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!UBC: The Nazi Doctors
Jan. 22nd, 2009 10:23 amLifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
This is an astounding book. On a second reading, I am, if possible, even more impressed by Robert Jay Lifton than I was the first time. He takes on an enormous question--how did doctors under the Nazis come to participate in the genocide of the Jews?--and not only does he answer it, but the bulk of his research is interviews with surviving Nazi doctors.
The idea makes my skin crawl, and I'm not Jewish. Robert Jay Lifton is.
So one of the things I admire in this book is Lifton's courage and honesty. His courage to do the interviews, and to do them honestly. He didn't pretend to his subjects that he validated their experience, or that he forgave them, but at the same time, he listened to them and again and again, he struggled--and struggles in the writing of the book--for empathy:
Demonizing the Nazis doesn't help (although in the case of Hitler and Himmler, it's well nigh impossible to avoid); making them inhuman and unique merely prevents us from understanding how and why they did what they did. They were human beings; that doesn't make their crime less. Arguably, it makes it greater: you can't blame an inhuman evil for being inhuman and evil. Only humans can be blamed for their failures in humanity. One of the things that Lifton's persistent emphasis on empathy reveals is in fact the contradictions in the selves of the Nazi doctors, the fact that they did struggle with their killing mission.
Now, they resolved those struggles in ways that allowed them to keep killing--and that in fact may be the central question of this book. What makes doctors kill, and kill professionally--that is, as doctors?
The answer is complicated, but here is the nutshell version I'm carrying away with me:
1. Ideology (this hearkens back to the Solzhenitsyn quote in my last book post). Nazi ideology, with its emphasis on the race (the Volk) over the individual, and its sacralization of biological racism, presented the idea that killing the Jews (inhuman, evil, deadly) was in the service of "curing" the Aryan race. (One Nazi doctor described the Jews as a "gangrenous appendix"--lovely, huh?) Nazi ideology also elevated the doctor to the status of race hero (an idea few doctors in Weimar Germany were equipped to resist), and in general mobilized the romantic idea of the hero, of the glorious life or death struggle: if killing all these Jews is hard, well it should be! You must make sacrifices for the Volk.
Notice, please, just whom that sacrifice consists of.
So Nazi ideology first of all glorified death and killing, glorified struggle and sacrifice, and neatly reversed the polarity of genocide: not killing, but curing. And it was assisted at every point by the pre-existing German anti-Semitism; even Germans who were opposed to killing the Jews believed that they were a dangerous problem for Germany.
2. Psychology. Lifton talks a great deal about a psychological process he calls "doubling": the creation of a second self, in this case, an Auschwitz self. (He emphasizes that doubling is far from unique to Nazis:
In fact, as Lifton notes, prisoners in Auschwitz, especially physicians, also went through doubling. They had to, in order to survive.
The Nazi doctors' doubling, though, was not a survival mechanism in that way. It is clear that it was possible for Nazis of all kinds not to participate in genocide. But the vast majority of them did not make that choice. They chose instead to create an Auschwitz self.
The Auschwitz self makes selections, does experiments (almost all of them hideously cruel, some of them lethal, and most of them ludicrously bad science, like Mengele's "experiments" in changing the eye-color of brown-eyed blond children by injecting methylene blue into their irises), is hard and unempathic and efficient, leaving the prior self essentially dormant, except for interactions with family and pets--and weirdly, sometimes, with prisoners. The Auschwitz self is also formed by the transferal of attention (my phrase): instead of thinking about the thousands of people you're killing on a daily basis, you think about how to make the gas chambers operate more efficiently, or you think about the technical problem of disposing of all those bodies when you've outstripped the processing power of the crematoria. And by selective loyalties: instead of recognizing your common humanity with your victims, you focus on your duty to support your SS comrades in their own trial.
And thus black becomes white; evil becomes good. The Holocaust becomes possible.
This is an astounding book. On a second reading, I am, if possible, even more impressed by Robert Jay Lifton than I was the first time. He takes on an enormous question--how did doctors under the Nazis come to participate in the genocide of the Jews?--and not only does he answer it, but the bulk of his research is interviews with surviving Nazi doctors.
The idea makes my skin crawl, and I'm not Jewish. Robert Jay Lifton is.
So one of the things I admire in this book is Lifton's courage and honesty. His courage to do the interviews, and to do them honestly. He didn't pretend to his subjects that he validated their experience, or that he forgave them, but at the same time, he listened to them and again and again, he struggled--and struggles in the writing of the book--for empathy:
... it felt strange and uncomfortable to hold out even minimal empathy (and even with full awareness of the clear distinction between empathy and sympathy) for participants in a project so murderous, and one aimed specifically at my own people, at me. If I never fully resolved the matter, I managed it by understanding my empathy to be in the service of a critical rendition of those doctors' psychological actions and experiences.
(501)
Demonizing the Nazis doesn't help (although in the case of Hitler and Himmler, it's well nigh impossible to avoid); making them inhuman and unique merely prevents us from understanding how and why they did what they did. They were human beings; that doesn't make their crime less. Arguably, it makes it greater: you can't blame an inhuman evil for being inhuman and evil. Only humans can be blamed for their failures in humanity. One of the things that Lifton's persistent emphasis on empathy reveals is in fact the contradictions in the selves of the Nazi doctors, the fact that they did struggle with their killing mission.
Now, they resolved those struggles in ways that allowed them to keep killing--and that in fact may be the central question of this book. What makes doctors kill, and kill professionally--that is, as doctors?
The answer is complicated, but here is the nutshell version I'm carrying away with me:
1. Ideology (this hearkens back to the Solzhenitsyn quote in my last book post). Nazi ideology, with its emphasis on the race (the Volk) over the individual, and its sacralization of biological racism, presented the idea that killing the Jews (inhuman, evil, deadly) was in the service of "curing" the Aryan race. (One Nazi doctor described the Jews as a "gangrenous appendix"--lovely, huh?) Nazi ideology also elevated the doctor to the status of race hero (an idea few doctors in Weimar Germany were equipped to resist), and in general mobilized the romantic idea of the hero, of the glorious life or death struggle: if killing all these Jews is hard, well it should be! You must make sacrifices for the Volk.
Notice, please, just whom that sacrifice consists of.
So Nazi ideology first of all glorified death and killing, glorified struggle and sacrifice, and neatly reversed the polarity of genocide: not killing, but curing. And it was assisted at every point by the pre-existing German anti-Semitism; even Germans who were opposed to killing the Jews believed that they were a dangerous problem for Germany.
2. Psychology. Lifton talks a great deal about a psychological process he calls "doubling": the creation of a second self, in this case, an Auschwitz self. (He emphasizes that doubling is far from unique to Nazis:
Doubling is part of the universal potential for what William James called the "divided self": that is, for opposing tendencies in the self. [...] the potential for doubling is part of being human, and the process is likely to take place in extremity, in relation to death.
But that "opposing self" can become dangerously unrestrained, as it did in the Nazi doctors. And when it becomes so, as Otto Rank discovered in his extensive studies of the "double" in literature and folklore, that opposing self can become the usurper from within and replace the original self until it "speaks" for the entire person. Rank's work also suggests that the potential for an opposing self, in effect the potential for evil, is necessary to the human psyche: the loss of one's shadow or soul or "double" means death.
(420)
In fact, as Lifton notes, prisoners in Auschwitz, especially physicians, also went through doubling. They had to, in order to survive.
The Nazi doctors' doubling, though, was not a survival mechanism in that way. It is clear that it was possible for Nazis of all kinds not to participate in genocide. But the vast majority of them did not make that choice. They chose instead to create an Auschwitz self.
The Auschwitz self makes selections, does experiments (almost all of them hideously cruel, some of them lethal, and most of them ludicrously bad science, like Mengele's "experiments" in changing the eye-color of brown-eyed blond children by injecting methylene blue into their irises), is hard and unempathic and efficient, leaving the prior self essentially dormant, except for interactions with family and pets--and weirdly, sometimes, with prisoners. The Auschwitz self is also formed by the transferal of attention (my phrase): instead of thinking about the thousands of people you're killing on a daily basis, you think about how to make the gas chambers operate more efficiently, or you think about the technical problem of disposing of all those bodies when you've outstripped the processing power of the crematoria. And by selective loyalties: instead of recognizing your common humanity with your victims, you focus on your duty to support your SS comrades in their own trial.
And thus black becomes white; evil becomes good. The Holocaust becomes possible.
