| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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| was aware of others’ reports of his brutality and had
“no doubt” about his capacity for it, but added, “never in my
presence.” When she went on to wonder whether she might not have had a
“humanizing effect” on Mengele and other SS doctors because “I
treated everyone [inmates and SS doctors] like a human being,” she was
expressing another principle of doubling: the importance for each self of being
confirmed by others. The word “double” (or its French equivalent) was
actually used by Dr. Alexander O. in his excruciating struggles to come to
terms with Mengele: |
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The double man [l’homme
double]. The double [le double], that is to say he had all the
sentimental motions, all the human feelings, pity, and so on. But there was in
his psyche a hermetically closed cell [une cellule hermétiquement
fermée], impenetrable, indestructible cell, which is obedience to
the received order. He can throw himself in the water to go and save a Gypsy,
try to give him medication. … and then as soon as they are out of the
water, … tell him to get in the truck and quickly off to the gas
chamber. |
Dr. O. identified not only the doubling itself but the
central role of Mengele’s ideology (though only hinted at) in the process.
As O. went on to explain, “Mengele liked the Gypsies a lot. He loved the
Gypsy children, who called him ‘Uncle Mengele.’ ” But he knew
that the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] had ordered a slow death of the
Gypsies, and Mengele was “the kind of man … to believe that orders
had to executed.” Without such a concept, one who, like Teresa W., was
exposed to Mengele’s decency but at the same time accepted the truth of
reports about his experiments and cruel behavior, has to end up declaring
painfully, “I can’t understand him!” Or prisoners might. develop
their own racial theory to explain his contradictions: for instance, the rumor
that he was kinder to Gypsies than to others because “he himself was of
Gypsy origin” — a rumor that was consistent with his dark non-Aryan
appearance.
Eva C. told, with considerable sensitivity, how her own
psychological experience as an inmate helped her understand Mengele. She
pointed out that prisoners also began “to behave like that … with a
shell around us,” and how she herself watching grotesquely weak women on
the sick block stretching their arms out and pleading, “Help me! Help
me!” made her “somewhat embarrassed” because of her feeling
“We’re here to die. What do you mean, ‘Help me’?" Then she
could add, “The fact that these people actually had retained their sanity
[in asking for help] and I was nuts … never entered my mind. You know, I
was already touched with [affected by] that whole [Auschwitz] mentality.”
C. explained further that both the SS doctors and the prisoners “were
being processed — so I could understand Mengele.” Auschwitz was
“a different planet” whose rules totally reversed those of ordinary
society: according to those rules, “we were there to die and not to
live.” And "to be able to accept being where |
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