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| Chapter 18 |
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Healing-Killing Conflict:
Eduard Wirths |
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I can say that I have always done my duty and have never done
anything contrary to what was expected of me. |
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— EDUARD WIRTHS |
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Eduard Wirths lived out most directly, and most extremely,
the Auschwitz healing-killing conflict and paradox. A man with a strong
reputation as a dedicated physician, and described by inmates who could observe
him closely as “kind,” “conscientious,” “decent,”
“polite,” and “honest,” he was the same man who established
the camp’s system of selections and medicalized killing and supervised the
overall process during the two years in which most of the mass murder was
accomplished. Because of that dichotomy, he was one of the few Auschwitz
doctors frequently spoken of as not only criminal but a tragic figure. Hermann
Langbein, the political prisoner who served as his secretary in both Dachau and
Auschwitz believed him to be the only Nazi doctor in Auschwitz who refused to
succumb to its ubiquitous corruption and in no way enriched himself there. From
the time of his first encounter with Wirths in Dachau, Langbein was struck by
his medical conscientiousness and considered him “completely different
from other SS doctors.”¹
He differed also in the story of his
death — not in the way that he died (a considerable number of Nazi doctors
committed suicide) but in what transpired just before his death. It is claimed
(probably accurately) that a British intelligence officer, a member of the
group to whom Wirths surrendered himself, greeted him and then said, “Now
I’ve shaken hands with a man who … bears responsibility for the death
of four million human beings.” That night Wirths hanged himself; although
cut down, he died two or three days later, in September 1945.² |
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