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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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425 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| Doubling: The Faustian
Bargain |
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Auschwitz self sufficiently to remain inwardly divided and
unable to imagine any possibility of resolution and renewal — either
legally, morally, or psychologically.
Within the Auschwitz structure,
significant doubling included future goals and even a sense of hope. Styles of
doubling varied because each Nazi doctor created his Auschwitz self out of his
prior self, with its particular history, and with his own psychological
mechanisms. But in all Nazi doctors, prior self and Auschwitz self were
connected by the overall Nazi ethos and the general authority of the regime.
Doubling was a shared theme among them. |
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| Doubling and Institutions |
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Indeed, Auschwitz as an institution — as an
atrocity-producing situation — ran on doubling. An atrocity-producing
situation is one so structured externally (in this case, institutionally) that
the average person entering it (in this case, as part of the German authority)
will commit or become associated with atrocities. Always important to an
atrocity-producing situation is its capacity to motivate individuals
psychologically toward engaging in atrocity.27
In an institution as powerful as
Auschwitz, the external environment could set the tone for much of an
individual doctor's “internal environment.” The demand for doubling
was part of the environmental message immediately perceived by Nazi doctors,
the implicit command to bring forth a self that could adapt to killing without
one’s feeling oneself a murderer. Doubling became not just an individual
enterprise but a shared psychological process, the group norm, part of the
Auschwitz “weather.” And that group process was intensified by the
general awareness that, whatever went on in other camps, Auschwitz was the
great technical center of the Final Solution. One had to double in order that
one’s life and work there not be interfered with either by the corpses one
helped to produce or by those “living dead” (the
Muselmänner) all around one.
Inevitably, the Auschwitz
pressure toward doubling extended to prisoner doctors, the most flagrant
examples of whom were those who came to work closely with the Nazis —
Dering, Zenkteller, Adam T., and Samuel. Even those prisoner doctors who held
strongly to their healing ethos, and underwent minimal doubling, inadvertently
contributed to Nazi doctors’ doubling simply by working with them, as they
had to, and thereby in some degree confirmed a Nazi doctor’s Auschwitz
self.
Doubling undoubtedly. occurred extensively in nonmedical
Auschwitz personnel as well. Rudolf Höss told how noncommissioned officers
regularly involved in selections “pour[ed] out their hearts” to him
about the difficulty of their work (their prior self speaking) — but went
on doing that work (their Auschwitz self directing behavior). Höss
described the Auschwitz choices: “either to become cruel. to become
heartless and no longer |
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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 425 |
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