Wilkinson

"Over the Auschwitz album, like a gloss, clings a sense of a prideful observance of manners and customs, a tranquil and purified world, a shared purpose, a satisfaction in uniforms, boots, and accordions. Lives so exalted required trips to the hills, shotguns and game hunting, companionable dogs, wine, and the presence of young women. “That S.S. officers went on vacation didn’t take us by surprise,” Judith Cohen says. “What surprised us was that Auschwitz wasn’t only a place to imprison men and women and kill European Jews; it was also a place to have fun.”

The album’s effect is discordant. The people it depicts are engaged in the greatest mass murder ever committed, yet its principal impression is of pleasure; nor do the people portrayed look like villains. “They haven’t got red eyes and horns,” Erbelding says. “They don’t look like people you would dislike.” What they have done is not written on their faces, but, even so, their faces are not especially sympathetic. They are the faces of hard men, who give the impression of being restricted in their capacities, their ranges of feeling. Hoecker’s is the stray face among them which seems now and then to reflect charm, courtesy, and fellow-feeling. In many of the photographs, he assumes what seems to be a characteristic posture—passive, recessive, placid, as if requiring an invitation to join the officers who outrank him. At a hearing related to the Auschwitz trials, a doctor who worked at the camp recalled Hoecker’s presence but not his name. “Adjutant was a quiet and solitary man, modest,” he said. “I never saw him among his comrades except at meals, but there also he sat by himself.”

Several people at the museum told me that the strangest thing about the album for them is that a person can look again and again at the images and never find an answer to the question “How could you have done what you did?” One thing that is particularly troubling is the presence of so many doctors and the pseudoscientific legitimacy that their participation lent to the selection process. I showed the album to Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and author of “The Nazi Doctors” (1986). Alcohol, Lifton told me, is what made it possible for many of the doctors to persevere when killing was substituted for the imperative to heal, or at least to do no harm. “What the doctors found there was overwhelming,” Lifton said, “even to Nazis who had seen things before. It was staggering. The doctors would have symptoms like post-traumatic symptoms; they would have bad dreams, they would be upset, sometimes they would say, ‘We shouldn’t be part of this,’ but they would often say this while drinking. They would be taken into the hands of experienced doctors there, almost as a therapeutic response, who would say, ‘Look, we didn’t create this. We have to do what we do, and perhaps save some lives.’ The experienced doctor would go with the new one to his first or second selection, and help him, as a matter of therapy—a socialization to evil. One has to be in some way in synch with one’s environment to work. And if the environment is evil the principle holds, even though the adaptation may be more difficult."

Alec Wilkinson