The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Abstract

If a lexicon were compiled of the greatest inhumanities man has visited on his fellows, the Holocaust would surely be the preeminent subject. The Nazi "final solution," promulgated in January 1942 at the Wansee Conference, was dedicated to the permanent eradication of Judaism. It was not a conceptual reshuffling of religious identity by conversion but rather a physical destruction. This genocidal purging was deemed a necessary program to rid the world, and more specifically the Aryan people, of the genetic reservoir of polluting Jewish genes. How this monstrous endeavor could be conceived and accomplished is the subject of Robert Jay Lifton'sThe Nazi Doctors. Dr Lifton, a renowned psychiatrist and author, spent a decade interviewing Nazi doctors and concentration camp survivors to piece together the horrifying process by which German physicians aided (for the most part willingly) in the destruction of 6 million innocent men, women, and children. Dr Lifton

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