| The Auschitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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Nor did well-educated Nazi doctors escape that
confusion in clinging tenaciously to their medical identity. One former Nazi
doctor spent decades, following conviction at Nuremberg (for involvement in
experiments) and a long prison sentence, attempting to restore his medical
honor; during our interviews, he repeatedly asked that I intervene formally and
ever legally on his behalf, despite my clear declarations from the beginning
that no such action on my part was remotely possible.
For Jews to be
made into victims, Jewish doctors had to be divested of their standing as
healers (as I have described in chapter 1). Long before Auschwitz, the slogan
was put forward in Germany that “a Jewish doctor is no doctor; he is an
abortionist and a poisoner.”55 But
German doctors became precisely what they had accused Jewish doctors of being
— not abortionists but killers of infants and children, certainly
“poisoners,” and also, in their way, “treaters” or
“handlers” of the sick. The further Auschwitz irony, (found in other
camps as well) was that the only authentic healers were the prisoner doctors,
who were, of course, mainly Jewish.
Nazi doctors could make
psychological use of that irony by living vicariously, medically speaking,
through the prisoner doctors they sponsored and ruled over. The Auschwitz self
could take on its own medical identity (furthered by medical hobbies and
“scientific” experiments) and thereby become better able to kill.
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| The Purely Technical |
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Perhaps the single greatest key to the medical function of
the Auschwitz self was the technicizing of everything. That self could divest
itself from immediate ethical concerns by concentrating only on the
“purely technical” or “purely professional” (das rein
Fachliche). Demonstrating “humanity” meant killing with technical
efficiency.
For the Auschwitz self there is a logical sequence: a
doctor’s task is to alleviate suffering and to exert a humane influence in
any setting. When the setting is one of mass murder, that means calling forth
medical and technical skills to diminish the pain of victims. While the logic
depends upon a highly technicized view of medical function, the Auschwitz self
can grasp at the pseudo-ethical principle of “humane killing.”
That principle was put forward not just by Auschwitz doctors but by the
Nazi regime in general. Hitler himself, in his final testament-suicide note,
contrasted the painful deaths of “Europe’s Aryan peoples” by
hunger, battle, or bombing with the “more humane means” by which
“the real criminal … [had] to atone for his guilt.”56
The use of poison gas — first
carbon monoxide and then Zyklon-B. — was the technological achievement
permitting “humane killing.” Hence, the early advice by Grawitz,
chief SS physician, when consulted by Himmler on the matter, in favor of gas
chambers — surely the ultimate in such technical-medical consultation.
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