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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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474 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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Indeed, the transcendence is likely to be related to some
such killing, often to war or the expectation of war. Examples here are
religious wars of the past and their contemporary expressions, as well as
secular analogues of these religious wars. The war fever of 1914 mentioned
earlier, with its anticipation of victory and national deliverance, set a
standard for Nazi transcendence. And that 1914 moment, in turn, drew upon
earlier historical memories. Consider the words of a German “national
liberal” upon the return of the victorious (over Austria) Prussian troops
to Berlin in 1866: “I feel more attached to the goddess of beauty and the
mother of graces than to the powerful god of war, but the trophies of war
exercise a magic charm even upon the child of peace. …One’s spirit
goes along with the boundless rows of men who acclaim in the god of the moment
— [military] success."35
Hitler
became an agent of this transcendence, because of both his oratorical-demagogic
genius and the German hunger for transcendence. As he invoked principles of
“‘honor,’ ‘fatherland,’ ‘Volk, ’
‘loyalty,’ and ‘sacrifice,’ … his German hearers not
only took his words in deadly earnest but hung on them as upon the message of a
savior.” 36 For each of these words
represented a transcendent principle, a means of offering the self to an
ultimate realm that provided a sense of immortality bordering on omnipotence.
Then “the will of the Führer” could become a “cosmic
law”37 because his message of
revitalization could invoke the experience of transcendence and place that
experience within a structure of thought and a program of action.
Albert Speer described to me the extraordinary impact of hearing Hitler
speak for the first time. It was 1930; and Speer, a young architect the
university seemed in that time of economic and political duress, to have no
future. He had boyhood memories of being part of a voluntary group greeting
returning soldiers at the railway station at the end of the First World War
(“It was terrible, terrible, awful [They were] dirty, neglected, really a
defeated army”) and of experiencing “kind of a mourning about this
situation.” Now Hitler appeared addressing a university audience* in
measured tones with the simple message that “all can be changed” :
Germany could become great again and individual Germans could divest themselves
of guilt and loss by embracing this glorious future. Speer was moved to the
point of rapture, felt himself to be “drunk” or in an altered state
of consciousness, and needed to go off by himself to walk in the woods outside
Berlin in order to “absorb” what was happening to him. He was
describing a classical experience of transcendence, an ecstatic state of
feeling outside oneself and swept up by a larger force that could connect or
reconnect one with ultimate spiritual principles. From that day on, he belonged
to Hitler and came to share his sphere of omnipotence and power, so that he
could describe the whole |
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* Speer said that Hitler had
two separate speeches: a simplistic rabble-rousing message for ordinary
audiences; and a more careful "historical analysis," no less "rousing," for the
educated. |
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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 474 |
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