| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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This Jewish doctor’s judgment emerged clearly
(Zenkteller “was the only [prisoner] doctor who would beat, insult
without reason …. the only doctor who would eliminate, persecute, do evil
for evil’s sake"), and his rage was such that, encountering Dr. Zenkteller
in a hospital soon after the liberation, O. seriously considered killing him
(“I assure you it is the fear of being surprised and given away which kept
me from strangling him”).
Other prisoner doctors essentially
agreed. They also understood Zenkteller to be psychologically disturbed: he
was, as one prisoner doctor put it, “erratic” and “highly
unstable,” his beating of both colleagues and patients an aspect of his
“episodes of violence.” Part of that instability was the inevitable
Auschwitz twist or contradiction — in his case, an occasional show of
decency. When another prisoner doctor was critically ill with typhus, it was
Dr. Zenkteller who first tried to place him on an “Aryan” block where
he had a better chance to survive; though the attempt failed, the fact that he
had been taken to the block rendered the ill doctor sufficiently
“élite” that he was not sent to the gas chamber when a
selection was made.
Fundamentally, however, as the other prisoner
doctor went on to say, Zenkteller “was a faithful servant of the SS
doctors.” While Zenkteller himself “was powerful enough to
decide on the life and death of any inmate, even the chief physicians among the
inmates,” in relation to the SS doctors “his submissiveness was
one-hundred percent.”
Zenkteller’s story resembles, in many
ways, the stories of Adam T. and Wladislaw Dering: the combination of Polish
nationalism with anti-Semitism; early fear and near physical and mental
breakdown in response to brutal treatment; adaptation by means of servile
behavior to the Nazi hierarchy and murderous behavior toward prisoners; and
then the development of a set of self-serving structural and psychological
arrangements for perpetuating personal power and omnipotence. But Zenkteller
differs from the other two collaborators in his extensive physical violence and
generally sadistic behavior. I will argue later that such sadism is inseparable
from a sense of omnipotence and has to do with overcoming one’s own
struggles with death and mutilation. But however we understand these
psychological and social currents, we must recognize the extent to which the
Auschwitz environment encouraged their coalescence into a self-process that
rendered at least a few prisoner doctors activists in Nazi medicalized
killing. |
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| Jewish Medical Collaborator: Maximilian
Samuel |
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| The one Jewish doctor I know of who can be included here,
Maximilian Samuel, had been a distinguished academic gynecologist in
Cologne.8 He had also been an ardent German
nationalist, was awarded the Iron Cross for military service during the First
World War, and was active in a |
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