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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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477 |
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| Genocide |
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as “infecting” the “German national
body,” and as (in the last three words of Hitler’s testament)
“deadly Jewish poison.” Similarly, “Kultur-poisoning
Jews” were infiltrating the art world, and the general danger of
“inner Judaization” and “racial pollution” was perceived as
a fundamental threat to German biological and biosocial continuity and
immortality.47 In addition, Jews — or
the concept of “the Jew” — were equated with every form of
death-associated degeneracy and decomposition, including homosexuality, urban
confusion, liberalism, capitalism, and Marxism. Goebbels could use straight
medical imagery in declaring, “Our task here is surgical ... drastic
incisions, or some day Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.”48
There may also be a universalization of
the alleged evil of the victim — as in Hitler’s claim, “If
… the Jew conquers the nations of this world, his crown will become the
funeral wreath of humanity, and once again this planet, empty of mankind, will
move through the ether as it did thousands of years ago.”* The victim will
destroy not only the perpetrator, it is claimed, but everyone and everything
else. Where the threat is so absolute and so ultimate — where the struggle
becomes “fighting between humans and subhumans,” in Himmler’s
phrase — genocide becomes not only appropriate but an urgent necessity.
Such a struggle must be “fought to the last man, until one side or the
other is eliminated without trace” (italics added). Once that
genocidal necessity is established, perpetrators can take the more casual tone
of Himmler’s suggestion that “anti-Semitism is exactly the same as
delousing.”50
In other work I
have spoken of rival claims to immortality — to ultimate spiritual power
— as a source of victimization. For some Christian groups, Jews are both
the originators and the destroyers of the Christian theological mode of
immortality, in the sense that Jews are seen as rejectors, betrayers, or
murderers of Jesus. To this general pattern the Germans brought a status
described by Freud as “badly christened Christians,” as people who
held tenaciously in the face of their own apparent Christianization to their
heathen, pre-Christian feelings and modes of being.51 This could well have been a source of German
vulnerability, over centuries, to threats to their Christian belief system, and
ultimately to their, sense of immortality.
For instance, during the
plagues of the Middle Ages, Jews everywhere in Europe were accused of
responsibility for the Black Death, often specifically of having poisoned
drinking wells. But although the mortality in Germany was relatively lower than
in some other countries, anti-Jewish pogroms arose there with special ferocity,
as did the phenomenon of the flagellants, fanatical bands of Christians who
beat themselves ritually and mercilessly and also turned violently upon
theJews.52 More significant |
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* The quotation is from Mein
Kampf. Eberhard Jackel points out that, in later editions, the phrase was
“appropriately” changed to “millions of years ago.”
49 This suggests that Hitler
or his sympathetic editors believed in the concept sufficiently to present it
in its most “reasonable” form. |
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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 477 |
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