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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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407 |
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| Healing-Killing Conflict: Eduard Wirths
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the beginning”65
(partial criticism of Nazi policy, especially perhaps of mass murder). And also
affecting that kind of statement was his sense of other possible readers:
prisoners to whom he wanted to convey opposition to Nazi excess, and Nazi
authorities before whom he did not want to appear disloyal or treasonous. The
letter too was a means of adaptation.
The letters to his wife at the
end became more desperate because the adaptation could no longer be maintained:
approaching Soviet and American troops were associated not only with danger to
his life but with a kind of judgment day. He began to invoke God (his brother,
said that “he became a religious man in Auschwitz”) and also wishful
pictures of a quiet, harmonious family and medical future. Threatened with
losing everything, his need to merge with his wife intensified (“I only
live in you”). And, after leaving Auschwitz, his affirmation of his
“good conscience before God and before man”66 seems wish rather than conviction. He was then,
in his brother’s words, “completely broken, a man without hope,”
not only because Auschwitz had been his downfall but because he had lost the
entire structure, including Auschwitz and the Nazi movement, to which he had
been adapting. Only guilt toward his family was manageable, which is why he
called it his “greatest guilt.”67
During those last days, he questioned the behavior of his superiors in
not having “the necessary courage” that might have enabled them to
ease his situation. He was still a man with a crusade, now more tortured, this
time to save his own life and his family’s future (getting “the other
side” to “understand … [the] strong constraints on me and all
the things that … tormented my brain and still torment it”). He was
also saying goodbye when he referred to himself as “your Eduard [who]
wishes to live and fight only for you and the children and he will be here and
with you, with God and you.”68
In contemplating death, he came a little closer to exploring his
Auschwitz behavior. He spoke of the suffering of their people “which had
to come after all these years of evil.” About himself he was more
convoluted, acknowledging profound error and perhaps guilt but still justifying
his behavior and invoking a guilt-denying form of religious resignation.69
Although his brother Helmut and others
had offered to hide him longer, Wirths was apparently ready to go into British
captivity in the hope, as he wrote, that “the way I have now begun is
righteous in the eyes of God and of my conscience.”70 The apologia he composed at the time for
presentation to Allied authorities was, as we have seen, a mixture of truth,
half-truth, distortion, and falsehood presenting the picture of a man
unwillingly called into the SS concentration-camp system where he fought the
good fight but was always himself being victimized and “robbed of the
fruits of my work.” But the claim was in direct conflict with the high
evaluations he had always received from his superiors: the Auschwitz
commandant’s office had praised him for his “soldierly
tenacity”; and Lolling, for filling his position “to the most
complete satisfac- […tion] |
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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 407 |
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