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 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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Chapter 5
 

 
 
Participants 
 
 
  Determined ... to intervene therapeutically to attain healing and health for everyone, full of the desire to put themselves primarily at the service of the community, and full of impotent rage over the therapeutic inaccessibility of so many mental patients, psychopaths and habitual criminals (that is, the Jews!), they [the psychiatrists] actually moved from the individual to the “national body” [Volkskörper], to pervert “treatment” [Behandlung] metaphorically: to make extermination [Sonderbehandlung] the perfection of healing.   
  — KLAUS DÖRNER   
     
At the Killing Center 
 
A Psychiatrist Who Stayed: Horst D

Dr. Horst D. worked at a killing center for about a year and was, at the time of our meetings, involved in an elaborate, unresolved legal procedure. A bearded vigorous man in his early sixties, I found him tense, cautious, and limited in his capacity to express feelings — wishing very much to explain himself and at the same time conflicted about his own explanation.

He thought he had been assigned to the T4 program because of a recommendation made to Heyde by a friend from student days with whom he (Dr. D.) had shared a semester of psychiatric work. His early enthusiasm for the Nazis together with his military experience and medical inexperience were also undoubtedly factors in the assignment. Like others, he had been pressed into military service before completing his medical thesis, 1 and then was frustrated because he had virtually nothing to do and “there was no medicine at all.” At that point, in mid-1940, “I was told I should come to Berlin and present myself at the Chancellery  
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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