Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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First meetings between adopted brothers and sisters can have an erotic aspect, with prolonged hugging, kissing and nervous jokes about sleeping together. Indeed, says Betty Jean Lifton, an adoptee and the author of Lost and Found...
...Lifton concedes that most other German professionals also capitulated to Hitler, with certain heroic exceptions. What made the corruption of physicians so crucial to Hitler was that their support provided moral and scientific legitimacy for his crazed racial and biological notions. They did this in varying ways: by cooperating in sterilization and euthanasia programs, by counseling patients toward "racially pure" marriages, by expelling Jews from medicine, and by actually helping carry out the Holocaust. After all, it was doctors who supervised the "selections" at the concentration camps-deciding who would live to work, who would die in the gas chambers...
...Says Lifton: "Doctors were the embodiment of 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...
...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...
...Lifton sees another, more controversial psychological device at work. Because most cultures fear dying, one way to combat that dread is to look around for an enemy that symbolizes death. For the Nazis, it was the Jews, who had long been portrayed as Christ killers. Says Lifton: "If you view the Jews as death-tainted, then killing them seems to serve life." In Lifton's eyes, those who look upon the Nazis or their medical henchmen simply as maddened sadists are on the wrong track. "Most killing is not done out of sadism, not even most Nazi killing," says...