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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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205 |
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| Socialization to Killing |
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for propaganda verbiage
[Propagandageschwätz] is now totally, completely, wholly [ganz,
ganz, ganz] matter-of-fact [trocken; literally, “dry”] and
strategically concrete, that it is being realized [verwirklicht] with
100-percent strategy. That above all shook one. That one did not foresee [but]
... you knew it, and all of a sudden you are standing in front of it. Did you
really know it? |
The passage is clear enough on the doctor's shocking
confrontation with the literal enactment of victimizing imagery. But I believe
it also suggests the widespread German psychological resistance to taking in
the dark side of Nazi actuality, whatever the extensive evidence of its
existence — a form of psychological resistance still present today in Nazi
doctors despite, and because of, their exposure to the darkest Nazi reality of
all.
Doctors could call forth an absolutized Nazi version of good and
evil as both justification for what they were seeing and doing and further
avoidance of its psychological actuality (as Ernst B. explained): |
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Precisely because they were convinced of the
justness, . . . or of the ... National-Socialist “world blessing”
[Weltbeglückung] and that the Jews are the root evil
[Grundübel] of the world — precisely because they were so
convinced of it did they believe, or were strengthened — [in that belief],
that the Jews, even existentially, had to be absolutely exterminated [die
Juden eben existentiell, also absolut vernichtet werden
müssen]. |
| And although “not everybody approved of the
gassing” and “many theories were discussed,” one had to admit
that gassing was an improvement over the inefficiency of previous methods:
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The main argument for the gassing was that when
one. tried to create ghettos, ... they never lasted longer than one or two
generations. And then the ghetto — let us say — would become porous
[undicht geworden; “would become leaky”]. That was the main
argument for the gassing. Against the gassing there were a number of different
kinds of the most nonsensical speculations ... forced sterilization and so on
.... Lots of theorizing went on. |
| Now there was a more successful approach to the
“Jewish problem” and, as Dr. B. added, “a means of
confirmation” of that success. In talking about these matters, he never
directly answered one question I repeatedly asked him: whether doctors
disagreed with one another about the necessity to kill all Jews, or agreed
about that and disagreed only about the means. I believe that the ambiguity has
psychological significance beyond this evasion. From what Dr. B. and other
observers have conveyed, it is probably accurate to say that most Nazi doctors
in Auschwitz believed that something they perceived as “Jewishness”
had |
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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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