Robert Jay Lifton: Nazi Doctors

One crucial question for the confrontation with National Socialism and the Holocaust is how it was possible to get ordinary citizens to participate in the extermination campaigns. The renowned documentary filmmakers Hannes Karnick and Wolfgang Richter chose a greatly reduced approach for WENN ÄRZTE TÖTEN / ROBERT JAY LIFTON: NAZI DOCTORS (2010). They decided to forego historical film material and pictures from concentration camps. The focus is on their in-depth interviews with the American psychology professor Robert Jay Lifton. He has studied the perpetrators for decades. The focus was above all on Nazi doctors, with whom he traced the conditions and prerequisites that turned medical doctors – sworn healers – into murderers. The trigger for his research was the involvement of medicine in the Holocaust, which became public in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials beginning in 1963. In death clinics and concentration camps, physicians were actively involved in the murder of Jews, Sinti and Roma, political opponents and in the destruction of what Nazi jargon labelled “unworthy lives.” The interviews with the two directors also deal with strategies of covering up and suppressing the perpetrators. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton had to read between the lines and read facial expressions. These conversations provided him with important insights into the self-image of these perpetrators and their biographies, which are among the most remarkable in scientific research on National Socialism and its crimes.

The usual historical television productions work more with emotions and aim to arouse empathy. In its reductionism, WENN ÄRZTE TÖTEN / ROBERT JAY LIFTON: NAZI DOCTORS is purist about scientific research. In 2013, Wolfgang Richter was the producer of the film “Radical Evil” by Stefan Ruzowitzky, who opulently implements this topic with historical material and elaborate re-enactments.

Image © Wolfgang Richter