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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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246 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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with the … SS” in connection with reporting on
the attempted escape of three Jewish prisoners, who were soon captured and, in
keeping with prevailing Auschwitz practice, publicly hanged. K. went on to tell
how Dr. T. had learned surgical techniques from Jewish doctors, but added that
“he treated the doctors very nicely” and that he himself remained on
a friendly basis with T.: “[He could be] very, very nice, . . . but I felt
from the beginning I can't trust him.”
K. was suggesting a pattern
of doubling in Dr. T., which I have identified in Nazi doctors (and will
discuss in detail later). Adam T.’s combination of right-wing Polish
nationalism and anti-Semitism, along with his stance of omnipotence in response
to his own overwhelming death anxiety, led to his developing an “Auschwitz
self” very similar to that of an SS doctor. Dr. Jacob R. made the point to
me that it was a case not so much of “identification with the
aggressor” (in psychoanalytic terminology) as one of identification with
the overall Auschwitz structure of authority, an identification Dr. T. could
half maintain and half reverse during the postwar years. In Auschwitz, however,
that form of adaptation enabled him to enter directly into the healing-killing
reversal epitomized by selections. |
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| Experimental Operations and “Libel”: Wladislaw
Dering |
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The second of three Polish prisoner doctors, Wladislaw
Dering, performed cruel experimental operations on Jewish inmates, which became
widely known through his being the plaintiff in an extraordinary libel trial
that took place in London in 1964.¹
Dering, who had been
imprisoned because of his activities in the Polish underground, arrived very
early in Auschwitz (15 August 1940) and underwent severe beatings by the
Gestapo. In Auschwitz he first did hard physical labor and then became a nurse,
before emerging as a leading Polish physician who "in the beginning had a good
reputation" among prisoners.² During this early phase, he helped many
people, especially fellow Poles, and was recognized by inmates and SS doctors
as an unusually skillful surgeon.
In an important early incident, he
was told by a German doctor to give a phenol injection. In the version he gave
at his later trial, he claimed that, upon discovering the nature of the
substance in the syringe, he refused to give the injection. A prisoner doctor
testified afterward, however, that Dering actually gave the injection on an
order from Dr. Entress but did not know what he was injecting. And when the
prisoner died almost instantly, Dering was “shocked and declared that he
would never again give any injections.”³ Whichever account is true (I
am inclined to believe the latter version), Dering was undoubtedly stunned and
terrified by the experience, which may nonetheless have served to take him over
the threshold into atrocity. |
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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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