Between Hitler and Hippocrates
GEWEN, BARRY
BETWEEN HITLER AND HIPPOCRATES BY BARRY GEWEN when Robert Jay Lifton began his research for The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic, 561 pp.,$19.95), many people...
...History and sociology can help provide broad explanations to account for the rise of Hitler and the implementation of the Final Solution...
...If everyone who doubles is a potential mass murderer, we will never stop looking over our shoulder...
...the teeth...
...He would have been wiser to leave well enough alone...
...Because the evil within the self can thus be released, "doubling facilitates genocide...
...extraction [from] the corpses.'" Physicians also administered fatal injections to prisoners, thereby stepping outside of the machinery of genocide and directly engaging in murder...
...This was so treacherous an endeavor that some of his associates urged him to abandon the project rather than risk the danger involved...
...A biologically sound society had to cleanse itself of all impurities, all ailments, and the most dangerous of these, the "sickness of the Aryan race," was the Jew...
...The author refers to B.'s "inner contradictions...
...eighth, 'He...
...Lifton lists the different stages as delineated to him by one of the camp's survivors: "First, the chief doctor's assignments to his subordinates concerning duty schedules and immediate selections policies...
...ut of his rich material Lifton attempts to construct a "psychology of genocide...
...Lifton's judgment on him can stand: "He was both brutally 'misused' (in his brother's word) by a murderous regime and his own architect of that very misuse...
...fourth, the doctor ordering 'how many [pellets] of gas should be thrown in...
...As defined by Lifton, doubling is a phenomenon that can occur in any number of environments, not only Auschwitz...
...Auschwitz in particular and the Third Reich in general contained a multitude of persons acting out of a multitude of motives...
...observed...
...Despite pressure from Wirths, he refused to join in making selections and actually succeeded in saving some people from extermination...
...Unfortunately, he didn't...
...For some reason that never does become clear, professionals are more susceptible to doubling than others...
...seventh, 'He signed a [form] that the people are dead...
...An inquiry into evil would itself become an evil inquiry...
...With their belief in racial superiority and racial purification, the Nazis took ideas about eugenics and euthanasia that were current throughout the West at the time and raised them to a higher power, bringing to bear the full weight of the state to create, in effect, a "biocracy...
...And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body...
...What he really needed was a strong psychic equilibrium...
...The "dedicated physician" Wirths, on the other hand, made selections for the crematoria one day and saved lives the next, inspiring hatred or loyalty depending on who was doing the telling...
...Thus was healing transformed into killing...
...No individual, however, was more remarkable than Ernst B. Arriving at Auschwitz almost by chance, he was horrified by what he saw and decided to remain only after he was assured that he could "stay out of this whole business...
...Mengele is questionable, and so is B. The physician in the book who proudly displayed an infant he was starving to death seemed quite comfortable in his role...
...To his credit, he succeeded admirably in keeping his balance...
...These were lengthy, intense exchanges, draining the interviewer no less than the interviewee...
...The theory fails from another direction as well, because it is not obvious that all of Lifton's Nazi doctors engaged in doubling...
...One Auschwitz doctor, asked how he could reconcile his complicity in mass murder with his Hippocratic Oath, memorably replied: "Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life...
...Everyone knows that doctors engaged in some of the most heinous activities of the Nazi period: the medical experiments conducted at the death camps and concentration camps...
...We are not accustomed to thinking of scholars as courageous, but The Nazi Doctors is an example of courageous scholarship...
...They "can move to the farthest shore of evil...
...It was all too easy to lose one's moral bearings, so that empathy shaded into sympathy and the distinction between victim and victimizer was blurred...
...Even those who served at Auschwitz failed to fit a single mold...
...Before being hanged in 1948, he declared:" I have always fought in good conscience for my personal convictions and done so uprightly, frankly and openly...
...Whatever the cost to the author in psychic energy, the sessions were worth the effort...
...Mengele, as might be expected, was evil incarnate, "the one most in tune with the place, an example for others...
...the most detested and notorious, Josef Mengele...
...The basic material for The Nazi Doctors comes from a series of interviews Lifton conducted with former Nazi physicians and Holocaust survivors, including five with doctors who had worked in the camps...
...Combined with the doctors' general anti-Semitism, the logic of such "idealism" led inevitably to the gas chamber...
...For Lifton was not interested in producing one more account of the Third Reich's crimes...
...From the careful analyst attentive to detail, he turns into the overreaching theorizer making outlandish claims for his pet notion...
...This is an explanation that doesn't explain...
...Although not, as we shall see, the perfect Virgil to guide us through Hell, Lifton deserves our applause for taking on an agonizing job and carrying it through...
...Lifton notes that B. did not completely escape Auschwitz's orbit of complicity, since the camp associate he had the highest regard for was Mengele, yet the postwar judges acquitted him and Lifton calls his story "admirable, even extraordinary...
...He wanted to know how seemingly ordinary men could undertake the unspeakable—specifically, how those trained to heal could be transformed into killers...
...The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind...
...second, the individual doctor's service on the ramp, performing selections...
...he gave the order to ventilate...
...Such a regime had a special need for doctors, who in turn, with the increased prestige they received under the Third Reich, persuaded themselves that they were putting medicine at the service of the highest ofcauses.Karl Brandt, the man who headed the euthanasia program that killed at least 80,000 people until its techniques were adopted for the death camps, had two personal heroes—Adolf Hitler and Albert Schweitzer...
...The uncomfortable fact is that the Nazi doctors were not all monsters...
...Acutely drawn portraits are sprinkled throughout, culminating in separate chapters on three highly contrasting personalities—the most humane of the Auschwitz doctors, Ernst B. (unnamed because still alive...
...Hitler's ideology, Lifton notes, had particular appeal to the medical profession...
...Lifton's goal was understanding...
...The key to the Nazi doctors, he says in the final section of his book, is "doubling," a process through which a person responds to extreme situations by dividing himself into two functioning wholes...
...One might have expected Lifton to arrive at exactly this conclusion from the case studies that make The Nazi Doctors so noteworthy...
...Like any group of human beings, they exhibited a range of qualities, from decency to criminality...
...told Lifton he had "a positive attitude toward [the Nazis'] economic successes and toward the possibility of [society's] reform...
...It seems fairer to say that he was a Jew-hater who would not become a Jew-killer...
...That job had for the most part been completed by such authors as Raul Hilbergand Lucy S. Dawidowicz (though not, granted, to the satisfaction of a few anti-Semites camped on the lunatic fringe of scholarship who insisted the Holocaust never happened...
...Lifton was fully aware of the pitfalls...
...Soldiers in battle double, doctors at the operating table double, corporate executives, divided between the rough and tumble of business and the comforts of home and family, double...
...Lif-ton's description of one of these encounters, lasting through several meetings and running a gamut of emotional changes, has all the nuance and drama of a carefully crafted short story...
...and the most influential, the dutiful and conflicted Eduard Wirths, who served as chief physician at the camp and committed suicide at the end of the War...
...The finest parts of his book are the psychological biographies of the living and the dead he was able to construct from his discussions...
...It" provides a connecting principle between the murderous behavior of Nazi doctors and the universal potential for just such behavior...
...fifth, 'He observed through the hole how the people are dying...
...Should that occur, the effort at understanding would turn into an exercise in apologetics...
...BETWEEN HITLER AND HIPPOCRATES BY BARRY GEWEN when Robert Jay Lifton began his research for The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic, 561 pp.,$19.95), many people said to him: "I hope you have a strong stomach...
...Prisoners who worked for him believed he was opposed to the entire system (B...
...Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of B.'s personality was his attitude toward the Jews...
...third, the doctor riding in the ambulance or Red Cross car to the crematoria...
...sixth, 'When the people were dead...
...When a chance for a transfer arose, Jewish inmates pleaded with him not to go, and he concluded, "At least I could do something humane here"—a startling remark, given the context, but accurate...
...They were crucial to the euthanasia program that was the forerunner of the organized mass murder, and at Auschwitz they had a hand in every step except the actual killing...
...But in trying to understand why certain individuals did what they did, their "psychology of genocide,'' no single theory will suffice...
...In his Introduction and again in his Afterword, he writes about his difficulties in interviewing some of his subjects, his "embarrassment and shame," and about his struggles to maintain his footing while scrupulously adhering to the role of observer...
...Doctors j oined the Nazi Part y and its elite corps in alarming numbers, and stood at the center of Hitler's Final Solution...
...But Lifton emphasizes that the physicians' participation was scarcely limited to the sadistic behavior of a few fanatics...
...And to arrive at answers he was obliged to get into the skins of individuals who were sadists and mass murderers, to adopt a stance of, if not neutrality, at least detachment, in order to see the world from their point of view...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 18
