JTA — Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and public intellectual whose groundbreaking work on the psychology of genocide shaped Holocaust and Jewish studies for the past 40 years, died on Thursday at his home in Truro, Massachusetts. He was 99.

Lifton, who was raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, devoted his career to exploring the human capacity for both cruelty and resilience. His 1986 book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,” documented how physicians were enlisted in the machinery of the Holocaust.

Lifton spent a decade interviewing Nazi doctors and concentration camp survivors to piece together the motivations of physicians who carried out horrendous medical experiments and assisted in the extermination of Jews and others under the Nazis.

Although not without its critics, some of whom were dubious that psychiatry could be applied to mass phenomena, the study deepened historical understanding of the Holocaust and became a touchstone for bioethics and the study of evil.

In a 2009 documentary, “Robert Jay Lifton: Nazi Doctors,” Lifton wrote that he was fascinated by the “reversal of healing and killing.”

“If a whole society including the........

© The Times of Israel