| Healing-Killing Conflict: Eduard
Wirths |
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any Aryans and insisted that the medical blocks be set up
to prevent that from happening. His concept of the "correct" was probably
involved here no less than his ideological anti-Semitism.
His
bureaucratic integration also undoubtedly contributed to his typhus
experiments. Langbein told me that he estimated Wirths’s thought processes
to be as follows: Typhus was still a problem for SS personnel; a new medication
or serum had to be tested; and since there were no typhus cases at that time in
Auschwitz: “These are anyhow only Jews, they would die in any case, but
now I can try out a drug [on them] which could be important for many [German]
people.”21
Perhaps Wirths’s
organizational loyalty was most revealed when he invited Langbein to win his
freedom by joining the SS. Wirths had been excited to learn that this policy,
occasionally applied to Aryan prisoners, could be implemented with Langbein in
a way that would permit him to continue the work he was doing in the camp, but
from within the SS. Wirths was upset when Langbein gently refused (“His
face los[t] its friendliness”); but upon hearing Langbein’s
explanation that since the inmates were his comrades, he would not be able to
do the things SS men in Auschwitz were commanded to do, Wirths commented,
“Your view does you honor,” though sounding “a bit
disappointed.”22* |
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| Selections |
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Selections were the crux of the matter — for
Auschwitz as an institution, for its chief doctor, and for understanding
Wirths’s inner contradictions. Significantly, he was, at least initially,
strongly opposed to selections in general and to doctors performing them.
Höss noted, this opposition to the mass killing of Jews and Langbein
referred to another SS officer who remembered Wirths telling him that the task
of physicians was to treat patients and that selections were not a proper
activity for them.23
But rather
quickly Wirths found himself fighting hard to bring selections under the
control of physicians, which meant under his control. A close friend and SS
physician colleague later testified that, before the spring of 1943, selections
were conducted by the camp commander and his subordinates; and that Wirths was
convinced that they sent many people fit for work to the gas chambers and was
at about that time able to arrange for physicians to take over (see also
chapter 8).† The official |
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* What Wirths did not know
was that the man he was recruiting for the SS was half-Jewish, a secret that
Langbein (as he later explained) guarded carefully in the camp, since its
becoming known could have greatly endangered him.
† This sequence
resembles that of a physician I interviewed: a distinguished academic
specialist who had displayed some courage in speaking out against experiments
on human beings at a meeting of military physicians, only to take part (though
in a somewhat indirect way) in such experiments later on. He had been politely
summoned by Conti, with whom he had a “fair discussion,” during which
his superior apparently convinced him of the importance of the experiments for
saving the lives of German soldiers. He too had the need to remain loyal to the
tasks put forward by the Nazi project, while clinging to the belief he could
improve upon what was being done by participating in it.
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