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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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126 |
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| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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| “dreadful isolation of people” in the city
(“People die in the same house, and the other person doesn’t even
notice it at all”) He went so far as to say, “The fact that I became
a politician* can be traced back to this [dislocation],” by which he meant
that a vision of rediscovering that ideal community became the leitmotif of his
political struggles. |
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| Overcoming War and “Betrayal” |
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In his early adolescence at the outbreak of the First
World War, he remembers the “very powerful sensation” of the
mobilization order and the euphoria of the general population at that moment
and later at the announcement, in the marketplace, of each German victory. His
entire family was directly involved: his father as an army doctor; his older
brother training to become an officer; his mother, a leader in support
activities; even his grandfather, a veterinarian with a cavalry regiment; and
S. himself, a boy who was drawn to the military and hung around with officers
quartered in his home. But before long victories and celebrations were replaced
by defeats and by food shortages and hunger. Worst of all was the telegram
announcing that his father had been wounded. The sight of his father
“standing in front of me at the railroad station, . . . his arm in a
bandage, . . .wearing a uniform together with ... house slippers” was so
overwhelming that it seemed like a déjà vu experience: he
was convinced that he had encountered that exact scene in, dream the night
before the telegram arrived. (It turned out that his father had been hit by a
bullet from a German plane; but rather than acknowledge that absurdity, S.
tried to make it a form of distinction by equating his father with Prince
Wilhelm of Hesse, who was also hit by a German bullet, and in his case killed.)
Though his father survived, S. recalled a series of subsequent events, almost
equally disturbing, including the final defeat and returning troops shouting
anti-military and anti-monarchical slogans, forming soldiers' councils, and
tearing off the rank insignia from the uniforms of their officers (which caused
S. to be especially “shaken”). To make matters complete, his older
brother was wounded during the last days of battle, and “then the
government collapsed.”
In fact, the family never quite left the
war. The older brother became one of the founders of a Freikorps unit
(these "free corps" were voluntary paramilitary units composed mostly of
demobilized soldiers); and S. himself, then age seventeen, joined to serve
under his brother. He was eager to get into the military: “I belong to the
age group that was not drafted for the war in 1918.” While the formation
of these units was initially encouraged by a weak government to help it keep
the peace and suppress the threatened Communist revolution, members of the
Freikorps came to see themselves as “cemented by their blood” to one
another, struggling |
__________
* Since the word
“politician” (Politiker) generally had a derogatory
connotation for a person of Dr. S’s rural background, his use of it here
could suggest a certain inadvertent self-condemnation. |
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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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