|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
401 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Healing-Killing Conflict: Eduard
Wirths |
| |
who had visited Eduard first in Dachau and then in
Auschwitz, later described the latter visit in uneasy, defensive terms. He
remembered seeing prisoners who seemed to be “semi-free,” and two
young Jewish women working in his son’s office who were “basically
cheerful,” and noted of inmates that “in the morning they went out
singing and came back at night singing”; he claimed to have learned only
later on that “they had to sing!” Even after coming to understand
much of the truth of Auschwitz, including “how the people died there of
… sicknesses and … were exterminated,” he declared to his son,
”There is no place in the whole world where you can do as much good as in
Auschwitz. Endure.”46
Whatever
good they hoped Eduard could achieve in Auschwitz and whatever their own
relationship to Nazi ideology, his brother and father were caught up in the
same German commitments to duty and obedience that affected Eduard himself.
Their advice gave his Auschwitz stay a family sanction, and at the same time
furthered the kind of moral displacement we have been discussing: the issue
became more a struggle with family values and family obedience and less with
Auschwitz mass murder. |
| |
| |
| Moral Crusade: Rectitude and Compromise |
| |
Important to Wirths’s adjustment in Auschwitz was his
sense of being on a continuing moral crusade. The purpose of the crusade could
be amorphous — the transformation of the primitive Auschwitz environment
with “German work” but was always in the context of war and survival
(“Yes there is war, and it is a hard, the hardest, time”). His
crusade could become more concrete, and more inwardly credible, when it focused
on a version of “medical humanity.” In his apologia, he speaks of
“my difficult struggle,” which was against disease and especially
typhus epidemics, and on behalf of better medical care for prisoners, including
accurate medical reports depicting true conditions at Auschwitz, expanded
facilities and improved equipment and supplies, utilization of a division of
Jewish prisoner doctors, replacing brutal ordinary criminals with more decent
political prisoners, eliminating fatal phenol injections on the medical blocks
and cutting down on selections there, and bringing about a significant decline
in the death rate among those living in the camp, The Auschwitz command’s
frequent opposition to him gave this crusade further meaning for him, as did
the slogan “Manpower” [Arbeitskräfte] he claimed to have
stressed. In his apologia, he went so far as to claim that he was doing
God’s work (he had “a sign from above [that] I should and must fight
on”) in preserving Jews, and that “it probably can be credited to me
that Jews are alive in Europe at all today.”47
One reason Wirths could almost believe
this was that in his feelings he did oppose — as was known to
Höss and others — the very mass killing of Jews he supervised. On 29
November 1944, Wirths wrote to his wife: Can you imagine my dear how wonderful
it is that I am no longer |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 401 |
Forward |
|
|
