Perhaps the most large-scale, infamous misappropriation and misapplication of medical personnel and practices and widespread perversion of medical research occurred in the Holocaust. As Lifton [Lifton RJ: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.] recounts in his monumental study, The Nazi Doctors, the Nazi ‘biomedical vision’ seized on the metaphor of healing the racially diseased body of the German nation.
In this context, killing those who constituted the disease was a therapeutic venture, much as the excision of a malignant growth. “The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on the simple concept of ‘life unworthy of life’ (lebensunwertes Leben) … 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.” [Lifton RJ: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.]
Lifton [Lifton RJ: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.] quotes Martin Borman, “The Fuhrer holds the cleansing of the medical profession far more important than, for example, that of the bureaucracy, since in his opinion the duty of the physician is or should be one of racial leadership.” In the camps, Jewish doctors among the inmates on occasion were forced into assuming various roles in the Nazis' projects.
Lifton [Lifton RJ: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.] found that many of the Nazi doctors coped with the tension between their usual selves and values and the roles that they had in the camps by ‘doubling,’ i.e., by forming a self that could tolerate and adapt to the total perversion of traditional medical values. “In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.” [Lifton RJ: The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.]
Even more disturbing than the mass killings of the concentration camps was how the prisoners were routinely stripped of all human dignity. The camps and the killing was all about efficiency. Having prisoners naked added to the efficiency and made them more compliant.
Within 90 minutes of arrival at the camps, after being stripped of possessions, clothes and all human dignity, prisoners were prodded naked down what the SS laughingly called Himmelstrasse - "the road to heaven" - to the "showers."
They complied because the guards were authority figures and the purpose of undressing was for "hygiene" and "medical" reasons. The medical aspect was to choose the which prisoners were to be used for slave labor and medical experiments, the rest were sent to the gas chambers.
Medicalization of the killing process was one of the many deceptions the Nazis used. It was partly for the victims so that they can be rendered non-resisting as much as possible, and for the Nazis, so they can see themselves as some way caring out a legitimate medical procedure.
Auschwitz was not just an extermination camp, it was the clearest example of German doctors betrayal of all their ethical training. For the first time physicians could implement death into their medical research. Buchenwald was the first camp to use prisoners for medical experiments, but it was not the only one.
Doctors had been the largest professional group to join the SS. Their crimes were so great, that a separate trial took place in Germany for them. The object of their experiments was not how to rescue or cure, but to destroy and kill.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide - 1986
Robert Jay Lifton (B.1926)
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Graphic - Meagan Magpie Rodgers (B.1996)
