| Socialization to Killing |
| |
replace moral questions. They became concerned not with the
evil of the environment but with how to come to some terms with the place.
They then became creatures of what Dr. B. described as the
all-important Auschwitz milieu or atmosphere: “In that atmosphere
everything is seen differently from the way it would be viewed now.” On
the basis of all the pressures and adaptive inclinations I have described,
“after a few weeks in that milieu, one thinks:
‘Yes.’”
The selections machine did not function
impeccably. There could be not only too many transports for the facilities but
poor organization in handling transports, too little room in camp quarantine
where new inmates were kept, and occasionally an insufficient supply of gas.
Among the troops, efficiency could be impaired by drinking too much, and the
same was true of doctors. Doctors indeed drank heavily, though, according to
Dr. B., only one was a recognizable alcoholic, and even he “had sufficient
discipline not to get drunk when he was on duty doing selections.” One
could say that whatever the technical problems or human frailties, Auschwitz
could mobilize a collective determination to keep the gassing process going.
Psychological Distance
Participation in
selections was also enhanced by a sense that they did not come first in the
hierarchy of horrors. Dr. B., for instance, stressed that “other things
were much worse” — such as scenes of starving children in the Gypsy
camp, where 80 percent of the inmates in general were starving to death while a
few could be “living very well.” He stressed the difficulty of
“having this in front of you every day, continuously,” and how,
“it took a long time to be able to live with that.”
There, as
in other situations, what mattered was what one could see, what confronted
one’s senses: “The killing was mostly excluded [from conversation],
... [since] it was not what was directly visible. But very visible were the
so-called Muselmänner. [Also] visible were the ones who were
starving ... to death.... That was a bigger problem .... One was more oppressed
by that.”
By not quite seeing it, doctors could distance
themselves from the very killing they were actively supervising. The same
purpose was served by drawing upon their having witnessed what they claimed
were worse horrors — in camps for Russian prisoners of war and in other
concentration camps — which enabled them to conclude that
“they’ve got it a lot better here.” As Dr. B. went on to
explain: “What made Auschwitz especially notorious were the gassing
installations. Right? And those were now somehow or other a bit further off,
and one could only actually sense them by means of smell.” But, as he
earlier implied, one gets used to a smell.
Furthermore, there were more
“fundamentally controversial” activities about which SS men had
greater qualms. Among these, Dr. B. mentioned Gestapo methods for extracting
confessions, about which “one had very |
|
