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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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203 |
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Contents |
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| Socialization to Killing |
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I couldn’t ask [Dr. Fritz] Klein,
“Don't send this man to the gas chamber,” because I didn’t know
that he went to the gas chamber. You see, that was a secret. Everybody knows
the secret, but it was a secret. If I said to him, “Herr Doktor Klein, why
should you send this man to the gas chambers?,” I suppose that he would
say, “Gas chamber? What do you mean?” |
Partly out of boredom, but for important psychological
reasons as well, all Nazi doctors took up what Dr. B. called
“hobbies.” These hobbies might include approximation of actual
medical work or research; or collaboration with more experienced prisoner
doctors in various medical enterprises including surgery and both clinical and
laboratory studies. In these the Nazi doctor, in relationship to the prisoner
doctor, was both student and arbiter of life and death. Certainly the avid
construction of ambitious hospital units was still another. hobby. And the
reason these were all hobbies is that, as Dr. B. put it, “We could do
[them] at the pace of a hobby or with the attitude of a hobby.” Or, to put
matters more simply, such was the nature of Auschwitz that everything not
concerned with killing — and to a lesser degree, with work production
— was no more than a hobby.
All such hobbies come down to a
particular purpose, as Dr. B. tellingly put it: “And there one could seek
out, lay out, a task. And in it also achieve success. And in that way sweep the
problem [of Auschwitz killing] under the table.” Building medical
facilities, then, served the psychological purpose of avoiding awareness of
one’s own killing and of others’ dying. In that milieu, as Dr. B.
said, “a hospital is a contradictio in objecto [objective
contradiction] .... The doctors escape into . . . illusion.”
Also
crucial to SS doctors were a series of personal alliances. Each doctor sought
to have good relationships with the members of the SS team he worked with on
the ramp. In a different way, the SS doctor could also experience various kinds
of psychological satisfaction from his contacts with prisoner doctors (to be
discussed later) and develop what Ernst B. called “small cells of personal
communication” giving rise in turn to “many, many small islands of
humanity.” However precarious, these “islands of humanity”
enabled SS doctors to feel that they could “really do [people] a lot of
good” and helped them block out the Auschwitz mainland of murderous
inhumanity. |
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| Ideology and the
“Jewish Problem” |
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| Crucial to the capacity to perform selections was a
doctor’s relationship to Nazi ideology. Important here was the basic early
attraction on the part of most of these doctors to the Nazi promise of German
resurgence — a tie that could sustain them through reservations arid
discomfort: “We |
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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 203 |
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