| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| Moreover, for some of the long-standing SS doctors, the
selections process was an improvement over earlier camp conditions: |
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There were old-timers who had experienced much
worse things than selections earlier on — personally beating someone to
death and such things .... [The duty] was disliked, unpleasant. Yet the real
old-timers who were around at the introduction of these selections, who
experienced the time when people just expired in the camps and the prisoners
beat one another to death or beat to death those who were dying or were
suspected of having typhus.* ... For them the selections were practically
— one can't quite say relief — but in any case a situation that had
improved. It got better — things were
systematized. |
| Newcomers who had not experienced those earlier brutal camp
conditions “suffered initially” at the selections, but “then it
got to be routine — like all other routines in Auschwitz.” SS doctors
rarely made selections a topic of conversation: “If they did, it might be
to complain .... Someone might feel cheated if he had to stand one more night
more often [than the others], or if he were not relieved [from duty when he was
supposed to be] or the like.” |
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| Adaptation: From Outsider to
Insider |
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A survivor and leading chronicler of Auschwitz. Hermann
Langbein classified Nazi doctors as falling into three categories: zealots who
participated eagerly in the extermination process and even did “extra
work” on behalf of killing; those who went about the process more or less
methodically and did no more and no less than they felt they had to do; and
those who participated in the extermination process only reluctantly.²
Langbein referred mainly to selections within the camp, which could be observed
closely by prisoner physicians and certain other inmates (he himself observed a
great deal as Wirths’s secretary). But those differing attitudes applied
to ramp selections as well — both in the drinking patterns just described
and in overall ramp “styles.”
For instance another survivor
contrasted the style of Dr. Franz Lucas, generally acknowledged to be a
reluctant participant with that of Josef |
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* Dr. K., though mostly
accurate about Auschwitz details, tended at times, as here, to stress the
brutalized behavior of prisoners while minimizing that of SS
men. |
