| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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believed that doctors were “certainly” affected
by Himmler’s message because it heightened the sense on the part of SS
officers and personnel that working in a camp made them a special élite,
and the doctors’ further sense of being an élite within that
élite.
That special recognition received for participating in
murder helped shift doctors’ conflicts to intra-organizational ones —
questions of personal loyalty to either the chief doctor or the camp
commandant, and general issues of one’s “sense of duty as a civil
servant,” or at least its military equivalent. For these and other
reasons, Ernst B. could say that he saw no direct expressions of revulsion
toward selections, though he “always wondered” why that was so. A
partial answer is that a combination of ideology and cynical detachment became
a much more comfortable psychological stance — here described by the
prisoner nonmedical scientist who observed a few Nazi doctors closely and read
some of their records: |
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They considered themselves performing Therapia
Magna Auschwitzciense. They would even use the initials TM. At first it was
mockingly and ironically, but gradually they began to use them simply to mean
the gas chambers. So that whenever you see the initials T. M., that’s what
it means. The phrase was invented by Schumann who fancied himself an academic
intellectual among the intelligentsia of Auschwitz doctors. By that phrase they
meant, for instance, saving people from typhus epidemics. They were doing them
a favor. And there was also a sense of humane method in what they were doing
.... A second part of the concept of Therapia Magna was doing things for
science — learning things for science, etc. |
In connection with those few doctors who resisted
selections Dr B groped unsuccessfully for their reasons. He concluded only
that, after one has “witnessed the whole procedure from the beginning ...
then you can only in a clearly intuitive way [nur rein
gefühlsmässig] say, ‘This is impossible!’ I don't have
any explanation for it.” (Just one SS doctor so far as we know — Dr.
B. himself — succeeded in refusing and holding to it, though with the help
of a special relationship to chain of command; and one other SS doctor —
Hans Delmotte — tried to, for a while.)
The very contradictions
and complexities concerning healing and killing that caused Dr. B. to speak of
a schizophrenic situation also militated against resistance at the time —
and against comprehension later on. On trying to explain Auschwitz by writing
about it, Dr. B. said, “For me, it’s impossible because . . . if you
start at one point, then the [endless] problems [of nuance and explanation]
come and because nothing is concrete, you see.”
What did become
clear was the power of the Auschwitz environment, |
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