In the case of Dr Delmotte, we can see the strategies that the Auschwitz authorities used to habituate him to his work, aiding the extermination process:
At the first selection he was taken to, Delmotte became nauseated and returned to his room quite drunk; what was unusual, however, was that he did not leave his room the next morning. Dr B heard that Weber [Dr Bruno Weber, chief of the ‘Hygienic Institute’ at Auschwitz], upon visiting Delmotte, found him ‘catatonic … completely blocked’; Weber thought at first that the young doctor had been stricken with a severe illness but concluded that he had simply had too much to drink. When he finally emerged in an agitated state, he was heard to say that he ‘didn’t want to be in a slaughterhouse’ and preferred to go to the front, and that ‘as a doctor his task was to help people and not to kill them.’ It was an argument, Dr B said, that ‘we never used’ in Auschwitz: ‘It would have been totally pointless’ … B also stressed that Delmotte approached the medical profession ‘with high ideals and great enthusiasm,’ that he had ‘grown up in an SS cadet camp and was ‘determined not to betray his SS ideals,’ and that he had declared (though this only when drunk) that he would never have joined the SS if he had ‘known that there was such a thing as Auschwitz.’
Lifton then describes the remarkable lengths that the Auschwitz authorities went to in order to assuage Delmotte’s distress at what he was now being expected to do. Dr B found out that the new commandant, Arthur Liebenschel (Rudolf Höss’s temporary successor), took a ‘therapeutic’ approach, and had been sympathetic to Delmotte, telling him, ‘I can certainly understand this. One must first get used to a new environment.’ Liebenschel then organised, in collaboration with Dr Weber and Dr Eduard Wirths, the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz, a three-part ‘therapeutic programme’ for Delmotte.
First, Delmotte was given Mengele as a kind of mentor figure, Mengele was able to appeal to Delmotte’s shared ‘SS idealism’, and persuade him to change his viewpoint by arguing that even if one thinks that extermination of the Jewish people is wrong, or is being done in the wrong way (Delmotte, according to Dr B, believed that ‘Jewish influence’ had to be combatted but disapproved of the Auschwitz method) … since prisoners became sick and died terrible deaths, it was ‘more humane to select them.’ Also he used the ‘combined patriotic, nationalistic, racial, and biomedical argument that, during this wartime emergency, one should do nothing to interfere with the great goal being sought: ‘the triumph of the Germanic race.’ Within two weeks Mengele’s persuasion had done the trick and Delmotte began to take part in the selections again.
Secondly, Liebenschel agreed with Weber’s suggestion, as a ‘good psychologist,’ that Delmotte’s wife, very unusually for an SS doctor at Auschwitz, should be allowed to live at the camp. We know from Dr B that she possessed great beauty and great amorality, as he put it – ‘no heart, no soul, no nothing’ … But it seems that Delmotte’s regular sexual access to her made him calmer, more ‘quiet.’
Finally, Delmotte was given another intellectual mentor (for the research and writing involved in his dissertation) – an eminent, elderly Jewish prisoner physician, a former professor and widely acclaimed scientist who became a ‘father figure’ to Delmotte, according to other doctors at Auschwitz. The two men became very close, and Dr B felt that the professor ‘contributed the most toward helping Delmotte out of his [difficulties]’. Lifton tells us that Delmotte then selected without further incident until selections were discontinued in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944.fn3
Again, there might be a temptation to consider such examples as extreme. Yet anyone who has experienced military training or war situations would recognise significant parallels with the examples given above – the survivalist need to adapt rapidly or else go under, the continuous comparison of oneself with one’s fellow soldiers and the strong appeals to patriotism. There is also the extensive use of alcohol or drugs – as can be seen in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – to anaesthetise against the most disturbing aspects of war, and finally, the selective use of respected elders in pastoral care when a soldier is experiencing exceptional difficulties.
PART FIVE
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Walking into the World of the Desk Killers – Four Journeys
‘History walks on two feet.’
Karl Marx
13
The Doctors of Wannsee Meet in a Villa by the Lake
1. Night Train to Berlin: Fifty Paces from T4 to the Philharmonic
27/8 December 2003, Brussels Midi
Past midnight. Icy wind. Drifts of rain sweep across the platform. Two hours here waiting for the Berlin train. Bit dazed from last night still, only two hours’ sleep, watching Shoah again in preparation for this journey, only finishing at 6.30 this morning. Struck by the drabness of this station, especially compared with the modernity of the Eurostar terminal. Peeling concrete, fag ends everywhere, accentuated by continuous dripping and harsh glare of sodium lights. Desolate. Tarkovsky territory.
Train pulls in, forty minutes late, my seat is occupied by a Turkish family but decide not to do the uptight English thing about it, soon find another half-empty compartment, slide down next to the window. Into a kind of trance. A fug of warmth and darkness. I fall into sleep listening to a middle-aged South American man chatting to two Chinese girls. Come round to a train nightscape through the glass – Belgian towns, rushing delivery vans, wettened, blackened streets, beads of Christmas lights. And, as so often before, thinking of the eyes of the deported, through the cracks of the wagons, travelling these same tracks sixty years ago, the glinting rails leading ever further eastwards and away from safety.
Coming into Berlin, Sunday morning. Surprised by the rawness of my emotion, confronted by the fact of the passage of time. Last time here, August 1984, with Ayesha. Twenty years old! That very nerve-wracking hitching, having to bribe the East German border guard in the middle of the night because my passport was about to expire. Only getting out of that due to Ayesha’s excellent German. The bizarre sunken road that led to West Berlin, fenced off on both sides. The wall. Another century now. Old friends dispersed, lost with the passage of time.
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Ten days. A journey long in the planning. Days to travel through Berlin, physically and conceptually – to try to understand the forces that culminated in the meeting at Wannsee which has so dominated my thoughts these last years. Days in which we’ll see Auschwitz and Monowitz for the first time. The exact place that Primo Levi analysed with his chemist’s precision. And by travelling in the depth of winter, perhaps we will avoid the mass tourism aspect that I’ve always found so disturbing. Then finally to Lodz and Chelmno – and a full circle will have been completed, from the town in Switzerland which manufactured the gaswagen to the remote area of Poland where they were used. The place where Simon Srebnik was forced to sing, as he relates in the opening sequence of Shoah.