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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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58 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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Whether he ordered the drugs that killed that particular
infant, he was certainly implicated in the killing project. He had
responsibility for the false records, and admitted filling out many forms that
resulted in children's deaths, and signing large numbers of false death
certificates. He is widely suspected of having done much more: for a period of
months during his work at the institution when there was no head doctor,
children continued to die in ways considered suspicious. To me he clearly
sought to explain his involvement in such a way as to minimize his
responsibility. But I believe he also conveyed accurately the deliberate
ambiguity that facilitated his actions and limited his sense of guilt about
whatever he did in connection with the killing. This “as if”
situation is characteristic of direct medical killing and, to a considerable
extent, of indirect medicalized killing as well.
F.’s youthful
embrace of the Nazi movement in Bavaria also had great bearing on his
perceptions and actions. Having been an unusually enthusiastic member of the
Hitler Youth and a Party member since he was eighteen, he was deeply troubled
by rumors he heard, while working in psychiatric hospitals during the early
1940s, of the killing of the mentally ill. He at first denounced these rumors
as “vicious propaganda against the regime”; and when they could no
longer be denied, he still “tried to see all of this somehow in connection
with the idealism of National Socialism.” He had the need, that is, to
seek, on the one hand, some justification of the killing within the biomedical
vision; and, on the other hand, to continue to call forth defenses of denial
and psychic numbing helped by the bureaucratic medicalization of the program,
in order to convince himself that “these forms [which he filled out] were
absolutely harmless,” and that even the policy of killing deformed
children “was not a command but a regulation giving the authorization so
that the children could be killed.”
He described an
interaction between the child-victim without ordinary human feelings
(“whom one cannot speak to, who does not laugh, who is affectively
unapproachable”) and the physician-killer with the same malady (“Such
an executioner does not have that bad feeling [that one has in directly killing
a person] .... There is a lack of the affective tension, the emotional
participation ... and that can turn any human being into a murderer”). He
spoke of the Hoche-Binding study as having provided “mental
preparation” for that kind of attitude, and could say of the later killing
of children: “One cannot call it a National Socialist program.” Like
many doctors and scientists, he combined professional advocacy within the
biomedical vision with ideological embrace of National Socialism in the name of
the greater German racial community: “One could not attack one’s own
people from behind [dem eigenen Volk nicht in den Rücken
fallen].” He also spoke of the influence of the war: how “people
feared that through events of the war they themselves would be killed” and
“did not have much concern left over for the sufferings of other people
— let’s |
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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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