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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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410 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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to be ashamed of him.” Later in the documentary, she
carne to the idea that “if you were among them … that is the
guilt.” And she told Langbein that her husband’s suicide “was
probably for the best” — a statement that might have referred to her
husband’s despair, the hopelessness of his legal case, and the pain .a
trial would have caused everyone, or was perhaps an acknowledgment that,
despite her commitment to his goodness, he had to be judged guilty.
His
two sons struggled more directly with the issue but no less ambivalently. The
older son, who had warm childhood memories of playing with his father, said,
“I do not know whether it is right to defend him,” and ended, “I
wish to leave the question open.” The younger son, with no such childhood
memories, seemed to come closer to a judgment in his sense that his
father’s suicide meant that “he must have felt guilty,” and that
“I don’t know why he didn’t refuse right at the beginning
because he knew what happened there.” But then he denied that his father
had committed crimes, and said, “I don’t know.”
Wirths’s elderly father struggled with his own role in having
advised the son to stay at Auschwitz, and, in a long and carefully worded
letter to the Frankfurt Court, told of having “entreated [his son] …
to save lives where he could” but that “he should not execute inhuman
orders” — an admonition that sounds dubious at all levels for
everyone. The father listed in detail ways in which his son did save lives and
characterized his activities in Auschwitz as “sacrificial.” Yet in
the very last words of the documentary, he held his own original advice up to
question: “But he had to become guilty there, did he not? I ask you only:
was that [my advice] right?”79
Wirths s
daughter, a married woman in her early forties recalled being told by her
mother virtually nothing about her father except that “he was dead from
the war” ; and also that “he was a good man and a really good
father,” which was consistent with a few loving memories she had of him.
With the family decision to cooperate with a Dutch film maker on a documentary
about Wirths, her mother began to tell her more, including details of
selections, while emphasizing Wirths’s despair, wish to leave, and
decision to stay “in order to prevent an even worse situation.” In
books the daughter was now reading, “all of a sudden there is a totally
different picture [of him], a totally different [person].” She found this
very hard and difficult to believe, “wanted to apologize for him … to
understand him to find justification.” She tried to see him as “a
soldier in war who shoot[s] people [as] his work,” and as having stayed in
order to “save his family” (that is, to prevent repercussions).
Struggling to get inside of her father’s pain, she believed that only his
family ties prevented him from killing himself earlier; she considered him at
the end “a broken man” who, “knowing that he had killed people,
… could not live with this.”
She said that, after repeated
discussions with her younger brother, “in the final analysis neither of us
condemns him … We cannot condemn |
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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 410 |
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