Word: cohen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Jews sent to Auschwitz, only a handful survived, and Cohen asks himself relentlessly, "Why did I survive?" The answer, he believes, lies largely in his psychological preparation for the ordeal. He had an active, personal philosophy of life. A theoretical Zionist who had put the comforts of Holland above the rigors of pioneering in Palestine, he blamed himself: "I hadn't been enough of a 'hero' to go to Palestine." Much the same, he adds, was true for the political foes of Naziism who were prisoners: "They could understand why they were in camp." Finally, Cohen knew...
...exception to the rule of animal egotism, a group of prisoners would sacrifice part of their ration to give a dying friend a last pleasure. "In those people, I think, some standards of their old superego [conscience] had remained stronger than the influences of the concentration camp," says Dr. Cohen...
...summary, Dr. Cohen describes the prisoners' transition from the initial reaction to the stage of adaptation, in which hunger becomes the all-consuming drive and the sex urge disappears. Then comes the third stage, one of acquiescence, when prisoners accept their fate and the amorality of camp life. With their jealousies and factionalism, the prisoners do not form an "organized mass" in the Freudian sense, says Dr. Cohen, but merely a crowd...
...jailers, on the other hand, he sees as a highly organized mass. He tries to explain their psychology in the light of German traditions. First, Dr. Cohen makes a distinction between SS men who committed common acts of cruelty and those who had the job of gassing Jews. "The latter," he says, "were educated to believe that jews were inferior people, guilty of Germany's defeat in the First World War. The German superego (the interaction of parents, educators, laws of the country, rules of society) accepted these ideas . . . German education taught that you have to obey every order...
Minor mistreatment of prisoners was also part of the German pattern, in which superiors mistreat subordinates, Dr. Cohen reasons. Most difficult to explain, he found, were deliberately planned tortures. He feels these cases cannot be dismissed as simple sadism. Rather, he believes, they resulted from Freud's drive of aggression, heightened by frustration. "Normally this drive is counteracted by mental inhibitions provided by society, but Nazi society supported this aggression...