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

I got my hands on this book after my Mom helped a librarian friend clean out the Stillwater High School library's non-fiction section. Since they're just going to toss the books anyway, she often sets aside any Third Reich related materials for me. I think they do this weeding because non-fiction becomes out of date so quickly, and library's use the average copyright date of their materials to gauge how up to date their collection is. In any case, after reading the book I felt that the HS could have probably kept this one!
Even though it was published in the 1980s, this book was a very interesting glimpse into the psyches of the Nazi doctors who worked in the death camps. Dr. Mengele is, of course, the most famous of these but I particularly liked the fact that he was just one of many in this book. Though he has become "THE angel of death," the horrible truth is there were many.
Another little acknowledged fact is that many doctors that worked in the camps were prisoners, who lead a somewhat double life - they were forced to aid the Nazis in their medical experiments as well as medicalized killing, but many tried to help their patients as well. This hierarchy lead to many complicated and profound relationships between doctors, Nazi and prisoner. This was an aspect Lifton went into that I hadn't seen in my other Nazi medicine related readings, at least not in the same depth.
One of the things I liked best about this read was the fact that Lifton constantly invoked the Hippocratic oath, and asked his interviewees to discuss their relationships with this sacred responsibility to heal, both inside the Third Reich, and afterward the war.
Ultimately, I feel like this scholarship takes an approach I haven't found in my other Nazi reads, and I enjoyed it's depth and sensitivity towards both the victims and the perpetrators. I would highly recommend it to anyone as interested in the psychology of "everyday" Nazis as I am.