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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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406 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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concentration camps as well and “eliminate the
influence of the camp authorities.” He did not say, of course, that those
expanded medical facilities were part of the general Nazi vision of a vast
expansion “after the victory” of Auschwitz killing and slave
labor.63
There is a final key to the
adaptive value of Wirths’s medical self in his brother’s
characterization of him as “a good doctor” who “tried to do what
he could do” on the assumption that “if anybody must be killed,
… a doctor has to be a witness, … guilty or not.” In the middle
of death, even death he is bringing about, a healer has the noble function of
bearing witness — because he is a healer. |
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| Adapting to Evil |
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Wirths’s pattern illuminates the crucial distinction
between conflicts and actions: in the absence of a basic decision to change
one’s actions (cease doing selections, leave, etc.), the tendency is to
absorb conflicts and mold them to one’s adaptation. Wirths’s
depression and even his change in demeanor (according to his wife, from an
outgoing, happy man to a deeply troubled and reclusive one) were a way of
maintaining his adaptation — as, of course, was his opposite tendency,
remembered by his daughter in Auschwitz, toward tenderness and gaiety with the
children.
Reportedly somewhat depressed while in Dachau, then more so
in Auschwitz, Wirths exclaimed to his brother Helmut, “How can I go on
living?” After the war Wirths wrote of having been “so emotionally
burdened that I saw suicide as the only way out of these grave conflicts of
conscience [Gewissenskonflikten ],”64 but he implied that his psychic state was
improved by being able to travel to Berlin and obtain permission for medically
constructive steps in Auschwitz.
Wirths clearly experienced guilt
feelings, a sense of self-condemnation, but his brother Helmut made it clear
that those feelings of “not being able to live in peace with his
conscience” were greatest “[at the] beginning and in the end”
— as were all of his conflicts. During most of the time between, Wirths
could see Auschwitz, as Helmut put it, as “a task” (the
“crusade” for improvement I have spoken of). The messages of
gratitude he received from prisoners also helped allay guilt; and even when he
“fell into despair,” as his brother put it, because he realized that
Auschwitz evils were not diminishing but “became more and more,” the
despair was partial and by no means incapacitating.
His expressions of
guilt toward the end were still ambiguous In a letter to his parents, but
particularly his father, of 13 December 1944, he declared, “The guilt
cannot be denied” (including his own, we must assume), “but surely
our people has atoned for much by its heroic conduct, by its immense
sacrifices, particularly among women and children” (an expression of
mitigation but also of retained loyalty not only to the German people but, we
suspect, to their cause) “which in my opinion could have been avoided if
one had stayed away from such things from |
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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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