The Nazi Doctors:
Lewis, Thomas T
INTERNS OF SOCIAL IRRESPONSIBILITY THE NAZI DOCTORS Medical Killing and The Psychology of Genocide Robert Jay Lifton Basic Books, $19.95, 561 pp. Thomas T. Lewis How was it possible that large...
...Lifton emphasizes that multiple selves can exist within a single person, and he uses the term' 'doubling" to refer to the phenomenon...
...Ernst B." Lifton looks upon these three doctors as representative of three dominant types...
...Following their scientific training, they looked upon their work from a problem-solving perspective, taking pride in their professional competence...
...He writes: "Psychological research is always a moral enterprise, just as moral judgments inevitably include psychological assumptions...
...A non-orthodox psychoanalyst, Dr...
...Lifton has made an important contribution toward uncovering the "psychological conditions conducive to evil...
...one could avoid that involvement only by refusing to exercise one's capacity to save lives...
...They learned to accept the unacceptable through a process of "psychic numbing," and one doctor compared his adjustment to the experience of learning how to slaughter animals for market...
...Some writers, including Bruno Bettelheim, have argued that Lifton goes too far in the direction of understanding, fearing that tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner...
...Fritz Klein) explained: "Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life...
...Robert Lifton, currently Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the City University of New York, devoted about ten years to historical research, interviewing twenty-nine former Nazi doctors, twelve former Nazi non-medical professionals, and eighty survivors of Auschwitz, half of them doctors...
...Although much of the book is devoted to unpleasant subject matter, it is a brilliant study which helps one to understand the dynamics of institutional evil and the pressures for conformity...
...Lifton finds that the majority of Nazi physicians were not sadistic monsters...
...More importantly, if people are going to oppose the emergence of tyrannical systems, it is necessary that they understand why and how ordinary people can be motivated to cooperate with such systems...
...In addition to their belief systems, the Nazi physicians were able to adapt to circumstances with the use of several psychological strategies...
...and finally in the summer of 1941, the project of mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps...
...conducive to evil...
...Even if Dr...
...Although only a few participated in the medical experimentations, all doctors had to participate in the process of selecting those who would go to the gas chambers...
...Nothing in Lifton's book, however, would suggest that medical atrocities should be excused...
...Lifton includes long chapters devoted to three doctors at Auschwitz: Joseph Mengele, Edward Wirths, and a "Dr...
...Although Dr...
...They also radically compartmentalized their work into contradictory roles, so that they could heal the sick and then make selections for the gas chambers...
...In the case of Mengele, there was not much need for doubling, for here was indeed a man who was authoritarian, cruel, enthusiastic about his medical experiments, and completely devoted to the Nazi ideology...
...In addition to German doctors, there were many prisoner doctors who actively cooperated with the medical practices of the extermination camps...
...the genocide of the final solution...
...The application of this principle occurred in five sequential stages: first, beginning in the summer of 1933, the coercive sterilization of those considered to have genetic deficiencies (a practice then more common in the United States...
...Thomas T. Lewis How was it possible that large numbers of physi- cians-after taking the Hippocratic oath- became key participants in the murderous projects of the Third Reich...
...secondly, beginning early in 1939, the killing of "impaired" children in hospits tals...
...Ernst B., interviewed by Lifton on five different occasions, had never been associated with the selections for the gas chambers, and Lifton describes him as "a human being in an SS uniform...
...One prisoner doctor explained the moral dilemma of the situation: "One could save lives only by contributing to Auschwitz selection policies...
...In justifying the practice of medical killing the Nazis used the concept of "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben...
...This crude form of racial Darwinism might be objectively absurd, but early in the century such racism was a common belief among educated men of science...
...Lifton is a Jew with anti-Nazi convictions, he does manage to empathize somewhat with the doctors analyzed in his book...
...The doctors, it appears, were especially attracted to the Nazi conception of a biomedical science...
...Lifton never makes use of the kind of Freudian reductionism which one often encounters in some works of so-called psycho-history...
...fourthly, the further extension of the program to include "impaired" inmates of concentration camps...
...Rather than the Freudian notion of an irrational superego, Lifton is a moralist who yiews the development of a sensitive conscience as an important component of a healthy personality...
...It is estimated that about 350 physicians were guilty of medical crimes, but countless others supported the regime and its medical philosophy...
...Physicians were actively involved in the planning and application of the euthanasia campaign between 1939 and 1941, and the same was true of the larger program of genocide from 1941 to 1945...
...The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind...
...How was it possible for ordinary people to be responsible for such "demonic acts" ? Part of the answer, according to Lifton, was related to the wrong-headed idealism associated with the ideology of National Socialism, for it was this ideology which justified the killing of humans in the attempt to "heal" the German people from a racial disease...
...Even with ideological commitment, numbing, and doubling, however, the physicians often turned to alcohol in order to exist from one day to the next...
...And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body...
...they were "ordinary people" who were neither stupid nor exceptionally intelligent...
...In trying to answer this disturbing question, Dr...
...Never does he suggest that the behavior of the Nazi doctors might be explained by reference to primal scene trauma or to an unresolved oedipus complex...
...Wirths, in contrast, was a person who strongly reflected the phenomenon of doubling: a medical self which was devoted to healing the sick and a Nazi self which was committed to...
...B. had never actively participated in medical crimes, he did continue to have anti-Semitic convictions and to state there was "something right," something that "was good with the Nazis...
...thirdly, in October of that year, the extension of euthanasia to include "impaired" adults in mental hospitals...
...This was the belief of not only politicians such as Hitler and Himmler, but as one Nazi physician (Dr...
...In fact, about 45 percent of the doctors of Germany joined the Nazi party, more than any other group of professionals...
Vol. 115 • April 1988 • No. 7
