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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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438 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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were working toward an “organically indivisible
national community,” opposition to which was considered “the symptom
of an illness which threatens the healthy unity of the … national
organism.”30 For the image of National
Socialism as “nothing but applied biology” was not just one
doctor’s perception from a single Nazi speech; it was a vision put forward
by the movement for building nothing less than a biologically evolved state.
Gottfried Benn, one of the few German writers of stature who, at least
temporarily, embraced the Nazi cause, welcomed “the emergence of a new
biological type, a mutation of history and a people’s wish to breed
itself.” Benn was also a physician concerned with the “vitality”
of the German race. There seems to have been a bit of the same in Martin
Heidegger — no physician but one of the great philosophers of the modern
era — in justifying his early sympathy as the Germans “will to be
ourselves.”31
The temptation for
doctors lay in the fact that their realm (that of biology and cure) was to be
the realm of national rejuvenation. Their difficulty lay in the murderous
course chosen for that rejuvenation and in the group entrusted with the task of
“racial police” — the SS. Doctors joining the SS had little
difficulty accepting its racial requirements — the establishment of Aryan
family roots going back several generations — as part of the principle of
SS people embodying the racial ideal Where they began to have difficulty was
when, as members of this exemplary group, they were expected to take part in
the killing. For that they needed an Auschwitz self, or an equivalent product
of doubling. Its formation was aided by the medical temptation of taking over
the entire Nazi ethos of controlling the controlling image of Nazi
life. |
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| The Anti-Semitic Ethos |
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The anti-Jewish aspect of the Nazi ethos was also
biologized, so that the Nazi doctor arriving in Auschwitz brought with him some
of the ethos of Jews as the threatening anti-race. That imagery was
psychologically helpful to the Auschwitz self, since selections were easier to
perform if one viewed as potentially murderous enemies the people one was
sending to their deaths
Different from these draconian, abstract, and
primal images of Jews were specific contacts with actual Jewish colleagues.
Here resentment and envy concerning the number — and, in many cases, the
success and talent of Jewish doctors — led to satisfaction at their being
forced out of German medicine (which tended quickly to improve the position of
Nazi doctors), along with a guilty awareness of complicity in the mistreatment
of men who were, after all, their colleagues. As a doctor who was briefly at
Auschwitz put it, “You could always say that Jews were guilty” in
connection with the Communist danger and other political difficulties, and
declare them to be “arch enemies of Germany,” after which “the
step to |
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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 438 |
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