| “A Human Being in an SS
Uniform”: Ernst B. |
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do selections. B. remembered Mrugowsky answering, “I
myself could not do it either. I also have children.” Then the chief of
the Hygienic Institutes, also indignant that “his” doctor had been
pressured by Wirths, picked up the phone and made the calls necessary to
reassert his authority in protecting B. from selections: “In a few minutes
it was all done.” B. insisted that Mrugowsky’s actions were more than
mere assertion of authority, “I must say, it was also humane
[menschlich]”; and his further comment that this was “the same
man who was later hanged as a war criminal” suggested either
contradictions in Mrugowsky’s behavior or possibly B.’s sense that
the Nuremberg verdict had been unfair.
While Dr. B. was never again
asked to do selections, the episode had certain uncomfortable ramifications for
him. As a compromise, Mrugowsky provided a young doctor named Delmotte, whose
Auschwitz assignment specified that only one half of his time would be at the
Hygienic Institute and the other half as a camp doctor — which meant he
was to do the selections instead of Ernst B. An ardent member of the SS in his
mid-twenties and from a family with high Nazi connections, Delmotte had just
emerged from one of the first classes of a special SS cadet training course
made available for doctors; he had wished to be sent to the front but agreed to
Auschwitz because of having been promised that he could write his doctoral
dissertation there.
At the first selection he was taken to, Delmotte
became nauseated and returned to his room quite drunk; what was unusual,
however, was that he did not leave his room the next morning. Dr. B. heard that
Weber, upon visiting Delmotte, found him “catatonic … completely
blocked”; Weber thought at first that the young doctor had been stricken
with a severe illness but concluded that he had simply had too much to drink.
When he finally emerged in an agitated state, he was heard to say that he
“didn’t want to be in a slaughterhouse” and preferred to go to
the front, and that “as a doctor his task was to help people and not to
kill them.” It was an argument, Dr. B. said, that “we never
used” in Auschwitz: “It would have been totally pointless.”
Indeed, no other Auschwitz doctor I came upon in the research expressed that
truth so clearly and repeatedly. B. thought that Delmotte spoke in that way
only because of “his ingenuousness, his youthful inexperience, his total
ignorance of the work in this respect.” B. also stressed that Delmotte
approached the medical profession “with high ideals and great
enthusiasm,” that he had “grown up in an SS cadet camp” and was
“determined not to betray his SS ideals,” and that he had declared
(though this only when drunk) that he would never have joined the SS if he had
“known that there was such a thing as Auschwitz.” At the heart of
Delmotte’s resistance to selections, in other words, was his SS
idealism.* |
__________
* Langbein confirms
B’s version of these events, reporting that it was the morning following
the outburst that he realized that alcohol had not played the primary role. He
also observed that Delmotte’s appeal to his superior had been
“diplomatically very awkward — he told us that later — in that
he had officially refused and said he requested either to be sent to the Front
or he himself should be gassed. But he could not do it [select].”
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