Showing posts with label WWII. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WWII. Show all posts

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Code name: Lise - A True Spy Story

 



Code Name: Lise: 

The True Story of the Spy Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Woman

By Larry Loftis

Reviewed by

Geoffrey W. Sutton

Lise was the code name for Odette Samson. She's living in Somerset England with her children at the outset of World War II. Her husband is off at war. Because she was raised in France, her language and experience make her a potential candidate to help the resistance organised by Britain's War Office referred to as SOE (Special Operations Executive).

The story moves quickly from training to deployment. Relying on a trove of records that include interviews and official communications, Loftis creates a vivid thriller of a determined young woman focused on carrying out her risky responsibilities as a courier under threat of the Nazi boot. As the story progresses, she falls in love with her commanding officer, Peter Churchill.

Despite many thrilling escapes, she and Peter are eventually captured by Hugo, Germany's master spy catcher. Disgusting accounts of excruciating torture challenge us as we sink into the depths of Nazi prison cells. Will she and Peter survive? 

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Code Name: Lise is a well-written spy story that reads like a thriller as the heroes face near death experiences bolstered by loyalty and love. After the World War II story ends, Loftis fills us in on what happened to the legacy of this woman who eventually appeared on a UK postage stamp. I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys reading true stories about courageous women in times of war.

What's missing? As a psychologist, I wonder if all the interviews and reports would offer us insights into the character of this woman who survived so much before, during, and after World War II. She was in her sixth year when her father died. She survived some serious health challenges during childhood. Like many in Britain, she was alone with her children when her husband headed to war. Then there's was the separation from her children during her war service and horrific torture along with exposure to the multiple severe traumatic events of others. She was a witness after the war. And there were two divorces plus postwar public battles.

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About Odette

Odette Marie Léonie Céline Brailly was born in Amiens France 28 April 1912. Her father died at the battle of Verdun in 1918. She married Roy Sansom in 1931. They had three daughters. Her World War II service was recognised by the British awards of the George Cross and an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire). France awarded her the Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur. Odette and Roy divorced. She married and divorced Peter Churchill and later married Geoffrey Hallowed. (Wikipedia)

Code Name: Lise is available on AMAZON










Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Nazi Doctors Medical Killing Psychology of Genocide- Book Review





THE NAZI DOCTORS

Medical Killing and the

Psychology of Genocide


  By  Robert Jay Lifton


Reviewed by

  Geoffrey W. Sutton




Lifton peers into the lives of physicians who killed millions. He examines the beliefs and practices of Nazi culture, which provided a biomedical context for ridding Germany of disease by exterminating those targeted as responsible for such disease. In an evil irony, healers frame killing in an expanding narrative that ultimately reaches the level of genocide. In addition to records, Lifton included interviews with surviving Nazi physicians and some prisoner doctors who served as their underlings in Auschwitz.

Lifton discloses his perspective, which is that of a an American psychiatrist, a Jew, with a psychoanalytic perspective informed in part by the ideas of Otto Rank. In the Introduction, Lifton informs us of key elements of his psychological model. People seek to deal with mortality by seeking immortality in various life projects. Many also seek to deal with limitations via transcendence. He refers to Rank's notion of "immortality systems" to help gain a sense of the meaning of the Nazi's "Thousand Year Reich" in which ordinary Germans and professionals could be bound together in an uplifting and eternal endeavor.

Lifton also shows us that in the mass killings of Jews and others, especially as seen in the death camps, the Nazis crossed a significant barrier beyond that kind of episodic violence, which targets hated people here and there to reach a systematized elimination of certain human lives based on the logical extension of a distorted biomedical theory that harnessed physicians to a gross expansion of euthanasia to the selection of multitudes of Jews for lethal "cleansing."

In Part I, Lifton explains the early Nazi medical killing program of euthanasia presented as "life unworthy of life." There were several components beginning with required sterilization then the killing of "impaired" children and adults in hospitals-- mostly mental hospitals. The practices of injection and carbon monoxide poisoning were eventually expanded to inmates at concentration and extermination camps and then to mass killings.

Part II focuses on Auschwitz. The SS doctors performed the initial selection of arriving prisoners either for the gas chambers or temporary survival. Additional selections followed as doctors "examined" prisoners' fitness when overcrowding or health conditions commanded their attention. The "unfit" were of course selected to die in this bizarre application of triage. Lifton closes this section with three chapters each devoted to a close look at three physicians. One he considers a "human being" in an SS uniform, the other, Josef Mengele, identified as "Dr. Auschwitz," and the third, Eduard Wirths a representative of the "healing-killing conflict."

The final Part III examined the psychology of genocide. Lifton explains his view of the concept "doubling." Nazi doctors form two selves to cope with death. The previous physician self is the healer, which emerges from time to time. The Auschwitz self takes on the numbing routine necessary to psychologically survive the initially shocking assignment to carry out selections of people for immediate death. Lifton addresses some additional themes related to genocide and mentions some similarities of the Nazi killings to the earlier Armenian genocide.

Overall, I found Lifton's work informative and worthy of consideration given the in-depth interviews with Nazi and other physicians who survived the almost indescribable horrors. His analysis of "doubling" is interesting because he provides numerous examples of how this construct may help approach an understanding. Unfortunately, like many mental constructs there is a circularity that fails to satisfy my desire for a closer look at causation. Lifton does mention the cultural milieu and even provides historical perspectives that no doubt bolstered the German biological view of a healthy and superior race in contrast to those people viewed as a subspecies who were unworthy or even dangerous to life. It is this milieu, and an understanding of social psychology, that I think would offer a more useful explanation as we continue to confront extreme outgroup hatred.

Another perspective I would like to have seen is a more careful analysis of moral psychological perspectives. In fairness, much of moral psychology research has taken place in the last couple of decades and would thus be unavailable to Lifton. Nevertheless, contemporary readers would do well to consider the work of Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, 2012) and others to examine the scheme of justifications employed by the Nazi's in their killing narrative.

Finally, Lifton appears to have ignored the work of Zimbardo and the well-known 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which offers empirically supported ideas for considering the rapid shift from fellow citizen to the split roles of guardian-inmate. A quote from Zimbardo is relevant.

"How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended 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. Please read the story of what happened and what it tells us about the nature of human nature."

What we can glean from Lifton's research is the perspective of a psychiatric physician who offers us a face-to-face encounter with some of history's most malevolent and scariest beings-- healers turned killers.

Related Post

Psychopaths and Leadership

Read more about Auschwitz-Birkenau at auschwitz.org


Reference

Lifton, R.J. (1985). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books.  (Paperback, 561 pages)


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