|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
381 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
| |
by various reports of people meeting and talking with him
in Paraguay, reports that suggest he still had influence in a German, if not
Nazi, community there, and also that he was preparing his own memoirs defending
his actions over the course of his life. Whatever the mixture of truth,
exaggeration, and falsehood, the legend grew.
For many survivors,
Mengele had so come to represent Auschwitz evil that meaning in their lives
could be restored only by his capture and trial. “I would like to live and
see this trial and then I could die,” is the way one prisoner doctor put
it. In adding that “a human being should know, … should be told that
his deeds are evil [because], after all, there is not only heavenly, but also
earthly justice,” he was struggling to move beyond the legend to the man.
The twin Simon J. made the point more directly: “I would wish to have a
good front-row seat and listen to the proceedings [because] I fear him totally.
… To me he is the key to my sense of fear from everything that is
German.” And then the crux of the matter: “I would be very interested
to hear the details and to see him pass [through] this metamorphosis of turning
back into a person instead of God Almighty.” Another survivor expressed a
similar need for Mengele to come to understand that “this is what
happened,” and then added, “After that I hope I can make peace with
myself.”
Mengele’s imagined trial, then, involved both the
legend and the man: justice for Mengele came to represent a restoration of a
just cosmos — a means of overcoming a vast “wound in the order of
being,” in Martin Buber’s phrase, that Auschwitz has represented. It
also came to signify the desacralization of a terrible deity: the god must be
rendered not only human but vulnerable to truth and retribution. Only then, for
many survivors who were rendered helpless to the point of feeling their
humanity virtually annihilated — only then could they regain freedom from
his control, experience a sense of vitality, feel alive. A few of those
survivors, while exploring Mengele’s meaning for themselves, insisted on
thinking beyond him. Dr. Henri Q., while well aware of Mengele as ‘a
terrible man’ and “the name one heard most” in Auschwitz,
nonetheless warned me against concentrating too much upon him because Auschwitz
had to be understood as “a collective enterprise.” Another prisoner
doctor had the same message: “There’s not only one Mengele. They are
all part of Mengele — all the doctors.” She was saying that what was
so glaring in Mengele, morally and psychologically, was present, perhaps more
muted, in all of the SS Auschwitz doctors. We can say, then, that, while
Mengele qualifies as the exemplar for “medical Auschwitz,” we should
use him to help us unlock, and not ignore, the broader evil of Auschwitz
truths.
Other survivors invoked the character of Dorf (in the 1978
television film Holocaust59), an
intelligent careerist who rises in the SS hierarchy until he becomes a key
figure in the planning of the annihilation of Jews. Dr. Lottie M. said that
Mengele, like Dorf, was “very cool,” "clean-cut," a “pretty
boy”; and that, although Mengele was more ideological, she could well
imagine him doing what Dorf did in the film, providing the |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 381 |
Forward |
|
|
