Robert Jay Lifton

I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed.