The extermination camps: Auschwitz
I will use information provided by Robert J. Lifton about Nazi doctors to interpret their psychology as perpetrators in the framework of this book.f30 These Nazi doctors played an important role at Auschwitz. They selected the many Jews who were to be killed immediately and the few who were to work in the camps. Their cars and ambulances, marked with red crosses, lulled new arrivals at the station of Auschwitz-Birkenau into some feeling of hope and security; the doctors took the gas to the gas chambers and determined the required amount for each gassing, they decided when to open the door to the gas chambers and checked to make sure that those inside were dead. The doctors also selected for killing those who had become useless for work or potentially harmful to the “ecology” of the camp (e.g., a potential source of epidemics); for example, they periodically lined up Jewish prisoners and sent the weak to the gas chambers, making space for stronger new arrivals.
Most of this became practically and psychologically routinized. Whatever initial reservations doctors had, they came to view these activities as “normal duty,” as a “regular job.” In fact, they fought to retain the right to do the selections, apparently psychologically the most difficult of their jobs, as a sign of their power and status.
A number of the doctors were shocked when they arrived at Auschwitz. I would expect there was less initial shock among doctors at the other extermination camps, because those doctors were transferred from the euthanasia killing centers. Auschwitz was established later and the doctors sent there, not having participated in the euthanasia project,31 missed steps along the continuum of destruction that would have prepared them.
The initial shock was expressed in conversations – often drunken – with other doctors. The doctors condemned the “filthy” business of the camp, by which they meant not the killings themselves, which they took for granted as necessary, but the overall atmosphere. They were affected by the women and children sent to the gas chambers, the ever-present filth of emaciated, starving inmates, the whole “anus mundi” (the anus of the world) environment, as one Nazi doctor called it.
The expression of such feelings was probably encouraged as part of the initial adjustment. It did not necessarily imply a concern for the victims. German doctors (and other SS men) valued cleanliness, good manners, and good appearance. They were accustomed to using euphemisms and continued to do so in the camp, keeping reality at a distance. The conditions in the camp evoked their discomfort and even disgust. In later years they may have used this discomfort – even to themselves – in self-serving apologias as if it expressed concern about the victims rather than self-concern.
The initial expressions of feeling served many functions. Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz, said that noncommissioned officers “ ‘regularly involved in selections’ poured out their heart to him” about the difficulty of their work.32 They may have sought support or a way to show their devotion (especially because they were told by their superiors that they were doing difficult work requiring great sacrifice). Some may also have sought to transfer responsibility to the commander. If so, it shows that they felt some guilt or apprehension.
The doctors also sought justifications and rationalizations. New doctors were told that gassing saved inmates from suffering, from “croaking in their own shit,” and helped them go to heaven in a cloud of gas. They made absurd comparisons, pointing out, for example, that doctors working at the front had to make choices about whom to save and whom to let die. The doctors and presumably other SS members in the camps made a very speedy adjustment. The comments, questions, and doubts stopped soon after arrival. One doctor kept a diary in which there is no mention of difficulty in adjustment after the first few days.
The attention of doctors and other SS men focused on their tasks and on “technical” problems. Their task was to render the killing both effective and “humane.” To find “humanitarian [methods in the face of].. .general overload of the apparatus – that was the problem.”33 Doctors would discuss for days such questions as “Which is better: to let mothers go with their children to the gas or to select the mothers later by separating them from their children.” The issue arose because women criminal capos (camp functionaries drawn from the German criminal population) “found it much less difficult to handle arriving mothers whose children were with them.”34 In the spring and summer of 1944, another practical problem arose when about four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz. Although the gas chambers had sufficient capacity to kill, the crematoria did not have sufficient capacity to burn all the bodies. Therefore, bodies were also burnt in large trenches. However, naked bodies do not burn well. The whole SS contingent, including the doctors, was preoccupied with finding a good practical solution.
Lifton asks how the Nazi doctors could do what they did and at the same time (some of them) show kindness to inmates, treat prisoners who were pressed into work as doctors with professional courtesy, and go home to be kind husbands and fathers. His answer is that the Auschwitz environment forced them to adapt. They did so by doubling. This is a process whereby two opposing selves are created, one of which is responsible for evil. The two selves seem encapsulated, walled off from each other to avoid internal conflict. Auschwitz, the “atrocity-producing situation,” created the Auschwitz self. Lifton implies that the Nazi doctors had no choice. “They found themselves [in Auschwitz] in a psychological climate where they were virtually certain to choose evil: they were propelled, that is, towards murder.”35 They adapted to this climate by doubling. Evidence for doubling apparently includes occasional kindness to prisoners and Hoess’s account of how noncommissioned officers bared their souls to him.
Doubling is an appealing concept and
