| “A Human Being in an SS
Uniform”: Ernst B |
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seen (his wife said specifically, “This is not for
us!”), Weber took him aside, told him to send his wife home, and asked him
how he could make such a disastrous blunder in bringing her there.
Alone with Weber, Dr. B. continued to express his desire to leave, but,
in his confusion, felt “fortunate to have Weber [there] as my
friend.” Weber urged him to stay and serve there as ordered and stressed
that his leaving would cause embarrassing “complications”
for
their common SS sponsor as well as uncertainty concerning B.’s own future.
Weber then laid out to B. “almost with irony” the central
Auschwitz truth, invoking the official term the “Final Solution of the
Jewish question”: "He [Weber] said, ‘If you want to see how it works,
go look out of the window. You will see … two large smokestacks ….
The normal kind of production of this machine …. is a thousand men in
twenty-four hours.’ ”
Weber then added what Dr. B. called
“the most important thing to me” — an explanation of how the
autonomy of the Hygienic Institute from the camp and its medical hierarchy
would enable them to keep their own hands clean and “stay out of this
whole business.” Weber added that they were responsible only to their
Berlin chief, Mrugowsky, who encouraged the Auschwitz unit to employ capable
prisoner physicians in its laboratories to produce work that could be published
under his name. That arrangement contributed to the group’s advantageous
situation, as did its important role in combating the danger of typhus
epidemics. Weber added that if B. stayed (“If you and I can stick
together”), the institute’s position would become even stronger. B.
was immediately convinced and made no effort to leave.
In moving from
“hearing … the [Auschwitz] story and seeing the smoke on the one hand
and being directly confronted with the actual machinery on the other,” he
had two enlightening lessons. The first began with a sudden visual impression
he had during his first days at the camp, an image he is still not quite sure
how to evaluate. He observed a miserable-looking group of prisoners from the
“outside Kommandos” (Aussenkommandos) marching back from their
work, bunched together six abreast, in humiliating rapid cadence, all of them
emaciated and dressed in the same Auschwitz clothes: “Then all of a sudden
I … thought — I don’t know whether it was true or whether I
imagined it — I still don’t know …. I thought I saw a schoolmate
of mine …. Immediately after … I talked to Weber and said,
‘I’m sure that was Simon Cohen.’”
A Jewish
classmate from a well-to-do family, Simon Cohen had been a good friend during
the early 1930s, when anti-Semitism was already widespread in Germany. The two
boys were drawn to one another partly by their common lack of interest in
schoolwork and would take long vacation trips together on their bicycles. Upon
returning from a year abroad in 1933, Ernst B. found that the Jewish boy
“wasn’t there any more.” He had sometimes wondered what had
happened to his friend.
When questioned, Weber told him that there were
large numbers of |
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