|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
327 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| “A Human Being in an SS
Uniform”: Ernst B. |
| |
[institu … ] tional attribution “From the
Hygienic Institute of the Concentration Camp Auschwitz.” Years later,
after the professor had died, I was able to talk to his daughter, who knew a
great deal about her father’s relationship to Ernst B., especially how he
had saved her father’s life on three separate occasions. Dr. B. had taken
on, as a result, an almost mythical quality in her mind: she thought of him not
as an SS doctor but “as my father’s savior,” imagined meeting
him sometime in Germany, and went so far as to say that when her father died
Dr. B. seemed in certain ways to replace him in her feelings.
She was
puzzled, however, by one aspect of the relationship. She had seen the warm
correspondence between the two men, including Dr. B.’s grateful letter
following his acquittal. After that, her father wrote back saying in effect (in
her words), “You saved my life — I saved your life — now we are
even.” She noted that the two men then stopped corresponding; and when she
asked her father why he did not write the German doctor again, he told her,
“Well, we saved each other’s life. That’s all. What more could
we talk about?”
I suspect that her father did experience the
matter as a true exchange. First, he had mobilized full energy and influence on
behalf of acquittal and liberty for a man who had previously been within the
category (but not the mentality) of the professor’s own concentration-camp
jailor Then he must have needed to step back from the Auschwitz-derived
dependency on and gratitude toward Dr. B., as well as from his own Auschwitz
involvements and compromises, in order to assert finally an unbridgeable area
in the separate terrains of prisoner physician and SS doctor in
Auschwitz. |
| |
| |
| Dr. B.’s “Auschwitz
Confession” |
| |
| Ernst B.’s most powerful prison experience had to do
with “a roomful of files” from the Hygienic Institute, which the
examining judge, by now favorably disposed toward him, asked him to examine. B.
plunged into a study of such questions as how long an ill prisoner and
prisoners in general could survive in Auschwitz on the diet provided them. He
went about the task energetically and methodically, studying nutritional
components of diets for various kinds of prisoner, including those suffering
from different diseases, and concluding that seriously ill inmates had life
expectancy of no more than fourteen days and the general life expectancy of an
ordinary prisoner was no more than three months. His findings, which were used
by the court and by other researchers, were published. He stressed to me that,
beyond these statistics, “What is important is that for months I was alone
in a room [cell] with these files and nothing else,” and that
“through dealing with these papers I established a special contact with
Auschwitz.” Before that, in a group cell, “one used every opportunity
to suppress these memories,” but in that room “confronting the
problem … in a different way, … one could deal with |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 327 |
Forward |
|
|
