| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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arriving SS doctor were his ritual of initiation, his
transition from ordinary life to the Auschwitz universe, and the early calling
forth of his Auschwitz self.
In terms of actual professional
requirements, there was absolutely no need for doctors to be the ones
conducting selections: anyone could have sorted out weak and moribund
prisoners. But if one views Auschwitz, as Nazi ideologues did, as a public
health venture, doctors alone became eligible to select. In doing so, the
doctor plunged into what can be called the healing-killing paradox.
For him especially, killing became the prerequisite for healing. He
could arrange for medical care only so far as the slaughterhouse was kept at
full function. And his healing area (the medical block) was simultaneously a
clearinghouse for further killing. He became an advocate of killing on two
fundamental levels: that of the ecology of the camp (selecting larger numbers
at the ramp and on the medical block when the camp was overcrowded, hygienic
conditions were threatened, and the quantity of sick or weak inmates strained
medical facilities and lessened work efficiency [see pages 180-81]); and in
connection with the larger biomedical vision (curing the Nordic race by ridding
it of its dangerous Jewish infection), whatever the degree of intensity or
amorphousness of his involvement in that vision. The healing-killing paradox
was what Dr. Ernst B. called the “schizophrenic situation.” But that
situation was an enduring institutional arrangement, the basis for social
equilibrium in Auschwitz (see pages 210-13).
But prisoners could not be
permitted to kill themselves; suicide violated the logic of the healing-killing
paradox. Indeed, overt suicide; such as running into the electric fence, was
considered a serious violation of discipline and often exhaustively
investigated. (Suicides by Treblinka prisoners were described by one
commentator as the “first affirmation of freedom” contributing to
significant prisoner rebellion in that camp.6) More gradual submission to death as in the case
of the Muselmänner, could be tolerated or even encouraged because
it did not seem to challenge Nazi life-death control. The healing-killing
paradox, if it was to be internalized by the Auschwitz self, required
exclusive' control of life and death on the part of Nazi perpetrators.
The key word in the healing-killing reversal is
Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” carried over from
Nazi practice and from the 14f13 project in particular (see pages 136-37). We
have seen how this euphemism for killing insinuated something on the order of
medical therapy, along with a standing that was “more legal than
legal.” (In general bureaucratic usage, “special” [the prefix]
was the opposite of “regular”: special trains and regular trains,
special courts and regular courts, etc. Special procedures were deemed
necessary because of special conditions. The word not only detoxified killing
and aided in its routinization but, at the same time, infused that killing with
a near-mystical priority for the “Auschwitz self” in carrying it out.
Killing assumed a certain feeling of |
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