Doctors of the Death Camps

An American psychiatrist examines some murderous M.D.s

Of all the troubling questions that linger from the Holocaust, one is as baffling today as it was when the first Allied soldiers stumbled upon the Nazi death camps: How could German physicians, heirs to Europe's proudest medical tradition, participate in mass slaughter and grisly human experiments?

No one has offered a convincing answer, certainly not the participants themselves. Only last week a West Berlin court convicted a former SS doctor of having murdered scores of inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria--"sometimes out of pure boredom," said the judge. For Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who has spent much of his professional life examining disaster, understanding the doctors of the Holocaust has now become a particularly grim challenge.

The author of a notable study of Hiroshima survivors, Death in Life, and other examinations of disaster, Lifton is writing two books: one on Auschwitz doctors, another on the medical profession under Hitler. As Lifton told TIME Associate Editor John Leo, collaboration by doctors was crucial to the Nazis' warped success. Says Lifton: "Doctors were key agents in the Holocaust. They are enormously implicated in the killing."

Lifton, 53, had been planning to write about the Holocaust for years, but this opportunity came by chance. Two years ago, the New York Times Book Co., a subsidiary of the newspaper, hired a German jurist as a consultant for a proposed book on Auschwitz. Lifton agreed to write it.

Financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, Lifton spent ten months in Europe and the Middle East interviewing scores of German doctors, former Nazi bureaucrats and inmate doctors, mostly Jewish and Polish.

For Lifton, a Jew, these examinations were obviously painful. Even a generation later, Lifton found, many of the German doctors resorted to complicated mental gymnastics in discussing their Hitler days, and often seemed to be almost totally unreconstructed. Some saw themselves as idealistic Nazis who worked to restrain primitive elements within the movement.

Others continued to feel the magnetism of Nazism. As Lifton explains, in an almost defensively clinical tone: "Often the former Nazi doctors seem to have two separate and functional selves--a conventional conservative postwar German attitude toward Nazism and its 'excesses' and a nostalgia for the excitement, power and sense of purpose of the Nazi days. For many, that intensity is so great that the Nazi belief system has not been given up."

Lifton concedes that most other German professionals also capitulated to Hitler, with certain heroic exceptions. What made the corruption of physicians so crucial to Hitler was that their support provided moral and scientific legitimacy for his crazed racial and biological notions. They did this in varying ways: by cooperating in sterilization and euthanasia programs, by counseling patients toward "racially pure" marriages, by expelling Jews from medicine, and by actually helping carry out the Holocaust. After all, it was doctors who supervised the "selections" at the concentration camps--deciding who would live to work, who would die in the gas chambers, who would become guinea pigs in barbarous experiments justified as science.

Says Lifton: "Doctors were the embodiment of Nazi political and racial ideology in its ultimate murderous form. The killing came to be projected as a medical operation." Incredibly, some came to see genocide as a health measure. Said one: "If you have a gangrenous growth, you have to remove it." Another commented coldly that life at Auschwitz was as routine as "building a sewage project." Against the background of a eugenics movement that gained unfortunate respectability in some scientific circles in Europe and America during the '30s, says Lifton, "many doctors came to see themselves as vast revolutionary biological therapists." The third ranking doctor in the Nazi hierarchy admitted to him that he joined the party when someone fired his imagination by arguing that "Nazism is applied biology."

How did so many doctors manage to preside over killings while viewing themselves as idealists? And how could they possibly continue to regard themselves in so favorable a light even today? Lifton concludes that they invoked two standard psychological forms of selfdelusion: the first is "psychic numbing"; at Auschwitz, for example, doctors talked compulsively about technical matters to avoid confronting the reality of all the horrors around them. The second is "middle knowledge," a form of knowing and not knowing at the very same time. One doctor who had shipped large allocations of cyanide to the SS storm troopers who ran the camps seemed genuinely shocked to learn that it had been used to exterminate Jews and other people. Comments Lifton dryly: "He had worked very hard not to know."

Lifton sees another, more controversial psychological device at work. Because most cultures fear dying, one way to combat that dread is to look around for an enemy that symbolizes death. For the Nazis, it was the Jews, who had long been portrayed as Christ killers. Says Lifton: "If you view the Jews as death-tainted, then killing them seems to serve life." In Lifton's eyes, those who look upon the Nazis or their medical henchmen simply as maddened sadists are on the wrong track. "Most killing is not done out of sadism, not even most Nazi killing," says Lifton. The reality of medical participation in the Holocaust, as he sees it, is even more chilling: "The murders are done around a perverted vision of life enhancement."

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