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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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201 |
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| Socialization to Killing |
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state, or making exchanges or other deals with prisoners
through which Nazi personnel, including doctors, obtained gold or money from
them. He went on to point out that, moreover, Auschwitz rules were such that
“the very moment [an SS physician] fraternized, he was ... committing a
crime.” In the vicious circle of contradiction and illegality that
developed, whatever means one took to curb illegal practices could usually be
accomplished only by further illegalities: to curb excessive trading of food or
hoarding of gold on the part of corrupt SS men or capos required that
special arrangements (essentially forms of bribery) be made with others in
authority. And since anything was possible in that atmosphere, it was difficult
to separate fact from mere rumor or from what Dr. B. called “latrine
talk.” As he declared, “Even in the case of Rudolf Höss,
certainly the most incorruptible and most correct camp commandant that ever
existed, . . . there was this rumor, . . . much talked about,. . . that he had
an affair with a Jewish woman.”*
The food situation was a
perpetual source of corruption. With near-starvation rations further siphoned
off at various points, the ordinary prisoner could not survive on the amount of
food made available to him or her. Everyone therefore “organized,” as
the Auschwitz term had it: arranged a way to get enough food to stay alive and
help friends do the same. Corruption in that sense was life preserving —
but, as Dr. B. put it, “All those who survived Auschwitz lived from food
that was taken away from the others.” What he did not say was that the SS
policy, as carried out by camp medical and command authorities, imposed this
fundamental life-death corruption. They used the situation for
reward-and-punishment control over prisoners and frequently for additional
trading that filled their own pockets.
The ultimate corruption was the
existence of the mass killing, around which the camp essentially revolved.
Since that killing process depended upon extensive prisoner involvement, it
could be maintained most effectively when camp conditions were relatively good.
In other words, whatever Nazi doctors contributed to the health of inmates
— and they did improve camp hygiene, expand medical facilities, and
support prisoner doctors — was in the service of not just the work force
but the murder machine. That was the real “dirt” on all of
their “walking sticks.”
Yet many Nazi doctors kept pressing
for better medical conditions — searching everywhere for useful equipment,
accumulating it in their barracks, seeking to have better operating rooms
— but always faced what Dr. B. called the “barrier,” the threat
of starvation, so that the medical structures they built were part of a
“fiction.” Even if enough food could be “organized” to keep
patients alive for a while, “the primary founda- […tion] |
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* Characteristically, the
rumor was partly true (he did have an affair with a prisoner, Eleonore Hodys)
and partly false (she was not Jewish) — and, in this latter aspect, more
scandalous than the truth. But there was much more to question about
Höss's alleged incorruptibility: he in fact tried to murder Hodys when she
became pregnant.5 |
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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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