| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological
Themes |
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combination was also reflected in the Auschwitz
doctors’ resentment of their superiors in Berlin for providing inadequate
technical facilities (gas chambers and crematoria) for the professional
requirements of the mass killing.
There is always a technical element
to medicine and a necessity for a mechanical model of the body. The ordinary
doctor, in effect, says (or should say) to the patient: “Allow me to look
at your body as a machine, in order to do what I can in the service of your
overall health as a human being.” But the Nazi doctor held to an
absolutized mechanical model extending out into the environment. The machine of
the body was subsumed to an encompassing killing machine, and Auschwitz inmates
had no standing except as they could be seen as contributing to that larger
machine. The Auschwitz self of the Nazi doctor was also part of that
environmental machine, charged with maximizing its own as well as the
inmate’s contribution to it. The extraordinary technical-medical success
of the killing machine could create the impression for the Auschwitz self that
nature itself was responding — that the project was in harmony with the
natural world.
Simply absorbing oneself in medical work, in Auschwitz
or elsewhere, was a way that physicians could technicize their relationship to
mass murder. When I asked Dr. Otto F. whether, over the course of his extensive
medical service with the police and the SS (outside of his brief stay in
Auschwitz), he had encountered any atrocities or examples of Nazi mass killing,
his answer was that he had been extremely busy setting up hospitals and medical
programs so that at times he worked from fourteen to sixteen hours a day. More
specific for the Auschwitz self of physicians was Wirths’s intensity in
seeking actual medical work whenever possible. A nonmedical but parallel
example is a statement by Rudolf Höss describing his superhuman efforts to
get Auschwitz built and functional and declaring, “I lived only for my
work.” 57 |
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| “A Doctor Remains a Doctor” |
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| The matter became more complicated for the Auschwitz self
when performing something close to a medical act in the very process of
killing: for example, examining the degree of muscular emaciation of medical
block inmates as a criterion for whether to send them to the gas chamber. Even
then, one’s momentary sense of functioning as a doctor could have
specifically diminished awareness of killing. The same could be true of such
medical judgments that overcrowding and pure hygienic conditions required
selecting larger numbers of prisoners for the gas chambers: then, too, as
absurd as it may seem from the outside, the Auschwitz self could still distance
itself from the killing by the sense it was performing a medical function. As a
prisoner doctor put it, “A doctor remains always a doctor — a
physician who tortures remains a physician all the same,” so that as a
doctor he must “justify himself to himself.” |
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