BOOKS
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tematically would kill up to 20,000 people per day, and would do so
"efficiently," and in relative secrecy . True, Dr. Lifton does try to ex–
plain. (His book is the more important of the two, and much of what
he discusses subsumes what we are told about Plant's victims.) Ex–
trapolating from the memories of a few physicians who supervised the
extermination of six million Jews and of three more millions of Poles,
Gypsies, and other "undesirables" - among them homosexuals - he
coins terms such as the healing-killing paradox and doubling, and he
talks of a biomedical vision, of self-realization at Auschwitz, and of a
Faustian bargain. Although he demonstrates clearly just how doctors
were being turned, or turning themselves, into murderers, he could
have done so without this terminology. For after reading over five
hundred pages of gruesome testimony and details, we wonder whether
we have learned anything we didn't know already . I do not mean to
deprecate Dr. Lifton's exacting scholarship. But I do question whether
it is indeed even possible to fully understand why the Germans fol–
lowed Hitler to the point of becoming the executors of his madness .
Dr. Lifton tells us in the first sentence of the foreword that a
rabbi friend encouraged him to study the Holocaust in the way he
had studied the survivors of Hiroshima, by concentrating on the psy–
chology of the survivor, and that in the course of these inquiries, he
began to investigate the psychology of the executioner. Such a shift
seems natural for someone interested in the sources of evil- "in order
to engage and combat it." Like all intellectuals, he is concerned with
the morals of society, but more than most of them, he stresses the
moral components of his own intellectual pursuits.
Because Dr. Lifton mined the memories of surviving perpetra–
tors, none of whom seemed to feel much remorse, his book differs
from others on the Holocaust. He extrapolates from what he was
told, as well as from the records of trials , without dwelling on his
respondents' unconscious motives, or analyzing their intrapsychic
mechanisms. Staying away from psychoanalytic concepts, and from
such Freudian defense mechanisms as splitting or detachment, leads
him to talk of "numbing" as facilitating daily life in the death camps,
and of "doubling" as "the division of the self into two functioning
wholes": this explains how "a part-self could act as an entire self,"
and how a "killing self," able to avoid guilt feelings, could exist along–
side a "normal" ethical self.
Dr. Lifton focusses on "the Nazi doctors who became the life–
blood of Auschwitz," because they lent legitimation to the entire enter–
prise. They selected who would go to the gas chambers upon arrival
