The beginning of Jewish persecution:

1) In the Spring of 1933, Jews were removed from the civil service2) In the fall, non-Aryan editors were dismissed from German newspapers3) By year’s end, Jewish artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers were expelled from the guilds set up under the Reich Chamber of Culture by Goebbels. 4) In 1935, Jews were stripped of their citizenship5) In Sept. 1935, two laws were passed (see page 33):

A: The Law for the Protection of German Blood>>prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between "Jews" (the name was now

officially used in place of "non-Aryans") and "Germans" and also the employment of "German" females under forty-five in Jewish households

B: The Reich Citizenship Law>>declared those not of German blood to be Staatsangehörige (state subjects) while those

classified as "Aryans" were Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich). In effect, this law stripped Jews of German citizenship.

C: The above two laws were known as Nuremberg Laws6) In 1937, all Jewish property was registered7) In 1938, all Jewish business still in existence were Aryanized

>>Within a year, Germans had taken over the ownership of our out of five Jewish business, acquiring them at bargain prices prescribed by the Nazi Ministry of Economics.8) In July 1938, Jewish physicians were forbidden to treat non-Jews. Eventually, Jewish passports were marked with the letter J, for Jude.9) On August 1938, Jews had to take new middle names; all Jewish men were to be called Israel, all Jewish women, Sara. 10) In Nov, 1938 came the pogroms known as  Kristallnacht. A pogrom is a violent massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews

Beginning of Final Study Guide

Kristallnacht [Night of the broken glass]:This was an outburst against the Jewish community. On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, anti-Jewish violence

erupted throughout the Reich. According to German authorities, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jewish youth killed a German embassy official in Paris. This caused national anger. In result, “actions against Jews and their synagogues [took] place in all Germany”. Within 48 hours, over 1000 thousands synagogues were burned, 7000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, 96 Jews were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes were destroyed. Jewish people were forced to clean the mess and those who suffered damages did not get any compensation.

On Nov. 15, Jews were barred from schools. Two weeks later, local authorities were given the right to impose curfew, and by Dec. Jews were denied access to most public places. All remaining Jewish business were Aryanized.

“Doubling”He argues that it was a “biomedical” conception of society which produced Nazi extermination policies.

The German people, conceived as a sacred organic whole called the Volk, could be strengthened or weakened depending on the biological constitution of its members. A person of an inferior “race” or of a defective mental or physical constitution was deemed a malignant tumor within the biological stock of the Volk.

One Auschwitz doctor summed up this biomedical vision when he explained to a prisoner doctor that his participation in the extermination of the Jews was not the repudiation, but indeed the consummation, of his Hippocratic oath: “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”

How could doctors, devoted to healing, partake in the evil that was Auschwitz? Lifton believes that they necessarily underwent a psychological metamorphosis after arriving at Auschwitz, developing two psychodynamically whole and distinct “selves”—the “Auschwitz self,” operative for all matters concerning their evil deeds, and a prior, normal self for their non-Auschwitz existence. This psychological state, which Lifton calls “doubling,” allowed the individual to compartmentalize each aspect of his dual existence: “The individual Nazi doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards. At the same time, he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself as humane physician, husband, father.” The individual doctor developed, in other words, a psychological self appropriate for living and functioning in each of two radically different environments which together made incompatible psychological and moral demands. Doubling permitted healers to become killers.

The key to understanding how Nazi doctors came to do the work of Auschwitz is the psychological principle I call “doubling”: the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. An Auschwitz doctor could through doubling not only kill and contribute to killing but organize silently, on behalf of that evil project, an entire self-structure (or self process) encompassing virtually all aspects of his behavior.

Doubling, then, was the psychological vehicle for the Nazi doctor’s Faustian bargain with the diabolical environment in exchange for his contribution to the killing; he was offered various psychological and material benefits on behalf of privileged adaptation. Beyond Auschwitz was the larger Faustian temptation offered to German doctors in general that of becoming the theorists and implementers of a cosmic scheme of racial cure by means of victimization and mass murder.

Healing-Killing Conflict or ParadoxAccording to Lifton, this healing-killing paradox characterized Nazi doctors behaviour in

Auschwitz. In terms of actual professional requirements, there was absolutely no need for doctors to be the ones

conducting selections: anyone could have sorted out weak and moribund prisoners. But if one views Auschwitz, as Nazi ideologues did, as a public health venture, doctors alone became eligible to select. In doing so, the doctor plunged into what can be called the healing-killing paradox.

For him especially, killing became the prerequisite for healing. He could arrange for medical care only so far as the slaughterhouse was kept at full function. And his healing area (the medical block) was simultaneously a clearinghouse for further killing. He became an advocate of killing on two fundamental levels: that of the ecology of the camp (selecting larger numbers at the ramp and on the medical block when the camp was overcrowded, hygienic conditions were threatened, and the quantity of sick or weak inmates strained medical facilities and lessened work efficiency [see pages 180-81]); and in connection with the larger biomedical vision (curing the Nordic race by ridding it of its dangerous Jewish infection), whatever the degree of intensity or amorphousness of his involvement in that vision. The healing-killing paradox was what Dr. Ernst B. called the “schizophrenic situation.” But that situation was an enduring institutional arrangement, the basis for social equilibrium in Auschwitz.

Eduard Wirths lived out most directly, and most extremely, the Auschwitz healing-killing conflict and paradox. A man with a strong reputation as a dedicated physician, and described by inmates who could observe him closely as “kind,” “conscientious,” “decent,” “polite,” and “honest,” he was the same man who established the camp’s system of selections and medicalized killing and supervised the overall process during the two years in which most of the mass murder was accomplished. Because of that dichotomy, he was one of the few Auschwitz doctors frequently spoken of as not only criminal but a tragic figure. Hermann Langbein, the political prisoner who served as his secretary in both Dachau and Auschwitz believed him to be the only Nazi doctor in Auschwitz who refused to succumb to its ubiquitous corruption and in no way enriched himself there.

From the time of his first encounter with Wirths in Dachau, Langbein was struck by his medical conscientiousness and considered him “completely different from other SS doctors.”Note: Nazi doctors supervised the process of killing at Auschwitz from beginning to end yet did no direct medical work. The  medicalization of killing was crucial to genocide and murder seen as a therapeutic imperative. Lifton describes how therapeutic killing took place on two levels at Auschwitz: first, at the level of the camp ecology, when selection on the ramp or in the barracks took place to relieve overcrowding; and second, as part of the larger biomedical vision(curing the nordic race by ridding it of its dangerous Jewish infection). At both levels, it can be seen how the malign logic of the healing-killing paradox worked.On the smaller scale, killing the infirm,old and ill took place to save the stronger and more healthy inmates; on the larger scale,killing certain groups of people (Jewish, Gypsies, etc) would save another group (Germans).

Zimbardo Prison ExperimentA 1971  prison life simulation conducted by Dr. Zimbardo. This two-week investigation into the

psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

The experiment started by having police officers picked up the college students. Everything as if they were actual criminals. The goal was to see  the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls.

The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards. Instead they were free, within limits, to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners.

Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage.The only prisoner who did not want to speak to the priest was Prisoner #819, who was feeling sick, had refused to eat, and wanted to see a doctor rather than a priest.

In 2003 U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed and took photographs.

First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's shoulders. Aim: To investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that simulated prison life. Zimbardo (1973) was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment.

Sadism is the derivation of pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, cruelty, degradation, or humiliation, or, watching such behaviors inflicted on others.

Findings: Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily.Within hours of beginning the experiment some guards began to harass prisoners.

The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too.  They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They ‘told tales’ on each other to the guards. They started taking the prison rules very seriously, as though they were there for the prisoners’ benefit and infringement would spell disaster for all of them. Some even began siding with the guards against prisoners who did not conform to the rules.

Conclusion: People will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards. The “prison” environment was an important factor in creating the guards’ brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study). Therefore, the roles that people play can shape their behavior and attitudes.

Note: Zimbardo became over involved in his own "experiment" to such an extent that he could not see the damage being done. Rather, it took an outsider, marginal to the Experiment itself, to tell him to stop it. He acknowledges this.

Comparison of Zimbardo’s experiment with Abu Ghraib(some of it)

Zimbardo said the report on Abu Ghraib prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba describes a prison that was the perfect petri dish in which the culture of guard violence could flourish.

It also became a chapter in many psychological textbooks -- and 30 years later, Zimbardo said, the phenomenon of the Stanford Prison Experiment is so well understood that officials should have seen how it was being duplicated in Abu Ghraib.

As in his own study, Zimbardo said, the evil spell of circumstance wasn't broken until somebody inside -- at Stanford, another researcher; in Baghdad, a soldier -- pointed out the egregious nature of the practices taking place.

Note: guards in Abu were not trained and/or not know anything about prison life.

Some of the necessary ingredients are: diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do not intervene, and a setting of power differentials.

Those factors were apparently also operating in Iraq. But in addition there was secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain of command, conflicting demands on the guards from the CIA and civilian interrogators, no rules enforced for prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking the will of the detainees, and no challenges by many bystanders who observed the evil but did not blow the whistle.

The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things — including the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

At Stanford and in Iraq, he added: "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was the Reich Leader (Reichsführer) of the dreaded SS of the Nazi party from 1929 until 1945. Himmler presided over a vast ideological and bureaucratic empire that defined him for many -- both inside and outside the Third Reich -- as the second most powerful man in Germany during World War II.

Given overall responsibility for the security of the Nazi empire, Himmler was the key and senior Nazi official responsible for conceiving and overseeing implementation of the so-called Final Solution, the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe.

On November 9, 1923, Himmler marched with Hitler, Röhm, Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders in the Beer Hall Putsch against the German government.

On January 6, 1929, Adolf Hitler, the Führer (Leader) of the Nazi party, appointed Himmler Reichsführer SS. The SS, which in 1929 totaled 280 men, was subordinate to the SA and had two major functions: to serve as bodyguards for Hitler and other Nazi leaders and to hawk subscriptions for the Nazi party newspaper,Der Völkischer Beobachter (The Race-Nationalist Observer).

Himmler built an unassailable position for the SS by taking control of the German police forces. On March 9, 1933, he was appointed provisional president of police in Munich. Three weeks later, he was named Commander of the Bavarian Political Police. By late 1934, Himmler sought and obtained command of each of the state political police departments in Germany, and had centralized them within a single new agency in Berlin, the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei; Gestapo).

Hitler -- who was impressed with the Dachau concentration camp established by the SS in March 1933 -- authorized Himmler to create a centralized concentration camp system.

It was Himmler whom Hitler entrusted with the planning and implementation of the "Final Solution." In his most quoted speech, that of October 4, 1943, in Poznan to a gathering of SS generals, Himmler explicitly justified the mass murder of the European Jews in the following words: “In front of you here, I want to refer explicitly to a very serious matter….I mean here…the annihilation of the Jewish people…. Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses lie side by side, or 500 or 1,000…. This page of glory in our history has never been written and will never be written….We had the moral right, we were obligated to our people to kill this people which wanted to kill us.”

April 28-29, 1945Himmler attempts to transmit an offer of surrender to the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces.

When Hitler hears of the attempt, he strips Himmler of all his offices and orders his arrest.

Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen (in this context, mobile killing units) were squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei; Sipo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD) officers, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union.

Their victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist party. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of institutions for the mentally and physically disabled.

Shooting was the most common form of killing used by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet in the late summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, noting the psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested that a more convenient mode of killing be developed. The result was the gas van, a mobile gas chamber surmounted on the chassis of a cargo truck which employed carbon monoxide from the truck's exhaust to kill its victims. Gas vans made their first appearance on the eastern front in late fall 1941, and were eventually utilized, along with shooting, to murder Jews and other victims in most areas where the Einsatzgruppen operated.By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions had killed over a million Soviet Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet political commissars, partisans, Roma, and institutionalized disabled persons. The mobile killing methods, particularly shooting, proved to be inefficient and psychologically burdensome to the killers. Even as Einsatzgruppen units carried out their operations, the German authorities planned and began construction of special stationary gassing facilities at centralized killing centers in order to murder vast numbers of Jews.

Faustian BargainFaust, in the legend, traded his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. To “strike a Faustian bargain” is to be

willing to sacrifice anything to satisfy a limitless desire for knowledge or power.The pact that Faust made with the devil for fame and fortune. As he notes in his introduction, the "Faustian bargain" is a phrase often applied imprecisely to anyone who participated in the Nazi state. But the story of Faust is more than a moral compromise made in exchange for worldly success. Rather, Faust "made his deal with the devil in return for greatness and in pursuit of a lofty ideal (in many versions, for knowledge). The figures in this study were not simply corrupt or self-promoting. They were at or near the top of their respective fields and held ambitions for even loftier accomplishment" (p. 4).

-Lifton: a title of one of his chapters that was assigned for reading, German literature: Goethe - The Nazi doctors have the power of life and death over the inmates.  It is a bargain, voluntarily agreement with the devil.  How Lifton thinks that the Nazi doctors voluntary sell their souls at Auschwitz. - Then the Nazi doctors have to deal with what they have done.

Zyklon B

Zyklon B was used in Germany before and during the Second World War for disinfection and pest extermination in ships, buildings and machinery. In the Auschwitz concentration camp as well, it was used exclusively for sanitation and pest control until the summer of 1941. After the end of August 1941, Zyklon was used in the camp, first experimentally and then routinely, as an agent of mass annihilation.- originally used as a pesticide, and Jews were seen as a pest.- Lifton 161: only special physicians were allowed to handle these canisters and released it into the gas chambers.-> like a magical ritual using a chemical with/for such power.

Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg Laws (German: Nürnberger Gesetze) of 1935 were anti semitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party.

A: The Law for the Protection of German Blood>>prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between "Jews" (the name was now

officially used in place of "non-Aryans") and "Germans" and also the employment of "German" females under forty-five in Jewish households

B: The Reich Citizenship Law>>declared those not of German blood to be Staatsangehörige (state subjects) while those

classified as "Aryans" were Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich). In effect, this law stripped Jews of German citizenship.

C: The above two laws were known as Nuremberg Laws

T-4 Program

In the fall of 1939 the German government established, under the Reich Chancellery, the Euthanasie Programme under the direction of Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt. The headquarters of the operation were at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin and the codename for the program was derived from that address—T-4.

Basically, this program was used to perform killings of the unfit. At the same time it was structured in a professional manner as to deceive the population. For example, there were these so called “questionnaires” to examine a patient but in reality these questionnaires were useless.

Their first task was to devise the questionnaires which would be used to categorize the targeted institutionalized populations. Four categories were specified:

1. Patients suffering from specific diseases who are not employable, or are employable only in simple mechanical work. These included schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile diseases, therapy-resistant paralysis, feeble-mindedness, and the like.

2. Patients who have been continually institutionalized for at least five years.3. Patients who are criminally insane.4. Non-German patients.

The questionnaires were then sent to panels of three or four psychiatric experts, who indicated their opinion about whether the patient (whom they had never seen, much less examined, and whose medical history they were unfamiliar with) was to live or die.

The questionnaires were then sent to a chief expert, who passed the final judgment. At this "higher" level, there was no alternative other than life or death. In fact, the "senior expert" was not bound by the recommended decisions.

EugenicsIn 1932, inspired in part by Laughlin's Model Eugenics Law and other writings in the United States, the

Weimar government drafted a plan for sterilizations of individuals with "hereditary illnesses." Many people were living in institutions, and they were costly to the country. Sterilizing them would prevent them from having children; some might then also be able to leave the institution and live on their own. The plan involved those to be sterilized (or their guardians) in decision making, requiring prior consent to the procedure.The next year, the National Socialists-Nazis-took control of Germany. On July 14, 1933, the new government issued its "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases." This law was far more directive than the Weimar government's plan. People with so-called hereditary illnesses had to be sterilized, even if they objected. And the list of persons classified as hereditarily ill included those suffering from "congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, and serious physical deformities." People with chronic alcoholism could also be sterilized.