| “This World Is Not This
World” |
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[sub…] sequent students of the process realized that
sadism and viciousness alone could not account for the killing of millions of
people. The emphasis then shifted to the bureaucracy of killing: the faceless,
detached bureaucratic function originally described by Max Weber, now applied
to mass murder.7 This focus on numbed
violence is enormously important, and is consistent with what we shall observe
to be the routinization of all Auschwitz function.
Yet these emphases
are not sufficient in themselves. They must be seen in relation to the
visionary motivations associated with ideology, along with the specific
individual-psychological mechanisms enabling people to kill. What I call
“medicalized killing” addresses these motivational principles and
psychological mechanisms, and permits us to understand the Auschwitz
victimizers — notably Nazi doctors — both as part of a bureaucracy of
killing and as individual participants whose attitudes and behavior can be
examined.
Medicalized killing can be understood in two wider
perspectives. The first is the “surgical”method of killing large
numbers of people by means of a controlled technology making use of highly
poisonous gas; the method employed became a means of maintaining distance
between killers and victims. This distancing had considerable importance for
the Nazis in alleviating the psychological problems experienced (as attested
over and over by Nazi documents) by the Einsatzgruppen troops who
carried out face-to-face shooting of Jews in Eastern Europe (see pages 159-60)
— problems that did not prevent those troops from murdering 1,400,000
Jews.8
I was able to obtain direct
evidence on this matter during an interview with a former Wehrmacht
neuropsychiatrist who had treated large numbers of Einsatzgruppen
personnel for psychological disorders. He told me that these disorders
resembled combat reactions of ordinary troops: severe anxiety, nightmares,
tremors, and numerous bodily complaints. But in these “killer
troops,” as he called them, the symptoms tended to last longer and to be
more severe. He estimated that 20 percent of those doing the actual killing
experienced these symptoms of psychological decompensation About half of that
20 percent associated their symptoms mainly with the “unpleasantness”
of what they had to do, while the other half seemed to have moral questions
about shooting people in that way. The men had greatest psychological
difficulty concerning shooting women and children, especially children. Many
experienced a sense of guilt in their dreams, which could include various forms
of punishment or retribution. Such psychological difficulty led the Nazis to
seek a more “surgical” method of killing.
But there is
another perspective on medicalized killing that I believe to be insufficiently
recognized: killing as a therapeutic imperative. That kind of motivation
was revealed in the words of a Nazi doctor quoted by the distinguished.
survivor physician Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner. Pointing to the chimneys in the
distance, she asked a Nazi doctor, Fritz Klein, “How can |
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