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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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404 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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cruelties.” Helmut said that until the end his brother
“believed [in] Hitler as a good man” and “couldn’t believe
that they [the Nazis] wouldn’t win.”
Earlier: Wirths had
shown Langbein a plan for extensive expansion of Auschwitz “after the
victory.” Langbein commented that Wirths “feared' a defeat of
National Socialism even though he had become familiar with its true face at
Auschwitz more clearly than anybody else”; Wirths held to the
Führer’s ignorance about the extermination camps because “he
probably needed this [thought] construction in order to justify for himself his
membership in the National Socialist movement.” When Langbein, in their
last conversation toward the end, stated that the war had been completely lost,
Wirths said, “That's horrible,” and when Langbein said, “That's
good, doctor,” Wirths responded, “How can you say that? You’re a
German too.”55
In his apologia,
Wirths exaggerated his alienation from others in the Auschwitz hierarchy and
the degree to which he took "refuge in … illness.” His heart and
kidney problems did undoubtedly intensify under the stress of his conflicts,
and we know that actual antagonisms with other SS officers led him to suggest
to Höss that he wished to be transferred,56 though he apparently never made anything on the
order of an all-out effort to leave. His later claim that he “worked for
the Polish Resistance … movement” is a falsehood built upon the
tiniest kernel of truth (his having worked supportively with Poles and others
whom he suspected or knew were part of the Resistance) and his probably
accurate claim that toward the end he was accused by the Gestapo of
“demoralization of the people,” when he made a statement that the
German armies could no longer resist, was the kind of experience Karl Brandt
also had (see footnote on page 115) and one typical for a “decent
Nazi” at the end.57
And though
he went into hiding after the surrender, he held to his duty, virtually to the
end, long after others (like Mengele) had fled. He could thus write to his wife
on 13 January 1945, with considerable truth (defending himself against negative
allegations made by Grabner): “I can say that I have always done my duty
and have never done anything contrary to what was expected of me.”58 |
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| Wirths’s Medical Self |
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| Beyond his crusade from within and his Nazi loyalties,
Wirths adapted to Auschwitz by clinging to the sense of himself as a physician.
The healing image of the physician helped him deny his and other Auschwitz
physicians’ actual killing. He could attribute that killing to “the
camp authorities” who, he wrote in his apologia, would appear secretly
“without notifying the physician or at times when one knew the physician
was absent, or at night” and then have “the sick and weak removed
from camp in order to kill them with poison gas.” In defending that
falsehood, Wirths articulated the healing-killing paradox with exquisite
accuracy: “It was insane that people whom one has saved through the
efforts and art |
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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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