| Introduction to Part II |
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necessity and appropriateness, enhanced by the medical, as
well as the military, aura surrounding it.
Sonderbehandlung was
part of the mystical imperative to kill all Jews; and once Auschwitz took on
that imperative, any Jewish arrival or prisoner could be experienced by the
Nazi doctor’s Auschwitz self as designated for death, and, psychologically
speaking, as already dead. Killing someone already dead need not be experienced
as murder. And since Jews, long the Nazis’ designated victim, were more
generally perceived as carriers of death, or bearers of the death taint, they
became “doubly dead.” Just as one could not kill people already dead,
one could do them no harm however one mutilated their bodies in medical
experimentation. The human experiments performed by Nazi doctors (chapter 15),
while tangential to questions of ecology, were fully consistent with the
regime’s larger biomedical vision.
For their regulation of the
Auschwitz ecology, SS doctors needed the actual medical work of prisoner
doctors, who in turn needed SS doctors to make that work possible — to
keep others alive and stay alive themselves. What resulted were profound
conflicts within prisoner doctors concerning their relationship to the
Auschwitz ecology and to their SS masters as they (the prisoner doctors)
struggled to remain free of selections (chapter 11) and to retain a genuinely
healing function (chapter 12).
There were antagonisms among these
prisoner doctors along with a few examples of close identification with Nazi
medical policies (chapter 13). But it was the SS doctors who pulled the
strings, who, while not without their own significant inner conflict, managed
to adapt sufficiently to the Auschwitz system to maintain its medicalized
killing (chapter 10). Their adaptation involved the process I call
“doubling,” which permitted them to select for the gas chamber
without seeing themselves as killers.
At the end of part II, I examine
in greater detail the behavior and psychological experience of three individual
SS doctors: one who managed to avoid doing selections and to help many inmates
despite his Nazi contradictions (chapter 16); another, the notorious Mengele,
who found full self-expression in Auschwitz (chapter 17); and the chief doctor
(chapter 18), who sought to “reform” the Auschwitz system in ways
that might benefit prisoners, even as he set up the full machinery of
medicalized killing. |
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