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When Robert Lifton asked Nazi doctor Fritz Klein how he could reconcile the concentration camps with his Hippocratic Oath to save lives, he replied “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."
So there it was: Lifton's The Nazi Doctors articulated the same fantasy that i had uncovered as the foundation of Hitler's Ideology: the Jew as a diseased part of the German body politic that had to be "removed" to save the life of the nation.
The Nazi Doctors was published in 1986 eleven years after my book (Lifton acknowledge his debt to Hitler's Ideology). However, although academics glorify the idea of "priority," it's actually not fun at all.
I quit my position as "Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science" to research, write and publish Hitler Ideology. I returned to the academic world in 1988 (thirteen years after the publication of Hitler's Ideology) when I was invited to present a paper (with Vamik Volkan) at a meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology.
Thirteen years outside of the academic world--on my own a complete unknown. Not a bad life, actually ("street life, it's the only life for me"). There's a lot of excitement--and a lot one can learn--if one can function outside of the symbolic order.
Richard Koenigsberg
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| ABSTRACT: The central fantasy uncovered by Robert Lifton was that of the German nation as an organism that could succumb to an illness. Dr. Johann S. who spoke about being “doctor to the Volkskorper (‘national body’ or ‘people’s’ body).” National Socialism, he said, is a movement rather than a party, constantly growing and changing according to the “health” requirements of the people’s body. “Just as a body may succumb to illness, so the Volkskorper could do the same.”
When Lifton asked doctor, Fritz Klein, how he could reconcile the concentration camps with his Hippocratic Oath to save lives, he replied “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”
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IV. NAZI IDEOLOGY (A)
My initial research on Nazi ideology focused on Hitler’s rhetoric. I subsequently turned to writings by other Nazi leaders to develop a general theory of the relationship between ideology and fantasy. I had discovered a coherent fantasy at the root of Hitler's writings and speeches. Would it be possible to discern a similar fantasy within the rhetoric of other Nazi ideologues?
A key moment for me was the publication of Robert J. Lifton’s, The Nazi Doctors (1986), which provided substantial evidence that the fantasy I found at the heart of Hitler’s thinking--was central in the thinking of other Nazi ideologues. Lifton spent several years interviewing 29 men who had been significantly involved at high levels with Nazi medicine. His reconstruction of the deep-structure of Nazi ideology is based upon these interviews, combined with an analysis of written accounts, documents, speeches, diaries, and letters.
The central fantasy uncovered by Lifton was that of the German nation as an organism that could succumb to an illness. Lifton cites Dr. Johann S. who spoke about being “doctor to the Volkskorper (‘national body’ or ‘people’s’ body).” National Socialism, Dr. Johann S. said, is a movement rather than a party, constantly growing and changing according to the “health” requirements of the people’s body. “Just as a body may succumb to illness, so the Volkskorper could do the same.”
When Lifton doctor Fritz Klein, how he could reconcile the concentration camps with his Hippocratic Oath to save lives, he replied “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”
Lifton mentioned this phrase “gangrenous appendix” to Nazi Dr. B., he quickly answered that his overall feeling and that of the other Nazi doctors was that “Whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated (ausgerottet, meaning also “exterminated,” “destroyed,” “eradicated”).
A number of the Nazi doctors interviewed by Lifton expressed a fantasy, then, that closely resembles the fantasy that I uncovered at the core Hitler’s ideology. In this Nazi fantasy, the nation is conceived as if a gigantic organism. Jews in this fantasy are imagined as diseased entities within this organism whose presence might cause the body politic to die. According to this Nazi fantasy, preventing the death of the German organism required “removing” these diseased entities.
Let me provide additional examples of Nazi rhetoric revealing this fantasy of (to use Lifton’s phrase) “killing as a therapeutic imperative”). Dr. Werner Best, Heydrich’s deputy in the Secret Police Office, stated that the National Socialist State was an institution that “carefully supervises the political health of the German body politic.” The Nazi state was "quick to recognize all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction and to remove them by every suitable means.”
In his Table Talks (1942), Hitler referred to the transport of Jews to the eastern regions asking what possible objection could be raised when in the interest of the state an “obvious canker of the people has to be eliminated.” In 1943 when the gas chambers were operative, Hitler said to the Hungarian Regent Horthy that Jews should be treated like “tubercles which can infect a healthy body.” Nobody could call this cruelty--considering the necessity of “killing innocent creatures of nature like hares and roes to prevent them from causing damage.”
Goebbels put it this way: “Our task here is surgical; drastic incisions, or some day Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.” Hans Frank, General Governor of Poland during the Nazi occupation, called Jews “a lower species of life, a kind of vermin, which upon contact infected the German people with deadly diseases.”
When the Jews in the area he ruled had been killed, he declared that, “Now a sick Europe will become healthy again.” Finally, on February 22, 1942, Hitler made the following astonishing statement: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle we are engaged in is of the same sort as the battle waged during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch.”
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