Erik Graff's Reviews > The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Lifton, a psychiatric physician and teacher himself, has written a host of books, many of them treating of the threat of nuclear war, all of them with a decided ethical concern, a concern which can be related to what Freud termed the 'thanatos' or death instinct. How does it happen, he asks, that people can become so destructive, so evil?

While treating of early Nazi extermination practices (f.i., of the disabled and infirm), most of this book concerns itself with Auschwitz, that enormous complex of camps and industrial concerns run by the S.S. for the purposes of production, profit and industrialized mass murder. Most specifically, it's about the doctors serving the camp and the medical aspects of the camp's management. These medical professionals include not only the regular German physicians but also their assistants, many of them themselves imprisoned M.D.s, many of them Jews, some of them the former mentors of their captors.

Much of Lifton's work in preparing this study was in interviewing these doctors, often quite extensively. How did they see their transition from being healers to becoming murderers? What were the higher purposes of their work and how did they reconcile the tenets of their Hippocratic oaths to 'do no harm' with their oaths to Adolf Hitler? And how, most importantly, can one objectively account for such extraordinary hypocrisy?--this being the point of his efforts.