|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
402 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
| |
forced to do this terrible work, yes, that it no longer
exists.”* In correspondence with his parents, he corrects the elder
Wirths’s mistaken impression that he, Eduard, had been actually
responsible for the changes, but does relate his personal crusade to their
achievement (“I pointed out at every opportunity that offered itself to me
… the inhumanity, impossibility and genuine indignity of the whole
procedure”). His way of doing so was to stress how "they [those advocating
the killing] have burdened … our entire people, … particularly at the
time of such a terrible war”48 — an
approach that met with acceptable Nazi standards of opposition as well as his
own loyalties. He could still, however, understand his crusade to be on behalf
of family and future — that is, on behalf of his “decent self.”
His crusade, then, was on behalf of maintaining acceptable standards
within the Nazi movement. It could extend to such petty matters as telling a
man on the medical staff under his command (as Wirths describes in a letter to
his wife), that if he does well in a course he was leaving to take, he would
get fourteen days of special leave, while adding that along his travels this
man would purchase some wool, a valuable wartime commodity, and bring it to
her49 (hardly a notable vice by Auschwitz
standards, but suggesting that Wirths was not above bending his rectitude
slightly in order to please her).
His sense of moral crusade was
significantly maintained in the struggle against Grabner and the Auschwitz
Gestapo. Here he could denounce their corruption and “illegalities”
in murdering and foisting their murders on his unit. Within the Auschwitz
structure, his crusade against Grabner might well have demanded a certain real
courage, but it also had the enormous psychological value to Wirths as a
crusade against evil as symbolized by Grabner.
Wirths’s
combination of rectitude and compromise enabled him to feel relatively
comfortable in Auschwitz. From the beginning, he pitted “only one thing,
the straight path,” against the ultimate corruptions of Auschwitz. In
terms of personal arrangements, he could say, “I asked for nothing,”
and reveled in his friend Horst Fischer’s reassurance that he deserved the
house being built for him and everything else: “If I hadn’t created
[what I have] here, Auschwitz would not be … what it is now. ”50
Yet it is Wirths who complained of
Fischer’s rectitude, seeing him as “always straightforward and
honest, thus making some things difficult for himself and me” —
rather than doing things “diplomatically,” which meant making
compromises even as one “keep[s] to one’s straight path.”
Wirths’s development of his Auschwitz self enabled him to adjust to the
camp, to (in Helmut’s words) “g[e]t used to it.” (Wirths could
still claim rectitude for his Auschwitz self by taking such stands as objecting
— in early January 1945, with the Russian armies close — to
nurses living in the |
__________
* This was the time when,
with Russian troops approaching and most available Jews already killed, a
decision was made to stop large selections in anticipation of closing the camp.
|
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 402 |
Forward |
|
|
