books:

	The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide Robert Jay Lifton Basic Books, 2000 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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I was surprised that the Doctors did all the selecting and treated the people as cattle. They thought they were being the least cruel in this manner because the people suffered less. I also learned that typhus was one of the biggest diseases at the time. It was interesting to find out that only 15% of the people even had a chance to survive and the rest went straight to the gas chambers. Some of the Doctors were vicious while others were able to get away with not being cruel and inhuman.

I have to admit I thought Mengele was quite a character in the way that he treated people. He thought he was so superior and the story of the eyes that people had that were different colors that he set out to other colleges in Germany, well that was pretty twisted.

Also the part about him asking the kids if they wanted a ride in his car and he would drive them to the gas chambers was pretty psycho.

Overall this was a well written book but it was also very graphic so you should take care when you decide to read this one.

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Best of its kind, but..

This is the best book out there on Nazi doctors. Lifton covers topics outside just Nazi doctors at death camps such as the Euthanasia program. His chapters on Mengele and Wirths were very good too. And he has a ton of primary sources such as interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs. Also, unlike other books written by scholars, Lifton's writing is not stuffy and boring. Instead, the book reads very well and quickly. The only reason I gave the book 4 stars rather than 5 is because I felt the last 2-3 chapters on the psychology of the doctors was somewhat boring. Other than that, a great book on a somewhat seldom covered topic.

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Good but no objective

This was a all around informative book. I enjoyed reading it and it changed my perspective of the Nazis. It just proves my theory that this is what happens when you take yourself to seriously. It just amazes me that these were doctor and yet they still never used common sense.

As the narrative goes, it is well written and thought out. He interviewed numerous doctor and survivors and amassed a large enough fact to construct a clear recount of the concentration camps. At most though this is a history book and most defitinely not a psychology book. Yes the author makes evaluations and tries to explain but it is very poor. He'll state an event and then throw in his two sense about what was going on. Everything is objective till he expresses his opinion and then it becomes boring. He is jewish but that doesn't mean that he couldn't of written an objective account. He simple doesn't try. He acts like he is compeled to speak his mind, almost ruining the entire chapter you had just read.

I give him a five as a historian but a two in his opinions.

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Good, flawed book

This book is a must for anyone interested in the direct psycho-social and material circumstances of the Final Solution--an enterprise that most people have found awesomely cruel. Like Arendt's _Eichmann in Jerusalem,_ _The Nazi Doctors_ attempts to demystify the motives of Holocaust perpetrators--in this case SS doctors and medical workers--and ends up contributing greatly to a modern, enlightened, psychological understanding of "evil." The formalization of Lifton's extensive research is probably what will continue to bring new readers to _The Nazi Doctors_. Despite the importance and persuasiveness of his overall thesis (that "medicalized killing" played an essential and often overlooked role in the Holocaust), Lifton's psychological theorizing about the etiology of individual doctors' behavior is usually either obvious or, if not obvious, simple. Of course there is no harm in stating simple ideas or facts, especially if they are new or have been overlooked. There is no harm, either, in stating the obvious: of course there are those to whom it isn't yet obvious. But this book states and restates basic psychological theories, and then summarizes its statements and restatements. For example, Lifton points to, among other things, a sort of psychological "doubling" phenomenon that took place in the personalities of Auschwitz doctors--most of whom began life as relatively normal people. This doubling allowed them to separate the non-murderous versions of themselves--the family men, the husbands, the fathers--from the men who felt compelled by circumstance or duty or some deviant inner need to conduct selections, murders, cruel pseudoscientific experiments, etc., on innocent people. While certainly true, it's a simple idea and could have been stated in far fewer pages and invoked far less often without thwarting the author's ends. It is Lifton's application of the idea, rather than the idea itself, which is original. The fact that he goes on for so long explaining such things makes the book seem bloated. This is a terrible injustice to his research. An added weakness for ostentatiously academic formulations makes Lifton seem at times almost unsure of the book's importance. I suppose the thing among career academics is to make a name with novel ideas. Though Lifton clearly succeeds in accomplishing a lot more than that, one can't help but feel subjected to a secondary effort to satisfy a tenure board. (The book was written in the mid-eighties, as straightforwardness was first being widely discouraged by the mainstream academy.) The real core of the book, for these reasons, is the unself-conscious, highly instructive, and direct middle section documenting the careers of Nazi doctors, among them Mengele and Wirths. Even the prose style in this section seems strikingly fluent in comparison with the rest of the book.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6

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