The scientists of Nazi Germany

The scientists of Nazi Germany

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—Berlin, Germany (Public Domain)

Originally published 23 March 1987

When I was a kid, my favorite com­ic strip hero was Cap­tain Mar­vel. The archvil­lain of the strip was the mad sci­en­tist, Dr. Sivana, who used his con­sid­er­able pow­ers of intel­lect in evil plots to dom­i­nate the world.

Mad sci­en­tists have often been cast as vil­lains, in comics, movies, and even lit­er­a­ture (remem­ber Dr. Jekyl­l’s fiendish oth­er self, and that stu­dent of chem­istry and anato­my named Franken­stein). It is not hard to under­stand why. In their roles of truth-seek­ers and heal­ers, sci­en­tists and physi­cians rep­re­sent what is best in our­selves. When that same pow­er is turned to evil, it is a suit­able guise for villainy.

But no com­ic, no movie, no work of lit­er­a­ture could have pre­pared the mind for the mag­ni­tude of vil­lainy exposed in Robert Jay Lifton’s recent book, The Nazi Doc­tors (Basic Books, 1986). In the face of the Nazi per­ver­sion of med­ical sci­ence the mind recoils, stunned, revolt­ed, unbe­liev­ing. The Nazi “mad sci­en­tists” do not fit the usu­al hero/an­ti-hero dichoto­my. They car­ried the arts of know­ing and heal­ing into inver­sions so ter­ri­ble as to seem beyond the bounds of human good and evil.

Robert Jay Lifton, a pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try and Psy­chol­o­gy at John Jay Col­lege and the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter of the Uni­ver­si­ty of New York, has writ­ten sev­er­al wide­ly-acclaimed psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies. In The Nazi Doc­tors he brings his skills as a thinker and writer to the prob­lem of under­stand­ing the minds of the Ger­man physi­cians who became instru­ments of geno­cide in the name of bio-racist “sci­ence.” If the book has a flaw, it is that any attempt to under­stand the psy­chol­o­gy of the killers must inevitably be incom­men­su­rate with the enor­mi­ty of their crime.

Willing collaborators

For any­one con­cerned with the human dimen­sion of sci­ence, Lifton’s book should be required read­ing. Again and again I picked it up — and again and again turned away in revul­sion. It is a book that requires courage (and a strong stom­ach) to read. When at last I had fin­ished it, I put it down with relief. These are things which one must know, but to dwell too long on the grotes­queries of the Nazi death camps invites a kind of madness.

Lifton’s book does two things. First, it traces the process by which a sig­nif­i­cant part of the Ger­man med­ical pro­fes­sion was made the will­ing col­lab­o­ra­tor in mur­der; and, sec­ond, it attempts to under­stand the psy­cho­log­i­cal cir­cum­stances in which ordi­nary peo­ple — sci­en­tists and heal­ers — became par­tic­i­pants in mon­strous acts of evil.

The slip­pery slope to Auschwitz began before Hitler’s rise to pow­er with debate among med­ical the­o­rists on the right­ness of euthana­sia — the med­ical killing of severe­ly insane or ter­mi­nal­ly ill patients — and the forced ster­il­iza­tion of the insane and car­ri­ers of genet­ic defects. With the ascen­dan­cy of the Nazi regime, euthana­sia and forced ster­il­iza­tion became state poli­cies, with the osten­si­ble pur­pose of pre­serv­ing “the puri­ty of Ger­man blood.” The killing of impaired mem­bers of soci­ety was “jus­ti­fied” by the same med­ical eth­ic that allows a doc­tor to remove a dis­eased limb or organ to save the life of an indi­vid­ual. Soon, with the coop­er­a­tion of physi­cians and psy­chi­a­trists, gas cham­bers and cre­ma­to­ria were employed to emp­ty the hos­pi­tals and asy­lums of “life unwor­thy of life.”

What is strik­ing about Lifton’s account is how lit­tle resis­tance physi­cians and sci­en­tists offered to these dia­bol­i­cal poli­cies. When wide­spread protest final­ly caused the euthana­sia pol­i­cy to be pub­licly revoked, it came most­ly from reli­gious lead­ers and the fam­i­lies of victims.

But of course, euthana­sia was not dis­con­tin­ued; it only pro­ceed­ed more qui­et­ly. The cre­ma­to­ria were dis­man­tled and moved to camps in the occu­pied East. Now began the gris­ly busi­ness of mass mur­der of healthy and sick alike, includ­ing the sys­tem­at­ic exter­mi­na­tion of Euro­pean Jews. And still the doc­tors par­tic­i­pat­ed. Their par­tic­i­pa­tion was held to be essen­tial by the bureau­crats who ran the camps: It lent the oper­a­tions a cer­tain moral and sci­en­tif­ic “cor­rect­ness.”

Lifton’s book does lit­tle to explain how so many Ger­man doc­tors became cor­rupt­ed. As we read of their activ­i­ties — arbi­trar­i­ly select­ing those who will live and die, con­tribut­ing their knowl­edge of physics and chem­istry to the solu­tion of such prob­lems as how to make great heaps of bod­ies burn — we shake our heads in bewil­der­ment; no com­bi­na­tion of pro­fes­sion­al ambi­tion, pro­pa­gan­da, peer pres­sure, or cow­ardice seems an ade­quate expla­na­tion for their actions.

Lifton does offer some insight into how the doc­tors man­aged to cope with their crime, by a process he calls “dou­bling” — the divi­sion of the self into two func­tion­ing wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. Accord­ing to Lifton, “the Nazi doc­tor need­ed his Auschwitz self to func­tion psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly in an envi­ron­ment so anti­thet­i­cal to his pre­vi­ous eth­i­cal stan­dards. At the same time, he need­ed his pri­or self in order to con­tin­ue to see him­self as humane physi­cian, hus­band, and father.” Each self dis­avowed the oth­er. The Auschwitz self repu­di­at­ed the nor­mal mean­ing of mur­der; the pri­or self remained detached from any­thing done by the Auschwitz self.

Dou­bling, as Lifton defines it, is not the rad­i­cal dis­so­ci­a­tion of self encoun­tered in the dis­or­der known as mul­ti­ple or “dual” per­son­al­i­ty. The Nazi doc­tors can not be judged “not guilty” on account of insan­i­ty. Dou­bling is a sane per­son­’s way of evad­ing moral respon­si­bil­i­ty, not of elim­i­nat­ing it.

It is this last insight that makes Lifton’s book valu­able cau­tion­ary read­ing for any sci­en­tist or med­ical researcher whose work has any sort of anti-social or anti-envi­ron­men­tal ram­i­fi­ca­tions, no mat­ter how triv­ial by the ghast­ly stan­dard of the Holo­caust. Dou­bling is a psy­cho­log­i­cal maneu­ver we can all employ to deal with moral con­tra­dic­tions; in Auschwitz, the maneu­ver was car­ried to an unpar­al­leled extreme.

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