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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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386 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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(Thüringisches Landesamt für Rassenwesen)
in Weimar because, as he wrote on an SS form in 1936, “I was particularly
interested in human genetics and racial hygiene.” He wrote also of his
“love for the biological tasks set by the SS.” Although brought up as
a Catholic and initially identifying himself as such on official forms, he
later reverted to the Nazi-preferred category of “believer in
God.”4
From the late 1930s, he
divided his time between his country practice (in which he was said to be so
conscientious that he sterilized his own instruments), state medical positions
(where one was close to the regime), medical work with ethnic Germans being
“resettled” in Germany from Eastern areas, and military service for
which he volunteered. He entered the Waffen SS in 1939. He served in Norway and
saw combat on the Russian front until, in April 1942, he was declared medically
unfit for combat duty because of a cardiac condition and possible additional
ailments.
Wirths’s early attitude toward Jews was contradictory.
His family was not anti-Semitic, and he not only had Jewish patients but
continued to treat them even after it became illegal for Aryan doctors to do
so. With no Jewish doctors in the area, Jews would sneak into his consulting
room at night, sometimes for injuries sustained in Nazi persecutions. At the
same time, Wirths clearly embraced some of the broader Nazi anti-Semitic
worldview, came to believe that “the Jews were a danger to Germany,”
and apparently retained this ideological anti-Jewishness until his death.5 |
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| Chief Auschwitz Doctor |
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Wirths spent short periods of time at Dachau and
Neuengamme, two concentration camps within Germany, before being sent to
Auschwitz in September 1942. He was probably sent there as chief doctor because
of his medical reputation, as others before him in that position had failed to
stop persistent typhus epidemics that increasingly affected SS personnel.
Langbein later described Wirths as “a competent physician with a strongly
developed sense of duty and extremely conscientious and careful”; and even
Lolling, his antagonistic and incompetent superior, described him as “the
best physician in all the concentration camps,” to which Commandant
Höss added: “During my 10 years of service in concentration-camp
affairs, I have never encountered a better one.”6 While Wirths’s medical humanity —
concern about and friendliness toward prisoner patients — was certainly
not a reason for his appointment to a high post in Auschwitz, it did,
according to Langbein, come to mean a great deal to many inmates there.
Wirths lived up to expectations in stopping the typhus epidemics by
means of widespread disinfection procedures and enlisting the cooperation of
prisoner physicians in identifying isolating and treating typhus |
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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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