| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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as he was by no means without conflict over having advised
his brother to stay and having himself actively participated (however he
minimized that participation) in his brother’s cancer research.
He
had come to considerable truth about Auschwitz, which he could state with
something approaching eloquence, as in the epigraph to chapter 7. His eventual
judgment of his brother was repeatedly that of “tragic guilt …
inescapable guilt,” as described in classical Greek drama. He meant that
circumstances create a destiny that leads inexorably to guilty actions —
but he too understated his brother's active Nazi commitment. Helmut stressed
his brother’s youth and inexperience at the time, along with his own, and
wished that he himself could have been at the time "a mature man … able to
judge [things] better.” Then he would have been able to take “an
unconditional stance against these events,” for he had come to the
conviction that “the only thing to do in a situation like that is to say,
‘No, I won’t do it.’”
What can be
finally said, then, about the psychological fit between this “good,
conscientious doctor” and the Auschwitz killing project? The beginning key
is Wirths’s unique combination of passionate Nazi ideology with impressive
medical talent — a combination that could propel one quickly into a
position of medical leadership, or leadership in medicalized killing. He was
significantly immersed in Nazi ideology in three crucial spheres: the claim of
revitalizing the German race and Volk; the biomedical path to that
revitalization via purification of genes and race; and the focus on the Jews as
a threat to this renewal, to the immediate and long-term “health” of
the Germanic race. While Wirths did not absolutize these convictions in the
manner of a Mengele — they were in him combined with a strong current of
medical humanism — his commitment to the Nazi cause was probably no less
strong.
Wirths had another trait insufficiently noted by commentators:
a combination of moralism and obsessiveness that under ordinary conditions
contributes much to making one a “reliable professional,” and in
Auschitz contributed to the efficiency with which Wirths set up and maintained
the entire structure of medicalized killing. It enabled him to be always both
“correct” and meticulous about rules and regulations, whether in
trying to limit Auschwitz evil or (more importantly, as it turned out) in
serving it.
In Auschwitz, Wirths was thrust into the ultimate
atrocity-producing situation. He encountered a set of conditions so structured
organizationally and psychologically that virtually everyone entering into the
situation committed atrocities. In that sense there is some truth in
Helmut’s claim that, once sent there, his brother had to become guilty
— but only if one remained there. And powerful psychological forces bound
Wirths to Auschwitz and overcame his ambivalent desire to leave.
“Enduring” in Auschwitz — staying there, whatever the
duress — was a |
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