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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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405 |
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| Healing-Killing Conflict: Eduard
Wirths |
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of the physicians [though he did not here credit prisoner
physicians], who because of treatment, improvement in diet, personal hygiene,
etc. were now forcibly killed.”59
Because a part of him, as a physician, opposed the process, he could see
himself as one combating the killing, even while actually orchestrating it.*
He could thus later claim that he had acted in accordance with his
“Christian and medical conscience” and that “my work as a
physician was purely that of offering care”: “I took the point of
view that I was employed in Auschwitz only as a physician and could not act
contrary to my conscience.”60 While the
absurdity of these claims are partly a function of his immediate postwar
desperation, they also reflect an actual self-image of a man who understood
himself to have struggled to maintain his medical conscience.
No wonder
he conveyed such excitement in announcing to his wife (on 23 July 1943),
“Just think, I have come up with an entirely new delousing preparation,
already tried it out on 500 people, and. with excellent and above all 100%
success”; he added, “I hope to have a degree of success in this
respect such as the world has never seen before [so that] in one fell swoop I
could do away with all of the typhus. and above all, my little one, nobody has
helped me with it … on the contrary.” Now he is a lonely medical
spirit who can point to a real epidemiological achievement, even if because
“it is done with a strong poison it is naturally not without
danger.”61 The delousing preparation was
cyanide gas, or Zyklon-B.
We can understand why he found it important
to hold an “office hour” for SS families, and to serve as marriage
counselor and personal advisor to them. He was a healer among them, even if (as
he later claimed with some truth) they looked upon him suspiciously as an
unreliable intellectual and part of the “academic international”; he
and they had a functional stance toward one another. Also understandable is the
intensity of his involvement in work on a new military hospital, so that his
greatest sadness in acknowledging to Langbein at the end that Germany had lost
the war was that “the work on the [new SS] infirmary will have been
totally in vain.”62
By claiming
for himself this stance as healer, Wirths could place his Block 10 experiments
in the dignified and technical medical category of “colposcopic mass
examinations of the uterus for early detection of cancer with the active
support of Professor Dr. Hinselmann.” He could even put a medical face on
selections by claiming that he “demanded of the camp authorities that
physicians would have to be consulted for a decision regarding the ability [of
inmates] to work” — though adding (and thereby half acknowledging the
killing element), “I had to burden the physicians subordinated to me with
this terrible fact.” His apologia also contains a visionary plan for
“a large field hospital for sick prisoners with a capacity for
30,000-40,000 sick people” which would service other |
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* Wirths’s apologia
had the purpose of exculpation — he was trying to save his own life —
and he was willing to bend the truth considerably to that purpose.
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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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Page 405 |
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