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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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458 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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The fate of Nazi doctors after the defeat varied
enormously. Quite a few killed themselves, probably relatively more than in
other professions. Another group was executed after trials under Allied
authority in Nuremberg and elsewhere and after later trials under German
authority. Many served prison sentences, which were, however, generally
considered light for the crimes committed. A few, like Mengele, escaped and
were never caught. A considerable number returned to medical practice and
continued with it until retirement or natural death — or until, as in a
few cases, they were discovered to have been criminals and belatedly tried.
Many are practicing now. But the doubling process and the residual Nazi or
Auschwitz self has remained with them and significantly affected their
attitudes and their lives. For this reason, younger Germans could say to me
that there was no hope of salvaging that generation.
A prisoner doctor
who struggled painfully to maintain healing principles when there, asked me
somewhat rhetorically, “Can Auschwitz be a true reflection of the
medical?” He was trying to point to the extremity of conditions behind the
profound medical corruption. A German anti-Nazi doctor, in discussing my
research, asked, “What are we allowed to do with other people? What is the
limit?” A former Nazi doctor who had spent a brief period at a killing
center for mental patients, in discussing any future principle of mercy
killing, asked, “Who would do it? A doctor? A hangman?” As Nyiszli
said, “Among all the criminals and murderers, the most dangerous type is
the criminal physician.”61 The
doctor’s danger, we now see, lies in his capacity to double in a way that
brings special power to his killing self even as he continues to anoint himself
with medical purity. |
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| The Construction of Meaning
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Finally, the Auschwitz self takes on a larger, sense of
meaning. Its activities take on a logic and purpose and come to seem
appropriate to the environment and its overall ethos. What that self becomes is
not only acceptable but significant.
Such a sense of significance is an
important means of fending off feelings of guilt. More than that, it is part of
a universal proclivity toward constructing good motives while participating in
evil behavior. That proclivity is one of the remarkable dimensions of human
adaptability, of man’s capacity (in Loren Eiseley’s words) “to
veer with every wind, or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically
elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it.”62 For no reality is directly or fully given us as
human beings. Rather we must inwardly “construct” that reality on the
basis, of what we inwardly bring to what is “out there.” Each such
construction, every reality, is influenced by all aspects of one’s psyche,
as influenced in turn by individual and cultural history and even |
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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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