Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, Lifton spent ten months in Europe and the Middle East interviewing scores of German doctors, former Nazi bureaucrats and inmate doctors, mostly Jewish and Polish...
...Lifton, a Jew, these examinations were obviously painful. Even a generation later, Lifton found, many of the German doctors resorted to complicated mental gymnastics in discussing their Hitler days, and often seemed to be almost totally unreconstructed. Some saw themselves as idealistic Nazis who worked to restrain primitive elements within the movement...
Others continued to feel the magnetism of Nazism. As Lifton explains, in an almost defensively clinical tone: "Often the former Nazi doctors seem to have two separate and functional selves-a conventional conservative postwar German attitude toward Nazism and its 'excesses' and a nostalgia for the excitement, power and sense of purpose of the Nazi days. For many, that intensity is so great that the Nazi belief system has not been given...