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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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11 |
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| “This World Is Not This
World” |
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a certain uneasiness about what the young might be up to.
Every once in a while there would be a flash of nostalgia for the Nazi times,
for an era when life had intensity and meaning, whatever the conflicts
engendered.
I never quite got over the sense of strangeness I
experienced at sitting face to face with men I considered to be on the opposite
side of the victimizing barricade, so to speak. Nor did I cease to feel a
certain embarrassment and shame over my efforts to enter their psychological
world. These feelings could be compounded when, as in a few cases, I found
things to like about a man, and felt myself engaging his humanity. My central
conflict, then, had to do with my usual sense of the psychological interview as
an essentially friendly procedure, and my considerably less than friendly
feelings toward these interviewees. I worked always within that conflict. I
frequently had the impulse to divest myself of the conflict by means of
aggressive moral confrontation. For the most part, I resisted that impulse -
though my psychological probing could resemble such confrontation and certainly
left little doubt concerning my perspective. But it was necessary to maintain
that distinction; and the psychological probing, rather than moral
confrontation, was required for eliciting the kind of behavioral and
motivational information I sought. That distinction was also necessary, I later
realized, for maintaining something important to me, my own professional
identity in doing the work. So much so that it would probably be accurate to
say that for me psychological probing was a form of moral confrontation. Yet I
must add that there were moments when I wanted not only to confront but to
accuse — indeed in some way attack — the man sitting opposite me.
With it all, I experienced, and still experience, an obligation to be
fair to these former Nazi doctors — that is, to make as accurate
and profound an overall assessment as I am able.
With Auschwitz
survivors the atmosphere of the interviews was entirely different. Just about
all of them (with the exception of one who felt too upset by these matters to
talk to me) involved themselves immediately in a common effort toward
understanding Nazi doctors and what they did in the camp and elsewhere. The
former inmates proved to be invaluable observers on both counts. Not
surprisingly, my closest personal identification was with Jewish survivor
physicians. In many cases they had come from families and social and ethnic
backgrounds not too different from my own, and from areas close to my
grandparents’ original homes. I could not help contrasting their ordeal
with my own privileged existence, and would come from these interviews
literally reeling, sometimes close to tears. But I also had moving interviews
with non-Jewish doctors from Poland and various other parts of Europe, many of
whom had been sent to Auschwitz because of having tried to help Jews. An
exception to this fundamental sympathy was one painful but revealing interview
with an anti-Semitic Polish doctor who had worked closely with the Nazis and
whom I shall discuss later in the book.
The interviews I conducted were
unlike any I had previously at- […tempted] |
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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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