Comments

July 9, 2006 at 12:52 pm

(1) Andrew Stone says:

It’s fascinating how the central facts about Joseph Menegle are ommitted from all discussions about why he was one of the few doctors who coped very well with the selection process.

A accurate account of Menegele’s personality and that of the other doctors at Auschwitz is found in ‘Nazi Doctors’, by Robert Jay Lifton.

The central reason was not that Menegle was ‘a monster’ but that he had been ‘combat traumatised’ working in frontline field hospitals. He had spent months in the field ’selecting’ German soldiers for evacuation, operation or death - in conditions of -30 with little or no anesthetic relatively minor injures can prove fatal.

Menegle had spent a considerable time condemning German soldiers to death because he did not have the time or resources to treat them.

It’s much smaller step from that position to selecting on the ramp - which most of the doctors (those who had not been combat traumatised) had enormous moral and psychological problems with.

That is to say, Menegle was a product of war and circumstance, not major character flaws. He could have been produced in any WW2 Army - war does that to people and doctors.

Perhaps you never heard Baur’s (who was a commandant at Auschwitz)

‘I remember watching a 10 year old girl splashed with phosphorous (napalm) in the British bombing of Hamburg - She ran round in circles howling like an animal - till one of my comrades shot her. There was nothing we could do to save her.

You get used to everything eventually.’