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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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445 |
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Contents |
Index |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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| of the kind of continual involvement of the self in
experiences that would ordinarily produce lots of feeling (see footnote on page
161). |
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| Killing without Killing |
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The language of the Auschwitz self, and of the Nazis in
general, was crucial to the numbing. A leading scholar of the Holocaust told of
examining “tens of thousands” of Nazi documents without once
encountering the word “killing,” until, after many years he finally
did discover the word — in reference to an edict concerning dogs.43
For what was being done to the Jews,
there were different words, words that perpetuated the numbing of the Auschwitz
self by rendering murder nonmurderous. For the doctors specifically, these
words suggested responsible military-medical behavior: “ramp duty”
(Rampendienst) or sometimes even “medical ramp duty”
(ärztlicher Rampendienst) or “[prisoners] presenting
themselves to a doctor” (Arztvorstellern). For what was being done
to the Jews in general, there was, of course, the “Final Solution of the
Jewish question” (Endlösung der judenfrage), “possible
solutions” (Lösungsmöglichkeiten), “evacuation”
(Aussiedlung or Evakuierung), “transfer”
(Überstellung), and “resettlement” (Umsiedlung,
the German word suggesting removal from a danger area). Even when they spoke of
a “gassing Kommando ” (Vergasungskommando), it had the
ostensible function of disinfection. The word “selection”
(Selektion) could imply sorting out the healthy from the sick, or even
some form of Darwinian scientific function having to do with “natural
selection” (natürliche Auswahl), certainly nothing to do with
killing.
The Nazi doctor did not literally believe these euphemisms.
Even a well-developed Auschwitz self was aware that Jews were not being
resettled but killed, and that the “Final Solution” meant killing all
of them. But at the same time the language used gave Nazi doctors a discourse
in which killing was no longer killing; and need not be experienced, or even
perceived, as killing. As they lived increasingly within that language —
and they used it with each other — Nazi doctors became imaginatively bound
to a psychic realm of derealization, disavowal, and nonfeeling.
As one
gradually became habituated to Auschwitz, the Auschwitz self internalized its
own requirements. Group support for the adaptation was always present, and life
there became “like the weather,” except more predictable: part
nature, an enveloping reality. When Dr. Magda V. told me, “The thing was,
there were never very many Germans around,” she was not only commenting on
the small number of SS personnel needed to control the camp but also suggesting
a sense of automated natural power. As the Auschwitz self enabled a Nazi doctor
to go on selecting, with his assistants taking care of all the details and
inmates keeping records of all that took place in the camp; as transports
arrived and the crematoria smoked; as winter gave way to spring and spring to
summer — if the Auschwitz self did not exactly feel that “God is in
His heaven,” |
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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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