| AUSCHSWITZ: THE RACIAL
CURE |
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looked at it [Auschwitz] as a totally messed-up thing.
[But] you could not change it, you see. That's like in a democracy, where you
may find many things wanting, but you cannot change it. Or rather you stick
with it nonetheless. Because [you] think democracy is better.” The strong
implication is that Nazism even with Auschwitz was the best of all
possible worlds.
However ironic, these medical participants in mass
murder were held to the regime behind the murder by the principles of what Dr.
B. called “coherent community” (zusammenhängende
Gemeinschaft, which also means “community that hangs together”)
and “common effort” (allgemeine Anstrengung, which implies intensity
and exertion) in discussing his and others' sense of the Nazi movement's
commitment to overcoming staggering national problems. Hence he could speak of
"a faith" [Glaube] and, more than that, of a "practiced faith" joined to a
community [Gemeinschaft]; in all this, “the bridge ... is the
ideology.” And that “bridge” could connect the Nazi doctors to
an immediate sense of community and communal purpose in their Auschwitz work.
Anti-Jewishness was an active ingredient in that ideology. While there
was individual variation, Dr. B. claimed that “all physicians were
absolutely convinced that ‘the Jews were our misfortune’” —
the phrase first uttered by Heinrich von Treitschke, the nineteenth-century
politician-historian who contributed to the sense that “there was
something virtuous about being anti-Semitic” (see pages 35-36).6 When I mentioned the phrase “gangrenous appendix”
an SS doctor had applied to Jews (see pages 15-16), Dr. B. quickly answered
that the Nazi doctors’ overall feeling was: “Whether you want to call
it an appendix or [not], it must be extirpated [ausgerottet, meaning
also ‘exterminated,’ ‘destroyed,’ or
‘eradicated’].” He went so far as to say that even the policy of
killing all Jews was readily justified by this “theoretical and
ideological” stance, so that “of course they supported it.”
On other occasions, B. spoke differently, stressing that Auschwitz Nazi
doctors were not for the most part ideologically minded. But he was consistent
in stressing their sense of a “Jewish problem” and their tendency to
speak in what he called the usual propaganda phrases: “That all cultures
have realized that the Jews . . . must be kept outside of the regular
[normal] culture .... That German culture cannot grow
[ausbreiten; also: ‘spread,’ ‘unfold,’ ‘open
out'] if it is being infiltrated ‘Jewishly’ or some thing along that
line.”
But to perform selections, the Nazi doctor had to make the
psychic shift from ideology to actual mass murder (as Karl K.
explained): |
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There was no one in Germany or in the whole world
who had not heard Hitler’s and Streicher’s proclamation that the Jews
had to be exterminated [vernichtet] . . . . Everybody heard that. And
everybody “heard past it” [vörbeigehort; “didn't
take it in”]. Because nobody believed that such a reality would come into
practice . . . . And suddenly one is confronted with the fact that what one
used to, my God! take |
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