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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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392 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| the other SS doctors in that “he never did [anything]
with his [own] hands, but always ordered somebody to do [things] for him. He
never operated himself, … never did … anything … not injections,
nothing.” When Dr. J. concluded, “I have to say to you that he was
probably as bad as the other ones,” it was with a touch of reluctance. Dr.
Jan W. was less reluctant to declare, “From the formal point of view,
Wirths was responsible for everything that happened in [the medical sections
of] the camp from September 1942 until the end of the camp’s existence, so
he must have accepted, ideologically, everything that went on in the camp.
… Millions were destroyed.” |
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| A “Correct” Bureaucrat |
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Wirths combined bureaucratic skill with a quality of
“correctness” (a concept of proper, controlled, relatively impersonal
behavior that infuses German culture and character) and reliability in ways
that enabled him to help inmates while succeeding within the SS. His
organizational loyalty was always clear to other SS observers. Ernst B. looked
upon him as little more than a representative of Nazi authority, a man one
would do well to stay away from because of his demanding “spirit of the
bureaucrat.” Rudolf Höss, observing Wirths more closely, spoke of him
as a man with “a strong feeling of duty,” who was “extremely
conscientious and … obeyed all orders and directives with painstaking
care.” Also “correct” with inmates, the commandant went on,
Wirths’s only fault was frequently to be “very soft and good
natured” with them and to treat prisoner physicians “as
colleagues.” But he was “a good comrade … very popular”; he
“helped everyone who came to him,” and “everybody trusted
him.”19
For
“everybody” to trust Wirths required that he largely accept the
Auschwitz situation — as Höss implied in commenting that Wirths never
objected to the use of an ambulance marked with a red cross to transport those
selected for death to the gas chamber, despite the fact that he “was
usually very sensitive about such matters.” Indeed Wirths himself drove
about in, a car flying “a white pennant with a red cross.”20
There is a similar implication in a
comment made by Helmut Wirths, concerning a horrible scene of extremely
emaciated corpses he and his brother had viewed outside of a medical block:
“What really bothered me was his [Eduard’s] telling me that these
were the dead from natural causes.” Wirths meant of course that they were
not victims of the gas chamber or any other means of direct killing — but
in calling any deaths in Auschwitz “natural,” he was going quite far
in his identification with the institution. :
Wirths’s ideological
anti-Semitism contributed to his bureaucratic adaptation to Auschwitz. He could
permit Jewish prisoner doctors to do more medical work, but said it would be
“impossible” for them to treat |
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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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