Movie Review - 'Robert Jay Lifton - Nazi Doctors'

Movie Review - 'Robert Jay Lifton - Nazi Doctors' - Film Forum Documentary on Holocaust Doctors - NYTimes.com: In 1986 Dr. Lifton wrote a well-regarded book called The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, which explored the twisted logic by which doctors were able to rationalize their participation in the Holocaust. Dr. Lifton, now in his 80s, can be interesting, as when he talks about the obfuscations he encountered when interviewing some doctors.

“You can’t get the full truth of evil from the perpetrators,” he notes; you can’t even get an accurate sense of the emotional impact the wretched work had on the doctors themselves. He also shares some stunning anecdotes, like the time one physician told him that the act of killing a child with sedatives “didn’t seem so much a killing as a putting to sleep.”