| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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Justifying oneself to oneself as a doctor was what Ernst B.
was doing when he suggested that, while helping people in Auschwitz, he found
his medical calling there; and what Wirths was doing in his persistent claim of
medical purity. But the truth was, as one survivor phrased it, that no
physician in the entire German concentration-camp system “gained
distinction for his work as a doctor.” The statement accurately
suggests that working as part of the Nazi project in the camps meant abnegation
of medical responsibility. An important psychological step here is the SS
doctor’s giving expression to his “holy terror of infection” (in
Kogon’s words)58 by absolute avoidance
of typhoid and other contagious patients. That meant stepping out of the
Hippocratic sphere of the healer. The Auschwitz self could not psychologically
afford that interpretation and sought to avoid it by clinging to every possible
fragment of remaining medical identity.
An aspect of that struggle was
some Nazi doctors’ glorification of their role. Dr. Otto F., for instance,
told me that “there existed an outstanding medical attitude from the
beginning to the end, and of everything published about it so far not one
single word is applicable.” He went on to present a series of
unsubstantiated, claims that doctors assigned to Auschwitz had resisted the
killing process there, and spoke of a duty that “I owe … to my
colleagues who fell during the war” to bear witness to their courage in
adversity. One could say that he was still promoting the Nazi equation of
Auschwitz with service in war, while at the same time expressing actual
feelings of a survivor mission, however misguided, in terms of fellow doctors
killed during his military, service. Significantly, such implicated Nazi
doctors never brought up any of the few cases of genuine medical resistance to
the Nazis: that of Ewald in opposing direct medical killing, or
“euthanasia” (see pages 82-87); or the more quiet resistance to that
program by men like Karl Bonhoeffer (see pages 81-82). To do so would have
further contrasted genuine resistance with their own behavior. What these
doctors sought to do instead was to defend more broadly the good name of German
medicine at that time as a means of claiming for themselves a kind of
automatic, reflected medical virtue. |
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| The Postwar Self |
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Most Nazi doctors who worked in camps fled from
approaching Allied armies. But others, less identifiable as having been
associated with criminal activities, told me proudly of collegial encounters,
sometimes even joint medical work, with Allied physicians soon after the
surrender. What ever the accuracy or exaggeration of these accounts, and the
possible need of some Allied physicians to see German colleagues as having been
less corrupted than was actually the case, what was involved psychologically
for Nazi doctors was their intense effort to reconnect with the Hippocratic
sphere as a way of claiming they had never left it.
Upon returning to
their homes, they continued, for the most part, to |
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