Word: auschwitzes
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Jewish people (at Auschwitz): I kneel before all the inscriptions that come one after another bearing the memory of the victims, before the inscription in Hebrew. This inscription awakens the memory of the people whose sons and daughters were intended for total extermination. This people draws its origin from Abraham, our father in faith, as was expressed by Saul of Tarsus. The very people that received from God the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" it self experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference...