!UBC: The Nazi Doctors

[truepenny]

Lifton, 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:

... 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.

Comments

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

Mmm, another one for me to read. I have a special fascination for Josef Mengele to the point that I built him up like one of my writing characters in order to pick his brain. In my opinion, I think the idea of 'doubling' is spot on. He was raving mad.

The point you make about demonising the nazis is something that always gets on my nerves. They were not evil monsters, that's the problem. They were all too human and people are afraid to face that because that means that they too, as humans, have the possibility of committing atrocities. It got me very angry when some very respected Holocaust researchers turned out to be afraid of even thinking of the nazis guards as human. What the hell?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Is "doubling" his term for what's mostly referred to as "dissociation" in current psych literature, or is he suggesting it's a different thing?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

To the best of my understanding, in Lifton's model, disassociation is part of doubling. The Auschwitz self dissociates like crazy (if you'll pardon the phrase), leaving the prior self able to respond emotionally.

[peneli.livejournal.com]

Because it can be hard to admit that yes, you are the same thing as them and have the potential to do that kind of evil too. It's easier to demonize than admit shared humanity.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

It gets on my nerves because that's what "Never Again" means. It means having to look inside yourself and seeing that possibility, recognising it and keeping an eye on it so it can never become reality again.

[g33kgrrl]

I already added this book to my to-buy list after your last post when you mentioned it, but now I'm convinced I need it. Thank you for writing this up.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

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.

with any substitution for "ss" above, i think you have now tersely explained how any person can participate in any war.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The principle is nothing if not broadly applicable. But I think it was particularly potent for Nazis.

ETA: what gets me is that they knew that what they were doing was horrible. They knew it. But they flipped it. Instead of, "this is a horrible thing--we shouldn't do it," they went to "this is a horrible thing--our sacrifice for the Führer is all the greater and more glorious. We are doing what must be done. It's not our fault that what must be done is horrible."

It just ...

There are no words.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i think the same could be said of the cultural revolution in china, the slaughter in my lai, the tuskegee syphilis programs, or even the stanford prison experiments.

(i'm the ptsd-suffering child of a ptsd-suffering holocaust refugee. i think we gotta find words, is all. i more or less instinctively believe "homo homini lupus est", but i also believe in semantic completeness ;)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I meant there are no words for how infuriated it makes me. Not that there are no words for the process or the rationalization.

And, yes, the idea of comradeship, of being part of a small group that has access to a deeper truth, a small group that's going to make the hard choices, is part of any atrocity. But American examples always run counter to widely held cultural beliefs. Whereas Nazi perpetrators had their belief in their own rightness reinforced by every aspect of their culture. And part of Nazi ideology was also the subsumation of the individual in the Volk and, even more specifically, the subordination of the individual to the will of the Führer. In a lot of ways, Nazi Germany was set up to encourage atrocities to happen; in other ways it actively demanded that atrocities happen.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i confess i am of mixed minds about this. i see what you're saying; indeed i found reading "eichmann in jerusalem" gave me more insight into my refugee-parent's assumptions about the world than knowing him all my life had. otoh, americans from milgram's 39 on have been so *easy* to push into that kind of behavior, i can't see it as that much more embedded in culture than in the kind of critter we happen to be.

i also think that the end of apartheid in south africa also shows how *ineffective* the cultural setup can be. if there was ever a country ripe for civil war, that was it. there but for the grace of archbishop desmond tutu and the truth and reconciliation efforts go a whole lot of atrocities....

a possibly telling test, i guess, would be how many of say the "guards" in the stanford experiment themselves were traumatized thereafter, as opposed to the guards at the nazi camps. and i guess we'll find out over the next few years how the new crop of american veterans fare after they've served their time and commited their own inhumanities. perhaps the gitmo guards will be our next test case.

[thecoughlin.livejournal.com]

and the more successful you are at it, the more "adjusted" the person is away from war-- and the less likly to tell war-stories to non-veterans.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! This sounds, in what I hope is a non-creepy way, like something I would enjoy reading. Thanks to supergee for the pointer over here. Even your brief review has been helpful in my thinking about literary villains.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting about this. I realize that Nazi ideology took it further, in particularly horrifying ways, but it wasn't just the Nazi ideology that made doctors shut off their empathy. Medical education itself used to push the ideal of doctors as self-sacrificing heroes, who had to be above personal sentiment to accomplish their noble work. Before antibiotics, before vaccines for most infectious diseases, professional doctors in the US and western Europe were commonly taught to depersonalize patients in order to troubleshoot their bodies without being distracted by empathy. (This was one reason many women preferred to have a midwife instead of a doctor assist them in childbirth.) Doctors trained in the best medical schools of the 1920s took sick children from their parents and put them in isolation wards. They amputated limbs. They did the best they could, and most of their patients died anyhow. Even now, when doctors learn better tools and better emotional coping techniques, a lot of them burn out emotionally and treat patients as engineering problems.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. Lifton discusses that part of it, too.

[firecat]

Even now, when doctors learn better tools and better emotional coping techniques, a lot of them burn out emotionally and treat patients as engineering problems.

Fuck yes.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've read this book: it is indeed very good.

Point one (ideology) boils down to this: They accepted the validity of the Zeroth Law of Robotics.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

With the given that Jews != human.

(Not arguing that the Zeroth Law isn't creepy and kind of fascist. Also smug, sanctimonious, and self-righteous, which is what totalitarianism is all about. But the Nazis still are one step down. One VERY BIG step.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, you don't need that given. What the Zeroth Law states is that the life of the human race over-rides the life of any human.

But that is inherently inhuman, and enables Nazism even if the adherents of the Zeroth don't take that giant step down. I think the point is: inevitably they will. After all, Nazi genocide had its roots in longstanding race theory that was not originally genocidal: it just inherently devolved that way, eventually.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree with you. But do you think that's part of the way the books understand the Zeroth Law, or something that we as readers find by reading against the text?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't know; I couldn't get far enough into that stultifying crap to find out. (And I'm an Asimov fan! I love his earlier work.)

I consider the end of Clarke's Childhood's End to be inhuman for a similar reason. The book's whole premise is that it's actually A Good Thing, but the author leaves a few hints that he might not agree.

[kirby-crow.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this? Someone posted this on my flist today. At first I thought it was a joke because it sounds so incredible, but the Telegraph is a serious broadsheet, so:

Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele 'created twin town in Brazil' (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/4307262/Nazi-angel-of-death-Josef-Mengele-created-twin-town-in-Brazil.html)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting. Thanks for the link!

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Ohh mannnn!

Barnes&Nobles had better send me my copy of that other book soon or I'm going to be one angry bibliophile >.<

But on this subject, one can't help but feel a disconnect when we delve deep into the horrors of such things. It's like the Door To December, or The Cat That Ate Itself in our heads. We just can't push past that wall. We can learn, comprehend, and even feel if the author is talented enough, but putting ourselves completely into their shoes is very hard. In a book I read once long ago a line stands up 'The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference'

The way those doctors turned off their hearts is a staggering example of indifference on a massive scale. Yet as much as we still look back on the Holocaust with deep horror, do we ever truly think on Rwanda? Or, the current place with genocidal humans in power, Darfur? I heard an interview of a victim in Rwanda whose husband and children were murdered by a man who'd been their neighbor for about ten years. They even had him over for supper. After the horror show there ended, they made a 'forgiveness' law and she 'forgave' him for his actions. As I recall, I felt a little queasy listening to that.

Now that I think of it, what of Biafra? The African civil war that killed over a million Africans? We seem to be a bit...conveniently anesthetized ourselves from what I can see.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

As people outside of Nazi territory were during World War II. (Lynn Nicholas' Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web goes into detail about the persistence with which Allied and neutral countries refused to take Jewish refugees.) It's part and parcel of the problem of genocide. Nobody wants to believe it, even when they know it's true.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Ah yes

Or as one of my fav authors put it 'We're ostriches and the whole world is sand' >.>

Oh, and thanks for the book mention *adds to list* it's going to be a full month for the bookworm :D

[thecoughlin.livejournal.com]

had Nazi's NOT invaded other countries, you would have seen the same lack of internaional engagement.

in the end, if there is not profit in waging war, we dont. The full answer is in Jarecki's movie "Why we Fight"

http://www.cceia.org/education/film/reviews/0003.html