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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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397 |
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| Healing-Killing, Conflict: Eduard
Wirths |
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[draw...] ings [and] good suggestions.”30 In later letters he looks forward to the roof
being put on, the floor being laid, the windows installed, a special plan for
the garden; and still later, with the tone of a thoughtful bourgeois husband,
he mentions his purchase of" 2 whiskbrooms, 1 meat-pounder, 1 children's table,
4 matching chairs, a little footstool, a hobbyhorse." He speaks of feeling
"embarrassed" by all the preparations necessary for the house - in regard not
to Auschwitz victims but to other SS doctors because three of them have to team
up in a single house.31
When he
writes of his “request to erect the fence soon because of the
children,” 32 one wonders how high the
fence was to be: only high enough to keep the children in, or, much higher so
that little or nothing could be seen of the Auschwitz world outside?
He
refers delicately to his sexual longing and aims his one expression of violence
at anyone who would take house, happiness, and beloved from him (“I would
bash in his skull”). It is striking how far he has removed their
relationship from his Auschwitz world as he inquires tenderly about her
condition, urges her to do the prescribed exercises, and expresses concern
about what was apparently a postpartum depression (after the birth of their
fourth child) in which she spoke of dying.33
Ever the family man, there is exuberant mention of pictures of the
children, of the appearance of the first tooth in one of them, and of prayerful
concern about his mother-in-law’s health. As if to preserve and contrast
that family purity, he speaks of “a disgusting fellow” who has
impregnated a woman and refuses to marry her.34
A touch of tension emerges as
Wirths’s wife seems to resist moving to Auschwitz; and apparently
referring to her requirements, he explains that it would be impossible to
remove the “dirt and disorder” even after the house has been
finished. He then quotes a slightly bitter little joke: a comment by his friend
Horst Fischer that the house would be ready “probably only when the war is
over,”35 a joke that turned out to have
its own prophetic truth. Their daughter later suggested that, in spite of these
urgings, “he did not want her [his wife] to be dragged into this.”
The Auschwitz side of their relationship was problematic to both, and
Wirths’s wife later claimed that, when there witnessing her husband’s
pain at performing selections, she wished to leave but did not because of being
told by a confidant that her presence was crucial “if you want to save
your husband.”36 Each was ambivalent
about being there, and about the other’s being there. But he stayed, and
she came.
After she has finally left, there is patter about family
events and rituals and much about the vicissitudes of his dogs: Basco who
“escapes” through a passage created by a bomb crater under a fence;
then a second dog “I just had to acquire”; and still a third. And
when the two new acquisitions become ill, “my little room at home is
… a sick ward.” In late November 1944 in the midst of German military
disaster, he refers to the goose he has been raising to send to her for
Christmas as “fat and |
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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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Back |
Page 397 |
Forward |
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