I can say that I have always done my duty and have never done anything contrary to what was expected of me.
-Eduard Wirths
How could physicians, trained as healers, become killers? From the Nazis' little-understood early program of sterilization and "euthansia," to the death camps - doctors were indispensible to Hitler's final solution. One case in point was Wirths, the chief Auschwitz doctor from September 1942.
Eduard Wirths lived out most directly, and most extremely, the Auschwitz healing-killing conflict and paradox. A man with a strong reputation as a dedicated physician, and described by inmates who could observe him closely as "kind," "conscientious," "decent," "polite," and "honest," he was the same man who established the camp's system of selections and medicalized killing and supervised the overall process during the two years in which most of the mass murder was accomplished. Because of that dichotomy, he was one of the few Auschwitz doctors frequently spoken of as not only criminal but "a tragic figure." Hermann Langbein, the political prisoner who served as his secretary in both Dachau and Auschwitz, believed him to be the only Nazi doctor in Auschwitz who refused to succumb to its ubiquitous corruption and in no way enriched himself there. From the time of his first encounter with Wirths in Dachau, Langbein was struck by his medical conscientiousness and considered him "completely different from other SS doctors."
He differed also in the story of his death - not in the way that he died (a considerable number of Nazi doctors committed suicide) but in what transpired just before his death. It is claimed (probably accurately) that a British intelligence officer, a member of the group to whom Wirths surrendered himself, greeted him and then said, "Now I've shaken hands with a man who ... bears responsibility for the death of four million human beings." That night Wirths hanged himself; although cut down, he died two or three days later, in September 1945.
A Dutch documentary film has explored the chief doctor's life and Auschwitz activities on the assumption that he is a key figure for our understanding of Auschwitz and of Nazi functioning in general. Wirths provides the specter of a "good man" becoming a leading figure in a project of unprecedented evil.
Eduard Wirths was born in 1909 in a village near Wurzburg in southern Germany, the oldest of three boys. His father, a stonecutter from a craftsman tradition, had developed a successful stoneworks and become a notable figure in the area. Wirths senior had served as a medical corpsman in the First World War, from which he emerged in a depressed state with pacifist leanings, which were undoubtedly expressed in his (as one son put it) "making doctors of us all." (Another son also became a doctor, and the third probably would have had he not died of cancer as a child.) This strict and revered father had liberal views, which contributed to a family atmosphere of humanism and democratic socialism.
Among the boys it was Eduard who came most under the father's influence in becoming meticulous, obedient, and unusually conscientious and reliable - traits that continued into his adult life. He never smoked or drank and was described as compassionate and "soft" in his responses to others.
Eduard was always a good student and apparently became a very good doctor. He did special work in gynecology under a well-known professor, Hans Hinselmann. Although he had shown talent as a surgeon, he settled into a general practice in a rural area near his birthplace partly out of the need to support a family, having married the first and only woman with whom he was ever involved.
Drawn to nationalistic and volkisch ideas during his student days, he joined the Nazi Party and the SA in 1933 and applied for admission into the SS the following year. An ardent and idealistic National Socialist, he volunteered to serve in the Thuringian State Office for Racial Matters (Thuringisches Landesamt fur Rassenzuesen) in Weimar because, as he wrote on an SS form in 1936, "I was particularly interested in human genetics and racial hygiene." He wrote also of his "love for the biological tasks set by the SS." Although brought up as a Catholic and initially identifying himself as such on official forms, he later reverted to the Nazi-preferred category of "believer in God."
From the late 1930s, he divided his time between his country practice (in which he was said to be so conscientious that he sterilized his own instruments), state medical positions (where one was close to the regime), medical work with ethnic Germans being "resettled" in Germany from Eastern areas, and military service for which he volunteered. He entered the Waffen SS in 1939. He served in Norway and saw combat on the Russian front until, in April 1942, he was declared medically unfit for combat duty because of a cardiac condition and possible additional ailments.
Wirths's early attitude toward Jews was contradictory. His family was not anti-Semitic, and he not only had Jewish patients but continued to treat them even after it became illegal for Aryan doctors to do so. With no Jewish doctors in the area, Jews would sneak into his consulting room at night, sometimes for injuries sustained in Nazi persecutions. At the same time, Wirths clearly embraced some of the broader Nazi anti-Semitic worldview, came to believe that "the Jews were a danger to Germany," and apparently retained this ideological anti Jewishness until his death.
Wirths spent short periods of time at Dachau and Neuengamme, two concentration camps within Germany, before being sent to Auschwitz in September 1942. He was probably sent there as chief doctor because of his medical reputation, as others before him in that position had failed to stop persistent typhus epidemics that increasingly affected SS personnel. Langbein later described Wirths as "a competent physician with a strongly developed sense of duty and extremely conscientious and careful"; and even Lolling, his antagonistic and incompetent superior, described him as "the best physician in all the concentration camps," to which Commandant Hoss added: "During my 10 years of service in concentration-camp affairs, I have never encountered a better one." While Wirths's medical humanity - concern about and friendliness toward prisoner patients - was certainly not a reason for his appointment to a high post in Auschwitz, it did, according to Langbein, come to mean a great deal to many inmates there.
Wirths lived up to expectations in stopping the typhus epidemics by means of widespread disinfection procedures and enlisting the cooperation of prisoner physicians in identifying, isolating, and treating typhus patients. He also improved conditions on the medical blocks, extended the work of Polish prisoner physicians who had been in Auschwitz for some time, and began to permit the large numbers of arriving Jewish physicians to do medical work as well. All this was consistent with overall SS policies of maintaining a work force in Auschwitz.
Wirths was also protective of prisoner doctors and other prisoners doing medical work. On one occasion he was heard to castigate Irma Grese, the notorious woman SS officer, with the words "Do not beat my people!" when he found her whipping a prisoner who worked on the medical block. And when a prisoner chief of Block 10 insisted upon beating other prisoners, Wirths not only removed her but gave unprecedented authority to the Jewish prisoner doctor he had appointed to run the medical block.
Wirths exercised his medical autonomy in a confrontation with the Auschwitz Gestapo head, Maximilian Grabner. Grabner's Political Department maintained a prison in the basement of Block 11, periodically had inmates shot at the "Black Wall" in the courtyard between blocks 11 and 10, and would then officially report those victims as having died of some illness in the infirmary. Upon learning of this system (with Langbein's help), which considerably elevated the recorded death rate in the medical blocks, Wirths got angry and declared, "The Political Department has to take responsibility for its own dead." The matter emerged during Konrad Morgen's celebrated SS investigation of Auschwitz corruption: the judge backed Wirths since killings at the Black Wall, unlike those in the gas chamber, were not considered legal. Morgen also supported Wirths in opposing Grabner's urging that pregnant Polish women be killed. In these struggles against Grabner and other Auschwitz enemies, Wirths anchored himself in medical propriety but at the same time scrupulously adhered to rules and regulations.
Wirths used his medical authority in other ways to save lives. At Gestapo trials held in Auschwitz, he frequently testified to the medical capacity of an accused, usually a Polish civilian, to perform useful work, thereby arguing for the prisoner to be allowed to enter the camp as an ordinary inmate rather than be shot at the Black Wall. He also gave psychiatric testimony that similarly served the accused.
Wirths clearly felt most comfortable when dealing with actual medical matters, and Hoss testified to his "constant struggle with the Construction Department because he always urged improvements and new construction in the medical facilities." Wirths in fact devoted much of his time during 1944 to the planning and construction of a new SS military hospital. In September of that year, with the war completely lost and the Soviet armies not far away, there was a ceremony marking the opening of the hospital and Wirths was promoted to Sturmbannfuhrer, or major - the whole scene epitomizing the fantasy element in this claim to healing.
Wirths conveyed an aura of moral scrupulousness: for instance, he alone among Auschwitz doctors kept to wartime food rations. He consistently took stands against brutality and random abuse of prisoners, was generally antagonistic to the ordinary criminals who took part in that abuse, and was much more sympathetic to Communist political prisoners.
The emotional conflicts in Wirths were clear to prisoners around him, as was his strong desire at times to leave the place. The relationships could not escape the Auschwitz paradox operating in all such relatively humane relationships between prisoners (including prisoner doctors) and the SS: while contributing to the saving of many lives, it helped the SS doctor adapt to his central function within the death factory. What can be finally said, then, about the psychological fit between this "good, conscientious doctor" and the Auschwitz killing project?
The beginning key is Wirths's unique combination of passionate Nazi ideology with impressive medical talent - a combination that could propel one quickly into a position of medical leadership, or leadership in medicalized killing. He was significantly immersed in Nazi ideology in three crucial spheres: the claim of revitalizing the German race and Volk; the biomedical path to that revitalization via purification of genes and race; and the focus on the Jews as a threat to this renewal, to the immediate and long-term "health" of the Germanic race. While Wirths did not absolutize these convictions in the manner of a Mengele - they were in him combined with a strong current of medical humanism - his commitment to the Nazi cause was probably no less strong.
Wirths had another trait insufficiently noted by commentators: a combination of moralism and obsessiveness that under ordinary conditions contributes much to making one a "reliable professional," and in Auschwitz contributed to the efficiency with which Wirths set up and maintained the entire structure of medicalized killing. It enabled him to be always both "correct" and meticulous about rules and regulations, whether in trying to limit Auschwitz evil or (more importantly, as it turned out) in serving it.
In Auschwitz, Wirths was thrust into the ultimate atrocity producing-situation. He encountered a set of conditions so structured organizationally and psychologically that virtually everyone entering into the situation committed atrocities. In that sense there is some truth in Helmut's claim that, once sent there, his brother had to become guilty - but only if one remained there. And powerful psychological forces bound Wirths to Auschwitz and overcame his ambivalent desire to leave.
"Enduring" in Auschwitz - staying there, whatever the duress - was a moral position not only endorsed by his family and by his own feelings of duty but by his deepest sense of self and world. Into that principle of "staying the course" went a young lifetime of filial, national, and ideological piety: strong immediate inclinations to obedience as well as a transcendent commitment to what he perceived as his immortalizing racial, national, and cultural substance. That immortalizing pull could prevail over whatever horror the humanist in him experienced, and contribute greatly toward his remaining the physician-manager of the very atrocityproducing situation so much of him abhorred.
However unusual Wirths was, he was at the same time all too representative of the physician's corruption in Nazi Germany. He was a partially willing implementer of the most visionary of all Nazi projects of healing the Aryan race by killing those seen as threatening it. He was what his father called a "sacrifice" only in the sense that, in embodying the most extreme reversal of healing and killing, he took on a large measure of the taint and guilt of his profession if not of his generation.
He was both a self-motivated implementer of his fate and a man acted upon by forces greater than himself. That is, he first seized upon the medical role of cultivator of the genes offered by the Nazis; was then propelled into a sequence of unsavory environments culminating in Auschwitz, environments that offended him but called forth his loyalties; and ended by providing skilled and reliable professional service to the killing project he had morally come to oppose. He was both brutally "misused" (in his brother's word) by a murderous regime and his own architect of that very misuse.
Whatever Wirths's pain and ambivalence, his form of doubling was in many ways ideal for the overall Auschwitz function. His Nazi-Auschwitz self, with its attachment to racial purification and national revitalization, could serve the killing project with extraordinary efficiency; his humane medical self, so strongly supported by loving family relationships, helped maintain his general function and contributed to his "decency" in his own eyes as well as those of other prisoners and many SS colleagues and fellow officers as well. Wirths was very much what William James called a "divided self," but the division was functional for Auschwitz. His was the doubling characteristic of the general phenomenon of the "decent Nazi"; and true to that phenomenon, Wirths got the job done.
Wirths was extreme in his involvement in both the healing and the killing functions. In that way his doubling resembled that of Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who, in strange and as yet insufficiently understood ways, behaved as an ardent SS activist; who took over much technical responsibility for Zyklon-B gas and its delivery to Auschwitz; but who also had an impressive record as an anti-Nazi, claimed to have infiltrated the SS in order to understand its killing operations, and tried desperately toward the end to inform the world of Nazi mass murder. Unlike Gerstein, however, Wirths never stepped out of his Nazi role to denounce to others the evil project he himself was part of.
Wirths's suicide did not result from resistance to the killing project. Rather it was a consequence of the project. One claim that Wirths killed himself because he "couldn't face the responsibility" for what he had done was therefore true. Suddenly stripped of his official-medical place in the immortalizing Nazi project, Wirths was vulnerable to the inevitably harsh consequences (trial, condemnation, death) of his actions.
Another claim may also be correct in saying that Wirths killed himself because he "had a conscience." He had more of a conscience than most Nazi doctors and possibly most human beings. But that conscience had been harnessed to the Nazi movement itself, to which he gave devoted service; it could not be dislodged from that movement even in Auschwitz, and even though a portion of that conscience was applied to saving the lives of prisoners.
His message to the future via his suicide also contains an expression of conscience: the principle that he who becomes involved in mass killing must himself pay with his life; and the accompanying principle, more dubious in our eyes but strongly felt, of maintaining the "purity" of the future of one's family by destroying its tainted component - oneself. Yet there may have been still a third principle, related to the other two: the reassertion of the healing ethos by destroying the physician (himself) who had become tainted with killing.
