Total Madness: General Selected Writings by Various Authors.
THE NAZI DOCTORS Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Jay Lifton
The following selections were taken from THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, by Robert J. Lifton, © 1986
“Bureaucracy, then, does much to render into a machine the human killing network and to deamplify the killing process for all concerned.”
Introduction to Part III
The behavior of Nazi doctors suggests the beginnings of a psychology of genocide. To clarify the principles involved, I will first focus systematically on the psychological pattern of doubling, which was the doctors’ overall mechanism for participating in evil. Then it is also necessary to identify certain tendencies in their behavior, promulgated and even demanded by the Auschwitz environment, which greatly facilitated the doubling. This exploration is meant to serve two purposes: First, it can provide new insight into the motivations and actions of Nazi doctors and of Nazis in general. Second, it can raise broader questions about human behavior, about ways in which people, individually and collectively, can embrace various forms of destructiveness and evil, with or without the awareness of doing so. The two purposes, in a very real sense, are one. If there is any truth to the psychological and moral judgments we make about the specific and unique characteristics of Nazi mass murder, we are bound to derive from them principles that apply more widely — principles that speak to the extraordinary threat and potential for self-annihilation that now haunt humankind. [p.417]
Genocidal Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy makes possible the entire genocidal sequence: organization, continued function, and distancing, numbing, and doubling of perpetrators.
Bureaucracy helps render genocide unreal. It further diffuses the impact of murderous events that, to begin with, are difficult to believe. In this sense we may say that the bureaucracy deamplifies genocide: diminishes the emotional and intellectual tones associated with the killing, primarily for perpetrator but also for bystanders* and victims. Central to the process is the dampening of language, the use not only of euphemisms (“resettlement” or “deportation” for killing) but also of certain code terms (“special treatment,” for instance) that are specific enough in designating murderous acts to maintain bureaucratic efficiency, even to THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
give them special priority, while contributing to a partial sense that one is not murdering people at all but doing something benign. This deamplification of language — with its attendant numbing, denial, and derealization — may extend to the point of relative silence, thereby maintaining the mixture of part-secrecy and “middle knowledge” likely to surround genocide.
Max Weber, though recognizing the necessity of bureaucracies, was acutely aware of their danger, especially to the mind. He equated bureaucracy with the “inanimate machine” of “mind objectified” and saw the phenomenon of bureaucratic organization as “busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt.”130 The Nazi genocidal project demonstrated that the human structure can be rendered relatively “inanimate” and “machine”-like, and the mind of bureaucratic perpetrators sufficiently “objectified” that the killing was rarely experienced in human terms, as vital beings murdering other vital beings. An important part of bureaucratic function is its sealing off of perpetrators from outside influences, so that intrabureaucratic concerns become the entire universe of discourse. What can result has been termed “group think,” a process by which bureaucracies can make decisions that are disastrous for all concerned and, when viewed retrospectively, wildly inappropriate and irrational. Irving Janis attributes “group think” to the collective need for cohesiveness and unity and to the avoidance of the kind of conflict engendered by dissenting voices.131 But when the group concerned is a genocidal bureaucracy, there is a powerful impulse, both from without and within, to create absolute barriers of thought and feeling between itself and the outside world. Only then can the strange assumptions of virtue within the group be maintained: ideological (“We are doing this for revitalization of our people”), technical (“What is most efficient is best for everyone”), and therapeutic (“We are healing our race and going about it as humanely as possible”).
The genocidal bureaucracy contributes also to collective feelings of inevitability. The elaborateness of the bureaucracy’s organization conveys a sense of the inexorable — that one might as well (as perpetrator or, victim). go along because nothing can be done. The bureaucracy’s structure and function — the murderous flow of its action — becomes itself the rationale, as clarity of cause and effect gives way to a sense not only of inevitability but of necessity.
Ancillary bureaucracies can be all too readily enlisted to carry out the genocide, as in the case of the German railroad organization in transporting Jews to the death camps while holding strictly to its own conventional bureaucratic routine (see page 446).132
Under certain circumstances, victims' bureaucracies can be coerced into participating in their own people’s victimization (as, for instance, Judenrat organizations, and also those prisoner doctors who collaborated closely with the Nazis [see chapter, 13]) Perpetrators’ bureaucratic de- [… amplification [de…] amplification can contribute to that participation of victims, and to victims’ own distancing from, and resistance to, the truth about the mass murder of their fellows. (Hence the failure of many Jews in Germany and Europe to recognize the danger they faced, and the relative inactivity of most American Jews despite increasing evidence of Jewish genocide in Europe.)
The combination of relative silence and organizational reach puts the bureaucracy in the best position to plan the details of genocide. That original involvement in planning contributes in turn to the bureaucracy's normalization of a genocidal universe.133 Mass murder is everywhere but at the same time (through the efforts of the bureaucracy) nowhere. There is only a flow of events to which most people in the environment (as Dr. B. said of Auschwitz doctors) come to say yes. To say no would take one outside that flow, outside of normal social existence, outside of reality. One seeks instead the most “humane” path within the going project.
Yet it is a mistake to speak of bureaucracy as “faceless” and “monolithic.” The faces are there, even if hidden and merged into a mass. And the apparent monolith can encompass divergent and contending positions. These conflicts make up part of the dynamic of any bureaucracy, even in totalistic circumstances. People vary considerably in how they function in bureaucracies, and the bureaucracies themselves vary in their relationships to political regimes. Bureaucracies can give rise to initiative for pursuing genocide, even at relatively low levels (as we have seen to be the case with Nazi bureaucrats, including doctors). That initiative is. likely, to reflect an individual or a group’s keen sense of what is desired by the regime’s leaders, to whom bureaucracies, at least totalistic ones, are likely to be closely attuned.
Bureaucratic practice also contributes to the later cover-up of genocide by not only dampening everyone’s responses but also serving to hide individual perpetrators. The attempt of German doctors to suppress the truth of their profound involvement in Nazi genocide is a case in point, even if that attempt eventually failed; there were similar patterns in Armenian genocide.
Bureaucracy, then, does much to render into a machine the human killing network and to deamplify the killing process for all concerned: the experience of killing for perpetrators, and the actuality of killing for bystanders and potential victims. But bureaucratic deamplification and hiding should not be confused with nonresponsibility.
A “Correct” Bureaucrat
Wirths combined bureaucratic skill with a quality of “correctness” (a concept of proper, controlled, relatively impersonal behavior that infuses German culture and character) and reliability in ways that enabled him to help inmates while succeeding within the SS. His organizational loyalty was always clear to other SS observers. Ernst B. looked upon him as little more than a representative of Nazi authority, a man one would do well to stay away from because of his demanding “spirit of the bureaucrat.” Rudolf Höss, observing Wirths more closely, spoke of him as a man with “a strong feeling of duty,” who was “extremely conscientious and … obeyed all orders and directives with painstaking care.” Also “correct” with inmates, the commandant went on, Wirths’s only fault was frequently to be “very soft and good natured” with them and to treat prisoner physicians “as colleagues.” But he was “a good comrade … very popular”; he “helped everyone who came to him,” and “everybody trusted him.”19
For “everybody” to trust Wirths required that he largely accept the Auschwitz situation — as Höss implied in commenting that Wirths never objected to the use of an ambulance marked with a red cross to transport those selected for death to the gas chamber, despite the fact that he “was usually very sensitive about such matters.” Indeed Wirths himself drove about in, a car flying “a white pennant with a red cross.”20
There is a similar implication in a comment made by Helmut Wirths, concerning a horrible scene of extremely emaciated corpses he and his brother had viewed outside of a medical block: “What really bothered me was his [Eduard’s] telling me that these were the dead from natural causes.” Wirths meant of course that they were not victims of the gas chamber or any other means of direct killing — but in calling any deaths in Auschwitz “natural,” he was going quite far in his identification with the institution. :
Wirths’s ideological anti-Semitism contributed to his bureaucratic adaptation to Auschwitz. He could permit Jewish prisoner doctors to do more medical work, but said it would be “impossible” for them to treat any Aryans and insisted that the medical blocks be set up to prevent that from happening. His concept of the "correct" was probably involved here no less than his ideological anti-Semitism.
His bureaucratic integration also undoubtedly contributed to his typhus experiments. Langbein told me that he estimated Wirths’s thought processes to be as follows: Typhus was still a problem for SS personnel; a new medication or serum had to be tested; and since there were no typhus cases at that time in Auschwitz: “These are anyhow only Jews, they would die in any case, but now I can try out a drug [on them] which could be important for many [German] people.”21
Perhaps Wirths’s organizational loyalty was most revealed when he invited Langbein to win his freedom by joining the SS. Wirths had been excited to learn that this policy, occasionally applied to Aryan prisoners, could be implemented with Langbein in a way that would permit him to continue the work he was doing in the camp, but from within the SS. Wirths was upset when Langbein gently refused (“His face los[t] its friendliness”); but upon hearing Langbein’s explanation that since the inmates were his comrades, he would not be able to do the things SS men in Auschwitz were commanded to do, Wirths commented, “Your view does you honor,” though sounding “a bit disappointed.”22*
Healing-Killing Conflict:
Eduard Wirths
I can say that I have always done my duty and have never done anything contrary to what was expected of me.
— EDUARD WIRTHS
Eduard Wirths lived out most directly, and most extremely, the Auschwitz healing-killing conflict and paradox. A man with a strong reputation as a dedicated physician, and described by inmates who could observe him closely as “kind,” “conscientious,” “decent,” “polite,” and “honest,” he was the same man who established the camp’s system of selections and medicalized killing and supervised the overall process during the two years in which most of the mass murder was accomplished. Because of that dichotomy, he was one of the few Auschwitz doctors frequently spoken of as not only criminal but a tragic figure. Hermann Langbein, the political prisoner who served as his secretary in both Dachau and Auschwitz believed him to be the only Nazi doctor in Auschwitz who refused to succumb to its ubiquitous corruption and in no way enriched himself there. From the time of his first encounter with Wirths in Dachau, Langbein was struck by his medical conscientiousness and considered him “completely different from other SS doctors.”©ˆ[pgs.392-393 ]
For further study:
Table of contents 
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
“Bureaucracy, then, does much to render into a machine the human killing network and to deamplify the killing process for all concerned.”
Introduction to Part III
The behavior of Nazi doctors suggests the beginnings of a psychology of genocide. To clarify the principles involved, I will first focus systematically on the psychological pattern of doubling, which was the doctors’ overall mechanism for participating in evil. Then it is also necessary to identify certain tendencies in their behavior, promulgated and even demanded by the Auschwitz environment, which greatly facilitated the doubling. This exploration is meant to serve two purposes: First, it can provide new insight into the motivations and actions of Nazi doctors and of Nazis in general. Second, it can raise broader questions about human behavior, about ways in which people, individually and collectively, can embrace various forms of destructiveness and evil, with or without the awareness of doing so. The two purposes, in a very real sense, are one. If there is any truth to the psychological and moral judgments we make about the specific and unique characteristics of Nazi mass murder, we are bound to derive from them principles that apply more widely — principles that speak to the extraordinary threat and potential for self-annihilation that now haunt humankind. [p.417]
Genocidal Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy makes possible the entire genocidal sequence: organization, continued function, and distancing, numbing, and doubling of perpetrators.
Bureaucracy helps render genocide unreal. It further diffuses the impact of murderous events that, to begin with, are difficult to believe. In this sense we may say that the bureaucracy deamplifies genocide: diminishes the emotional and intellectual tones associated with the killing, primarily for perpetrator but also for bystanders* and victims. Central to the process is the dampening of language, the use not only of euphemisms (“resettlement” or “deportation” for killing) but also of certain code terms (“special treatment,” for instance) that are specific enough in designating murderous acts to maintain bureaucratic efficiency, even to THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
give them special priority, while contributing to a partial sense that one is not murdering people at all but doing something benign. This deamplification of language — with its attendant numbing, denial, and derealization — may extend to the point of relative silence, thereby maintaining the mixture of part-secrecy and “middle knowledge” likely to surround genocide.
Max Weber, though recognizing the necessity of bureaucracies, was acutely aware of their danger, especially to the mind. He equated bureaucracy with the “inanimate machine” of “mind objectified” and saw the phenomenon of bureaucratic organization as “busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt.”130 The Nazi genocidal project demonstrated that the human structure can be rendered relatively “inanimate” and “machine”-like, and the mind of bureaucratic perpetrators sufficiently “objectified” that the killing was rarely experienced in human terms, as vital beings murdering other vital beings. An important part of bureaucratic function is its sealing off of perpetrators from outside influences, so that intrabureaucratic concerns become the entire universe of discourse. What can result has been termed “group think,” a process by which bureaucracies can make decisions that are disastrous for all concerned and, when viewed retrospectively, wildly inappropriate and irrational. Irving Janis attributes “group think” to the collective need for cohesiveness and unity and to the avoidance of the kind of conflict engendered by dissenting voices.131 But when the group concerned is a genocidal bureaucracy, there is a powerful impulse, both from without and within, to create absolute barriers of thought and feeling between itself and the outside world. Only then can the strange assumptions of virtue within the group be maintained: ideological (“We are doing this for revitalization of our people”), technical (“What is most efficient is best for everyone”), and therapeutic (“We are healing our race and going about it as humanely as possible”).
The genocidal bureaucracy contributes also to collective feelings of inevitability. The elaborateness of the bureaucracy’s organization conveys a sense of the inexorable — that one might as well (as perpetrator or, victim). go along because nothing can be done. The bureaucracy’s structure and function — the murderous flow of its action — becomes itself the rationale, as clarity of cause and effect gives way to a sense not only of inevitability but of necessity.
Ancillary bureaucracies can be all too readily enlisted to carry out the genocide, as in the case of the German railroad organization in transporting Jews to the death camps while holding strictly to its own conventional bureaucratic routine (see page 446).132
Under certain circumstances, victims' bureaucracies can be coerced into participating in their own people’s victimization (as, for instance, Judenrat organizations, and also those prisoner doctors who collaborated closely with the Nazis [see chapter, 13]) Perpetrators’ bureaucratic de- [… amplification [de…] amplification can contribute to that participation of victims, and to victims’ own distancing from, and resistance to, the truth about the mass murder of their fellows. (Hence the failure of many Jews in Germany and Europe to recognize the danger they faced, and the relative inactivity of most American Jews despite increasing evidence of Jewish genocide in Europe.)
The combination of relative silence and organizational reach puts the bureaucracy in the best position to plan the details of genocide. That original involvement in planning contributes in turn to the bureaucracy's normalization of a genocidal universe.133 Mass murder is everywhere but at the same time (through the efforts of the bureaucracy) nowhere. There is only a flow of events to which most people in the environment (as Dr. B. said of Auschwitz doctors) come to say yes. To say no would take one outside that flow, outside of normal social existence, outside of reality. One seeks instead the most “humane” path within the going project.
Yet it is a mistake to speak of bureaucracy as “faceless” and “monolithic.” The faces are there, even if hidden and merged into a mass. And the apparent monolith can encompass divergent and contending positions. These conflicts make up part of the dynamic of any bureaucracy, even in totalistic circumstances. People vary considerably in how they function in bureaucracies, and the bureaucracies themselves vary in their relationships to political regimes. Bureaucracies can give rise to initiative for pursuing genocide, even at relatively low levels (as we have seen to be the case with Nazi bureaucrats, including doctors). That initiative is. likely, to reflect an individual or a group’s keen sense of what is desired by the regime’s leaders, to whom bureaucracies, at least totalistic ones, are likely to be closely attuned.
Bureaucratic practice also contributes to the later cover-up of genocide by not only dampening everyone’s responses but also serving to hide individual perpetrators. The attempt of German doctors to suppress the truth of their profound involvement in Nazi genocide is a case in point, even if that attempt eventually failed; there were similar patterns in Armenian genocide.
Bureaucracy, then, does much to render into a machine the human killing network and to deamplify the killing process for all concerned: the experience of killing for perpetrators, and the actuality of killing for bystanders and potential victims. But bureaucratic deamplification and hiding should not be confused with nonresponsibility.
A “Correct” Bureaucrat
Wirths combined bureaucratic skill with a quality of “correctness” (a concept of proper, controlled, relatively impersonal behavior that infuses German culture and character) and reliability in ways that enabled him to help inmates while succeeding within the SS. His organizational loyalty was always clear to other SS observers. Ernst B. looked upon him as little more than a representative of Nazi authority, a man one would do well to stay away from because of his demanding “spirit of the bureaucrat.” Rudolf Höss, observing Wirths more closely, spoke of him as a man with “a strong feeling of duty,” who was “extremely conscientious and … obeyed all orders and directives with painstaking care.” Also “correct” with inmates, the commandant went on, Wirths’s only fault was frequently to be “very soft and good natured” with them and to treat prisoner physicians “as colleagues.” But he was “a good comrade … very popular”; he “helped everyone who came to him,” and “everybody trusted him.”19
For “everybody” to trust Wirths required that he largely accept the Auschwitz situation — as Höss implied in commenting that Wirths never objected to the use of an ambulance marked with a red cross to transport those selected for death to the gas chamber, despite the fact that he “was usually very sensitive about such matters.” Indeed Wirths himself drove about in, a car flying “a white pennant with a red cross.”20
There is a similar implication in a comment made by Helmut Wirths, concerning a horrible scene of extremely emaciated corpses he and his brother had viewed outside of a medical block: “What really bothered me was his [Eduard’s] telling me that these were the dead from natural causes.” Wirths meant of course that they were not victims of the gas chamber or any other means of direct killing — but in calling any deaths in Auschwitz “natural,” he was going quite far in his identification with the institution. :
Wirths’s ideological anti-Semitism contributed to his bureaucratic adaptation to Auschwitz. He could permit Jewish prisoner doctors to do more medical work, but said it would be “impossible” for them to treat any Aryans and insisted that the medical blocks be set up to prevent that from happening. His concept of the "correct" was probably involved here no less than his ideological anti-Semitism.
His bureaucratic integration also undoubtedly contributed to his typhus experiments. Langbein told me that he estimated Wirths’s thought processes to be as follows: Typhus was still a problem for SS personnel; a new medication or serum had to be tested; and since there were no typhus cases at that time in Auschwitz: “These are anyhow only Jews, they would die in any case, but now I can try out a drug [on them] which could be important for many [German] people.”21
Perhaps Wirths’s organizational loyalty was most revealed when he invited Langbein to win his freedom by joining the SS. Wirths had been excited to learn that this policy, occasionally applied to Aryan prisoners, could be implemented with Langbein in a way that would permit him to continue the work he was doing in the camp, but from within the SS. Wirths was upset when Langbein gently refused (“His face los[t] its friendliness”); but upon hearing Langbein’s explanation that since the inmates were his comrades, he would not be able to do the things SS men in Auschwitz were commanded to do, Wirths commented, “Your view does you honor,” though sounding “a bit disappointed.”22*
Healing-Killing Conflict:
Eduard Wirths
I can say that I have always done my duty and have never done anything contrary to what was expected of me.
— EDUARD WIRTHS
Eduard Wirths lived out most directly, and most extremely, the Auschwitz healing-killing conflict and paradox. A man with a strong reputation as a dedicated physician, and described by inmates who could observe him closely as “kind,” “conscientious,” “decent,” “polite,” and “honest,” he was the same man who established the camp’s system of selections and medicalized killing and supervised the overall process during the two years in which most of the mass murder was accomplished. Because of that dichotomy, he was one of the few Auschwitz doctors frequently spoken of as not only criminal but a tragic figure. Hermann Langbein, the political prisoner who served as his secretary in both Dachau and Auschwitz believed him to be the only Nazi doctor in Auschwitz who refused to succumb to its ubiquitous corruption and in no way enriched himself there. From the time of his first encounter with Wirths in Dachau, Langbein was struck by his medical conscientiousness and considered him “completely different from other SS doctors.”©ˆ[pgs.392-393 ]
For further study:
Table of contents
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
© 1986
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