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The Holocaust History Project.

 Dr Robert Jay Lifton THE NAZI DOCTORS:
                        Medical Killing and the
                            Psychology of Genocide ©
 
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Chapter 20
 

 
 
The Auschwitz Self:
Psychological Themes
in Doubling 
 
 
  The doctor, … if not living in a moral situation … where limits are very clear, … is very dangerous.   
  — Auschwitz survivor  
     
  He has the capacity to veer with every wind, or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it. [For man is a] fickle, erratic, dangerous creature [whose] restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals … believe all things and believe nothing … kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him   
  — Loren Eiseley  
     
 The Healing-Killing Paradox
 
The Nazi doctors’ immersion in the healing-killing paradox was crucial in setting the tone for doubling, as the Auschwitz self had to live by that paradox. To the extent that one embraces the far reaches of the Nazi vision of killing Jews in order to heal the Nordic race, the paradox disappears. The Auschwitz self can see itself as living out a commendable principle of “racial hygiene” and working toward a noble vision of or- […ganic] 
 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide

Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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