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

In this book, Robert Jay Lifton sought to understand how people trained to heal and protect life became involved as perpetrators of genocide and the destruction of life. It remains significant as a book which ties together the early eugenics laws and operations to sterilize or euthanize undesirables with the ultimate development of mass killings on the Russian front and in the extermination camps. It also remains one of the most comprehensive analyses of the men who carried out the selections within the camps, and thus is an important historical contribution, which fortunately remains readily available more than twenty five years after its initial publication.

This is not to say that the book is without flaws, however, and history teachers considering it as a text will want to supplement it with more current research on perpetrators by historians, such as Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Lifton was not a historian, and in his introduction he confesses his own limited ability in German, Polish, and other relevant languages. Although the book is based on interviews, it appears that Lifton did not adhere to accepted standards of oral history, acting more as a journalist or psychologist might in approaching the subject. In some sense, this is logical, as he was a psychologist who had published several popular works, mostly about recent traumatic events and their effect on the participants and victims. As such, he gives insight into the inner workings of perpetrators, and finds (as Browning would) that their responses to the situation varied. I’m not qualified to assess his use of the psychological concept of “doubling” to explain how perpetrators found it possible to live with themselves, but I tend to concur with his estimation that the concept of “lebensunwertes Leben” served as a justification for doctors in deciding to see “healing” the Volk community as a higher priority than protecting the individual lives of marginalized victims of the regime.

I read this book many years ago, at the outset of my interest in German history and fascism, and it served as a good place to explore some complex issues, following upon some rather more sensationalist works on the Third Reich. It is accessible for people with little background in history or psychology, and that is probably one key to its success, but it does not oversimplify or overstate its case. At the time I read it, I was particularly interested in its coverage of Joseph Mengele, who had been presented as a kind of movie-style villain figure in other works, and this gave a more complex sense of him, without trivializing the evil he committed. As Lifton quotes one of the camp survivors saying in the introduction, “it is demonic that they were not demonic,” but rather human beings committing acts of evil that live as a potential in each of us. Books such as this may help us ultimately find ways to prevent that potential from being expressed in the future.