|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
432 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
| |
| self, developed in response to the healing killing paradox
should be everyone’s basis for judgment — Mengele’s, his own,
and even mine. |
| |
| |
| Ritual Reversals |
| |
For the Nazi doctor, the selections process had the ritual
function of “carefully staged death immersions culminating in honorable
survival and earned rebirth.”7 In
Auschwitz the psychological survival of the ordeal of the anus mundi of
selections enabled him to experience that earned rebirth via the formation of
the Auschwitz self. He had solidified his relationship to his Auschwitz group
by means of what was called “blood cement” (Blutkitt),8 meaning direct participation in the group’s
practice of killing — a policy long followed by criminal groups throughout
the world. In that way the Auschwitz self was “baptized” by passing a
test for“hardness.”
Like most functioning rituals, selections
became regularized over time, as the Auschwitz self became established and more
experienced. Ritual thus heightened the “sense of actuality”9 of that Auschwitz self, and provided it with the
“enactments, materializations, realizations” of its commitment.10 In buttressing the Auschwitz self, selections
served the major ritual function of “overcoming of ambivalence as well as
of ambiguity,” and of “order perceived and yet also participated
in.”11 Selections thus ritualized the
practice of murder and the acceptance of evil both made possible by the
increasing immersion of the Auschwitz self in the healing-killing paradox.
Selections also provide a ritual drama. Whether the Auschwitz self
entered into that drama with integrated élan (as in the case of Mengele)
or with hesitation and conflict (as in the case of many others) participation
in that “cultural performance”12
tended to absorb anxieties and doubts and fuse individual actions with
prevailing (Nazi) concepts, as does ritual performance in general. Here
Auschwitz epitomized the overall Nazi preoccupation with ritual, much of it
having to do with healing and killing. The regime drew much of its power from
its ritualization of existence, so that every act it called forth could be
seen, as having profound mythic significance for the “Third Reich”
and the “Aryan race.” Even when these were, as in the case of
selections, forms of “ritual ignorance,”13 propounded principles in violation of available
knowledge of human behavior (in this case, false racial theories), such ritual
could give participants a feeling of truth.
The healing-killing
paradox so dominated Auschwitz as to create a world of selections. The
Auschwitz self functioned with the understanding that, when selections were
diminished in one place (the medical blocks), they were radically expanded in
another (at the ramp). Beyond pragmatic Nazi estimates of “needs” was
the psychological principle that atrocity begets atrocity:14 in order to justify selections, one must keep
selecting. A hint why this is so can be found in primitive medicine men, whose
“possession of magic … is not an entirely comfortable asset”
because |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 432 |
Forward |
|
|
