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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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107 |
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| Participants |
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people, especially those he cared about, wondering
“what those people would think if they knew what I have been doing.”
When eventually brought to trial, he felt the experience, painful as it was, to
be “a kind of relief” because the matter was confronted: “I had
nothing to hide any more. I could face everyone.” He hoped that “I
could really leave it behind me then”; but the trial dragged on, despite
his original acquittal, because the state appealed that acquittal.
In
addition to his regular medical practice, Dr. D. developed an interest in
contemporary psychiatry, contrasting its “tremendous possibilities”
for helping people with its “dead end” in the past, when
“everybody shared the common conviction that these lives [of mental
patients] were already ended — that these people were in Hoche’s
words, ‘empty shells.’ ” He stressed that it is the
responsibility of today’s psychiatric leaders “to point out the human
being in the patient, so that one feels obligated to help him and does not
regard him as something one can shove away [abschieben].”
Emphasizing how in the past “the professor for me was the highest,”
he declared bitterly that “it never would have occurred to me that a
professor, in no matter what field, would expect a student or a young colleague
to do something that would step over the boundaries of human ethics.”
Concerning “euthanasia,” or any program resembling that
conducted by the Nazis during the war, he was unequivocal: “I would not
agree to such a program today .... Who would do the work that had been expected
of me? ... Who would want to take the responsibility for the decisions?”
Horst D.’s experience epitomizes the tendency of Nazi doctors to
experience conflicts about killing but to find ways to subdue those conflicts
in adaptation to a murderous environment. His subsequent attitude, despite an
occasional glimmer of self-examination, fell far short of genuine moral
confrontation. |
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| A Psychiatrist Who Left: Wolfgang R. |
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Another doctor who had worked at a killing center, Wolfgang
R., experienced psychological circumstances closely resembling those of Dr. D.
but with a significantly different outcome: R. managed to stop doing the work
after about one month.
Tall and thin and ingratiating in manner, R.,
during our interview, was talkative but aware that, despite being generally
outgoing, “whenever I talk about the subject ... the words don't come
easily.” His early enthusiasm for the Nazis — and especially for the
military — even, as he described it, exceeded Dr. D.’s. Indeed, R.
thought himself “predestined” for the military because of the
strong military tradition of his area, and was among the first group of
students to join the new Wehrmacht (the armed forces of which Hitler was
supreme commander): “I valued the Wehrmacht in a very special way.”
He used words like “idealistic” and “free” to describe what
he and other young people felt |
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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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Page 107 |
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