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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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87 |
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| Resistance to Direct Medical
Killing |
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suffered more, they had suffered enough already”; and
she associated this activity with the same “simple sense of duty” he
felt in his personal resistance to the medical killing project.
During
the early postwar period, Dr. Ewald also gave willing testimony at
“euthanasia” trials. He seemed to want to reassert his opposition to
the project, but at the same time to offer personal help to psychiatrists who
had been implicated. It may be that in certain ways he did not consider himself
different from them. He had been a strong supporter of the regime, and his
principled stand against its major “psychiatric” project was an
attempt to reform it from within, even perhaps to preserve some of what he had
come to admire in it. He could well have been left with a measure of guilt for
this disaffection from his nation’s representatives, and more specifically
guilt toward his colleagues for stepping out of their group in a way that cast
aspersions on them. After all, he was strongly identified with most of his
colleagues professionally and politically, and probably went further than most
in cooperating with the regime prior to his stand against medical killing. This
guilt and identification contributed to his protection of his colleagues after
the war. However one judges that behavior, the sensitivity to guilt it reflects
could well have been related to the act of conscience that distinguished him.
Also undoubtedly crucial was his injury, his status as a handicapped person,
which made him more sympathetic than others to the potential victims of medical
killing, a little more wary of the concept of “life unworthy of
life.” (Significantly, Dr. Kuhn, who seems also, at Heyde’s Berlin
meeting, to have refused full participation, had an amputated leg.)20
Ewald could not summon Bonhoeffer's
deep-seated humanism and liberalism nor his professional stature. But I suspect
that — and here Ewald resembles both Bonhoeffer and Creutzfeldt —
earlier religious exposure affected this secular son of a Protestant
minister.21 Whatever the extent of such
influences, and whatever one’s prior relationship to the Nazi movement,
there remains the inner integrity that permits one at a given moment to say no.
A deeply concerned German physician who went over the entire Ewald story with
me concluded rather sadly, “It seems that a hero is not really a
hero.” That may be so: Ewald was considerably less than an anti-Nazi hero.
And yet perhaps he was a hero after all. He did perform, as a psychiatrist
within a discipline that essentially complied with the regime, a direct,
courageous, personal, and professional act of opposition to medical killing.
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* Of course, other secular
psychiatrists took stands, in one way or another, against direct medical
killing. They included Kurt Schneider (to be distinguished in every way from
Carl Schneider [see pages 122-23]), Ernst Kretschmer, and Professor Karl
Kleist, an internist with some psychiatric experience, who was described by an
interviewed doctor as having mentioned in a lecture his refusal to join a
“euthanasia” commission (see page 39). One young psychiatrist, Theo
Lang, also approached Matthias Göring and asked him to sign a declaration
against the extermination of mental patients. Göring declined;22 he resisted efforts to
gain his support on at least two further occasions (see page 91). The
resistance of psychiatrists from religious institutions is discussed later in
this chapter. Nor is this list in any sense complete. |
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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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