| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
| |
he did not feel capable of performing selections, and
wished to leave the camp, was met with a cool declaration that “according
to a ‘Führer order,’ service in a concentration camp was
considered front-line duty, and that any refusal was considered a
desertion” (see pages 393-94).³
Pressure and meritorship
could combine, as in the case of Franz Lucas who, known to have a certain
reluctance to select, was taken to the ramp by Wirths and Mengele and more or
less shown how to go about things. Lucas apparently tried several ploys,
including feigned illness, to avoid selecting; and even after complying, his
kindness and medical help to prisoners led to a dressing down and an eventual
transfer.4
In general the evidence
suggests that Wirths preferred persuasion to threat; but that a doctor could,
if sufficiently determined, avoid performing selections without repercussions
— though only if he expressed his reluctance as inability rather than
defiance. There were a few accounts of noncommissioned officers who broke down
in response to ramp duty. While Wirths in one case was reputed to have raged
and screamed and insisted that during the fifth year of the war, one could not
afford “sympathy with such sentimentalities,” such men were generally
given different duties. Official attitudes varied and Wirths is even said to
have responded to an SS doctor’s reluctance to select with the comment:
“Finally, a person with character.”
Whether he said exactly
that, he fiercely retained his prerogatives regarding medical control of
selections. Dr. B. reported, for instance, that during the crisis of the
Hungarian transports, when a camp commander learned that there were too few
doctors to perform all of the selections. required and offered to assign some
of his own people Wirths replied firmly, “No that is my
responsibility. I don’t want anyone else doing it.”
After
describing selections as having so permeated Auschwitz routine as to become
“like the weather.” Dr. B immediately added “like a
snowstorm” so that “when it is there one is unable to think about
it,” thereby suggesting that selections were not a calm but an agitated
fact of life.
The socialization of SS doctors to Auschwitz killing was
enhanced by the camp’s isolation from the world outside. The connecting
medical figure with outside authority was Enno Lolling, who came frequently to
the camp from his Berlin office and was essentially incompetent and a heavy
drinker. Ernst B had the impression that Lolling ’s superiors preferred
not to know too many details about the camps, and that there was a general
policy of “screening them off” from regular SS units. Camp doctors
perpetuated the isolation by their reluctance, in Dr. B’s phrase, to let
others “see their cards.” The result was, as he put it with only
partial exaggeration, that “a concentration camp [became] a totally
self-contained entity, absolutely isolated from everything — especially
Auschwitz.”
Doctors assigned there, then, had limited contact with
anything but Auschwitz reality. They became preoccupied with adapting
themselves to that reality, and moral revulsion could be converted into
feelings of discomfort, unhappiness, anxiety, and despair. Subjective struggles
could |
|
