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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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435 |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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| The SS was the élite “community within the
community,” “oath-bound, full of “corps spirit,” consistent
in its mixture of cruelty and courage. Nazi doctors entering the SS imbibed
some of this ethos. Each took the SS oath: |
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I swear to you, Adolf Hitler — as the
Führer and Chancellor of the Reich — loyalty and bravery. I pledge to
you and to my superiors, appointed by you, obedience unto death, so help me
God19 — |
| and thereby became what one observer called an
“ideological fighter,” whether or not one wore on one’s belt
buckle (as did ordinary SS men) the SS slogan: “My honor is loyalty”
(Meine Ehre heisst Treue). That idealism, however eroded by Auschwitz
corruption, was a prod for SS doctors in their initial adaptation and part of
the ideological call to doubling. We recall Dr. B.’s stress on
“faith” in Nazi ideology as a “bridge” to the SS community.
That faith in the Gemeinschaft became a source of murderous action and a
crucial support for the Auschwitz self. For that self was a creation not just
of the individual but of the mystical “collective will,” the
Auschwitz version in fact of the “triumph of the will.” |
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| Ordeal and Ethos |
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Whatever their original recalcitrance toward it, Auschwitz
doctors became caught up in the Nazi-German principle of killing as a difficult
but necessary form of personal ordeal. When asked how he could bring
himself to do such terrible things, Heinrich Himmler is said to have referred
to the “karma” of "the Germanic world as a whole," for which “a
man has to sacrifice himself even though it is often very hard for him; he
oughtn’t to think of himself.”20*
Here the killer claims for himself the ordeal of sacrifice. To perform the
prescribed ritual slaughter, he offers. both himself and his victims to the
immortal Germanic people and its hero-deity, Adolf Hitler.
To his
high-ranking SS leaders, and on at least one occasion at Auschwitz, Himmler
expressed this ethos of killing as an ennobling ordeal. He raised
“frankly” the matter of “the annihilation of the Jewish
people” and mocked the weak-hearted, even among Party members, each of
whom had “his one decent Jew” he wished to save: |
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Of all those who talk this way, not one has seen
it happen, not one has been through it. Most of you must know what it means to
see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To
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* Thomas Mann captured this
principle in his novel Doctor Faustus in describing Georges Sorel’s
pre-First World War Reflections on Violence as a precursor of Nazi
ideology. Connecting the fate of truth with that of the individual, and
indicating for both “a cheapening, a devaluation,” Reflections on
Violence “opened a mocking abyss between truth and power, truth and
life, truth and the community,” showing that “precedence belonged far
more to the community,” as truth was abandoned for “community-forming
belief.” 21 |
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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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