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.
