ROBERT JAY LIFTON: NAZI DOCTORS
Produced & Directed by Hannes Karnick & Wolfgang Richter
Written by Richter
Released by the National Center for Jewish Film
Germany. 87 min. Not Rated
 

Robert Jay Lifton: Nazi Doctors does a disservice to an influential psychiatrist and to an audience interested in the history of the Holocaust.

Two German documentarians, Wolfgang Richter and Hannes Karnick, subject the elderly pioneer of psychohistory to lengthy interviews at his sylvan Cape Cod home about his research that resulted in his 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Karnick conducts the interview on screen like an episode of The Charlie Rose Show, but he’s no thoughtful or clarifying interviewer. Lifton comes prepared with some notes to keep the conversation from completely rambling, but the filmmakers do not deign to provide any context whatsoever to the octogenarian’s personal reflections on his 1970’s research.

This is not a film about the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who has come to symbolize the historically freighted term “Nazi doctor” in the postwar imagination. Nor is it about the 23 defendants at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial that has faded more in memory since an American military tribunal brought charges in 1946. Lifton opens by explaining that his interest was piqued by a trial that received little notice in the U.S., which was recently brought to wider attention in the German TV documentary Verdict On Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965. The testimony at that trial intrigued him to see links to his earlier research about how ideological dedication influenced adaptation to extreme situations for Chinese revolutionaries, Hiroshima survivors, and Vietnam veterans.

It’s almost an hour into the Lifton interview before it becomes clear that this film is not about Auschwitz nor the notorious “scientific” experiments undertaken there. The filmmakers finally let his point emerge that the Nazi doctors were acting under an ideology of “the medicalization of killing,” where the need for maintaining the health of “the Volk,” the people of the Nazi-centered community, justified eliminating any threats of disease and contamination. With ideological-based definitions of disease, all such acts required a medical imprimatur, from the earliest programs of euthanasia of German mentally and physically handicapped to the final selections of political prisoners, Jews, and Gypsies for the crematoria.

But the discussion primarily focuses on Lifton’s interviews with Nazi doctors, incorrectly cited here as 40 such men, though his book actually identifies 29 men “at high levels in Nazi medicine” that he interviewed; the others were ex-Nazis in nonmedical professions. His most lively points expound on his theory of “doubling,” how Nazi doctors coped with the reversal of their medical role as healers vs. their function as killers by separating who they were as humane medical professionals from their acts of individual and wholesale murder.

Lifton extends this coping mechanism to their post-war years (some faced various legal proceedings) and descriptions of their comfortable lifestyles. Their crowded bookshelves invariable contained the works of Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel prize-winning scientist, who had a successful post-Nazi career as an eminent zoologist. (In Lifton’s book, he notes the high number of suicides among doctors facing charges, theorizing that for these men, who he did not get to interview, their separation of selves may have broken down.) He extends his theory of doubling to the conflict facing any medical professional employed by any military, who has to certify stressed soldiers as fit for combat or approve enhanced interrogation techniques of prisoners.

But the filmmakers don’t make it easy to pull out the important themes, including linking Lifton’s research to his activism against nuclear war, and they provide zero historical background—they self-righteously decry in their press notes the use of archival film and photographic materials as constituting further “discrimination against victims” as an excuse for not providing any basic facts for any level of viewers. Instead, the conversations are interspersed with ocean views from Lifton’s house, his walks on the shore, and images of his cute philosophical line drawings, some that were published as PsychoBirds.

This documentary consequently feels like only half a film. The most useful contribution these filmmakers could make to Holocaust history studies would be to allow more thorough documentarians to make use of clips from these interviews within more in-depth presentations. And to encourage viewers to read Lifton’s outstanding book. Nora Lee Mandel
October 6, 2010