| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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ordinary inmate rather than be shot at the Black Wall. He
also gave psychiatric testimony that similarly served the accused.
Wirths clearly felt most comfortable when dealing with actual medical
matters, and Höss testified to his “constant struggle with the
Construction Department because he always urged improvements and new
construction in the medical facilities.” Wirths in fact devoted much of
his time during 1944 to the planning and construction of a new SS military
hospital. In September of that year, with the war completely lost and the
Soviet armies not far away, there was a ceremony marking the opening of the
hospital and Wirths was promoted to Sturmbannfüher, or major —
the whole scene epitomizing the fantasy element in this claim to healing. But
as Langbein observed, “It was a purely medical task and he was glad to do
it.”11
Wirths conveyed an aura
of moral scrupulousness: for instance, he alone among Auschwitz doctors kept to
wartime food rations. He consistently took stands against brutality and random
abuse of prisoners, was generally antagonistic to the ordinary criminals who
took part in that abuse, and was much more sympathetic to Communist political
prisoners such as Langbein, in whom he could sense the kind of integrity he
respected.
The two men developed the kind of tie that Langbein spoke of
as “deepen[ing] into a human relationship.”12 Indeed, a chief camp doctor or an otherwise
prominent SS doctor was likely to develop a close relationship with a prisoner
secretary, as in parallel situations in Buchenwald and Mauthausen. The
necessary elements seemed to include an SS doctor who retained a kernel of
medical humanity; official SS encouragement of a certain amount of medical help
to prisoners to maintain a work force; a prisoner secretary who was
intelligent, reliable, and in his own life morally or ideologically committed
(often a Communist political prisoner); and German cultural ties between the
two men. Bonds between chief doctors and prisoner secretaries could also be
reinforced by their common capacity to adapt to bureaucracy.
Wirths’s conflicts and character traits made him vulnerable to
influence from “a powerful personality” (in Dr. Tadeusz S.’s
words) such as Langbein, and the latter consistently utilized the relationship
to better the situation of inmates in general and of the Communist prisoner
underground in particular. The relationship enabled Wirths to retain a humane
sense of himself. Langbein and a few other inmates (including Karl Lill, who
remembered the incident after the war) apparently had a sufficiently warm
relationship with Wirths and his wife to come into their home in Auschwitz
during the time the family was living there, and play “horsies”
[Reitpferdchen] with two of their small children. Despite their very
different situations, both Wirths and Langbein probably experienced a sense of
shared struggle within a death-saturated environment.13
The emotional conflicts in Wirths we
shall shortly discuss were clear to prisoners around him, as was his strong
desire at times to leave the place. Langbein and others tried to dissuade him
from doing so on |
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