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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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231 |
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| Prisoner Doctors: Struggles to
Heal |
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“You have to visualize the situation.” It seemed
clear to me that Dr. V. had been neither collaborator nor mistress. But in
speaking of how Nazi doctors looked approvingly on her poise and linguistic and
medical abilities and considered her to be “fair” and "doing a job in
a good way,” she revealed once more the potential taint in any
relationship a prisoner doctor made with SS doctors. Another prisoner doctor
may have characterized the bond most accurately when he spoke of Dr. V. as a
“mother-confessor to Rohde.”
Dr. Lottie M. owed her life to
Rohde. When she became extremely ill with typhus, Rohde announced to the
prisoner doctors who took care of her, “I don’t want her to
die,” and saw to it that she received good care and nourishing food. He
went so far as to bring her first a dress, and upon her further request a
brassière, so that she could get out of bed. All this was not lost on
the capos and SS personnel, who “felt that [she] was protected by
him ... and that they shouldn't interfere with that.” His friendly
attitude toward her began when he learned that she had done university and
medical studies in the same place as he, and he responded with enthusiastic
reminiscences and questions about professors, restaurants, and shops. Rohde
apparently found Dr. M. to be bright and attractive as well, so that, as she
put it, “I didn't feel close to him, but he did to me.” She had no
great respect for him, describing him as “silly, ... a. . .
good-looking sports type, . . . no bright ideas”; but she had still
further reason to be grateful for him: “The funny thing was, he always
tried to get me free.” He felt that, as a non-Jewish German, she should be
helped to leave Auschwitz, and with that in mind, even arranged for her to talk
with a new commander. When she came back from the meeting discouraged,
explaining to Rohde that the new subcamp commander “seems to be a great
anti-Semite [she had been imprisoned partly for helping Jews],” Rohde
replied, “Well, we are all anti-Semites.” Dr. M. told him she had not
had that impression about him, to which he answered, “Well, in the camp
the situation is different.” He was saying — in still another
manifestation of Auschwitz healing-killing schizophrenia — that the
“informality” of the camp permitted one to be more relaxed with
individual Jews (as he was with Dr. V.) even as one subjected them to mass
murder as a group.
Rohde attempted to convey to Dr. M. his reluctance
concerning selections and his need to drink in order to perform them. While
protective toward favored prisoner doctors such as Lottie M. and Magda V., he
seemed to want them to share the numbing he could induce in himself through
drinking. Thus once when a block was sealed off for selections
(Blocksperre), Rohde observed Dr. M. peeking out at the prisoners being
dragged into lorries and taken away to be killed, and said with some agitation,
“Why do you [try to] see it? Aren’t you lucky that you needn't look
at that? It's better not to look.”
Dr. Klein — who, as Dr.
Ella Lingens-Reiner told me, was a “real” anti-Semite — was
delighted to discover that she was not Jewish and was Ger- […man]
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 231 |
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