UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Courses > Hist 133D Homepage > 133D Book Essays Index page > Student essay
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Nazi Doctors: How Could They Do It? Book Essay
on:
Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and Psychology of Genocide
by Katherine Higgins for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course |
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& Abstract |
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Plagiarize! |
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About Katherine Higgins As a junior majoring in sociology, I am very interested in examining the factors that led certain groups within German society to participate so actively in genocide. This led me to look at the involvement of physicians in Germany during the Holocaust and how they were able to rationalize their behavior. Abstract (back to top) In The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton documents Nazi “medicine” during the Holocaust: its origins; its execution within concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz; and how doctors could assist in the systematic murder of millions. Lifton offers several theories on how doctors were able to transform from healers into murders, such as psychological characteristics within the doctors, institutional support systems, and distancing. However, Lifton focuses mainly on the idea of “doubling,” positing that a doctor could divide himself into two selves. Drawing on a variety of sources such as oral interviews with those involved with Nazi medicine (both survivors and practitioners), war trial transcripts, and biographies, Lifton offers a comprehensive look at what exactly Nazi doctors did to their patients and why they did it. Though wary of accepting Lifton’s theory of doubling, I became convinced that the splitting of doctors’ selves greatly facilitated their transformation into killers. Lifton shows that many individuals, under the correct circumstances, can easily become active participants in genocide. |
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Essay (back to top)
In his book The Nazi Doctors, author Robert Jay Lifton traces the history and evolution of Nazi medicine: how it began, how it was implemented in concentration camps like Auschwitz, and how these doctors were able to assist with the systematic killing of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups who suffered during the Holocaust. Lifton draws on many sources for his work, including oral interviews with Auschwitz survivors, Nazi officials and physicians, and others involved in the euthanasia program; court transcripts from war crimes trials; depositions; and both biographical and autobiographical works. In this paper, I will provide more background on how doctors became involved with Nazi medicine, what they were asked to do, and who some of these Nazi doctors were. However, I will focus on how the Nazi doctors were able to go through with the killing and torture by examining Lifton’s use of the concept of “doubling.” I argue that “doubling,” in addition to other factors, such as psychological conditions within the doctors, the threat of discipline, the normalization of killing, and distancing and separation from victims, are instrumental in understanding how a doctor could so clearly violate the Hippocratic Oath. Before beginning, it is useful to provide more background on Nazi doctors. First, one must look at how doctors became involved in Nazi medicine in the first place. Nazis established a unique biomedical vision with Aryans plagued by a dangerous racial disease; the only cure for which was the death of all Jews (Lifton 16). Jews as a general race were considered to be nothing but vermin that had diseased the Aryan race. To solve this problem, the Nazis planned to modify the concept of natural selection by implementing their own “selections” of those fit to live. This was the idea of “scientific racism” in which “dangerous Jewish characteristics could be linked with alleged data of scientific disciplines, so that a ‘mainstream of racism’ formed from ‘the fusion of anthropology, eugenics, and social thought’” (Lifton 17). It was in this plan that doctors found they were uniquely situated. As Lifton writes, “it is they who work at the border of life and death, who are most associated with the awesome, death-defying, and sometimes death-dealing aura of the primitive shaman and medicine man … [It] is they who are likely to be called upon to become biological activists” (17). This means that they were to be the key actors in shaping natural selection for the Nazis through euthanasia and medical experimentation. Doctors then were instrumental in what Lifton terms “the medicalization of killing” – killing disguised as healing – which allowed for the systematization of genocide (14). No longer were the murders of Jews and others only periodic as they were in events like pogroms; these murders became routine and organized through euthanasia. Of course, Nazi doctors did not become involved with mass killings in concentration camps until later in the evolution of the euthanasia project. Before the institution of death camps, Nazis enacted medical killing policies in which killings were carried out in actual medical facilities, as a result of medical decisions, by doctors and assistants (Lifton 21). The Nazis implemented the practice of euthanasia only gradually and mostly in secret. Lifton writes: Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals; and then the killing of “impaired” adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to “impaired” inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves (21). At the beginning of the Nazi plan to extinguish the Jewish race, the method for doing so was forced sterilization. However, the methods soon turned much deadlier. The Nazis began implementing plans of mass murder. What then were the Nazi doctors’ roles in concentration camps like Auschwitz? Lifton argues that when examining a Nazi doctor, though one mostly hears of doctors’ more gruesome experiments, it is more important to look at a doctor’s participation in the more routine aspects at every point in the killing process (4). Lifton describes just how involved doctors were with the killing process in Auschwitz specifically, saying that Nazi doctors were directly responsible for the deaths of the majority of the one million who died there (18). As those in charge of selections, doctors literally held the power to decide who would die and who would be allowed to live for another few days, months, or years. These selections occurred both as soon as prisoners arrived on the ramps as well in the camps’ medical blocks. Doctors were in charge of the gas chambers as well: they decided who would be sent there, supervised the actual killings, and declared when the victims’ lives had ended. In addition, “doctors ordered and supervised, and at times carried out, direct killing of debilitated patients on the medical blocks by means of phenol injections into the bloodstream or the heart” (Lifton 18). Through this all, there was an air of medical legitimacy. Doctors filled out death certificates with misleading information to keep these killings secret. The death camps were run similarly to a hospital in many ways: attention was paid to how to keep selections efficient, how many prisoners were needed alive for slave labor, and how to dispose of dead bodies quickly and efficiently. Lifton describes several case studies of Nazi doctors, such as Ernst B. and Josef Mengele. Though responsible for many deaths, both men, like many other Nazi doctors, were seemingly ordinary individuals prior to their work in Auschwitz. Lifton explains that there is nothing in these doctors’ pasts to suggest that they would go on to commit such terrible crimes. He writes, “Neither brilliant nor stupid, neither inherently evil nor particularly ethically sensitive, they were by no means the demonic figures – sadistic, fanatic, lusting to kill – people have often thought them to be” (4). They were ordinary people who did extraordinary killings. Hannah Arendt described the phenomenon of the “banality of evil,” in which ordinary people can be responsible for mass murders and crimes against humanity (287 – 288). These are individuals who so fervently believe in a particular ideology that they rationalize their actions, regardless of whether they hurt another person, as completely normal. They do so because they feel that it is part of the job; not because they are particularly aggressive individuals (Milgram 324). These ordinary people, like those in Stanley Milgram’s experiment in which subjects blindly administered deadly electric shocks to an individual simply because they were instructed to, are the primary culprits behind acts of brutality, Arendt argues. Because of the banality of evil, “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” (Milgram 324). However, many of these doctors were not just doing as they were told; they often committed crimes on their own and some, such as Mengele, took pleasure in their cruelty. This is not the mark of an ordinary person. Milgram is helpful in showing how a previously ordinary individual can be capable of evil; however, they soon become extraordinary individuals through doing evil. This is why Lifton does not seek to further Arendt’s argument regarding the banality of evil. He writes, “Repeatedly in this study, I describe banal men performing demonic acts. In doing so – or in order to do so – the men themselves changed; and in carrying out their actions, they themselves were no longer banal” (Lifton 12). Instead, his main argument for how Nazi doctors were able to turn from healing to killing is that they employed the psychological concept of “doubling.” This process involves a splitting of an individual’s self into two parts, which each act as a functioning whole self, not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Lifton 418). While all humans experience some doubling as part of regular life, in these cases one’s opposing or “evil” self can become unrestrained and take over (Lifton 420). Nazi doctors were then able to place the blame for their senseless actions on their “other” selves. They could dissociate themselves from what was actually happening. Lifton also notes psychological characteristics within the doctors, that were enhanced within the Auschwitz environment and helped to facilitate doubling processes (417). According to Lifton, a doctor’s ideologies and beliefs before coming to the concentration camp are a major red flag. He asks us to “consider the more or less typical Nazi doctor who sought from the movement a form of national renewal; who laughed at the more extreme claims of Nazi racial theory but was drawn to ‘scientific racism’ with its emphasis on German unity” (Lifton 434). These doctors may have been concerned with unifying Germany without fully buying into the Nazi idea of a racial disease but would have been easily convinced that this unification could only come from extreme measures. Doctors such as these could answer the call of Nazism fairly enthusiastically under the right conditions. Lifton also looks at institutional support structures which helped doctors ease into killing. In addition to doubling and other characteristics, there was “the ramrod discipline of the SS corps” to keep doctors from backing out (Kuper). If doctors did not perform the jobs they were told to do, they could face punishment. Another factor was the normalization of death and killing within the concentration camps. When an individual sees death and murders on the scale of those that occurred within Auschwitz, one becomes desensitized to death. In addition, Lifton also illustrates how distancing and separation made killing easier. When discussing the “surgical” way in which many were killed through gassing, Lifton notes that this was an important method because it maintained a safe amount of distance between killer and victim, thus minimizing some of the psychological problems doctors experienced (15). The professional status of the doctors also provided a measure of distance and separation from prisoners. Their status reinforced the idea that they were somehow fundamentally different from prisoners and had unlimited authority. All of these factors allowed doctors to complete their jobs and to avoid feeling excessive guilt over what they were doing. They could distribute the guilt to their other selves and place a great amount of distance (both physically and through their professional demeanor) between themselves and their victims. Some, such as Charles Roland, find Lifton’s argument unconvincing. He writes that “what the term doubling conceals is the banal truth that we all behave at times in a manner that does not conform to accepted social standards” (Roland). To Roland, one does not need to use a fancy term like doubling to say that sometimes we all do terrible things; it is simply part of being human – though many of us are not responsible for murder. Humans are prone to being easily persuaded by charismatic leaders and their ideologies, to hatred toward others, and to following authority. In a similar vein, Kuper in his review of The Nazi Doctors questions “whether one really needs so powerful a mechanism as ‘doubling’ to interpret the dedication of ideologically motivated Nazi doctors.” However, he finds the silver lining in Lifton’s concept: that perhaps this is just “an expression of Lifton’s humanism,” an admirable quality Kuper has found to saturate many of Lifton’s writings. He makes an interesting point, positing that perhaps we simply want to things to be more black and white and to easily identify these individuals as demonic. Events like the Holocaust lead participants to discover parts of themselves that they never knew existed; the most quiet, unaggressive person can be transformed by the situation into the cruelest of killers. When individuals are confronted with new situations, they undoubtedly change, sometimes for worse. Terrible genocides can also lead those who were not involved to examine themselves and question what they would do if put in the same situation. Many of us would like to think that participants in genocide were somehow born monsters or were psychologically different from the rest of us. We as humans like to categorize things and for things to operate as strict binaries: good or evil, black or white. We want to be able to say that these doctors are rare monsters in order to feel less uncomfortable with the knowledge that these men were for the most part ordinary and that many individuals would not have acted any differently. While this would be nice, actions cannot be so easily explained and it is necessary to have theories such as Lifton’s to understand why Nazi doctors could do such terrible things. Lifton offers a comprehensive look into the evolution of Nazi medicine, what Nazi doctors were asked to do, and who some of the more famous doctors were. He also offers some answers as to how a doctor could participate in something as evil as the mass murder of millions. He describes the process of doubling and the various mechanisms that allowed Nazi doctors to overcome their inhibitions surrounding taking an individual’s life. All together, these answers provide a detailed account of how doctors could kill and how genocide can still occur. This is an important book that could prove useful in avoiding more mass murder.
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Annotated Bibliography and Links (back to top)(links last checked 3/23/10) Book Reviews
Books and Articles
Relevant Websites
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Any student tempted to use this paper for an assignment in another course or school should be aware of the serious consequences for plagiarism. Here is what I write in my syllabi:
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