| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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great reservations.” With doctors buffered from the
killing, selections could be accepted as an established activity and seem less
onerous than special brutal tasks (such as medical collusion in torture to
produce confessions) and immediate confrontation with inmates dying of
starvation. But one may turn that point around and say that the selections were
so onerous, so associated with extraordinary evil, that Nazi doctors called
forth every possible mechanism to avoid taking in psychologically what they
were doing — every form of psychic numbing and derealization (see
pages 442-47). Hence Dr. B., who witnessed many selections without performing
them, could say that “what remains are a few personal impressions, and
these impressions are in themselves not even the really cruel events. If one
tried to describe a selection now, that would be almost impossible ... because
it is a technical process .... I can describe many isolated images; ... they
are still there, but one must drag them out of one’s memory.” This
difficulty of recall suggests that Nazi doctors never quite felt — that
is, emotionally experienced — their original act in performing the
selections.
Doctors were further enabled to do selections by the shared
sense that Auschwitz was morally separate from the rest of the world, that it
was, as Dr. B. put it, “extraterritorial.”* He referred not to
Auschwitz’s geographical isolation, but to its existence as a special
enclave of bizarre evil, which rendered it exempt from ordinary rules of
behavior. He also stressed its extreme contradictions as contributing to its
function.
For instance, he spoke of an aura of élite and highly
detached military professionalism on the one hand, and of all-pervasive
corruption on the other. That military professionalism, derived from both the
SS and the earlier Prussian tradition, required ramrod posture, demeanor, and
integrity and a form of self-control that would have made it “nconceivable
... to speak about [inner or intimate] feelings.” The underlying
corruption was in the nature of shared open secrets involving all and,
to a degree, contributing to cohesion: |
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Every single SS man had so many possibilities for
being corrupt in some way that almost everyone did something — had
“dirt on his walking stick” [Dreck am Stecken]. And everyone
knew about everyone else’s improper activity, which is why nothing ever
came of it — because everyone knew about everyone else. That's why the SS
troop Kommando always held together so well — at least
externally. |
| By “dirt” he meant such things as keeping gold
and other valuables taken from Jews before they were killed instead of turning
it over to the |
__________
* The word means outside
territorial boundaries and, in a modern historical sense, has special reference
to areas in which citizens of a dominant Western country were exempt from the
legal jurisdiction of a weaker country (either colonized or in some way
threatened or controlled) where they resided. |
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