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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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460 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| which it was carrying out the laws of “the natural
history and biology of man.”63 Rather
than being a mere anti-Semite like everyone else, the Nazi could see himself in
the forefront of what came to be called “biological anti-Judaism.”
Even if a bit troubled by mass killing, he could see it as part of the
necessary combination of destruction and creation always stressed in Nazi
imagery. Whatever meaning one gave these events, it was not that of murder,
because as a former Nazi doctor said in reference to “euthanasia,”
“there was a certain … sensibility that this couldn’t be, …
[that] one cannot simply murder a mentally ill or … old person or an
imbecile. Do you understand me?” That “sensibility” was what I
have called derealization and disavowal: the meaning within the killing center
or within Auschwitz was not that helpless people were being murdered but
something else: one was doing one’s duty, one was achieving heroic
hardness, one was being the ultimate biological soldier. |
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| Blaming the Victim |
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The meaning structure of the Auschwitz self depended
greatly upon the pattern of “blaming the victim.”64 Mengele’s insistence that the Gypsies were
genetically responsible for their fatal noma tumors, Ernst B.’s disgust
with the Gypsies for not distributing their food equitably among themselves,
the repeated blame placed on prisoner doctors for the terrible condition of
their patients and the frequent deaths among them — all these were
psychologically of a piece. The blame could be deadly: a group of Polish
prisoner doctors were sent to almost certain death in the punishment
Kommando, together with their infectious patients, because of a small
trachoma outbreak. As Dr. Henri Q. commented, the approach was “at the
very least original,” did succeed in stopping the trachoma epidemic, and
permitted the “innocent Germans” to do their killing. The meaning
structure imposed was that the Germans bore no guilt because they had been
“forced” by the medical negligence of the prisoner doctors to take
stern measures.
The imagery also closely parallels Hitler’s own in
his famous “warning” issued on 30 January 1939: “If
international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more
in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be
Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the
contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”65 The usual psychological explanation to the
effect that Hitler was “projecting” his own intention onto the Jews
is true enough. But probably more important was the narrative (or collective
meaning experience) Hitler was constructing, in which the designated victims,
already identified as the source of the world's “fundamental evil,”
could now be seen as posing a military threat to the Aryan nation, and
therefore as the group responsible for the ensuing bloodbath. |
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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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