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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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117 |
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| Participants |
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sitting in the dock,” and “that figure is
Hitler.”14 Though Hitler turned on him
viciously, Brandt never questioned their relationship or even his
Führer’s humanity in initiating “euthanasia,” never broke
away from the magnetic attraction Hitler held for him. Hence, Brandt could be
sincere when he declared, in June 1948 before being hanged, “I have always
fought in good conscience for my personal convictions and done so uprightly,
frankly and openly.”15
Brandt
is, more than any other doctor, the prototype of what I shall call the
“decent Nazi.” Such a doctor was usually from an aristocratic or
professional, often medical family whose general cultivation and pre-Nazi
ethical concerns seemed strikingly at odds with the depth of his Nazi
commitment. That commitment included a fierce involvement in the theme of
collective revitalization; Brandt in particular embraced Hitler personally not
only as a father, but as a prophet and savior. In these doctors, a
romantic-visionary inclination could combine with an embrace, even worship, of
scientific-medical rationality. Brandt’s religious-romantic involvement in
the Nazi project contributed to his extensive numbing toward mass killing and
to his extraordinary capacity to continue to see virtue in the total Nazi
program. He could reinforce a sense of personal virtue by a measure of decency
in immediate relationships and by opposition to the more “crude
Nazis” around him. His powerful sense of himself as a physician, as a
healer, was central to the process. The “decent Nazi” did much of the
work of the regime and was indispensable to Nazi mass murder. |
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| The Medical “Old Fighter”: Werner
Heyde |
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Werner Heyde (1902-61) was of a very different stamp
— the medical equivalent of the “old Nazi” or “old
fighter,” who became an SS “hit man” before taking over the
“euthanasia” project. Even for doctors close to the regime, as one of
them told me, Heyde had a “bad reputation . . . a real Nazi who had no
inhibitions.”
Neither his family background (he was the son of a
textile manufacturer in Lausitz) nor his early academic showing (he was said to
be “always first in his class”) give any special clue to what he was
to become. Two years older than Brandt, he was able to enlist in the military
at the age of sixteen, during the last months of the First World War.
At the age of eighteen, he participated in the Kapp Putsch,* and then
in a long series of organizations. events connected with radical nationalism
and National Socialism.
Heyde was said to have attended Hoche's
psychiatric lectures as a medical student during the early 1920s, and developed
into a competent . but unremarkable psychiatrist, described to me by another
doctor as “an |
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* This putsch was an
attempt by right-wing paramilitary and military organizations to overthrow the
Weimar Republic in March 1920. It failed after four days, in large measure
because of united and decisive opposition on the left. |
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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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