiding judge could say that “there is an invisible figure
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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 116 |
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