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Lobstergirl's Reviews > The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
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"National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology," said Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess at a 1934 meeting. Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology, examines the role medical doctors played in the Nazi genocidal project. From its beginnings, with the sterilizations of the unfit, the "euthanasia" of mentally defective or handicapped children, followed by adults, to its apotheosis in Auschwitz with the medical experiments of Josef Mengele and others, and the attempt to eradicate the "diseased" Jews from Germany and its conquered territories to cure the ills of the Nordic race through therapeutic mass killing, doctors were central to Nazi ideology and practice.
This is a work of both history and psychology. In addition to mining historical archives and testimony, Lifton intervewed surviving Nazi doctors and surviving prisoner doctors. His interest was in discovering how doctors, in a profession charged with healing, came to be medical killers. For some, the ideology of viewing Jews as the disease of the national body was sufficient rationale. (Of course, not just Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, Russians and others were marked for extermination.) Eduard Wirths, the head doctor at Auschwitz, saw himself as part of a moral crusade, making life better for the prisoners, controlling typhus outbreaks, eliminating diseases. One of the achievements he was proud of was reducing the death rate among Auschwitz prisoners; Wirths felt he was doing God's work in preserving Jews in this way.(*) For most Nazi doctors there was a bizarre distancing between their roles and the facts of extermination.
Most doctors, in order to become killers, needed to engage in a process Lifton calls doubling: splitting oneself in two, into an Auschwitz self and a non-Auschwitz self, so the killer could coexist with the healer, or the official who made gas chamber selections on the ramp with the loving husband and father. Doubling entailed numbing oneself to the exterminating side of Auschwitz, aligning oneself with the "healing" side, compartmentalizing the horrors from the rest. Doubling was crucial to the whole genocidal project.
(*) This of course reminded me of another jarring example of someone claiming to be doing God's work, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, during the financial crisis.
This is a work of both history and psychology. In addition to mining historical archives and testimony, Lifton intervewed surviving Nazi doctors and surviving prisoner doctors. His interest was in discovering how doctors, in a profession charged with healing, came to be medical killers. For some, the ideology of viewing Jews as the disease of the national body was sufficient rationale. (Of course, not just Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, Russians and others were marked for extermination.) Eduard Wirths, the head doctor at Auschwitz, saw himself as part of a moral crusade, making life better for the prisoners, controlling typhus outbreaks, eliminating diseases. One of the achievements he was proud of was reducing the death rate among Auschwitz prisoners; Wirths felt he was doing God's work in preserving Jews in this way.(*) For most Nazi doctors there was a bizarre distancing between their roles and the facts of extermination.
Most doctors, in order to become killers, needed to engage in a process Lifton calls doubling: splitting oneself in two, into an Auschwitz self and a non-Auschwitz self, so the killer could coexist with the healer, or the official who made gas chamber selections on the ramp with the loving husband and father. Doubling entailed numbing oneself to the exterminating side of Auschwitz, aligning oneself with the "healing" side, compartmentalizing the horrors from the rest. Doubling was crucial to the whole genocidal project.
(*) This of course reminded me of another jarring example of someone claiming to be doing God's work, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, during the financial crisis.
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October 1, 2009
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October 1, 2009
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November 21, 2009
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April 6, 2012
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April 16, 2012
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Velvetink
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Apr 17, 2012 10:16PM
"Doubling entailed numbing oneself" - I think most doctors learn how to do this today...not surprising to me that doctors were crucial to extermination. Today doctors are in cohoots with pharmaceutical co's who don't want to cure you but only maintain your illness & thus make money.
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Interesting. I wouldn't go as far as your last point. But I think it is entirely possible that doctors who go into medicine to be healers, and yet are confronted with the system we have in the U.S., where poor and middle class people have a very hard time getting and affording care because it's so costly, have to separate the caring, healing self from the self that simply can't help a certain number of people, because the system isn't set up to help those people. Doctors I'm sure would like to deal exclusively with medical issues, but obtaining healthcare is also a financial issue, and they aren't trained on the financial side of medicine. If I went to my doctor and said, "I have to stop seeing you, even though you're helping me, because I just can't afford it," my doctor would have to have a response to that that wasn't a medical, healing response. In order to stay in business, he would have to agree that he couldn't care for me anymore if I couldn't pay him. If doctors are ever confronted with this, I think it would entail a numbing response.
Ah yes well I wasn't referring to the money side of it so much...as the distancing of their emotions...in medical training there is a point when they have to view you as a broken leg or heart attack etc..in figuring how to fix it you as a person/the patient don't come into it...so they learn that early on...they also learn that to make complex medical decisions they have to wall off their feelings about the patient... & thus doctors have already developed the technique of numbing so were ideal candidates for the nazi endeavour. My reference to money and pharmaceuticals was that many of the drugs made and given for life to patients are maintenance drugs, not curing drugs so the pharmaceuticals are going to make money for the life of that patient. They don't really want to cure him and doctors get slack and complicit in this...they are all for handing over scripts instead of trying to get the patient to exercise and eat well etc...and will do that rather than spend time educating them. - and again this comes down to money one way or another and in the end they are not extremely bothered by it because they have learned to numb their feelings back in medical school.
Konrad Lorenz was the inspiration for the Nazi killing of Jews (along with Martin Luther). He believed that non-native populations weakened those existing amongst ones in their correct geographic home. He was talking about populations of geese interbreeding and he was a Nazi too, until after the war of course, then he wasn't.
There were a lot of inspirations for the Nazi killing of Jews. Lorenz would have to be way down the list, and Luther even further down. Lorenz joining the Nazi party in 1938 seems to me as much opportunistic as anything else, since not being a Nazi often got you blacklisted from academic posts.
