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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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374 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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what she called Mengele’s “diabolic”
attitude was his: appearing on a Jewish holiday and announcing, “This is
Tishahb’av [the commemoration of the destruction of the First and
Second Temples],” and “We will have a concert.” There was a
concert, then a roll call, and then an enormous selection, causing her to ask
bitterly, “Why should we listen to music while we are being
cremated?”
She stressed that Mengele’s behavior was carefully
planned: “He must have written it down: music; sit down;
Zählappell [roll call]; crematorium.” All this was part of his
“sadistic play,” she believed, because “every step Mengele
[took] was a psychological basis for torture.” And compared with other SS
doctors, Mengele was “more sadistic, … more raffiniert
[‘sophisticated, tricky, sly’]. He [was] more elaborated …
because he must know psychology.”
Sometimes the
psychological sadism could be naked, as when he spoke to a Jewish woman doctor
pleading unsuccessfully for the life of her elderly father, also a doctor:
“Your father is seventy years old. Don’t you think he has lived long
enough?” Or, to a sick woman: “Have you ever been on the ‘other
side’? What is it like over there? . … You will know very
soon!”55
Mengele maintained
these forms of deadly “colleagueship” until the very end. A prisoner
doctor describes encountering him in the infirmary of a camp in Czechoslovakia
after Auschwitz had been evacuated. Mengele referred to a patient who was
mentally deficient, and said, “If you were intelligent … she could
have fever, she could need medication,” meaning that “he wanted to
find … a reason to get rid of her [or a means of doing so] because she was
an idiot, … and [implied] we were so stupid we did not understand.”
She added, in amazement, “Just think … he was already at the time a
cornered beast, and that did not mean anything. He still had to find a way to
kill someone.” |
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| The “Double Man” |
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| Prisoner doctors found themselves struggling with
Mengele’s extraordinarily deep-seated contradictions — with his overt
doubling. Dr. Abraham C. felt compelled to raise “the big question which
we ask ourselves: Was he a kind man, good with children, good in general, who
was only driven to do the things he did by his passion for research? Or was he
a monster who only plays a role with the children to hide his game better, to
get his ends more easily?” While very few prisoners would adhere to the
first characterization, the second does not satisfy either. Dr. C. himself
seemed to reject both, as he went on to articulate the principle of
unfathomability I quoted at the beginning of this book (page 13). Mengele was
for Dr. C. the source and epitome of this principle of unfathomability, though
he meant it to apply to much that happened in Auschwitz. Dr. Magda V. similarly
spoke of Mengele as “a split personality.” She |
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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 374 |
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