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

This is one of the most harrowing and disturbing books I've ever read. It took me about a week and a half to get through -- and I was only able to pick at it intermittently by reading other books -- but it is a deeply important volume on the true evil carried out the Nazis. Robert Jay Lifton -- who is Jewish himself -- tracked down a remarkable number of surviving Germans, both the doctors and the prisoners, and has masterfully documented how the genocidal impulses sprung from the Aktion T-4 program, in which anybody declared "feeble" was gassed by carbon monoxide (Hitler specified the gas), starting in an abandoned prison in Brandenburg, and carried out to the terrified mechanized slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and anybody too weak to work in the camps. But within Auschwitz, there were further horrors than genocide. There was Block 10, where the whistling butcher Dr. Josef Mengele (whom Lifton REALLY unpacks here -- the sections on Mengele are a brilliant psychological examination) carried out experiments on children, twins, and various other horrific "tinkering" that I could not possibly write here on Goodreads to secure a master race. Aside from Lifton's heavy lifting on the systemic mechanisms of genocide, he has also confronted many of the "doctors" who cosigned onto these hideous experiments. At the time of these interviews (the 1970s and the 1980s, it appears), many of them were STILL defending Mengele and the ghastly mission. One Dr. B even tells Lifton that one cannot judge Auschwitz unless one was there, while simultaneously remaining in denial about the evil that was committed. If you are somehow unconvinced that fascism represents the worst political system that humankind has devised, I urge you to read this book. I cried. I was unsettled. I nearly vomited at some of the descriptions. But one cannot walk away from this book having even a remote strain of sympathy for those who gleefully signed on for the Nazi ideology. This is a vital read, but read it only when you are ready.