| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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| Another prisoner also had a surprisingly positive
experience with Klein: when walking in the camp, this man took the highly
unusual and dangerous step of approaching the SS doctor directly in order to
ask him to have his (the prisoner's) wife, a nurse, transferred from an attic
working place, where a great deal of sawdust caused her to cough incessantly,
back to a medical block where she had worked in the past. Instead of saying,
“Away with this fellow!” as everyone thought he would, Klein
complied. This survivor commented, “These things are so intermingled
— murdering and extermination on the one hand, and the very small details
where something could work out quite the other way.” He further
reflected: |
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When I tell this ... after thirty-five years, I
think, How could it be possible? ... That one could influence this god and make
a man who ... exterminated thousands of people ... to have interest in one
prisoner girl, and save her .... There are things that happen in human nature
... that an experienced analyst even cannot understand .... This split, . . .
it can be very delicate .... Maybe with these small [positive] things —
with Klein, there [was] something of ... medical tradition in them. But, in
general, I believe they were no longer doctors. They were SS officers. In these
things, the group spirit is one thousand times mightier than the individual
spirit. |
This survivor was saying that Klein functioned primarily
in relation to the collective SS ethos, or what I call the “Auschwitz
self”; but that he had available a humane dimension of self that could
emerge at certain moments.
The existence of that humane element of self
may, in fact, have contributed to Klein’s and other Nazi doctors’
cruelties. For instance, when SS doctors asked pregnant women to step forward
so that they could receive a double food ration — only to send those who
did to the gas chamber the following day — it is possible that a brief
sense of potential “medical activity” (improving the diet of pregnant
women) contributed to the doctors’ psychological capacity to carry out
this hideous hoax.
In my interviews with Dr. Lottie M., she raised
several questions she asked me to explore with Nazi doctors: How far did they
look upon all of Auschwitz as “an experiment [on] how much a person can
stand”? How much were they able to recognize “the irrationalism of
the racial theory”? At what point had “they started to be afraid of
the end”? But what she was most curious about was this question of split
loyalty — of conflicting oaths contradictions between murderous cruelty
and momentary kindness which SS doctors seemed to manifest continuously during
their time in Auschwitz.
For the schism tended not to be resolved. Its
persistence was part of the overall psychological equilibrium that enabled the
SS doctor, to do his deadly work. He became integrated into a large, brutal,
highly functional |
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