|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
490 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
| |
not only the technology of genocide but much of its
ideological rationale, moral climate, and organizational process.
Ironically, these very professional groups, lumped together as
“intellectuals,” are likely to be a particular object of scorn for
the genocidal regime. Rolf Hochhuth, for instance, has spoken of Hitler as the
culmination of “a long tradition of contempt for intellectuals, for
reason and the things of the mind.” Indeed; the regime’s leaders were
likely to equate this educated group with those who must be victimized:
“The moment Goebbels began to equate Jews with intellectuals his hatred of
them became homicidal.”112
Hitler recognized the regime’s need for particular
professional groups, and its determination to make functionaries of those
professionals; he issued a call to healers and thinkers to take leadership in
destroying healing and thinking as they had known them. For the principle of
annihilation of the mind, orchestrated by the most educated, precedes,
accompanies, and motivates genocide throughout.
The susceptibility of
professionals to extreme environments, including genocidal ones, is suggested
by the sequence now familiar to us in one German profession: from ordinary
doctors (before 1933), to Nazi doctors (1933-45), to ordinary doctors (after
1945). Doctors reflect the more general tendency to claim virtue for
maintaining under duress the function of a profession, especially a healing
profession, even when that duress includes participating in genocide.
Recall the description of Heyde, the psychiatrist in charge of direct
medical killing, as “a Nazi who was not really a scientist but who with
the help of science became the mouthpiece for the Nazis.” When that
“help of science” includes a healing claim, professionals can move to
the farthest shore of evil. That journey requires the kind of immersion in
ideology with its promise of a unified worldview and of knowledge put to
passionate purpose, an immersion toward which the educated are especially
inclined.
Consider two Nobel Prize winners’ embrace of the concept
of “Aryan physics,” and a great psychoanalyst’s insistence upon
sharp distinctions between “Aryan” and “Jewish”
psychology.113 Intellectuals can all too
readily welcome relief from the burden of thought, as described by Karl Stern
in depicting “a peculiar brand of irrationalism” that took hold of
German colleagues at the psychiatric institute where he worked — a
“mysticism which opposed itself to Reason” — but, we may add,
came to do so always in the name of science.114
Even members of the victimized group
can join in this process of taking science almost anywhere. Otto Weininger,
himself a Jew, described Judaism as “the greatest negation,” as
“the abyss over which Christianity is erected,” and as Christ's own
“original sin.”115* Not only is
Weininger expressing extraordinary self-hate, but he shows how far psychology
and |
__________
* Weininger’s Sex
and Character, published in 1903, was said to have been admired by Hitler
in its polarity of Aryan attributes and Jewish nonhumanity.116 |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 490 |
Forward |
|
|
