Rating: 
Summary: A detailed account
Review: If you only read one book about doctors under Hitler then this is the one. Lifton not only focuses on the leading medical figures in the Third Reich, but also includes eyewitness testimony and disturbing accounts from victims. He offers numerous theories on how medical professionals turned into dispassionate killers in the name of "scientific research." A must read for anyone interested in behavioral pathology.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing read
Review: In this reviewer's opinion, Lifton's book is the definitive work on the subject of Nazi doctors; in this book, he has pulled together more details and information about his subjects on a scale that has yet to be surpassed. From the origins of the Nazi "bio-medical vision" (his term) to "euthanasia," to the full-blown scale of the Final Solution, a clear-cut transition into mass murder and genocide is presented in light of a tremendous number of lives and times of Nazi perpetrators, whose betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath is shocking. Lifton's original research is in itself a work of tremendous value; he personally interviewed many former Nazi doctors, survivors that bore direct witness to their crimes, as well as the Jewish and non-Jewish doctors that became collaborators with their Nazi superiors. So many accounts of their lives and deeds abound within the pages of this book...their experiences speak for themselves to add to the growing portrait of the medical profession in light of Nazism. In this reviewer's opinion, Part III, which deals with the doctors in Auschwitz, is the most integral part of the book, with Chapter 16 being one of the most prominent chapters, as its subject, Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor that never ended up living and being caught for his insurmountable cruelty, is given a human face that cuts through all the years of myth, legend, and hype surrounding his career and medical experiments. There is one weak part of the book, evident in its sub-heading: "Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide." While it is incumbent that readers will judge for themselves the validity and integrity of psychoanalysis in history, this reviewer finds this an appropriate element suitable for another book. Psychoanalysis and history, in essence, should not be combined, as they themselves are two totally different areas not meant to be combined with the risk of considerable distortion and misunderstanding. Part IV of this book can be coined the Psycho-historical aspect of this work, as Freudian methods abound. Its psychoanalytical bearing notwithstanding, this book is absolutely riveting, tremendously exhaustive and interesting, and original. It is crucial to the understanding of the Nazi doctors that were trained (and sworn) to be healers, and who became killers and traitors of the most basic of human moral codes. Absolutely crucial to any understanding of Holocaust perpetrators and the driving force behind the genocide.
Rating:
Summary: Very Fair Author
Review: Mr. Lifton is amazingly fair in trying to view the action of the Nazi doctors from their point of view. I was very impressed with his fairness. This is one of the first books on the holocaust that I read and it made my mind hungry for more information. It answered alot of my first questions about the holocaust in the first of the book. How they came to have such power to kill based only upon race. Then he goes on to speak of the doctors personaly; giving some background information on them and what "function" they performed in the consentration camps, along with some stories about them. It was a great read and now I am less ignorant of what happened during the holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: Very Fair Author
Review: Mr. Lifton is amazingly fair in trying to view the action of the Nazi doctors from their point of view. I was very impressed with his fairness. This is one of the first books on the holocaust that I read and it made my mind hungry for more information. It answered alot of my first questions about the holocaust in the first of the book. How they came to have such power to kill based only upon race. Then he goes on to speak of the doctors personaly; giving some background information on them and what "function" they performed in the consentration camps, along with some stories about them. It was a great read and now I am less ignorant of what happened during the holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: some other recommendations
Review: out of stock! oh no! I hope they print more copies soon. This is probably one of the most important books I've ever read. Anyone who believes that fascism is dead and burried needs a serious cup of coffee. If you want to know what happened to the movement after World War II read "The Beast Reawakens" by Martin Lee. And also get a copy of "Friendly Fascism" by Gross. Anyone who opposes the fascist vision will benefit from reading these books.
Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Work
Review: Robert Jay Lifton has written an exceptional work, thoroughly and painstakingly researched, and above all, he presents an analysis of the psychopathology of the Nazi doctors that is so well-thought out and well-presented that I recommend this book above all others for my students of criminal profiling. His discourse on the nature of evil and its place and use in society is unmatched in any book I have read to date. Pat Brown, Director/Investigative Criminal Profiler/The Sexual Homicide Exchange of Washington DC and Vicinity
Rating:
Summary: A Book About Us
Review: The Nazi Doctors is not about the dark side of war; it is about us. Given the proper circumstance, many of us are capable of acts of extreme callousness and cruelty. This is the important message of the book.
The Nazi Doctors could alert us to the fact that our rational explanations for our actions always need close scrutiny by others and ourselves when our actions entail harming others. In the case of the doctors choosing who would live and who would die at Auschwitz, the explanation was that the health of the German people would be enhanced by the extermination of the Jews; thus, these doctors were 'treating' the German people and assuring the Reich's health.
I was struck by the similarities between the argument used by the Nazi doctors to justify the mass murder and the argument used today by vivisectors to justify hurting and killing monkeys and other animals in the name of medical advancement.
I doubt that most readers will consider such parallels, but to the informed reader the similarities will be stark and poignant.
Rating:
Summary: a powerful exploration of institutionalized cruelty
Review: This book explores the question of how doctors, who are sworn to do no harm, became the integral organizers and managers of the Nazi death camps. Through exhaustive interviews with these doctors, people who knew them, and camp survivors, Lifton arrives at more than just individual psychological profiles of these professional killers. He presents us rather with a dense, psychosocial exploration of the dynamics of state-organized terror, along with enough history to describe the milieu in which these dynamics evolved. (Many people will be surprised to discover that the eugenics movement, which fueled the Nazi terror, had a large following in the United States during the 1930's.) The book reads like a novel in parts (especially the chapter on Josef Megele). However, I found the introduction one of the most interesting sections; in it Lifton describes the process he went through to gather and analyze his data. This included interviewing ex-Nazi doctors, who suspected or knew outright that Lifton himself is Jewish. Lifton's descriptions of the little verbal dances he and these doctors did around the German/Jewish conflict are fascinating.....For obvious reasons this book is not an "easy read," despite the quality of the writing. It will literally give you bad dreams. However, those dreams will spring from the collective human experience which we all share. For that reason this book is important to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, flawed book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: What turns ordinary human beings into psycho killers?
Review: This book is a perfect analysis of what turns "ordinary human beings" into psycho-pathological killers: bureaucracy. I read this book primarily to find the bridge between the medical experimentation that took place in Nazi Germany, and the medical experimentation that is taking place today, under our very noses. Yes indeed,*The Beast Awakens* is a good book to precede or follow this one in order to get the message that I almost think Lifton *wants* us to get: "Genocide is a potential act of any nation." Those who do not learn from history, as they say, are condemned to repeat it. It is not bureaucracy alone that is at fault in Nazi Germany, Lifton contends. Careerism, autocracy, authority, the seeking for glory in medical history at the expense of human guinea pigs, and the unwillingness to ask the important questions hold us all accountable for our behavior when we are asked to compromise our most cherished values, those which make us human, when we are called to choose the path of evil. When we are asked to drop a bomb, or shoot the "enemy," or plant a mine; when we are asked to maintain a subsistance wage structure that contributes to the oppression of those who are considered "less worthy," (life unworthy of life), when we are ordered to withhold the truth from the citizens of our country because our "government" thinks we couldn't "handle" it, and when we do as we are told because it's "just the way it is," we must accept responsibility for those choices, for choices they are. "In light of the recent record of professionals engaged in mass killing," says the author, "can this be the century of doubling?" Doubling, says Lifton, is the psychological ability to separate your "human" self from your "shadow" self so that you can do what you have to do and remain able to connect with your family and live your life. How close is that to maintaining a "professional" facade that allows a doctor to perform surgery by cutting into another human being's body while maintaining an "objectivity" that makes that possible (in the possitive sense), or a major corporation executive to pollute the nearby water that causes cancer in infants while still being able to face his children as they graduate from expensive Ivy League colleges? "That wasn't me," the thinking goes, "It's just my job. It's just what I had to do to make a living." "We thus find ourselves," says Lifton, "returning to the recognition that most of what Nazi doctors did would be within the potential capability -- at least under certain conditions -- of most doctors and of most people." We have to look at this. We have to know it. To not look, to not know, is to have it happen again, all over again, and to not even see it coming. "If there is any truth to the psychological and moral judgments we make about the specific and unique characteristics of Nazi mass murder, we are bound to derive from them principles that apply more widely -- principles that speak to the extraordinary threat and potential for self-annihilation that now haunt mankind." Lifton focuses a lot on the psychological concept of "doubling" as it applies to the Nazis ability to do what had to be done in the "Auschwitz" context of life as the Nazis lived it. "The Auschwitz self could then become an absolute creature of context, and there is no better way to abnegate moral responsibility of any kind." Dissociation is another word for it. It's nothing knew. And it's not an excuse. It may be an explanation, but it is not an excuse. Killing to heal is another interesting concept that Lifton explores, and one that factors even more ironically into current controversies: "We had to destroy the village to save it," for example. The AIDS dissident point of view is another item that may easily be seen through the lens of Lifton's book, though he never does refer to it. Even more interesting is the comparison to war: "War is the only accepted institution...in which there is a parallel healing-killing paradox. One has to kill the enemy in order to preserve -- to "heal" -- one's people, one's military unit, oneself. We have got to get beyond that kind of thinking if we are going to survive to inherit this beautiful Earth we barely deserve anymore. Lifton knows it, and he knows why. So do I. If you read his book (and the others I've reviewed), you will know why too. In discussing Eduard Wirths' brother Helmut, who had advised his brother to stay at Auschwitz in order to do whatever good he could there, Lifton says that had he(Helmut)been older and wiser, Helmut states he would have been able to take "an unconditional stance against these events," for he had come to the conviction that "the only thing to do in a situation like that is to say, "No, I won't do it." Wiser words were never spoken. We don't need to be cogs in the wheel of destruction. Break free. In the 60s, we used to say, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" In fits and starts, that mantra has played out in small ways over time. It can come into its own today. Don't accept the slippery slope of small compromises. When you read this book, you will know that there is no way out once you start compromising what you stand for, and the human race, every one of us, will pay the price in the long run. When we stand up for dignity, freedom and justice, we all benefit. And remember...the whole world's watching.
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