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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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457 |
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Contents |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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try to cast off their Auschwitz or Nazi self and to see
themselves (and of course to represent themselves to the world) as essentially
decent and moderate postwar German burgher-physicians of a conservative stamp.
An incentive for being interviewed was to meet with me as doctor to doctor and
thereby reinforce their sense of themselves as healers. They were ambivalent,
of course, given their residual doubling and their sense, accurate enough, that
I would probe for the Auschwitz or Nazi self. Yet to refuse to see me would be
to suggest — to themselves, if not to me — that the Nazi self still
loomed large for them and had to be protected. What many of them wanted from me
was an opportunity to put forward the healing self and to receive my American,
or American-Jewish, confirmation of it. And that healing self tended to be
available to them professionally. Even Nazi doctors who had been directly
involved in murder could initiate or resume medical practice in their home
areas and become conscientious, much-admired physicians.* Hence, the strange
three-part odyssey from pre-Nazi physician-healer, to Nazi physician-killer, to
post-Nazi physician-healer.
What these doctors could not
psychologically do was confront the Nazi or Auschwitz self in its relationship,
to medicalized killing. Here there was conscious and unconscious collusion on
the part of much of the postwar German medical profession. There was, for
example, the protection given Heyde by other doctors before he was brought to
trial, as well as his strange death (see page 119), And even a man like Ewald
who showed considerable courage in resisting direct medical killing, destroyed
records that might have implicated other psychiatrists in that destructive
project and perhaps raised certain questions about himself as well. But the
most striking medical collusion in this respect was the ostracism by the German
medical profession of the distinguished psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich
because he insisted upon full disclosure of its crimes.†
Precisely
because it had not been confronted, the Nazi or Auschwitz self tended to
surface at odd moments: Ernst B.’s nostalgia for people’s sense of
purpose during the Nazi era; and the attempt of several doctors I interviewed
to bear witness to the Nazi era in their own way, by covering over crimes of
Nazi doctors and preserving the reputation of German medicine. A doctor’s
inability to confront the Nazi or Auschwitz self left him without moral clarity
concerning his contemporary self. |
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* One example was Dr. Kurt
Heissmeyer, who conducted cruel medical experiments in the Neuengamme
concentration camp on twenty Jewish children taken from Auschwitz. Artificially
infected with tuberculosis, they were murdered on Heissmeyer’s request so
they could not be witnesses. Also murdered were two French doctors, two Dutch
orderlies, and twenty-four Russian prisoners of war. After the war, Heissmeyer
returned to his home in Magdeburg, now in East Germany, where he was highly
regarded as a lung and tuberculosis specialist. 59
† According to Dr.
Mitscherlich, the first report on medical crimes he and his collaborator, Fred
Mielke, produced immediately disappeared from bookstores; German physicians
arranged to buy up the entire printing in order to prevent the book from being
read by anyone else. 60
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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 457 |
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