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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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403 |
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| Healing-Killing Conflict: Eduard
Wirths |
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officers’ club after having been bombed out of their
own quarters: “The proximity of the men there is no good at
all.”)51
When in hiding after
the war’s end, Wirths’s crusade took the form of mobilizing relatives
and friends to look out for his family. And as he began to sense that his
existence as a fugitive was his family’s greatest burden (his only future
being trial, conviction, and death), his suicide can be viewed as the final act
in his crusade. |
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| A Loyal Nazi |
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Whatever his conflicts connected with that crusade, Wirths
never ceased to be a leading figure and a respected physician within the
Auschwitz SS subculture.
In a letter to his wife of 27 November 1944,
he gushes his pleasure (“Isn’t this a fine thing. I want to kiss you,
my love with my deeply felt love.”) at 599 men being decorated with the
Iron Cross because of their “bravery”52 referring, it turns out, to the revolt of the
Sonderkommando, during which one crematorium was set on fire and a hand
grenade was thrown into an SS group; the revolt was quickly put down by SS
troops whose bravery consisted of slaughtering everyone remotely suspected of
having participated in it.* His letters are full of newsy references to gala
social occasions: a special dinner in the Führerhaus for department
heads, with half a wild duck for each, a hunt in early January 1945, where he
shot six hares and was permitted to keep one (“You, my all, get that one
tomorrow”); a Christmas party in 1944 at which a talented SS sergeant sang
“As a Small Boy at the Mother's Breast” (Als Knäblein klein
an der Mutter Brust) and included a comic sequence of Santa Claus bestowing
on Wirths “[not] a medal but a liverwurst” (suggesting that the good
physician was a sufficiently important member of the group to be made an object
of affectionate fun); and lunches and dinners at the home of Baer, the
commandant with whom he was friendly — to the point of becoming the
mediator — in the Baers’ extreme marital discord.54
He in fact remained a committed Nazi
throughout — one who, as Helmut Wirths pointed out, really believed that
“the Jews were a danger to Germany”; who supported Hitler’s 1939
warning that if the Jews began a war they, not Germany, would be destroyed; and
who could say of the arriving Hungarian Jews during the summer of 1944,
“They are the most pitiful of them.” Helmut went on to explain that
“[Eduard] believed in National Socialism ... [but] never believed that
Hitler himself could know [about the killing of the Jews]” — and that
Eduard would tell Helmut, “I must try to go to Hitler [and tell him about
this]. He can’t know ... [about these] |
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* FiIip Müller, a
prisoner eyewitness, described how “about 450 of our comrades … had
fought bravely and died honorably, refusing to resign themselves meekly to
their fate. … . A few SS men had died, a few more had been wounded. …
It became known later that when awarding the Iron Cross to several SS men the
Lagercommandant had mentioned that this was the first time concentration
camp guards had prevented a mass break-out, a feat of bravery for which their
Führer had decorated them.”53 |
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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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