Week of Oct. 6-10

The only item listed on this week's agenda was under Friday's title, "Race and Genocide." The reading assigned for Friday was a selection from a book called, "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide," by Jay Lifton. We were assigned chapters 7 and 8 to read and further examine so that we could discuss not only the debilitating effects genocide has on a group of people within whom it is exercised, but also the effect it can have upon on those who perform, in one way or another, in the process.

In the reading, Lifton says that, "Auschwitz can be understood only in relation to its three historical identities: as a Nazi concentration camp...as a work camp...and as an anhiliation camp..." (Lifton 312/425). It is essential to understand how it transformed into something completely different from the beginning of its creation (also, as the war continued) to understand how Nazis underneath the highest posts of command were able to stomach the orders for its next stages of eveolution. It was a gradual movement towards genocide, not an all-of-a-sudden rush to kill all the Jews in sight. The Nazi party not only couldn't have accomplished this, but more than likely as their goals for ultimate extermination failed, so would they have.

He also examines the processes of killing undertaken by Nazis in the in concentration camps. He also discusses how the doctors in the camps would actively choose the processes and sometimes even get into heated debates about why a certain process should be utilized. Someow, the topic of whether or not, as medical professionals, they should even be participating in should horrors never came up in the discussions. Doctors were also left to deal with the enormous amounts of corpses. They had to find a solution to the fact that the crematoria at Auschwitz wasn't near big enough to burn all of the bodies that were being systematically killed every day.