| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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[satisfac…] tion of his superiors.” On the basis
of such, recommendations, Wirths had been promoted in September 1944.71
Now he ruminated on passages from Nietzsche, such as “Oh,
demolishing is easy, but building!” — and on how “finally
painful experiences, sad events, lead our heart back to the faith of our
childhood.”72 But he was essentially
without hope, spoke frequently to his brother of suicide, and during a last
smuggled visit with family members, his brother and wife found him manifestly
suicidal. At this point he was in what would clinically be called an agitated
depression, accompanied by extreme despair, in which the necessary components
for suicide were present: the sense of entrapment and futurelessness, the
existence of a prior image of suicide as a possible option in one's life, and
the desire to convey an enduring principle best expressed by killing oneself
(in his case affirmation of love for his wife and family together with a
solution to the tormenting question of guilt).
The British
officer’s statement that he was shaking hands with a man responsible for
the death of four million people activated all three of those components of
suicide. Wirths had reason to feel hopeless about any future and to call forth
existing suicidal imagery to perform a final act that would spare his family
the pain and disgrace of a trial while neither acknowledging nor denying the
dimensions of his guilt.
Perhaps the main point to be made about
Wirths’s suicide was that he committed it after all that he had
done in Auschwitz. While there, despair, was part of his adaptation, part of
what has been called a “life of suicide” — a life in which the
possibility of killing oneself enables one to avoid genuine confrontation with
questions of meaning73 While Auschwitz
lasted, nothing in his conflicts prevented him from carrying out his functions
in that death camp. In this way his story represents, however exaggeratedly,
the overall experience of Nazi doctors in Auschwitz. |
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| Evaluations |
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We get a deeper sense of Wirths’s moral and
psychological contradictions — and of their larger significance — by
noting the difficulties others had in evaluating both the man and his suicide.
Hermann Langbein, the prisoner closest to him, was said (in a 1946
letter of Lill’s about Wirths to Wirths’s father) to have loved him
very much and called him his ‘fairytale prince’ whom, after the war
and in a different uniform, he wanted to see again — as a
friend.”74 But Langbein also came to
juxtapose Wirths’s extremely valuable help to prisoners with the fact that
“for two years he had a decisive SS function in the extermination
apparatus.” Langbein criticized Wirths less for his role in selections,
which he considered imposed upon the chief doctor, than for his last-hour,
fatal typhus experiments, which Wirths chose to do himself.75 In discussing these with me, Langbein spoke of
Wirths’s actions as reflecting the total demoralization of all people who
worked in Auschwitz in an SS |
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