146
PARTISAN REVIEW
HEALERS AS KILLERS
THE NAZI DOCTORS: MEDICAL KILLING AND THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF GENOCIDE. By Robert
J.
Lifton.
Basic Books. $19.95.
THE PINK TRIANGLE. THE NAZI WAR AGAINST HOMOSEXUALS.
By Richard Plant.
Henry Holt and Co. $19.95.
When Bruno Bettelheim introduced Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's
Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of Mengelis Famous Death Camp,
in
1960, he stated that we all wish to forget this unbelievable story: it is
outside our systems of values and thought. Barely twenty-five years
later, the Swiss history teacher Marie Pashoud, the French historians
Robert Faurisson and Henri Roques, argue that there never were
any gas chambers, or any innocent victims of the Nazis. And some
German historians compare "the shattering of the German Reich" by
the Soviet army in 1944-45 to "the end of European Jewry," and the
Nazis' actions against the Jews to "Bolshevik actions of annihilation ."
Such views, of course, may be explained as European anti-Semitism,
or as serving ultraconservative or ultraleftist interests. But while these
fabricated histories may be understood as defensive responses by in–
dividuals, or by those "defending" nations that refused to take in more
than a trickle ofJews , they contradict the memories of survivors , and
defile those of their dead relatives and friends.
Dr. Robert J. Lifton's
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
and Richard Plant's
The Pink Triangle
are among
the most recent additions to what has come to be known as "Holocaust
literature," that the "revisionists" will have to ignore . Both authors
begin by rooting the Nazi victory of 1933 in the German defeat dur–
ing the First World War, in its aftermath, and in the politics of the
Weimar Republic. But Plant, who documents the fate of homosexuals
in concentration camps, devotes much space to the social and politi–
cal climate in order to trace the beliefs of the Nazis to those of their
predecessors, while Dr. Lifton zeroes in on the atrocities at Auschwitz
in order to warn us against future disasters.
Both books should silence all the devious and unredeemable anti–
Semites - whether of Swiss, French, or German origins - who deny
the facts of the Holocaust. But neither these, nor any of the other ac–
counts that tell, remember, trivialize, or "sexualize" the extermination
camps, can adequately comprehend how the descendants of Goethe
and Schiller, of Kant and Hegel, could set up a machinery that sys-
