|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
109 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Participants |
| |
[plausi…] ble causes of death, he insisted that he was
“excluded” from the actual killing process because of his early
efforts to leave — though he was implicated in the deaths of many
patients.
Despite — partly because of — his vehement
insistence (“I never had the feeling of deserting — no, not at
all”), I suspect that this ardent nationalist, who loved the military and
believed in obedience, felt considerable guilt at leaving. In discussing those
feelings, he stressed that he “used this period to try to learn as much as
[he] could about psychiatry,” though he knew that “it may sound
macabre.” Here Dr. R. resembles Dr. D. in seeking to minimize guilt by
focusing upon medical-scientific experience, though the guilt in D.’s case
has to do not only with the activity at the killing center but with his wish to
“desert” his position there. In leaving, R. was in no way in bad
repute with the regime. He was for a while given the task of tracing
genealogies of prospective SS officers in order to determine whether their
family trees had been poisoned by Jewishness or hereditary disease.*
But later, during the postwar years, he became increasingly resentful
of Nazi medical leaders who had deceived him. He spoke of their manipulations
as “perfidious” and of the whole process as “all a very tricky
thought-out business.” And during this trial, when one of the program's
psychiatric leaders, testified about marking “Yes” or “No”
on questionnaires, R. felt himself become enraged and wanted to shout at the
man, “You had people killed without even seeing them!” R., in fact,
attributed a subsequent illness to those feelings: “I was so angry I had a
heart attack.” In that anger, and in his description of the matter to me,
he was expressing the deep resentment of the dependent person toward
authorities who had failed and misused him, as well as a continuing effort to
view them, and not himself, as responsible for what he did. For he still had
inner questions about whether he could have left the program even earlier; and
when asked what advice he would give to young doctors to prevent them from
becoming vulnerable to that kind of project in the future, he immediately
answered, “I would advise them to leave — not to stay in such
programs!” Don't stay even for a minute, he seemed to be saying, lest you
become part of the killing. And even more strongly: “Today I would rather
let myself be shot than participate in such an action.”
His
attitude had been influenced by the question constantly asked by his children:
“Why didn’t you leave [sooner]?” His answer, sadly put to me and
undoubtedly to them as well, was, “We simply didn’t ask questions at
the time.” He stressed with approval the difference between his and his
contemporaries’ unquestioning belief in Hitler and the new
generation’s insistence on questioning everything. Finally, he expressed
residual guilt in two additional ways. He said, |
__________
* In most cases, the policy
was to transfer recalcitrant doctors from the program quickly (or, as in the
case of Ewald, to cease to enlist them for it) and to find more cooperative
replacements. If reluctance or refusal were expressed discreetly — that
is, as a matter of individual inability rather than of disapproval or
condemnation of the program — there was unlikely to be any punishment or
loss of rank or standing.² |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 109 |
Forward |
|
|
