The Trial of a Nazi Doctor 9781805395317, 2024932325, 9781805395300, 9781805395324

Table of contents :
00 front Wisely
00 intro Wisely
01 part Wisely
02 part Wisely
03 bib Wisely
04 index Wisely

Citation preview

The Trial of a Nazi Doctor

T he T rial

of a

N azi D octor

Franz Lucas as Defendant, Opportunist, and Deceiver

••• Andrew Wisely

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2024 Andrew Wisely

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2024932325

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-530-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-531-7 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-532-4 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805395300

C ontents

••• List of Figures

vi

Prefaceviii Acknowledgmentsxi Abbreviationsxiii Introduction1 Part I. Lucas the SS Doctor 1

Radicalization (1933–1943)

45

2

Auschwitz-Birkenau (December 1943–August 1944)

69

3

Mauthausen and Stutthof (August–December 1944)

95

4

Ravensbrück (December 1944–February 1945)

103

5

Sachsenhausen and Exit from the SS (March–April 1945)

134

Part II. Lucas the Accused 6

Under Scrutiny: Becoming the Accused (1956–1963)

145

7

“White Raven” of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1964)

154

8

Confession, Closing Arguments, Judgment (1965)

194

9

The Path toward Acquittal (1965–1970)

221

Conclusion253 Bibliography267 Index284

F igures

••• 0.1. Franz Lucas (center) during the court’s inspection of AuschwitzBirkenau in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, presumably on 14 December 1964. Photographer: Georg Bürger. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institut, Photo Collection FAP/BUR 000042. Used with permission.30 1.1. Osnabrück studio portrait of Franz Lucas from his student file, University of Rostock. Universitätsarchiv Rostock, 1.09.0, Studentenakte Franz Lucas; Fotograf Alfred Lohmann, Photographisches Atelier Osnabrück, Schützenstraße 16. Used with permission.50 1.2. Page from the Waffen-SS service booklet of Franz Lucas, 1939–45. Source: Bundesarchiv ZM 0885 Akte 3. Used with permission.53 2.1. SS Oath of Responsibility signed by Franz Lucas at Auschwitz on 19 May 1944. Source: Bundesarchiv ZM 0885 Akte 3. Used with permission.71 2.2. Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, and Anton Thumann (from left to right), 29 July 1944, during an excursion of SS Auschwitz officers to Solahütte. Höcker Album, Photograph 34755, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of anonymous donor.81 4.1. Sylvia Salvesen (front, second from right) with dinner guests at her home in Oslo, presumably in 1947. The group requested reparations and social benefits for disabled Norwegian political prisoners. NHM 175. Sylvia Salvesen. Norway’s Resistance Museum. Used with permission.125

f igure s   •  vii

7.1. Franz Lucas (second from right) with defense attorney Rainer Eggert during the court inspection of Auschwitz on 14 December 1964. AP Images. Used with permission.180 9.1. Franz Lucas and his wife Susanne Lucas leaving the courtroom in Frankfurt after his acquittal on 8 October 1970. AP Photo/Mark Goecks. Used with permission.246

P reface

••• The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry, to extend a cordon sanitaire. It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded. . . . It remains true that the majority of oppressors, during or (more often) after their deeds, realized that what they were doing or had done was iniquitous, or perhaps experienced doubts or discomfort, or were even punished, but their suffering is not enough to enroll them among the victims. . . . Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic; and for all that, compassion itself eludes logic. —Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

My interest in Franz Bernhard Lucas began in 2006, the centennial of Hannah Arendt’s birth, when I read her essay on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and was captivated by her description of how Lucas took the proceedings more seriously than his codefendants, even though he professed a poor memory of events and witnesses. My colleague Jennifer Good and I were beginning to collaborate with the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies (HAIT) in Dresden, based on our study abroad trips to Dresden. At the time, I was pursuing other projects while fielding a heavy administrative and teaching load at Baylor University. Thanks to the initiative of HAIT researchers Gerhard Besier and Katarzyna Stokłosa, the four of us cosponsored conferences on Hannah Arendt in Dresden and, together with Marc Ellis, in Waco, Texas as well. The more I explored the great secret of the Nazi years, the more I learned to identify postwar tropes of deception. In response to a question on a Vienna Wiesenthal Institute Zoom session in 2020, I identified my method as endlessly orbiting over a topic or statement or justification until it revealed something—a rewarding tedium that historians, lacking the deadlines of jurists, can afford. My first attempts at making sense of Lucas were dilettantish. Deeper work had to

p re face   •  ix

wait until my research leave in 2010–11. If I am now asked, Why this topic, this figure, this premise? I explain my dedication as crossing a threshold, doing away with assumptions, and uncovering deception. Role models for me from the 1960s are the Mannheim state attorney Barbara Just-Dahlmann, the Frankfurt adjunct prosecutors Christian Raabe and Henry Ormond, the Hessen attorney general Fritz Bauer, the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, and Hermann Langbein, survivor/witness/historian from Vienna, to name a few. My project gained dimensions as I took advantage of opportunities. For example, while returning from a conference in northern Galilee, I spent a day at the Schleswig State Archive skimming the Kiel prosecutor’s office’s investigation (1955–57) of Dr. Carl Clauberg, trying to find connections to Lucas beyond their sterilizations of Sinti and Roma prisoners at Ravensbrück in early 1945 (Clauberg the women, Lucas the men). I also became adept at making day trips to archives in Koblenz from Frankfurt, or to Berlin from Dresden. I remember one upsetting day in May 2012 at the Hesse Main State Archives in Wiesbaden. I had just read how Lucas’s acquittal in 1970 allowed him to return to practicing medicine with fully restored rights, the same rights that Germany had stripped from its Jewish citizens some thirty-five years earlier. This made as much sense to me as the principle of nulla poena sine lege that begins the German Criminal Code: “An act can only incur a penalty if criminal liability was established before the act was committed.”1 The principle rightly protected a defendant’s rights, but it needed reexamination in light of the Holocaust. Until the trial verdict against John Demjanjuk on 12 May 2011, this principle of no punishment without law had wielded more importance than the moral courage to rewrite it in the aftermath of genocide. When the verdict was read, I was at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt interviewing Christian Raabe (1934–2022), who reflected on his interactions as adjunct prosecutor with Franz Lucas in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. After my conversation with Raabe, archivist Werner Renz handed us copies of the closing arguments of Cornelius Nestler, adjunct prosecutor for the plaintiffs against Demjanjuk. Renz, who arranged the interview with Raabe and granted access to documents and audio files, deserves special thanks for accommodating the fumbling researcher I was at the time. I expect I will always be intrigued by how persons justify their atrocities. Consider Kurt Gerstein, whom Alf Lüdtke and Saul Friedlander have analyzed with remarkable insight.2 Gerstein, a pious Christian in the Waffen-SS, remained enmeshed in discussions of how to kill with Zyklon-B gas, supposedly in order to bear witness to its horrors. This is an insult to countless camp prisoners who explained that the need to bear witness made their survival even more essential. Gerstein remained idealistic but apparently fractured enough to take his own life. The “good German” Franz Lucas, for his part, became disillusioned, gottgläubig (SS for theistic), and split between opportunism and revulsion. Primo

x  •   p r e fac e

Levi’s words about impeding painful memories, claiming victimhood, and exercising brutality and compassion apply to both men.

Notes 1. Retrieved on 28 October 2023 from https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/eng lisch_stgb.html#p0015. 2. Friedländer, Kurt Gerstein; Lüdtke, “Bann der Wörter.”

A cknowledgments

•••

The subfolders of my email account show correspondence with state archives in Wiesbaden, Duisburg, and Schleswig, federal archives in Berlin, Freiburg, Koblenz, and Ludwigsburg, and university archives in Rostock and Münster. Archival help has come from the memorial sites at Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Mauthausen. My gratitude extends to the Elmshorn City Archive, the Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland (Düsseldorf), the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (Berlin), the German National Library in Leipzig, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Netherlands), the International Tracing Service, Norway’s Resistance Museum, and the city archive of Bad Oeynhausen. My subfolders feature the National Archives and Records Association, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and Yad Vashem. Military files provided by Stephan Kuehmayer of WASt-Berlin were a game changer. Nina Burkhardt sent copies of Dutch newspapers, which Marcel van Es and Jolene Damoiseaux translated for me locally. At Baylor University, Tom Hibbs, Honors College dean, connected me with his friend Dan Napolitano at the USHMM, who arranged meetings with librarians and scholars. Katharina von Kellenbach, Ronald Coleman, and Elizabeth Anthony provided helpful leads. Conversations with Stefan Hördler, an expert historian on Nazi trials past and present, were crucial. In Germany, Marco Pukrop, who knows the history of Nazi doctors like few others, read through my manuscript and offered excellent comments. I have learned much from him. A conversation with Christian Dirks was as helpful as his biography on Horst Fischer. Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt, from Harvard, has been inspirational since I first met her in Israel. Susan Benedict, Kate Docking, Stephan Nolte, Oksana Dmytruk, and Sari Siegel have been friendly interlocutors along the way. During and after my fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute in the spring of 2020, shortened by COVID-19 closures, Éva Kovács arranged Zoom meetings and offered encouragement, as did the other fellows in my cohort. Herwig Czech contributed helpful comments to a virtual presentation, and Peter

xii  •   ac k n owl e dg m en t s

Black gave helpful feedback on an article during that time. Baylor University granted a research leave and travel funds. My immediate boss, Jennifer Good, has watched the project germinate since our earliest trips to Dresden together. Friends who have put up with my ruminations include Stephen, Adrienne, Sharon, Rob, William, Jake, Ben, and Neal. Book club and parish friends have followed suit. Finally, Mark Stanton was patient as I followed the rich advice of Berghahn reviewers. I am trying to assemble all the linkages of law, military history, medicine, psychology, and memory that this book has invoked. I started with a microcosm that I had to embed in a macrocosm. If I have still not yet read myself up to speed, I have at least reached the pace of hiking, a love I share with my wife Lynn. Besides encouraging me to close the laptop, Lynn has endured the long vetting process and my unconvincing responses of “as soon as,” “once I hear back from,” “I just need to,” and “I don’t know.” I owe her more than I can say.

A bbreviations

•••

AP

Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Tonbandmitschnitte, Protokolle, Dokumente. Fritz Bauer Institut Frankfurt am Main and Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. DVD-ROM. Berlin: DirectMedia, 2007

BArch

Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive). Nachlass Rudolf Aschenauer BArch N642

BGH

Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Supreme Court)

FBI/LF

Sammlung Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesse, Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main), Smlg StA Ffm (District Attorney of the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court Collection), Lucas File

FL

Franz Lucas

HHStAW

Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Hesse Main State Archive, Wiesbaden) Abt. 461, Nr. 37638: Staatsanwaltschaft bei dem Landgericht Frankfurt am Main: Strafverfahren Robert Mulka u.a. (1. Auschwitz-Prozess) Az: 4 Ks 2/63

HS

Hermann Schlingensiepen

IMT

International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg)

LG/FaM

Landesgericht / Frankfurt am Main (District Court)

NHM

Natural History Museum (Oslo, Norway)

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party)

xiv   •   ab b r e vi at io n s

OLG/FaM

Oberlandesgericht / Frankfurt am Main (District Court of Appeals)

RA

Rudolf Aschenauer

RSHA

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office)

RuSHA

Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Main Office)

SHD

Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst (Security and Assistance Service)

SHLA

Schleswig-Holstein Landesarchiv

SL

Susanne Lucas

SS-FHA

SS-Führer-Hauptamt (SS Leadership Main Office)

SSO

SS Officer Personnel File, National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD)

Strafsache Lucas 1970 Öffentliche Sitzung des Schwurgerichts 4 Ks 2/63, Strafsache gegen Dr. Franz Lucas, Frankfurt am Main (20 August to 8 October 1970), HHStAW Abt. 461, Nr. 37368/361 USHMM

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington D.C.)

WASt Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle für Kriegerverluste und Kriegsgefangene (Wehrmacht Information Site for MIAs and POWs), Deutsche Dienststelle, Berlin WO

War Office, National Archives, Kew, UK. Copies in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Record Group 59.016M, Judge Advocate General’s Office, War Crimes Case Files, Second World War, WO 235/3XX, Ravensbrück Case

WVHA

Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (SS EconomicAdministrative Main Office)

7 NL 016

Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland (Düsseldorf). Nachlass Professor Hermann Schlingensiepen, 7NL 016

I ntroduction

••• This book examines the career of the German SS medical doctor Franz Bernhard Lucas, who was born in Osnabrück in 1911 and died in Elmshorn, northwest of Hamburg, in 1994. It surveys a stretch of roughly fifty years, 1933 to 1983, in which Lucas bought into the promises of Nazism, covered up his involvement after the war, answered for his crimes, and returned to practicing medicine. During his time in the SS, Lucas served the longest in the death camp AuschwitzBirkenau, after which he performed duties as camp doctor in the Mauthausen, Stutthof, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. In the camps, Lucas showed more kindness than most SS personnel. In February 1944, for example, he opened the jeep door for Dina Gottliebová, a sixteen-year-old Czech Jewish prisoner, and drove her the short distance from the Theresienstadt family camp to the Gypsy family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau.1 He presented her to Dr. Josef Mengele as an illustrator for his experiments on the Sinti and Roma inmates there. In an interview she gave in 1998, Gottliebová expressed relief that after her audience with Mengele, Lucas drove her back to her barracks instead of to the crematorium.2 But Lucas showed his criminal side when he sterilized Heinrich Schenk, a German Sinti war veteran imprisoned in Ravensbrück, in January 1945. Several days after the incision, Lucas ripped apart the wounds that had since healed. When Schenk cried in pain, Lucas hissed, “Be quiet, you swine!”3 These two examples show Lucas building a loyal following among some prisoners while treating others with hostility. Whether prisoners remembered him fondly or with horror, it was his selections of Hungarian Jewish deportees for the Birkenau gas chamber in May, June, and July of 1944 that made him a defendant twenty years later in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. This trial bore the label 4 Ks 63, “Proceedings Against Mulka and Others,” and lasted from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965. One of the most enduring commentaries about the trial came from the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, controversial for her documentation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, especially her use of the phrase “the banality of evil” to de-

2  •   t h e t r i al of a n a z i d o c t o r

scribe Eichmann. For the Auschwitz trial itself, Arendt furnished an introduction to the English translation of Bernd Naumann’s compilation of the trial articles he wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Arendt’s comparison of the defendants on trial was my introduction to the figure of Lucas. She singled him out as the only defendant who “does not show open contempt for the court, does not laugh, insult witnesses, demand that the prosecuting attorneys apologize, or have fun with the others.”4 The minimum sentence for aiding and abetting murder— three years and three months—was, Arendt decided, too harsh for him: “Dr. Lucas had helped people from beginning to end; and not only did he not pose as a ‘savior’—very much in contrast to most of the other defendants—he consistently refused to recognize the witnesses who testified in his favor and to remember the incidents recounted by them. . . . To be sure, none of the acquitted defendants, none of the lawyers for the defense, none of the ‘exalted gentlemen’ who had gone scot-free and had come to testify could hold a candle to Dr. Franz Lucas.”5 There are problems with that assessment that I address later. For now, I should admit that although I believed Arendt at first, I became convinced over time that not even the most glowing endorsement lets a Nazi doctor off the hook. Because it is only natural for readers to be swayed by a convincing contrast, one of my chief aims is to complicate Arendt’s verdict on Lucas. To do so, I will analyze Lucas’s crimes and their impact on his victims, his humane actions and the prisoners who benefitted from them, his attempts to elude postwar discovery and avoid justice, and his eventual sentence, acquittal, and return to medical practice. For all the talk of Lucas’s character, his trustworthiness suffers from the fact that he spent over a year denying that he directed at least four thousand deportees on the Birkenau platform toward the lines for either labor or death. It took two weeks after Lucas’s confession on 11 March 1965 to have him arrested, and only because adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe went over the heads of the reluctant district court officials to win the approval of the appeals court. This says as much about the culture of the German criminal courts as Lucas’s sentence of three years and three months in a Frankfurt penitentiary. As the sole defendant granted his appeal on 20 February 1969 by the German Federal Supreme Court (the Bundesgerichtshof, BGH), he faced a different Frankfurt district court when his retrial began on 20 August 1970, exactly five years after Judge Hofmeyer concluded the original trial. His acquittal on 8 October 1970, which failed to account for the seriousness of Lucas’s crimes but reflected mitigating factors such as his doctoring abilities and resistance to criminal orders, became a foregone conclusion within the climate of West German postwar justice. That is a rough overview of the trial. In the remainder of this introduction, I provide a short sketch of Lucas’s career, touch on the postwar fate of fellow SS doctors and, because we hear very little from him that is straightforward and voluntary, convey something of his voice. I comment on what is at stake in postwar trials, situate Lucas’s biography within the research on perpetrators, and review

introduction  •  3

the existing scholarship on Lucas. The background of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial itself appears in the second half of my book. Born on 15 September 1911 into the family of a master butcher in Osnabrück, Lucas was the second oldest of four siblings.6 His younger brother died on the western front and his older brother on the eastern front, both in early 1944, and his mother died around the same time. This left his father and his younger sister, who sent him news from home during the war and testified on his behalf two decades later during the trial in Frankfurt. His status as the only remaining family son may have kept Lucas from active combat, since the deaths of his brothers came shortly after his paratrooper training in late 1943, which was considered service on the front. In his biography of Heinrich Himmler, Peter Longerich includes the wording of the SS and Higher Police Forces’ “Last Sons” decree of 15 August 1942: “Your task, as soon as possible, is to ensure, through conception and birth of children of good blood, that you are not the last sons.” This decree resulted in some SS doctors being “reclaimed” from the front, and may contribute to why Lucas performed duties as a camp doctor responsible mainly for prisoners, after serving ten months as a troop doctor in the Waffen-SS.7 Lucas grew up in a region heavily influenced by the Catholic Center Party. After beginning study at the Carolinum Gymnasium in Osnabrück in 1926, Lucas transferred to a Jesuit secondary school in nearby Meppen in 1930 and graduated with his Abitur (diploma) in the spring of 1933. That June, Lucas joined the SA (Sturmabteilung, storm troopers) and began studying medicine at the university in Münster. He remained in the SA until September 1934. In 1937 he transferred to the university in Rostock, where he completed his Physikum, or preliminary medical exam. He became a member of the Nazi Party in May 1937 and a member of the SS in November 1937. In 1939, just as German forces were overrunning Poland, he moved to Danzig (Gdansk). He completed a dissertation on ectopic pregnancies at the Danzig Medical Academy and passed the state exam on 26 July 1942. After being drafted into the Security and Assistance Service (Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst, SHD) in Danzig for the remainder of the summer of 1942, he was ordered to Graz in Austria for three months of medical courses at the SS Medical Academy overseen by the Waffen-SS. There he was promoted to Hauptscharführer (head squad leader). His next stop was in Nuremberg to serve as junior physician for the troops of a Waffen-SS signal corps and military hospital. A promotion to Untersturmführer (lieutenant) followed in January 1943. In October 1943 he reported to an SS paratrooper unit near Prague to serve as a troop physician. During that stint a further promotion made him Obersturmführer (first lieutenant), the rank he retained for the remainder of the war. On Lucas’s account, his transfer to paratrooper training was punishment for defeatist remarks he made over beer one evening in Nuremberg, and only an intercessory letter from one influential officer to another removed him from the dangers of parachuting and proximity to the enemy, although the paratroopers

4  •   t h e t r i al of a n a z i d o c t o r

saw no fighting until 1944, long after he was gone. Orders from Berlin assigned him to the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, WVHA), resulting in his transfer to Auschwitz in midDecember 1943. Was such a transfer an improvement of his situation, a deliberate punishment, or the result of being declared unfit for the front? In court, at least, Lucas indicated that everything that happened to him after 1943 was one long punishment. Lucas assumed medical responsibility in Auschwitz II (Birkenau) for the Gypsy family camp (BIIe, for deported Sinti and Roma families) and the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb, for the Jewish deportees from the Czech ghetto Theresienstadt). In early August 1944 he was transferred to Mauthausen, which he left in the second half of October for Stutthof. After Stutthof, he worked in Ravensbrück between mid-December 1944 and the last day of February 1945. As with all other camp transfers, Lucas attributed his transfer from Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen to a falling-out with his superiors. Both prisoners and his colleagues asserted that Lucas’s personality showed an obstreperous streak, although it was not uncommon for SS officers to resist some duties and carry out others. Evidence of less than zealous fulfilment of criminal orders mitigated a defendant’s prison time under German law. To escape the charge of treason, Lucas hid his Nazi credentials upon fleeing Sachsenhausen in mid-April 1945, or at least trotted them out cautiously. After hiding out briefly in a villa near Potsdam, he made his way to Elmshorn, northwest of Hamburg. There he became a resident on 26 April 1945 and an assistant physician for the city hospital not long after the armistice on 8 May 1945. Successfully avoiding a denazification trial, he kept his Nazi past under wraps long enough to be named the hospital’s director of gynecology in 1954. This is where the first half of my book ends. The second half of my book explores the public scrutiny of Lucas from 1955 until his acquittal in 1970. The lies he told to avoid detection of his Nazi past have shaped my choices for recording his career. Even before entering the SS, Lucas made claims that appeared trustworthy and were accepted as stages of his biography. They were lies, however, that he continued after the war in order to escape the limelight. I believe that his denial of the sixteen months he spent in an SS uniform in camps that killed prisoners signals his dishonesty in other areas. Calling out this deception affects how I discuss sources, methodology, and current scholarship on Lucas. But first, it is worth asking how Lucas practiced deception in his manner of speaking and choice of topics.

Finding the Voice of Franz Bernhard Lucas What are the utterances we hear from Lucas? We hear denials, curses, threats, protective claims, and partial confessions void of remorse. Mostly we hear a lot of

introduction  •  5

lies. For example, he claimed repeatedly that he studied philology for two years as a university student in Münster before turning to medicine. In the biographical sketch attached to his medical dissertation, he even asserted that he studied philology during his entire time at Münster, turning only to medicine when he arrived at the University of Rostock in 1937. Four years before the medical dissertation, Lucas attached a handwritten biography to his SS application that also mentioned philology. Both claims are refuted by his Rostock student record, which lists grades for his performance on the first part of his preliminary exam that he completed in March 1935. Perhaps more interesting in the vita than a lie about philological study is a truth about Nazi formation. Lucas claimed that he rejected the views of his Catholic prep school teachers in Meppen because he was captivated more by what a radical Nazi named Josef Egert could teach him. If so, then Lucas was espousing Nazism before the Nazi regime came to power in January 1933, or at least ingratiating himself with its most ardent supporters. Later, however, when it served his advantage and supported his acquittal in 1970, Lucas dismissed his tutelage under Egert as a juvenile lie, claiming that Egert was not his mentor but only a friend of his uncle. The court was supposed to dismiss the lie, given the uncritical exuberance of the time—yet we should recall that at the time of his SS application he was no longer a teenager, but twenty-seven years old. It appears, then, that Lucas lied about studying philology because he was concerned that nine years of training to receive his medical license made him appear a slow learner. Considering the military interruptions of the time and the mobility of students, however, it was not unheard of to study so long. It is harder to determine whether the 1938 detail about his mentor Egert was a lie or simply an unguarded moment of truth captured as evidence in his SS file. Either way, the specificity of the detail shows his eagerness to belong to the SS. Quite possibly Lucas developed deceptive habits as a coping mechanism that the effects of war only exacerbated. If Lucas’s selective deception was useful in his early adulthood for fitting in, in postwar Elmshorn and beyond it became a way to deny his Nazi chapter. Lying about his university years was less grievous than lying about his war years. Lucas must have felt vulnerable when, in 1954, he threatened to sue for libel anyone who identified him as a Nazi. Ironically, the very magistrate’s office that he informed of his intentions fired him from the city hospital at the end of 1962 as his Nazi past came to light. Well before then, Lucas had begun being interrogated about his former Sachsenhausen colleagues under investigation by state attorneys in other jurisdictions. The account he gave of his own whereabouts in 1944–45 began as a lie and continued that way. By the time Lucas himself became the target of interrogations during the investigative phase of the Auschwitz trial, blatant fabrications no longer shielded his past. In Frankfurt, the prosecutor Joachim Kügler and the court magistrate Heinz Düx, armed with SS records that challenged Lucas’s narrative, posed questions that now forced him

6  •   t h e t r i al of a n a z i d o c t o r

to downplay his role in selecting thousands of Jewish deportees in the spring and summer of 1944. Over the course of pretrial and trial hearings, he admitted first to performing ramp duty under duress, then to having resisted from the very start, then to caving in to orders out of fear. In his acquittal, he alleged becoming more resistant over time to the Schweinerei (disgraceful behavior) he encountered. Lucas’s chameleon-like responses are a reminder that a defendant’s choice of topics draws attention away from what he would like kept quiet. Lucas’s opening statement in court on 27 January 1963 focused on the few improvements he could make in Auschwitz-Birkenau due to limited resources. Instead of describing the expectation that he be present at floggings or prisoner selections, he complained about the inadequate daily caloric intake of the prisoners and the refusal of superior officers to honor his requests—while perhaps partly true, this was a typical ploy of camp doctors on trial. What exactly the silence of Lucas was hiding was not always clear, and he and his lawyers were not obliged to address areas not listed on the formal indictment. Along with his selective speech and guarded silence, and despite Arendt’s impression of him, Lucas cultivated a habit of denial in keeping with his fellow defendants. One need only consider his role supervising the family camps in Birkenau that were “liquidated”—the Theresienstadt Czech family camp in March and July 1944, and the Gypsy family camp in early August 1944. For both camps, Lucas insisted that transfer orders had removed him from the scene of the killings. But whenever judges or prosecutors reminded him that his dates of arrival and departure were inconsistent, he claimed a poor memory. Nevertheless, his memory was functional enough during pretrial investigations for him to insist that he neither knew nor worked with the Nazis in question—or, if he did overlap with them, it was his memory of their conversations that was correct, not theirs. The biggest lie was his fourteen-month-long denial of selections. When it was no longer avoidable, his partial confession signaled a change in strategy. His claim was now that obeying criminal orders had been his only option because he feared for his life. Strikingly, Lucas also denied remembering most survivor witnesses who either accused or supported him. He swore that he had never seen accusatory witnesses or that they had confused him with another doctor. Even grateful witness survivors who reported his kindheartedness went unacknowledged, as Lucas was still trying to avoid associations with certain places and times that compromised his defense strategy. Grateful camp survivors remembered Lucas cursing the war as Schweinerei. An Auschwitz telegraph operator had heard Lucas’s female companion, also employed at Auschwitz, report that he cursed Hitler and vowed that his own children would never enter the Hitler Youth. Ravensbrück witnesses recalled his disgust with everything his superiors expected of him in early 1945: chiefly, sterilizing Sinti army veterans in the men’s camp and singling out the frailest prisoners in the women’s camp for execution. Apparently, Lucas’s tirades against “disgrace-

introduction  •  7

ful” orders were the only time he raised his normally halting voice and upset his superiors enough to transfer him. His insolent tone emerged when he once told the commandant of Blechhammer, an Auschwitz subcamp, that instead of selecting frail prisoners for death, the SS should just consider feeding them more.8 How did Lucas’s voice sound under pressure? Hermann Langbein, prisoner secretary for Auschwitz chief doctor Eduard Wirths and expert witness in court, conveyed how the SS defendants sounded during the trial hearings. Robert Mulka, adjutant for Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, was “puffed-up,” while the lower-ranked report and block leader Oswald Kaduk and medical orderly Josef Klehr sounded “primitive.”9 The pharmacist Viktor Capesius was arrogant, and the block leader of the political division, Hans Stark, had a way of “barking” when agitated.10 In February 1965, Birkenau block leader Stefan Baretzki “spewed forth” his details with “elemental power” when he confronted higherranked Obersturmführer Lucas in court, who only managed a mumble.11 Lucas came across during the entire trial as self-conscious, striving to distance himself from the defendants whose crimes he seemed to remember as poorly as his own. The audio recording from the trial preserves his stammering and throat clearing. The only times he sounded a “Brustton der Überzeugung” (full-throated tone of conviction) came when he denied selecting on the Birkenau ramp.12 After confessing, any vocal confidence he could muster disappeared until the hearings that brought about his acquittal in 1970. Here is a sampling from Lucas’s inventory of responses, as recorded by Langbein: “I myself was neither there (i.e., ramp) nor at the crematorium a single time.” “In my crisis of conscience at the time, I could see no other possibility.” “Even today I don’t see how I could have acted any differently at the time.” “I had no possibility of dodging it.” “I cannot recall this case.” “I don’t know, I found myself in such a state of high tension at the time that I can no longer provide details.” “If I didn’t resist commands directly in Auschwitz, it was because I had been in a suicide commando. I was afraid.”13 Thus, Lucas not only sounds more educated than the others, but also more consistently negative and passive. He always “finds himself” somewhere, bewildered as to how or when he got there. Nevertheless, even his taciturn responses were more specific than those most of the other defendants offered, the court pointed out in its judgment, as though he tried to sound helpful even in his recalcitrance. In her brief attendance of the trial, Washington Post journalist Sybille Bedford, who consistently called Oswald Kaduk “brutishly stupid,” described Lucas as “a heavy, middle-aged man, gray suit, gray hair, who moves slowly and speaks in a low, unhappy voice. He is the first of the defendants who does not speak the language of the oppressor.”14 Although Bedford never spoke to Lucas directly, Dutch reporters did. When they interviewed him during the court’s site inspection of Auschwitz in December 1964, a year into the trial, they found Lucas evasive and shy, claiming a poor memory worsened by being asked to recall events from

8  •   t h e t r i al of a n a z i d o c t o r

twenty years earlier. According to his wife Susanne and the supporters from his hometown of Elmshorn, anything the press wrote against him had to be false.15 The Israeli journalist Inge Deutschkron had the closest contact to Lucas. She was interested in recording how his face changed from pale to red depending on which reporter, lawyer, or judge was pressing him for details. Described by a former prisoner doctor as stone-faced, he showed a rare smile on 8 October 1970, as he and his jubilant wife emerged from the courtroom following his acquittal. In the web of lies Lucas constructed for self-preservation, one aspect remained consistent: he never faked religious feelings. His wife knew this best about him. She explained to her theologian friend Hermann Schlingensiepen that in matters of faith her husband had always remained silent. Religiously outspoken, Susanne Lucas drew support from her own Protestant community in Elmshorn. While her husband was in prison, she raised two daughters and managed the household and her husband’s professional matters. Inside her world it is natural to feel sympathy for her. Reading her correspondence, it is easy to understand how wives of Nazi defendants hoped to sway courts to grant an early release of their husbands from prison. Such empathy should give us pause, however. For it is just as true that like their husbands, few of these women had anything to say to the victims who suffered the results of criminal actions supposedly so distressing for Nazis to carry out. The Germans who understood themselves as victims of victor’s justice at Nuremberg were hard-pressed to contemplate their own violence toward “outsiders” of the Volk community. As Katharina von Kellenbach argues, many German church parishes after 1945 became extensions of the Volk community, not the least through the moral absolutes they provided resentful Christians like Schlingensiepen’s pen pal Artur Wilke and through the concrete support they provided Susanne Lucas in the form of amnesty petitions.16 Whenever Lucas ventured to express anything apart from what his lawyers or wife said for him, it was usually on paper with his fountain pen. Two such letters from prison spring to mind. The first was addressed to the head doctor in the Kassel prison hospital where Lucas awaited surgery for gallstones. In it he lists, from one doctor to another, the dangers of undergoing surgery in unsuitable facilities with incompetent surgeons. In the second letter, to his lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer, he lists the faults in the written verdict of the Frankfurt district court that arrived fifteen months after its oral verdict. In both writings Lucas sounds indignant, insistent on his own logic. Two other letters come to mind as underscoring not so much Lucas’s indignation as his deference and sickliness under pressure. The first, a note he signed Heil Hitler! on 5 April 1939, requested that the second half of his preliminary exam in Rostock be postponed because of his illness. The second letter explained that acute bronchitis had slowed his responses to the questions posed by Frankfurt prosecutor Joachim Kügler during Lucas’s first interrogation in Elmshorn in November 1961. It also should be noted that Lucas used bed rest as an excuse to

introduction  •  9

miss the first two days of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in December 1963. Two of Lucas’s former SS bosses also noticed his propensity for illness. His commanding officer at Nuremberg wrote in 1943 that Lucas had worked himself to the point of contracting pneumonia as troop doctor for the SS regiment there. And when asked in the 1990s what he remembered about Lucas, the longstanding chief medical officer of Sachsenhausen, Heinz Baumkötter, focused on Lucas’s fundamental sickliness. Bronchial and kidney problems were surface indicators, but Baumkötter hinted that they were an outward sign of Lucas’s internal turmoil late in the war: “I didn’t want to impinge on his solitude. I thought I knew what was going on inside him—but seen solely from the outside he made a morbid impression. Call it pathological, even. While he went along with things, on the other hand I had the impression that he knew what he was doing and perhaps had the opinion that he could consciously do it in my presence, perhaps even pretend.”17 Was sickliness a sign of trying to walk a line to please both fellow SS officers and victims, of being driven by courage and held back by cowardice? This question is not meant to vilify. Real or imagined health shortcomings were something doctors tried to gauge when mustering recruits, especially given the number of Drückeberger (shirkers) the Nazis thought were trying to avoid the front lines. Lucas was classified as “kv” (kriegsverwendungsfähig, combat suitable) upon entering the Waffen-SS in September 1942, but later records may have classified him as “av” (arbeitsverwendungsfähig, work suitable), removing him from the dangers and stresses of the front to relative safety closer to home.18 But his continuous service record at least shows no sign of his classification under temporary or permanent unsuitability for combat. In his study of concentration camps, Buchenwald survivor Eugen Kogon ventured that SS members stayed in the camps to shirk the front.19 Marco Pukrop has argued against applying this idea to SS doctors or medical orderlies, whose injuries or illness designated them unsuitable for the front at precisely the point in the war when they were most needed there.20 Such was the case with Heinz Baumkötter, whose typhus prevented his return to the field troops. Assuming Lucas had an illness that kept him in the camps as well, it provides a way to reinterpret his predictable explanation that all his transfers were punitive. It could simply be that instead of being at the mercy of angry commandants or garrison medical officers, he was on the radar of the Medical Branch (Amtsgruppe D) of the Waffen-SS in the SS-FHA (SS Leadership Main Office), which placed qualified doctors in positions where they were needed and healthy enough to serve. It was not his supposed Sachsenhausen nemesis Dr. Enno Lolling who was signing the transfer orders, because Lolling, as Pukrop reminds us, did not have autonomous control over personnel. Instead, Lucas’s SS officer files show the signature of Dr. Max Peters, former SS doctor in Sachsenhausen and main division leader of the personnel division of the Waffen-SS Medical Branch.21 The punitive transfer argument draws from the same rhetorical well as duress under orders. The more

10  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

consistently a defendant invokes such arguments, the more believable they begin to sound, and the more carefully one must move the focus from exculpatory evidence to the idea that the kindness at the base of exculpation was not simply an element of Lucas’s character but his strategy of buying a return ticket to civilian life as he dismayed at the state of the war and the tasks he was asked to perform. As he fashioned his account of service in the camps, Lucas kept erasing his role in atrocities. He “recast” himself, to use the term David Messenger and Katrin Paehler have featured in their anthology A Nazi Past.22 After his arrest on 24 March 1965, Lucas painted himself increasingly as the victim, and by 1970 he and his lawyers went on the offensive by calling Lucas’s arrest and prison time unjust. Just before his acquittal, his lawyers shamed the court and prosecutors for keeping a beloved gynecologist from his patients for so long. Lucas’s acquittal then pushed him from diffident to indifferent. When state attorneys questioned him after 1970 about his role in Auschwitz or Ravensbrück, he referred them to published court opinions. Lucas’s narrative is dominated by a tone of reluctance, cited repeatedly by colleagues and prisoners alike who noted his hesitation to put the names of sick prisoners on selection lists for execution. This reluctance to play the scoundrel joined with his determination to practice medicine in settings that made a mockery of it. Lucas emerges as evasive and guarded, reluctant to carry out orders and indignant when his own suggestions went unheeded. He denied allegations and showed a lack of insight when they proved true. He was uncomfortable as the center of attention and, at least in the courtroom, avoided the Nazi vernacular of his fellow defendants. Somewhat sickly and self-absorbed, he did not exactly jump at the chance to show courage but preferred to curse his circumstances and the people he claimed put him there.

Lucas as Perpetrator, Bystander, Rescuer, and Victim Writing for the conservative newspaper Die Welt, journalist Gerhard Mauz remarked that Lucas could be a “devil” for some and an “angel” for others. “Dr. Lucas is both black and white,” Mauz concluded.23 This does not mean that he was two different persons but that he treated different prisoners in different ways, or the same person differently over time, depending on the motivations, facilitative factors, and contextual conditions at play—elements that Timothy Williams includes in his action-centric model of genocide, which “acknowledges that the person has a history before and after genocidal actions and may even have engaged in parallel acts of rescuing or bystanding.”24 Based on Williams’s view that persons inhabit the roles of perpetrator, rescuer, bystander, and victim in unpredictable intervals, I suggest Lucas’s actions themselves as starting points for understanding him.25 This is more reliable than trusting him, his patients, his

introduction  •  11

wife, or his lawyers to tell us when, how, where, or why he inhabited this or that role. Note that this vocabulary is different from will or intention, which German courts used to distinguish between Täter (perpetrator) and Gehilfe (accomplice), a distinction I will address shortly. An SS doctor could act like a savior one day and a sadist the next. It was volatility that prisoners dreaded more than anything.26 Hermann Langbein, secretary to Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief medical officer at Auschwitz, remembered his boss’s unpredictability with increasing ambivalence.27 Prisoner doctor Ella Lingens testified that Auschwitz doctors Werner Rohde and Fritz Klein played favorites, especially with female prisoners they could count on to clear their names. And then there is Hans Münch, who worked in the Hygiene Institute and was the only defendant acquitted among forty-one Auschwitz staff members in the Kraków trial of 1947. Grateful prisoners called him the “good German of Auschwitz.” But in 1999, former prisoner Imre Gönczi traveled from Haifa to Münch’s home in Bavaria to inform him that every deep breath he took or every time he raised his left arm was a painful reminder of an experimental bacteria Münch had injected into his lung in 1944. With no regrets, Münch assured Gönczi that he would “do it all over again.”28 Münch had nothing personally against him, but the fact that Gönczi was Jewish had made him fair game for Münch’s urge to make the most of the human “material” at his disposal, an attitude that had only fossilized in the intervening half century. Why not imagine Lucas on some occasions to have been as virulently antisemitic as Hans Münch or Fritz Klein, as heavy a drinker as Werner Rohde or Hans Wilhelm König, as heartless an opportunist as Josef Mengele, and as twofaced as his boss Eduard Wirths? This does not cancel out the other occasions when he delivered Swedish Red Cross packages, milk, bandages, and castor oil to grateful prisoners. This range of behavior is the mark of a human, not a monster. But the number of rescue stories that support Lucas’s justification narrative are not enough to redeem a man who sent thousands of Jewish deportees to their deaths from Birkenau transports. This conviction has inspired my study of Lucas as much as it has been shaped by it. A better example of authentic courage is the Austrian sergeant Anton Schmid, offered by Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem and also included in an anthology of military rescuers compiled by Wolfram Wette. Before his execution in 1942 for helping Jews in Lithuania, Schmid wrote to his wife: “If every respectable Christian tried rescuing just a single Jew, our Party honchos would be damn hard-pressed to carry out their solution to the Jewish Question. No way can our Nazis just snap up all respectable Christians and stick them in prison.”29 Despite her contention that Lucas was out of place among the lowbrow defendants, if Arendt had Schmid in mind when she described Lucas, she was mistaken.30 An altogether different spirit attends Lucas, who justified his obedience of egregious orders at Auschwitz-Birkenau by appealing to the authority of Bishop Berning of

12  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Osnabrück. He claimed that Berning advised him to lie low and do what he was told. Ironically, by following the authority of the Catholic Church, Lucas was assisting the cause of “Party honchos” instead of steadily undermining it in the way Schmid’s conscience prompted him to do. The significant difference is that Schmid proved the plausibility of his conviction by acting on it, while Lucas asserted a justification in retrospect for not acting at all. Biography scholar Simone Lässig has suggested that external forces are a better indication of a life’s trajectory than some predestined inner regulation that shows intention.31 Nazi criminals used the language of intention to explain their memberships, but they explained heinous actions as beyond their control and a distortion of their original goals. The assumption is that events tend to unfold favorably for persons until something external interferes. In a way, this sort of thinking recalls the intentionalism-functionalism divide that used to dominate historiographical discussions.32 Intentionalism helped account for the antisemitic ideology that drove Nazi policy, but also for the conviction that something logical was guiding the actions of the regime. Historical scholarship on the Nazi era now favors functionalism, which places less emphasis on antisemitism and more on the idea that Nazi policies unfolded as responses to economic problems and polycratic competitions, for example. In the same way, the motivations of the biographical subject Franz Lucas cannot be explained as having been straightforward intentions until being disturbed by hostile external forces. Surely there was no inner logic at work in either the Nazi criminals themselves or in the “Final Solution,” but rather a deep-seated resentment and a loss of inhibition regarding the Jews, fanned by political flames.33 If fate and tragedy are the hostile external forces that explain deviations from some life path, then the victim designation dominates above the perpetrator, because the autonomy factor remains unconsidered. A biographer who appeals to external forces resembles Lucas’s defense lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer, who asked the court to regard his client as an innocent German who set out to become the first physician in his family but found himself drowning in the sea of totalitarianism. Instead of acknowledging that the attractiveness of belonging to the SS could influence ambitions, Aschenauer argued that Nazism thwarted the basic character of his helpless client.34 This “normal German” alibi, which Devin Pendas calls the “minoritarian myth,” maintained that innocent SS recruits served a system imposed by unmerciful Nazis.35 Better biographies are written, Lässig suggests, by examining “the social background conditions that influenced, shaped, or even prompted individual decisions and actions.”36 The focus of the courts to second-guess a defendant’s subjective will in order to separate perpetrators from accomplices creates the temptation in biography to spend too much time retracing psychological motives and not enough time analyzing the influence of loyalties, competitions, and continuities among SS networks. Embedding biographical subjects as autonomous actors

introduction  •  13

within networks challenges Lucas’s claim that every one of his SS camp transfers was a punishment for refusing orders. The division of responsibilities for ramp and crematorium duty (and therefore also the accountability for it) is a better way to understand the 1944 pogrom against Hungarian Jews than considering it the result of vengeful actions of SS personnel forced to atone for insubordination by being pushed into the camp system. Hilary Earl has highlighted this tension between liberal democratic justice, which is highly individualist and wants to identify an actor’s agency, and the fact that genocide and all group crimes are a function of the group.37 Hannah Arendt identifies the danger succinctly: “Where all are guilty, no one is.”38 Sociologist Stefan Kühl has argued this point about shared responsibility in SS groups, and historian Stefan Hördler has shown that extermination networks, not accidental arrangements of insubordinate officers, influenced the final months of the war.39 One solution for resolving the tension between individual and group would be to write a group biography instead of concentrating on one figure. Marco Pukrop has done this for the SS doctors who served in Sachsenhausen, comparing their socioeconomic backgrounds and political influences and exploring a few of them in greater depth. We cannot know for certain what motivated Lucas to join the SS or to trade his Catholic mentors for Nazi ones. It may very well be that his decisions derived from peer pressure or youthful impetuousness. The problem is that his explanations for joining the organization sound too banal to support the severity of the crimes he committed as its member. Opportunism or ideological conviction can both be fanned into flame. His direct and indirect victims are proof only of his killings, not of the zeal or reluctance he showed. More than a few biographies since the year 2000 have attempted to explain what went wrong with Nazi doctors and why.40 Despite all evidence to the contrary, though, we still appear reluctant to blur the line between atrocity and altruism, healing and killing, because something in us prefers unambiguous extremes. German courts also preferred thinking that character traits produced certain actions and not others, much the way they thought they knew what constituted normal behavior in a place like Auschwitz. The problem is that participating in genocide hardly reflects solid character.

Postwar Trials in Germany and Their Issues To understand Lucas’s actions, especially those that run counter to his public image, requires patience. It requires repeated orbits over hard evidence, such as military documents, and soft evidence, such as witness testimony. Lucas’s habit of lying low, coupled with his silence, denials, and deception, complicates the task of analyzing his career. Granted, Nazis found plenty of ways to lie using “hard” documents: they drummed up letters to send the relatives of “euthanasia” victims, falsified death certificates of persons killed in the gas chambers, promised

14  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Sinti and Roma their freedom if they signed forms that spelled out their voluntary submission to sterilization, and forced German Jews to sign forms agreeing to relinquish assets during expulsions. All such documents used against Nazi enemies were meant to deceive, humiliate, and exploit. Most internal documents used for Nazi communication, however, are reliable sources to the extent that they were not censored or produced with concern for how posterity would receive them. Postwar trial courts in Germany determined the validity of hard and soft evidence to aid in reaching a verdict. Over time, as witness testimony became more necessary to fill in the gaps of missing documents, courts and defendants joined forces to discredit witnesses who contradicted themselves or suffered emotional breakdowns and thus appeared to break their vows of telling the truth on the stand—a high bar that was not set for any of the defendants. My first aim in the following is to sketch the developing notions of justice, especially against Nazi doctors, as Lucas must have seen them. He must have experienced trepidation as he learned the fate of his colleagues and that his own name was being dropped in Nuremberg during the International Military Tribunal (IMT) trial of major Nazi war criminals and in Hamburg at the Ravensbrück trial. Even if he was confident that his SS papers had been destroyed and that no accusatory witnesses had survived to testify against him, every day must have involved attempts to avoid discovery and to build a reputation of good character that could work backward in time to redeem the actions befitting the perpetrator side of him. My second aim is to trace the issues at stake in German postwar trials, which in the second half of my book I will apply to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial specifically. Along with voluntary affidavits of survivors, thousands of extant SS records helped secure swift justice for the IMT in Nuremberg.41 Witnesses corroborated that hard evidence without recounting their own experiences as victims in the ghettos and camps. Since the IMT’s example of a fair trial included the chance for defense lawyers to cross-examine witnesses, doubts were raised about the “soft” evidence of witnesses: if you say you suffered, why do you look so healthy now—or, since it is clear that you suffered so profoundly, how can we now trust your traumatic memories to be precise and not exaggerated?42 The effort by the defense to raise doubts about Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, an articulate witness who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, fell short, however. Even though she reported hearsay, she was the first trial witness to enlist Lucas in the canon of heroic resistance: M. Dubost: Can you tell us, Madame, if you can answer this question? Were the SS doctors who made the selection acting on their own accord or were they merely obeying orders? Mme. Vaillant-Couturier: They were acting on orders received, since one of them, Dr. Lukas, refused to participate in the selections and was withdrawn from the camp, and Dr. Winkelmann was sent from Berlin to replace him.

introduction  •  15 M. Dubost: Did you personally witness these facts? Mme. Vaillant-Couturier: It was he himself who told the Chief of the Block 10 and Dr. Louise le Porz, when he left.43

Lucas may not have followed the IMT proceedings as closely as he did another famous trial, the Belsen trial of “Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others,” which a British military court began in Lüneburg on 17 September 1945 and finished before Vaillant-Couturier appeared in Nuremberg. The trial is significant for at least three reasons. First, Lucas had worked under Kramer, the commandant of Birkenau who supervised the extermination of Hungarian deportees beginning in mid-May 1944, and he claimed that Kramer had been the one to force him into selecting prisoners on the ramp. Kramer earned the title “Beast of Belsen” after leaving Auschwitz in December 1944 and becoming commandant in Bergen-Belsen. In this trial of two months, long by 1945 standards, Britain’s military court adjudicated German war crimes against British citizens rather than crimes against humanity. Because only thirty-one witnesses were available so soon after the war to testify—twenty of them Jewish survivors—the court allowed affidavits submitted as evidence. While defense lawyers pointed out inconsistencies between affidavits and cross-examinations in court, prosecutors argued—and this is the second important point—that Kramer and his cohort did not have to hold pistols or syringes to be found guilty of murder, as their mere participation sufficed. As Colonel Backhouse argued, “It is my submission that all people who took part in these selections, knowing what they were, were equally guilty, whether it be the doctor who says, ‘This one to live, this one to die,’ or the man who pushes them into one particular compartment or the other, or the man who leads them, or the man who gasses them. When people take part in a murder by poisoning it is not necessary for them to do the actual deed in order to be convicted.”44 But the court disagreed, setting precedents for later war trials. Membership in Nazi organizations or participation in the camps was insufficient proof of individually committed atrocities. As Jörg Friedrich points out, the trial also inaugurated defense claims of being a victim of circumstances, of duress from superior orders, and of overstretched demands on morality.45 The third point is that thanks to the affidavit produced by Lucas’s and Kramer’s colleague Dr. Fritz Klein, there was little doubt about which SS doctors participated in selections of frail and diseased prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau.46 As Klein reported, There were several doctors in that camp, the chief one being Dr. Wirtz [i.e., Wirths]; others whose names I can remember are Dr. Fischer, Dr. Kitt, Dr. Lucas, Dr. Mengele, Dr. Thilo, Dr. Rohde and Dr. König. When transports arrived at Auschwitz it was the doctor’s job to pick out those who were unfit or unable to work. These included children, old people and the sick. I have seen the gas chambers

16  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r and crematoria at Auschwitz, and I knew that those I selected were to go to the gas chamber. But I only acted on orders given me by Dr. Wirtz [i.e., Wirths]. . . . All the doctors whom I previously mentioned have taken part in these selections, and although S.S. guards were on parade they took no active part in choosing those who were unfit to work.47

Klein’s affidavit was the basis for the Frankfurt state attorney’s office’s adding Lucas to the bill of indictment in 1962 for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Lucas’s lawyers failed in their attempt to dismiss Klein’s evidence as an attempt to blame others before he was hanged.48 Examined more closely, Klein’s document reflects partial acknowledgment of guilt, even though he claimed that he had acted on orders and that selecting was “not a pleasure.” Several months earlier, Klein had been less guarded. Prisoner doctor Ella Lingens remembered him proclaiming that a good physician is trained to remove an ulcerous appendix, and the Jews were the appendicitis on Europe’s body.49 Kramer and Klein were two of eight men from the Belsen trial hanged in Hameln, south of Lüneburg, in December 1945. Similar fates awaited other Auschwitz SS doctors who, after leaving Auschwitz before the Red Army arrived in January 1945, were ordered to other camps and were captured during the final phase of the Nazi regime, and Lucas knew them all. Bruno Kitt, whom Hermann Langbein considered more innocent than Lucas, was tried alongside other Neuengamme concentration camp staff and hanged on 8 October 1946.50 Werner Rohde followed three days later, based on his lethal injections of four British female special operatives.51 Some doctors committed suicide. Heinz Thilo, the same age as Lucas and a close collaborator in Birkenau, killed himself in prison a week after Germany’s capitulation.52 Percy Treite, also the same age and Lucas’s fellow gynecologist in Ravensbrück, took poison before he could be hanged in the first Ravensbrück trial. Lucas’s Auschwitz boss Eduard Wirths died in 1946 of wounds stemming from a botched self-hanging attempt while in captivity. Otto Heidl, Lucas’s boss at Stutthof, committed suicide in 1955 while on trial in Bochum. Lucas’s boss at Ravensbrück, Richard Trommer, supposedly swallowed poison before the war was over, although he was declared missing and dead only in 1950. Enno Lolling, the chief physician of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate in Oranienburg and the highest medical authority in the SS and concentration camp complex of Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, committed suicide at a hospital in Flensburg, a town in Schleswig-Holstein where many high-ranking Nazis sought refuge. Most other acquaintances were hanged or died of natural causes in prison. The suicides were not necessarily acknowledgments of guilt but a way to avoid the drawn-out humiliation and spectacle of hanging that many victims of the Nazis had been either forced to undergo or witness in the camps. Lucas’s boss at Sachsenhausen, Heinz Baumkötter, would have been executed if the British had not handed over responsibility to the Soviets to try Sachsen-

introduction  •  17

hausen personnel. Captured by the British in Lübeck on 3 May 1945, he spent a year in prison in Neuengamme and was handed over to the Soviets in June 1946. In the weeklong Soviet Sachsenhausen trial in Berlin (23 October to 1 November 1947), Baumkötter was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor in the Soviet Union but returned to Münster on 14 January 1956 in the wake of the famous Adenauer-brokered arrangement of 1955 that returned thousands of POWs to Germany.53 Less than two weeks after his return, the Münster attorney general took up the investigation of Baumkötter and two Sachsenhausen doctors he supervised, Alois Gaberle and Otto Adam. The trial began on 17 November 1961 and ended on 19 February 1962. Baumkötter was found guilty of accessory to murder in two cases and accessory to fourteen Tateinheit (action unit) crimes of murder. Sentenced to eight years, he was free on the basis of having served more than eight years in custody and in the penal camp Workuta as a Soviet POW.54 Gaberle received the same sentence as Lucas did three years later (three years and three months), while Adam was cleared of all charges.55 Based on the fate of Lucas’s medical colleagues, whether they perished by their own hand or by another’s, would his exceptionalism have saved him from execution if he had been discovered by the Allies while making his way to Elmshorn in April 1945? Leaving Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg just in time in his flight from the SS, Lucas survived to watch his former SS colleagues put on the stand and condemned by witnesses and prosecutors alike. The British prosecutor was convinced that a doctor in hiding should become the standard of goodness by which to weigh the behavior of the doctors on trial. As he lay low, Lucas never hid under a pseudonym like his fellow Auschwitz doctor Hans Wilhelm König, who settled in a Lower Saxony village and practiced medicine as “Ernst Peltz” before disappearing in 1962.56 Nor did he flee the country like his infamous colleague Josef Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979 under the pseudonym Wolfgang Gerhard.57 To reinforce the idea of openness and innocence, in 1965 Lucas’s lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer appealed to Lucas’s upstanding position in the community to convince the Frankfurt district court that he had nothing to gain from going underground and ought to remain at large, as his family, career, and happiness all remained in Elmshorn. Let me now sketch some of the issues at stake in German postwar trials. The Moscow Accord of 30 October 1943, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, declared soldiers, officers, and Nazi Party members responsible for German atrocities and specified that they would be put on trial in the countries where they had taken part in the atrocities, convictable on the basis of responsibility for events or their willing participation in them.58 The Allied Control Council Law No. 10, passed on 20 December 1945, provided uniformity for trials hosted in the four Allied zones and for trials of Germans in German courts. At the start, German courts were limited to investigating crimes committed by Germans against Germans in concentration camps, as part of the Night of Broken Glass (Reichs-

18  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

kristallnacht) on 9 November 1938, “euthanasia” killings, or executions of Germans in the final stages of the war.59 Article II of the Allied Control Council Law No. 10 provided a category for addressing genocide under crimes against humanity and identified the criminals responsible as those who were principal or accessory actors, or who ordered or abetted the crime, played a consenting role, were connected to the plans in carrying it out, or belonged to the organization or group that committed the crime. It also made clear that a defendant’s claim of carrying out governmental or superior orders under compulsion “does not free him from responsibility for a crime, but may be considered in mitigation.”60 The problem with the Allied Control Council Law No. 10 was its focus on crimes of a scope unimaginable to the German Criminal Code of 1871, which had not foreseen the possibility of genocide. As historian Devin Pendas has shown, to adjudicate a crime before a law was passed to expressly forbid it violated nulla poena sine lege, the longstanding prohibition of ex post facto law.61 A further point of German resentment was that the Council Law closed off the ploy of arguing helplessness in the face of superior orders, as the Allies were uninterested in subjective motivation or mitigating circumstances for mass murder. The defendants in the Einsatzgruppen (extermination squads) trial of 1947, the ninth of twelve subsequent trials that followed the IMT and were hosted by the Americans in Nuremberg from 28 September 1947 to 10 April 1948, nevertheless attempted to argue otherwise. Otto Ohlendorf and his defense lawyer Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer (1913–83), whose scores of Nazi clients later included Franz Lucas, justified the murder of ninety thousand Jewish noncombatants by Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D as the result of superior orders issued to prevent Soviet expansion.62 Much like Ohlendorf, Aschenauer was convinced that the USSR was waging an imperialist war that justified the Einsatzgruppen.63 However, the proud reports the defendants gave of exceeding murder quotas in their assigned territories left no doubt that following superior orders was less a hardship than a chance to demonstrate zealous initiative. The importance of Aschenauer for his client Lucas emerges throughout my investigation, but a few remarks about his career are in order here. A former member of the Nazi Party in Bavaria, Aschenauer began building his extraordinary reputation with the Malmedy trial in Dachau from mid-May to mid-July 1946, in which seventy-three members of the SS tank division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler were charged with the deaths of seventy-seven American prisoners of war and one hundred thirty civilians at Malmedy in December 1944. Aschenauer helped divert attention away from the massacre in order to focus on the alleged American psychological intimidation and physical abuse of German POWs awaiting trial. Ultimately, a rigorous US senate subcommittee investigation discredited most of the claims of the defense and the five defendants.64 Still, it remains sobering that Aschenauer was a contact for the US Intelligence Division, a lawyer for several Malmedy defendants on death row, a representative

introduction  •  19

for Protestant and Catholic clerical circles, and an advisor to Munich bishop Johannes Neuhäusler. Influenced heavily by Aschenauer, German clerics wrote amnesty pleas to General Lucius Clay and President Harry Truman that compared American occupation authorities to the Hitler regime.65 Resentment in Germany and in American conservative circles grew beyond American judicial efforts in Nuremberg and Dachau to include the entirety of the American military presence in Germany.66 Branding the trials in Nuremberg as political power void of justice, Aschenauer wrote revisionist pamphlets that shifted attention toward the Cold War and what many in Germany and the United States considered the clear and present danger, the Soviet Union.67 This resentful attitude informed Aschenauer’s activities in the second phase of trials, roughly 1950–58, an era of clemency already evident in the aftermath of the Einsatzgruppen trial.68 John McCloy, US High Commissioner for Germany, was pushed to pardon the German defendants still interned at Landsberg prison.69 In the middle of 1952, Aschenauer began fashioning a right-extremist political career. He consulted for and mediated discussions involving ultra-nationalist parties. In the mid-1950s he slowed his political ambitions in order to represent right-extremist groups and former SS members in court and engage with Stille Hilfe (Quiet Aid) and HIAG (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS, Mutual Aid Association for Members of the Former Waffen-SS).70 In the Auschwitz trial, he represented the two symbolic extremes of defendant behavior: Wilhelm Boger, former Auschwitz SS Gestapo guard synonymous in the press with sadism, and Franz Lucas, who many believed did not belong in court at all. For five years, Aschenauer was in regular contact with Franz and Susanne Lucas as their elective lawyer, while representing dozens of other former Nazis to ensure that they spent minimal time in prison. What accounted for the clemency of the 1950s besides the influence of the national churches? To begin with, German courts were given the jurisdiction over crimes against Allied nationals and the permission to try German war criminals according to German statutory law. On 31 August 1951, the British explicitly withdrew the authority of German courts in their zone to prosecute according to Control Council Law 10. In the same year, the Bundestag (parliament) in Bonn passed the important “Article 131” bill, which pardoned or diminished the sentences of former Nazis while restoring their privileges and positions.71 The bill expressed the idea that Germans had suffered enough from victors’ justice both in trials and in humiliating denazification and reeducation campaigns.72 On 5 May 1955, Law A-37 of the Allied High Commission granted German courts full legal autonomy to adjudicate according to laws that were on the books long before genocidal crimes were committed. This step was completed when, on 30 May 1956, the Bundestag ended the long-standing irritation of ex post facto law by annulling the Allied clause of crimes against humanity and adopting a genocide clause in the penal code that could apply only to future infractions.73

20  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

In the face of a Communist threat perceived as far more urgent than punishing Nazi criminals, any original didactic goal the Allies had for the trials in the 1940s faded into a policy of amnesty. Continuing to punish Germans appeared an embarrassing legacy—albeit not to the Nazis’ victims. In a new era of legal autonomy featuring public metaphors such as Schlußstrich (drawing a final line) and Nestbeschmutzung (dirtying one’s nest), high Nazi officials who had been pardoned or whose Allied trials had been terminated for lack of evidence were immune from additional trials, while those who served under them and happened to stand trial after them often had longer sentences to endure.74 By the mid-1950s, almost no one with a Nazi past had to fear discovery and accountability, according to Norbert Frei. From 2,500 in 1950, new investigations of Nazi violent crimes had dropped to 183 by 1954.75 The amnesty atmosphere, enhanced by the return of nearly ten thousand German POWs from the Soviet Union to a hero’s welcome in 1955–56, complicated the efforts of state attorneys to track down criminals who lived in their jurisdictions. To be sure, these returning POWs would have signaled the end of an era of already diminishing trials, had not 750 of them undergone investigation for severe war crimes. Lucas knew at least two of them: Carl Clauberg, who sterilized hundreds of women at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and the aforementioned Heinz Baumkötter, who directed medical affairs at Sachsenhausen. According to Annette Weinke, the push for accountability for severe crimes was persistent, even if those behind the push were in the minority. Its impulse was boosted in 1958 by the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial, whose central defendant was Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, commander of Einsatzkommando Tilsit.76 Prosecutor Erwin Schüle made it his mission to refute the claims of Fischer-Schweder, SS-Sturmbannführer (assault unit leader at the rank of a major) Werner Hersmann (represented by Aschenauer), and eight other codefendants. Schüle proved that in the summer of 1941 these men had competed to see who could kill thousands of Lithuanian Jews the most efficiently.77 Schüle also condemned the tactic of judges and physicians who certified former Nazis as unfit to stand trial. According to Patrick Tobin, Schüle was the first West German state attorney to request and receive documents from the Nuremberg trials, the Berlin Document Center, and WASt.78 These helped him identify hierarchies of command and possibilities of individual agency.79 Schüle also located Ona Rudaitis, the only known eyewitness to the mass shooting of Jewish women and children in a meadow outside her Lithuanian village of Virbalis.80 Tobin writes: “When Rudaitis, an old woman, recounted seeing her neighbor lying dead in a mass grave and witnessing mothers shot alongside their children, she brought home to the courtroom and to the West German public the unbelievable inhumanity and cruelty that underpinned every moment of Einsatzkommando Tilsit’s existence.”81 Thus, the Ulm trial broadcast the mass crimes committed against Jewish victims outside the camps. This working style of supplementing documents with eye-

introduction  •  21

witness testimony pointed to the role of survivor witnesses in the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, as Lawrence Douglas has examined in detail in The Memory of Judgment. In that trial, documents had long since condemned Eichmann, the key figure behind the mass RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office) deportation of Hungarian Jews, allowing survivors the chance to tell their own riveting stories. As witnesses began testifying in early 1964 in Frankfurt during the Auschwitz trial, however, testimonies of atrocities were mostly exploited as evidence against the accused, and judges admonished witnesses to limit their remarks to fit that pattern. Besides redirecting the public gaze toward Holocaust victims, an outcome of the Ulm trial was the call for a system of justice based on more than a chance discovery of crimes for overworked district attorneys.82 This explains the concerted efforts to establish the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes) in Ludwigsburg before the end of 1958. Its first investigations turned out to include the material that became the basis for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. The Central Office became responsible for investigating Nazi murders of civilians, determining separate crime complexes, locating perpetrators, and compiling interrogation protocols. It assigned cases to state attorneys in whose jurisdictions the accused parties resided.83 Hermann Langbein noted that the 42 West German trials featuring mass murders between 1958 and 1963 nearly doubled the 23 trials that had been completed before the emergence of the Central Office in 1958, as the number of defendants climbed from 28 to 136. A sign of the lenient times is that 9 of the 136 defendants were convicted of murder, 77 were judged accomplices, and 36 were acquitted. Of the 77 accomplices—who in the understanding of the courts did not “will” the murders or carry them out with “bloodlust”—43 received between three and five years in prison. Of this group, 30 were charged with assisting in the murders of between 100 and 15,000 persons.84 Thus, more trial activity did not translate into stiffer sentences. Instead, after Control Council Law 10 disappeared, German judges evaluated how interested the defendant was in the success of his crime and how much “criminal energy” he expended. Section 211 of the German penal code defined a murderer as one whose base subjective motive was bloodlust, sexual desire, or greed, and who used cruel and treacherous means to kill.85 If he acted on his own initiative, beyond the scope of orders, sadistically and excessively, he was a perpetrator (Täter). If he limited himself to carrying out orders without excessive zeal and distanced himself from the deed, he qualified as an accomplice (Gehilfe).86 Determining inner attitudes required enormous guesswork from judges and juries, as Michael Greve notes. How effective was a judge’s guess whether a Nazi defendant had shared regime goals and willed the death of its enemies, or had succeeded in resisting its goals at the same time that he carried out its orders?87

22  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

A sentence of life in prison, the highest possible sentence for murder with malicious intent, entailed a defendant’s ardent Nazism. To cite the trial outcome in Ulm, even though the deaths under their supervision numbered in the thousands, all ten defendants were regarded “as accomplices of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich” and received sentences from three to fifteen years.88 As members of a mobile killing unit, they were shown even more leniency than death camp personnel. Indeed, on the basis of fifty trials of 153 Einsatzgruppen defendants from 1950 to 1983, Bettina Nehmer has calculated that four times as many defendants (23.4 percent) were acquitted than were assessed as perpetrators (6.3 percent). Most defendants (70.2 percent) were assessed as accomplices with a maximum sentence not exceeding fifteen years, but the vast majority (seventy-one defendants) received the minimum sentence of one to five years. After 1971, no accomplice was sentenced to over twelve years.89 As Stefan Wittke points out, this means that Einsatzgruppen killers of Jews and communists in Eastern Europe were judged less harshly by German courts than the camp personnel who ravaged victims on German (conquered) territory.90 More alarming is the statistic that not a single academic or white-collar official on trial for camp crimes was sentenced for murder between 1948 to 1993. Wittke and Falko Kruse both conclude that judges resisted the label of “perpetrators” for members of social elites—a finding that Michael Hayse has strengthened with examples from Hessen.91 West German courts often worked at loggerheads with prosecutors who called for much higher sentences. For them, prosecuting objective murder did not require asking whether Jewish victims were killed either with apathy or with pronounced antisemitism. In the view of the German courts, then, the perceived lack of subjective motivation justified the label of accomplice. So-called mitigating factors helped shorten prison sentences even more. For example, a defendant might have been too young at the time of crime to have known better, or too old at the time of sentencing to deserve a harsh sentence.92 Or, the passing of time diminished the need for atonement.93 Or, less educated persons and career officers were more susceptible to propaganda and thus less culpable. If one was a helpless pawn of antisemitic indoctrination, then another received leniency for being principled enough to resist it.94 Furthermore, defendants had joined the SS or NSDAP to find employment despite their discomfort with Nazi doctrine. While war had forced these solid citizens into regrettable actions, now these family fathers were rebuilding their homes and families at jobs below their dignity.95 Such were some of the well-worn tropes for reducing a sentence from perpetrator to accomplice, and from fifteen to three years in prison.96 These were shorter sentences than were levied on civilians charged with armed robbery.97 Not surprisingly, judges rewarded defendants who shared the Nazi values of “neatness, duty fulfillment, basic decent outlook, and a correct bearing.”98 All in all, Bettina Nehmer concludes, West German courts blamed the small elite of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich for taking the country hostage for over a decade, and for using German

introduction  •  23

citizens as marionettes to carry out acts of violence.99 Thus, although German judges rejected claims that defendants followed superior orders under duress, in the end they expected that under authoritarianism those defendants would have had to obey in order to avoid insubordination.100 Two points from this discussion require emphasis. First, very few defendants faced either life in prison for designation as perpetrator or the maximum of fifteen years for aiding and abetting murder. Rarely did they come across as delighting in treachery. Courts and juries, many staffed with former Nazis, mitigated sentences of defendants who now wore respectable business suits instead of uniforms with SS runes. Second, the lack of documents forced German prosecutors to summon more witnesses who could help reinforce indictments. Despite a general hostility from the defense, witnesses opened up a new arena of victim experience that was hitherto lacking. As the second half of my book will show, to the degree that journalists, exculpatory witnesses, defense lawyers, and even the presiding judge framed the image of Lucas as a contrast to sadists and downplayed this timid gynecologist’s role in genocide, they misled both themselves and posterity. It was impossible to imagine the possibility of a perpetrator who was also a rescuer, bystander, or even perhaps a victim. Understood within the default category of accomplice, then, it is no surprise that Lucas received the minimum sentence of three years and three months. Access to the evidence I address in the next section would not have changed the court’s mind, because its goals parted ways with those of historians.101

Methodology and Sources Historians must ask different questions about due process than the legal questions a court uses to gauge a defendant’s guilt.102 As Hilary Earl argues, historians cannot rest content with “public and involuntary testimonies derived through the interrogation process.”103 It is not in the defendant’s interest to offer comprehensive answers: “By their very nature criminal trials can act as strong impediments to historical truth when, by excluding or altering historical facts, a defendant can demonstrate innocence, or a prosecutor, guilt.”104 Thus, criminal trials may prolong misunderstandings even if the court determines a fair sentence. Trial historian Dick de Mildt notes that because trial verdicts frequently omit witness statements in the belief that “they are irrelevant for the legal questions under consideration,” historians should take more advantage of preliminary investigations for finding information.105 There is no question that most defendants are deceptive and that the court’s range of questions is limited. In a way, my book supplements the grievances of the prosecution and is inspired by the energy of the civil prosecutors, who posed different and ruthless questions in court because they represented the joint plaintiffs

24  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

(Nebenkläger). Thus, the ability of civil prosecutor Christian Raabe to make Lucas talk—especially, to confess—made Raabe a sparring partner for Lucas’s lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer in and out of court in 1965. My own perspective did not begin by matching Raabe’s skepticism of Lucas, but instead by accepting the view of Arendt and others that Lucas was a contrast to the so-called real criminals. By doing so, I mimicked both the jurisprudence of German criminal courts and the historiography of the Holocaust. The problem was that both realms claimed that the Holocaust was caused by masterminds above and sadistic criminals below who made life very difficult for decent Nazis in-between, as Mark Roseman puts it.106 The paradigm of an antisemitic Nazi elite that made the rest of German society its totalitarian victim still held sway at Lucas’s sentencing in 1965, even among the most respected historians summoned as expert witnesses.107 In my own research, it has become clear that Lucas straddled the line between aloofness and the wish to belong to something bigger. The “white raven” he has been called reflects those split allegiances less adequately than the Januskopf (Janus face), the mythical figure that looks both forward and backward in time. To put it another way, Lucas spoke out of both sides of his mouth by worrying about preserving his SS officer privileges in an organization he purported to no longer respect. I would not have reached my eventual level of skepticism of Lucas’s narrative without studying documents inaccessible until long after Lucas’s acquittal. These include his signed vow to keep secret the massacre of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau, telegrams, transfer orders, files that show no record of insubordination, and promotions for discipline and initiative. Most of these SS files, seized by the Red Army when it liberated Auschwitz, were long held in Moscow’s Sonderarchiv (special archive), then sent to the Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) after German unification in the early 1990s.108 These WASt documents have since been incorporated into Germany’s federal archives system. The student records for Lucas from 1938–39 in Rostock, part of the former German Democratic Republic, became available in 2016. They include files forwarded from Münster that show coursework and performance, extracurricular aspects, and explanatory notes and requests. Because most German and Austrian universities have by now researched the varied allegiance of their professors and administrators during the Nazi regime, it is possible to identify resisters, opportunists, and belligerent antisemites among the faculty. Jewish instructors, administrators, and students who disappeared from the university are again visible, or at least conspicuous in their absence. At the National Library in Leipzig, a copy of Lucas’s medical dissertation conveys his mindset during his stay in the Nazi-annexed Polish city of Danzig from 1939 to 1942. These educational documents supplement his documentation of racial purity (proof of “Aryan” grandparents) and his biographical sketch, which were components of the application materials he submitted to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in February 1938.

introduction  •  25

Correspondence also fits the category of mostly unguarded, reliable evidence. Two examples make this especially clear. The first concerns the papers of Lucas’s attorney Rudolf Aschenauer, who died in 1983 at age seventy-one. His widow Gertrud Aschenauer repeatedly insisted that copies of attorney-client correspondence remain sealed until after her death, which came on 9 November 2018.109 Besides documenting the defense strategy, these letters between Franz and Susanne Lucas and their lawyer show the Lucas couple with their guard down, whether outside or inside a courtroom, prison cell, or their own home. The Aschenauer-Lucas collection includes support letters from friends, patients, colleagues, clerical figures, and prisoner survivors expressing indignation about singling out Lucas for investigation. The second example of correspondence, between the theologian Hermann Schlingensiepen and the Lucases, is available in Düsseldorf from the Archiven der evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland. Like Susanne Lucas’s letters to her lawyer, her letters to an eccentric spiritual friend show her to be a religiously inspired woman still using the language of Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). Married since 1950, she worked hard during his trial and prison time to return her husband to the respect and livelihood he enjoyed until early 1962, when his name began appearing in the press in conjunction with Auschwitz. Beyond these examples of correspondence, the city council meeting minutes from the Elmshorn city archives and Elmshorn newspapers show the political differences at stake around Lucas’s job loss in late 1962. During Lucas’s years of relative safety and undisturbed professional life, state attorneys began questioning him about other SS perpetrators, especially Sachsenhausen doctors, in the context of the Münster trial against Baumkötter, Gaberle, and Adam. These interrogations mark the transition in source material between Lucas’s unguarded and guarded moments. He was as silent about his colleagues as he was about his own actions. The files of pretrial investigations in Hamburg, Schleswig, Münster, Itzehoe, Berlin, and Ludwigsburg, but especially the Hesse Main State Archive in Wiesbaden (Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, HHStAW), contain transcribed trial hearings and letters to and from the city of Elmshorn, labor courts, Lucas’s lawyers, and state attorneys. In the matter of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, the HHStAW is an unparalleled storehouse of pretrial and trial records, correspondence, witness lists, legal notices, prosecution and defense memos, court rulings, appeals, petitions and complaints, clemency appeals, and even trial expense reports. The same holds true for the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt, housed in the university and named for the Hessian attorney general who championed the trial, about which there is more to be said shortly. Although it may not always be direct, there is hard evidence about Lucas to be found in the places I have named. Soft evidence from accusatory and exculpatory witnesses also becomes a documentary source once it is recorded or transcribed. As mentioned, defense lawyers study witness statements to identify contradic-

26  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

tions, but historians can comb them for trends and blind spots. The majority of testimony about Lucas comes from medical workers, whether prisoners or colleagues, especially those who were German, French, British, and Scandinavian. For this reason, its trend is exculpatory, identifying Lucas as mostly rescuer and partly victim. Immediately after war’s end, for example, the German communist and block elder of Block 10 at Ravensbrück, Erika Buchmann, summoned her fellow communist prisoners to publish press releases that highlighted Lucas’s exceptionalism, in order to shield him from British investigations of Nazis. Understandably, what moves survivors is their own experience and the hearsay reports of others in their group, and they cannot help but be less aware of actions performed by an SS medical doctor outside their field of vision. The help and rescue that Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses attributed to him may not have been supererogatory at all but merely a doctor’s professional duty applied to prisoners normally deemed unworthy of medical attention. As philosopher David Jones wonders, “Were helpers and rescuers extraordinarily virtuous and courageous moral exemplars who should be admired as heroic or saintly? Or were acts of help and rescue something that was their actual duty to do, all things considered?”110 To believe Lucas’s account of being advised to avoid standing out, in actual SS practice this would have meant withholding assistance for racial prisoners. In the prison hierarchy, Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Soviet POWs were worse off than German criminals or members of political or ethnic resistance groups. It would have meant not risking what looked like prisoner favoritism and not intervening in the situations of violence that made up the normal state of affairs. Witnesses were less likely to remember situations of neglect, and far more likely to construe normal medical actions as supererogatory acts that transcended the duty to render aid or do no harm.111 For that reason, we cannot peruse reports of Lucas’s exceptionalism without asking how he is remembered by Sinti and Roma, Jewish, non-medical, non-Scandinavian, Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet prisoners. Among such accusatory witnesses, testimony may sound noble and dutiful, but also cathartic, vengeful, or biased to the judge and the defense. The usual complaint was that accusatory testimony was too far removed in time from the crime to be accurate, or that it conflicted with hard evidence. This complaint of bias never extended to exculpatory witnesses. All too frequently, the defense attributed factual errors to a witness’s trauma, rendering the witness both too far from and too close to the crime to be reliable. My own phenomenology of testimony aligns with James Young’s remark that even though witnesses were not flawless historians, their memory of an event had far more truth than a defendant’s denial of it: “For in the final analysis, no document can be more historically authentic than that embodying the victims’ grasp of events at the time.”112 This kind of soft evidence allows historians a far better reenactment of events where perpetrators caused their victims to suffer. There is little doubt, for example, that Lucas was on the ramp at Birkenau selecting far

introduction  •  27

more than the conservative figure of four thousand deportees he was accused of selecting. This was the view of the prosecution, and I concur. What testimony does is lift a few numbers out of the dulling effect of thousands and turn them into persons demanding attention. It allows us a glimpse of what Helen Goldman went through, a sixteen-year-old selected for work on the Birkenau ramp by an SS doctor she identified as Lucas, who forcibly separated her from the mother and siblings she never saw again. This gives it an authority above more internally consistent SS documents. The difference, of course, is that the writers of SS files could make choices, whereas prisoners had few opportunities to do so, and little reason to falsify their accounts.

Scholarship on Franz Lucas and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial Much of what has been written about Lucas suffers from secondhand information or misplaced trust in his protective claims. French MacLean’s Camp Men wrongly asserts that Lucas was not a member of the NSDAP, that his religion was unknown, that he was married, and that he was released from prison in 1963.113 Jeremy Dixon’s Commanders of Auschwitz puts Lucas at Auschwitz I (the main camp) from 15 December 1943 until April 1944, without mentioning Birkenau or Lucas’s transfer to Mauthausen in early August. Dixon’s dates thus bracket off Lucas’s involvement in the Hungarian transports, the very reason he stood trial. In addition, Dixon reports that Lucas was at Sachsenhausen at the war’s end and was released soon after being arrested. Not even Lucas made this claim.114 Most scholarship on Lucas begins and ends with the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Former prisoner Hermann Langbein and journalist Bernd Naumann supplied the first eyewitness notes in real time that paved the way for analyzing the trial. In his compilation of reports for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Naumann considered Lucas the prism that allowed the clearest view into the Auschwitz chamber of horrors.115 Like Naumann, Langbein attended almost every day of hearings after taking his turn as key witness on 6 March 1964.116 The dictated trial notes he sent to his wife in Vienna to transcribe produced a two-volume record of over a thousand pages.117 His second volume devotes forty-three pages to Lucas. More thematic than chronological, Langbein’s account reproduces the courtroom dialogue while occasionally commenting on it. In court, he was unable to recall Lucas at all, even though he was secretary for Lucas’s boss, Auschwitz chief doctor Eduard Wirths.118 Langbein includes testimonies of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors who saw Lucas selecting on the ramp, and of Ravensbrück survivors who implicated Lucas for sterilizing Sinti war veterans in the men’s camp there in early 1945.119 Langbein and Naumann are cited whenever scholars mention Lucas in passing as a contrast figure.120 Robert Jay Lifton’s Nazi Doctors uses Jean Steinberg’s En-

28  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

glish translation of Naumann, which begins with Hannah Arendt’s essay about the trial. Based on Naumann’s recounting of how Otto Dov Kulka described Lucas’s slow hand movements and Mengele’s quick movements during selections, Lifton aligned Lucas more closely with Josef Mengele than with Dr. “Ernst B” (i.e., Hans Münch).121 In an investigation of perverse Nazi medical practices, Jack Boozer regretted the irony that Mengele was at large and Lucas was in the block, given the “exceptional, almost unbelievable, testimonies in praise of Dr. Lucas.”122 He concluded that “[t]he net was strong and tight, and the struggle of conscience and for Hippocrates was, for Dr. Lucas, a lonely one indeed.”123 Matthew Lippman reached the same conclusion, describing the mitigating testimonies and the court’s acknowledgment that Lucas felt trapped in a net.124 But Irving Greenberg elected to discuss Lucas along with Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, notorious for recording his brief SS Auschwitz sojourn in his diary.125 Like Boozer and Arendt, Greenberg underscored Lucas’s unwillingness to recognize grateful witnesses, but he was struck most by Arendt’s account of the accusatory witness Helen Goldman seeing her mother and siblings torn away from her by Lucas on the arrival ramp in Birkenau. His conclusion was strikingly different: “[T]he truth rises swiftly: The best functionary in Auschwitz—the one who had pity—deserves to die! Must die!”126 Finally, Paul Hoedeman’s book Hitler or Hippocrates (1991) reports that Lucas arrived at Ravensbrück in 1941 and, after refusing to carry out selections, was punished through a transfer to the eastern front.127 He maintains that Lucas arrived at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 and remained there until the camp’s evacuation in January 1945.128 Most disturbing is that Hoedeman parrots the defense’s argument that Lucas’s selections saved prisoners from death: “He did his duty as a doctor: safeguarding peoples’ lives. Why Lucas had concealed this illuminating fact for so long remained unanswered.”129 In large part, the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt has helped reverse the trend of derivative scholarship. Building upon the scribal thoroughness of Langbein and Naumann, the Institut’s transcription and digitization of large segments of trial proceedings has made it possible to review the testimony of witnesses for or against Lucas and his nineteen codefendants, the arguments of prosecution and defense, the mediating work of the translators, and the press reports and photographs of the trial. The renaissance of scholarship is due largely to the efforts of archivist Werner Renz, who explored the origins and proceedings of the trial in depth.130 For the fortieth anniversary of the trial in the spring of 2004, the Institut hosted the exhibition “Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt am Main” in Haus Gallus in Frankfurt, where the original hearings took place in all but the first two months of the trial.131 Building on the work of Renz, Irmtrud Wojak edited in 2001 an anthology of Institut yearbook essays dedicated to the trial, and another volume in 2003.132

introduction  •  29

The DVD-ROM and the later online offerings of the Institut have offered an auditory dimension that eclipses the transcripts alone. When the French witness Louise le Porz testified on behalf of Lucas in November 1964, for example, the sound of school children playing outside Haus Gallus accompanied her memories of the gas chamber at Ravensbrück. In April 1965, after Bruno Stein reported that fellow Sinti and Roma had been sterilized by Lucas, he identified Lucas from the defendant lineup while gasping “Mother of God!” and continuing to weep into the witness microphone. This emotion is not captured in the transcript. Most memorable is how the audio files chart the poignant regression from confidence to despair in the testimony of Helen Goldman in September 1964 and Abraham de la Penha in April 1965. The auditory element underlines Noah Shenker’s notion of “testimonial literacy,” whereby the pauses, sighs, and tears of testimony constitute the hugely important signifiers of memory.133 Unfortunately, these nonverbal cues rarely usurp the supposed superiority of transcribable, linear language. Without the decision to preserve the reel-to-reel recordings whose original purpose was to “support the memory of the court,” that auditory dimension would have disappeared.134 Before the DVD project was complete, Devin Pendas and Rebecca Wittmann completed investigations in English that documented the larger issues of the Auschwitz Trial.135 Wittmann’s macro-focus falls on the inability of West German courts to think outside their inherited criminal code. Her book focuses more on Herbert Scherpe, a medical orderly in the trial, than on Lucas. Pendas identifies Lucas as the “good German” of the hearings, especially when recounting the press coverage of the trial. Contrasting Wilhelm Boger’s sadism to Lucas’s aloofness, Pendas emphasizes that courts, the press, and the German public were comfortable seeking longer sentences for criminals considered barbaric, but less concerned about sentencing upstanding doctors who had selected thousands for the gas chamber.136 The dust jacket of Pendas’s book features the same iconic photo that graced the first edition of the Fritz Bauer Institut’s DVD-ROM of the trial, showing Lucas alone near the ramp at Birkenau during the court delegation’s visit in December 1964 as he stares at the ground with hands buried in a dark overcoat. He was not yet in custody, and volunteering for the fact-finding visit was his bold move to float his innocence. Like Lucas’s own shifting account of events, however, the cryptic photo does not reveal whether Lucas was trying to forget or to remember. The journalist Hans Holder was also wondering what was “going on inside Dr. Lucas” when he observed Lucas during a moment of silence in front of the socalled “Black Wall” between Blocks 11 and 12 in Auschwitz I, the main camp: “Lucas too is accused and said to have selected. But many witnesses described him as a man different from the other SS men, who still saw humans in the bullied prisoners, who showed concern, made the effort to resist, and actually helped

30  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Figure 0.1.  Franz Lucas (center) during the court’s inspection of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, presumably on 14 December 1964. Photographer: Georg Bürger. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institut, Photo Collection FAP/BUR 000042. Used by permission.

them on occasion. . . . In the afternoon, out on the ramp of Birkenau, he admits freely to having been here. But: ‘I never selected, never decided who among the Jews was sent into the gas.’”137 Lucas’s state of mind in December 1964 reflected a combination of audacity, cowardice, and fear from twenty years earlier. The anniversary of the trial in 2004 came during an upsurge in discussions of perpetrators: Karin Orth about concentration camp personnel, Ernst Klee about medical perpetrators, and Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallman about midlevel SS perpetrators, to name a few.138 Historian Helgard Kramer organized conferences on interdisciplinary approaches to perpetrators, which stressed the importance of mentored Nazi cohorts.139 Fellow historian Winfried Meyer gave papers in 2003 and 2005 that introduced the salient issues of Lucas’s biography and examined his self-serving justifications. Based on Ravensbrück testimonies, Meyer depicted Lucas as a “white raven” even more at odds with the SS camp leadership than were the survivor witnesses who pitied him.140 Using historian Christopher Browning’s categories, Meyer argued that Lucas resisted SS ideology, group conformity, and authorities without losing his moral compass. Until confronted with extermination at Auschwitz, Lucas had never had to test his resistance to authorities.141

introduction  •  31

By viewing him as an isolated figure—the very profile Lucas preferred when discussed alongside his colleagues—Meyer saw little reason to doubt Lucas’s claims. This approach put Meyer at odds with Helgard Kramer’s typology of “bandwagon” SS physicians such as Horst Fischer, Hans Münch, and Eduard Wirths. Rather than discuss motivation derived from some unchanging good character, Kramer preferred to highlight Lucas’s membership, alongside fellow doctors, in extremist antisemitic organizations (SA, SS, NSDAP), which provided mentors and comradeship while denying membership to Jews.142 All such opportunists blamed their postwar plight on their superiors.143 Like Kramer, Christian Dirks brings out formational SS violence in his biography of Wirths’s friend and deputy, Horst Fischer. Rather than posit a mind capable of mass murder, Dirks reconstructs Fischer’s actions and choices.144 His assessment of Fischer, a perpetrator of conviction who lost his scruples in Auschwitz, may not apply as well to Lucas. Still, the contrasting view that Lucas gained scruples over time, advanced by the Frankfurt district court in 1965 and Ravensbrück scholar Bernhard Strebel, also seems overwrought. What Karin Orth famously called the Kriegsjugendgeneration (war-youth generation) was too young to fight in the First World War, but it prepared, justified, and carried out the genocide of the Second World War.145 Lucas was born in 1911, as were at least six other SS camp physicians whom he either knew or knew about—Josef Mengele, Hans Münch, Heinz Thilo, Percy Treite, Rolf Rosenthal, and Herta Oberheuser. More so than either Kramer and Dirks have determined was the case at Auschwitz, Marco Pukrop has illuminated important similarities and differences within the cohort of SS doctors that served at least briefly at Sachsenhausen. One important detail is the mobility of SS doctors between the eastern front and the camps. Often the doctors who served in the camps were unfit for further service at the front after being wounded. In Lucas’s case, exhaustion likely kept him in the camps.146 Overwork as a troop doctor led to pneumonia, his supervisor in Nuremberg noted. His work ethic was an ongoing and rewardable proof of his suitability for the SS, rewarded in Berlin and a reason to emerge in prisoner testimonies as a good doctor. As Pukrop notes, however, even though physicians such as Kurt Stelling, Waldemar Wolter, Ernst Frowein, Hans-Hermann Sorge, and Heinz Baumkötter also garnered support after the war, they contributed to camp crimes as soon as they became accustomed to everyday brutality.147 Doctors found a way to adjust to everyday violence in the camps.148 Pukrop contrasts Christopher Browning’s findings about gradual adaptation to violence with the views of historian Hannes Heer, sociologist Harald Welzer, and military historian Sönke Neitzel, who assert that soldiers inured themselves to violence quickly without needing a phase of adjustment.149 Given that rewards for violence included service medals and promotions, there is reason to assume rapid adaptation for at least some SS members.

32  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Recent scholarship has complicated earlier useful models such as perpetrator and victim or perpetrator, bystander, and rescuer, along with the notion of isolated, predictable actors. We are more aware of the breadth of action and inaction, choice and constraint available to actors.150 Timothy Williams has cautioned against “static and simple allocations of responsibility and culpability, with perpetrators being solely responsible, victims wholly innocent, and bystanders perceived as only passive and beyond the remit of action.”151 Perpetrators want to “portray themselves as rescuers, bystanders or victims . . . to reduce the responsibility they purport to have had for their actions, and by extension, their culpability for violence.”152 We should assume neither that ideological formation was the main impetus behind violent actions nor that it prevented SS members from extending occasional kindness toward enemies of the regime. Overcoming inhibitions, numbing oneself to criminal acts, or warming up to violence are attempts to explain adapting to genocide. One explanation was Lifton’s famous “doubling” metaphor, which posited a schism between a healing self and a killing self. Lifton discussed ramp selections, arenas of occasional SS enthusiasm but mostly of ambivalence, reluctance, refusal, resistance, and heavy drinking.153 Lifton noticed that, like the reluctant selecting physician Hans Delmotte, Lucas required about two weeks of watching Mengele or Wirths to model what was expected of him: “Pressure and mentorship could combine, as in the case of Franz Lucas, who, known to have a certain reluctance to protest, was taken to the ramp by Wirths and Mengele and more or less shown how to go about things.”154 Attributing to Auschwitz physician Horst Fischer the remark “We have gone so far now that we have no way out,” Lifton suggests that “continuing to kill becomes psychologically necessary in order to justify the killing and to view it as other than it is.”155 Lifton believed that sterilization, “euthanasia,” and medical experiments had already numbed the doctors to their violence before they reached the camps, making the “transition from feeling to not feeling . . . rapid and radical.”156 The fact that arriving Jews were not given registration numbers reinforced the impression that their lives counted for nothing, and two or three weeks were all that was required for SS doctors to stop seeing Jews as human, according to Lifton.157 More recently, Holocaust scholar Wendy Lower has remarked that SS men already saw Jews as less than human, and any inurement period that was necessary for violence applied only to the women who accompanied the SS.158 Stefan Kühl refers to fellow sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s term “fictional consensus” to describe the non-Jewish German approval of excluding Jewish Germans from public life. This exclusion deprived German Jews of economic livelihood while invoking them as the cause of Germany’s downfall. Antisemitism remains a motivation for killing, of course, but also functions as the soil of consensus in which other motivations take root.159 Six years after Lifton’s book, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men furnished three categories for perpetrators: 1) killing from conviction; 2) carrying out or-

introduction  •  33

ders and swimming with the tide (the vast majority); and 3) declining to take part in firing-squad executions of Jews.160 As with Lifton’s supposition about SS doctors, Browning postulated that members of Hamburg’s Police Battalion 101 were transformed over time into killers: “As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.”161 Therefore, antisemitism, ideological indoctrination, and the fear of consequences resulting from refusing orders do not, for Browning, adequately explain the killing.162 More accurately, as Browning, historian Gerhard Paul, and sociologist Harald Welzer have concluded, consciences were numbed in a climate of violence stoked by the brutalizing effect of the war, racist imperialism, massive pressure to conform, the esprit de corps of Blutkitt (blood bond), and binge drinking.163 In his study of T4 physicians involved in “euthanasia,” Holocaust scholar Henry Friedlander noticed that, “[i]n Milgram’s social science experiment, the subjects might have lacked the imagination to understand the pain they could inflict, but the Nazi killers, even if they were entirely lacking in imagination, could not avoid knowing what they were doing. They could see how their actions affected real human beings.”164 The young physicians retained the ability to choose, “and they could even have asked to be excused after they had started. They did not refuse.”165 Motivated by career and profit, they chose to jumpstart their careers by working with experienced physicians and professors in the killing centers, a prospect more tantalizing than tending to soldiers wounded at the front.166 In Friedlander’s view, killing did not spring from inurement to violence so much as from belonging and assenting to organizations that sanctioned the killing. Analyzing this idea of membership further, perpetrator scholars Derk Venema and Alex Jettinghoff explain that over time, T4 doctors and other perpetrators could rationalize the cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and behavior by convincing themselves “that the victims are guilty, or dangerous, or subhuman”—the classic argument of blaming the victim.167 Explanations for Nazi violence are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. Inurement to violence does not cancel out an SS member’s knowledge that an oath of fidelity required violence against outsiders. In whatever way they carried out criminal actions—zealously, dutifully, opportunistically, or reluctantly—they became numbed over time to their actions, justifying them morally as necessary for the community of the Volk.168 It is only natural to try to explain subjective motivation, so long as we discuss the German penal code without losing sight of the real victims. It is unrealistic to take Lucas at his word and place him within the 20 percent reluctant-perpetrator category proposed by the eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, unless we also view him in the categories of 20 percent zealot and 60 percent dutiful rule follower.169 Similarly, based on the choices he had that prisoners

34  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

lacked, there is no reason to move Lucas completely into the zone of rescuer. By the time of his 1970 retrial, Lucas claimed that he became more reckless from one camp to the next, caring less about being punished for altruism. Yet this claim reads as a fabrication arrived at during custody, not in 1944. Although it sounded good to the court, it is scarcely an example of what Eva Fogelman calls the “upward curve of risk,” her designation for persons who become more daring over time.170 The most risk Lucas took was deserting the SS a few days early, which held no benefit for inmates.

Structure Faced with whether to discuss events according to how they happened in Lucas’s career or as he remembered them, I have divided the book in two parts. The first section examines Lucas’s formation beginning in 1933, his complicity in camp crimes, and his “return ticket” to civilian life after 1945. Documents that trace his movements from camp to camp provide insights largely absent from testimonies about his character. In the first section, however, any hard evidence under discussion stems from Lucas himself. It is not until the second part of my book that we hear Lucas’s voice in real time during the 1960s, the decade between preliminary investigation and acquittal in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. My first chapter treats the years 1933 to 1943, the first ten years of Lucas’s radicalization into National Socialism, which began around the time of his preparatory school diploma and strengthened during his medical studies in Münster, Rostock, and Danzig. I map out the choices Lucas made in his medical-military surroundings, and I illuminate the Nazi justification of selection and some of the biopolitical concerns addressed in his dissertation. Chapter 2 treats Lucas’s stint in Auschwitz from mid-December 1943 to early August 1944, largely during his substitution as camp doctor for Josef Mengele in the Theresienstadt and Gypsy family camps. I discuss Lucas’s association with prisoners and prisoner doctors and involvement in the two “liquidations” of the Theresienstadt camp in March and July 1944. I also examine Lucas’s claims to be a loner in an SS organization built on mentorship and comradery, and I go into greater depth about the charge of ramp selection against him. Chapter 3 explores Lucas’s position between his nemesis and his role as advocate for prisoners at Mauthausen. On one side, Commandant Franz Ziereis calls him a coward and homosexual; on the other side the prisoners Josef Podlaha and Hans Marsalek remember him as a welcome contrast to the barbaric medical poseurs Hermann Richter, Helmut Vetter, and Karl Böhmichen. And yet despite apparently operating on prisoners without harm, Lucas likely selected prisoners for the gas chamber at Hartheim Castle near Linz, Austria. Such “manage-

introduction  •  35

ment” of disease-ravaged and starving prisoners continued at Stutthof, a holding camp that became a killing center after summer 1944 and yielded few survivors to accuse or exonerate Lucas. While reluctant to provide details of daily tasks he performed there, Lucas managed to depict a resistance that met with disapproval from both commandant and chief doctor and yielded his marching orders to Ravensbrück. Chapter 4 evaluates Lucas’s responsibility for the tuberculosis ward in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, his collaboration with fellow doctor Percy Treite, and his sterilization of Sinti war veterans and family members in the men’s camp. Lucas kept in hiding but was viewed by both witnesses and prosecutors as a contrast to Treite and other Ravensbrück Trial defendants in early 1947. Lucas participated in the same crimes, depending on the prisoner population. He collaborated with Norwegian political prisoner Sylvia Salvesen and Nazi nurse Gerda Schröder, while his stormy encounters with chief doctor Richard Trommer apparently resulted in his transfer to Sachsenhausen. Lucas’s six weeks in Sachsenhausen, including his desertion in April 1945 and refuge in a Norwegian political prisoner’s villa in Gross Kreutz near Potsdam, inform my fifth chapter. SS colleagues and prisoner survivors agreed on his humane treatment of prisoners, and Lucas played up the threats of Enno Lolling, the highest medical authority in the SS and concentration camp complex of Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. The chapter concludes with Lucas’s safe arrival in Elmshorn two weeks before the end of the war. The second section of my book begins with chapter six, as Lucas began to be interrogated after investigators heard his name mentioned by former SS physicians investigated in Münster for their crimes in Sachsenhausen, notably his boss Dr. Heinz Baumkötter. To hide the truth of his past, Lucas crafted at least four different versions of how he spent the war years. In addition, city council minutes and correspondence between Elmshorn and Frankfurt illuminate the circumstances of his being fired from his post as chief gynecologist at Elmshorn City Hospital at the end of 1962. My seventh chapter shifts the plot from Elmshorn to Frankfurt, where for twenty months Lucas sat among nineteen other defendants in the Auschwitz Trial. In 1964, the first full year of the highly public trial, most witnesses who chronicled Lucas’s activity at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück shaped his image in court and press as a “white raven.” My attention is directed at the opposing voices, whose stories are worth telling now precisely because forensic inaccuracy disqualified them in the eyes of the court and defense then. Chief among these stories is Helen Goldman’s account of watching Lucas select her mother and siblings for the gas chamber when her family arrived on the ramp at Birkenau. This account is incomplete without noticing the toll that a year of debilitating labor and its aftereffects had taken on her body and memory when she testified in

36  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Frankfurt twenty years later. In addition, I show the attention Lucas received as sole defendant in the court delegation’s site inspection of Auschwitz from 14 to 16 December 1964. I focus on the trial as it unfolded, not just on the information it revealed concerning events from twenty years earlier. The most surprising witness against Lucas was a codefendant of lesser rank, Stefan Baretzki, who accused Lucas in February 1965 of acting differently toward Auschwitz prisoners than toward the Ravensbrück witnesses, who seemed unable to praise him enough. This confrontation, the clash between adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe and Lucas’s lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer, and Lucas’s eventual confession on 11 March and arrest on 24 March 1965 lie at the heart of my eighth chapter. After examining the appearance of three Dutch Jewish accusers of Lucas, I sum up the arguments of prosecution, defense, and the court’s oral verdict with regard to Lucas, who was sentenced on 19 August 1965 to three years and three months of penitentiary. My ninth chapter concerns the events that spanned Lucas’s sentencing in 1965, the court’s written verdict, Aschenauer’s successful appeal in 1969, and Lucas’s acquittal in 1970. Aschenauer, Lucas’s wife Susanne, and the theologian Hermann Schlingensiepen all played an active role during this time. I comment on a few witness appearances in the retrial and how the court and prosecutor Jürgen Hess played into the hands of Lucas’s lawyers (Fritz Steinacker, Rainer Eggert, and Horst Loebe) in acquittal. In my conclusion, I review both the answers and the lingering questions that remain about Lucas’s medical career at the nexus of history, medicine, military, law, and testimony. My biography of Lucas the criminal disturbs his reputation as the “good German” contrast to fellow defendants in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and to SS camp doctors in general. To call Lucas a reluctant accomplice to murder because he feared for his life is, I propose, to buy into his narrative uncritically. Lucas the Januskopf had one face that prepared him to carry out genocide and another face that was eager to forget his complicity. These two faces correspond exactly to the two halves of my book. But it is better to regard him not as replacing one face with another, as though he were only progressing or regressing, but as wearing both faces at any given time. I suggest unearthing the myths by which Nazi perpetrators justified their atrocities and escaped justice by “recasting” their identities as postwar civilians.171 By taking Lucas’s deception as seriously as his good reputation, I hope to expose the participation of a Nazi doctor who straddled the line between going along and resisting and in so doing both killed and saved. Paradoxically, the biographical gaze is necessary to bring Lucas down to earth, back into the ranks of the SS, instead of letting exculpatory witnesses enjoy the last word. Forcing Lucas’s silence into speech is at least a miniscule token of late justice for the thousands of lives this upstanding SS doctor ended or ruined.

introduction  •  37

Notes 1.  All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Terms such as “Gypsies” or “Gypsy” are derogatory racial fabrications that both preceded and outlasted the Nazi era. If they appear without quotation marks or italics in by book, it is only to reduce special markings. My default terms are “Sinti and Roma,” whereby “Roma” tribes refer to persons who settled in Eastern Europe in the Balkans, or Austria, and “Sinti” tribes refer to Western Europe, including Germany. Both tribes spoke Romani dialects deriving ultimately from Indian Sanskrit. I call “Sinti” those veteran German soldiers and their families who were sterilized by the Nazis, especially by Lucas. For more on the subject of naming, see Fings, “Die ‘gutachtlichen Äußerungen,’” 425–26. 2.  Dina Gottliebová (Babbitt), Auschwitz survivor, interviewed by Hilary Helstein on 26 September 1998, Felton, CA. USC Shoah Foundation, Testimony Part 1, at 3 hours 50 minutes, retrieved on 20 December 2022 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRMWD8L1xDg. 3.  Statement of Heinrich Schenk, 18 August 1960, Landeskriminalamt in Baden-Württemberg (Zentralstelle, Ludwigsburg), qtd. in AP, 12,456–57. 4.  Arendt, “Note on the Trial,” xvi. 5.  Arendt, xxv. 6.  Biographical information derives in part from Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt, Berlin), File of Lucas, Franz Bernhard, and from Urteil im Hauptverfahren: Straftaten Lucas, AP 37,874–77. See also Gross and Renz, Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, vol. 2, 893–94. 7. Longerich, Himmler, 332. Another decree stems from 11 November 1941, but the “last son” principle also applied at least informally in World War I. See Pukrop’s examples in “SS-Mediziner,” esp. 335–36. 8. Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report, 65. 9. Langbein, Auschwitz- Prozess, 17. 10.  Langbein, 603. 11.  Langbein, 627. 12.  Langbein, 613. 13.  Langbein, 602–3, 622, 630–31. 14.  Bedford, “Worst that Ever Happened,” 226–27. 15. Burkhardt, Rückblende, 119. 16.  On Artur Wilke, see Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 138–57. 17.  Video interview, 19 February 1995, Bodo Michael Baumunk with Heinrich (Heinz) Baumkötter, Sachsenhausen Gedenkstätte, R 63/38/1, P 4 Baumkötter, Heinrich/2. 18.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 178–79. 19. Kogon, SS-Staat. 20.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 178–79. 21.  Pukrop, 180. 22.  Messenger and Paehler, Nazi Past, 5–6. 23.  Gerhard Mauz, “Wo ist unser Angeklagter?” (Spiegel, 23 December 1964). 24. Williams, Complexity of Evil, 17. 25.  Williams, 4. 26.  Statement of Ella Lingens, 2 June 1959, Vienna, HHStAW 461/37638/010, 1,399–1,401. 27.  This ambivalence is evident in Langbein, Die Stärkeren. 28.  Alexander Smoltczyk, “Der Doktor und sein Opfer,” Spiegel 14 (1999): 116–23. 29.  Quoted in Wette, Retter in Uniform, 23. 30.  Arendt, “Note on the Trial,” xxv. 31.  Lässig, “Biography in Modern History,” 7. 32.  For an overview of the debate, see Bartov, Germany’s War, 79–98.

38  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 33.  Dick de Mildt cautions against overrating “the pre-meditative element in the life-stories of the individual protagonists in the drama.” Name of the People, 44. 34.  Biography as a genre tries to show wholeness, not rupture; see Bourdieu, “Biographical Illusion,” 297. 35.  Pendas, “Historiography of Horror,” 222–23. 36.  Lässig, “Biography in Modern History,” 10–11. 37.  Earl, “Bad Nazis,” 65. 38. Arendt, “Personal Responsibility,” 28–29. 39.  See Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno. 40.  A small sampling of monographs: Grabher, Irmfried Eberl; Schmidt, Karl Brandt; Hahn, Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt; Christmann, Hanns Eisele; Klemp, KZ-Arzt Aribert Heim; Huber, SS-Zahnarzt Willy Frank; Völklein, Josef Mengele and Der “Märchenprinz” Eduard Wirths; Rettl and Pirker, “Ich war mit Freuden dabei.” 41.  Bloxham, “Milestones and Mythologies,” 541–42. 42.  Fitzel, “Zeugin im Nürnberger Prozeß,” 60–61. 43.  Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, vol 6. Forty-Fourth Day, Monday, 28 January 1946, p. 226. Yale Law School Avalon Project. Retrieved 20 December 2022 from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-28-46.asp. 44.  Closing Speech of Prosecutor Colonel T. M. Backhouse, 13 November 1945, “Belsen Trial.” The Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty- Four Others,” retrieved on 17 December 2022 from http://www .bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/trial/Trial/TrialProsecutionCase/Trial_088_Close_13.html. 45. Friedrich, Die kalte Amnestie, 125. 46.  Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vol. 2: The Belsen Trial (London: United Nations War Crimes Commission, 1947), 9–23, 132, 138. 47. Statement of Dr. Fritz Klein, Bergen-Belsen (private site). Retrieved on 20 December 2022 from http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/trial/TrialAppendices/TrialAppendices_Affidavits_ 90_Klein.html. 48.  Wilms and Ivens to LG/FaM, 14 June 1963, FBI/LF. 49.  Ella Lingens, Affidavit of 2 June 1959, Vienna, listed as Zentralstelle, Bl. 1,399. See also Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 15–16. 50.  Had Kitt been tried alongside Lucas in Frankfurt, Langbein wrote, he would have assembled even more exculpatory witnesses. Menschen in Auschwitz, 406–7. 51. Klee, Auschwitz, NS-Medizin, Opfer, 56. 52.  Klee, 58. Thilo had transferred from Auschwitz to Gross-Rosen as a part of the same rotation that moved Lucas from Mauthausen to Stutthof in October 1944. 53.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 466. In the preceding spring, two of Baumkötter’s colleagues, Ludwig Ehrsam and Ernst Frowein, had been executed as a result of Soviet secret trials in Berlin. 54.  Pukrop, 468. But since 1959 Baumkötter had not been allowed to practice medicine, and like Lucas had been relieved of his hospital post due to negative publicity (Baumkötter in November 1958, Lucas in December 1962). 55. See the LG Münster, Urteil gegen Heinz Baumkötter, Alois Gaberle und Otto Adam v. 19.2.1962 (6 Ks 1/61), in Rüter and de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 18, 215–331. 56. Klee, Auschwitz, NS-Medizin, Opfer, 412–15. 57.  On Mengele, see Klee, 456–91. 58.  Ueberschär, “Sowjetische Prozesse,” 242. 59. Rückerl, Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, 35–36. 60.  Nuremberg Trials Final Report Appendix D: Control Council Law No. 10, “Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes against Peace and Against Humanity.” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, retrieved 17 December 2022 from https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imt10.asp.

introduction  •  39 61. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 12. 62.  For a full account of the trial’s origins and outcomes, see Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial. 63.  Earl, 351. 64. Sigel, Interesse der Gerechtigkeit, 131. 65.  Sigel, 129–58. 66.  Sigel, 128. 67. Seliger, Politische Anwälte?, 353. 68.  See Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 265–95. 69. Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt, 14. 70. Seliger, Politische Anwälte?, 460. 71. Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, 19. 72.  Frei, 13–14. 73.  Frei, 14. 74. Rückerl, Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, 48–49. 75. Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, 20. 76. Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt, 10–14. 77. Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren, 154–55. 78.  Tobin, “Crossroads at Ulm,” 187–206; Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt, 15. 79.  Tobin, “Crossroads at Ulm,” 217. 80. Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren, 156–57. 81.  Tobin, “Crossroads at Ulm,” 278–80. 82. Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren, 160–61. 83. Rückerl, Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, 50–53. 84. Langbein, Im Namen des deutschen Volkes, 117–18. 85. Seliger, Politische Anwälte, 408–9. 86.  Greve, “Täter oder Gehilfen?,” 204–5. 87.  Greve, 206. 88. Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren, 158–59. 89.  Nehmer, “Täter als Gehilfen,” 635–68. 90.  Wittke, “Teilexkulpation,” 578. 91.  Wittke, 585. 92.  Wittke, 587. 93.  Greve, “Täter oder Gehilfen?,” 214. 94.  Greve, 215–16. 95.  Greve, 216–17. 96.  Greve, 218. 97.  Kruse, “NS-Prozesse und Restauration,” 111. See also Hayse, Recasting West German Elites. 98.  Kruse, “Zweierlei Maß,” 253. 99.  Nehmer, “Täter als Gehilfen,” 667. 100.  Nehmer, 668. 101.  Lawrence Douglas comments on the different goals of judges and historians in Memory of Judgment. 102.  Earl, “Scales of Justice,” 340–41. 103.  Earl, “Criminal Biographies,” 164. 104.  Earl, “Scales of Justice,” 328. 105.  De Mildt, Name of the People, 45. 106.  See Nehmer, “Beyond Conviction,” 85. 107. Nehmer. 108.  See the overview in Ueberschär, “Sowjetische Prozesse,” esp. 253.

40  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 109.  Files were moved in July 2018 from Freiburg to Koblenz: Aschenauer, Rudolf (1913–1983) (Rechtsanwalt), Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bestandsbeschreibung, Schriftgut/Nachlaß, Bestandssignatur BArch N 642. Gertrud Aschenauer’s death date of 9 November 2018, the eightieth anniversary of Reichskristallnacht, is hard to ignore. 110. Jones, Moral Responsibility, 199. 111.  Jones, 203–4. 112.  Young, “Between History and Memory,” 282. 113. MacLean, Camp Men, 149. 114.  Dixon repeats Lucas’s own claims that Lucas continued to select at Birkenau but hated it for placing him under suchstrain. As a result, Lucas withdrew from his fellow doctors and began drinking more (Dixon, Commanders of Auschwitz, 140–42). 115. Naumann, Auschwitz, 75. 116.  Weinzierl, “Hermann Langbein,” 225. 117. Langbein, Auschwitz-Prozeß. In his conversation with me on 12 May 2011, adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe mentioned skimming Langbein’s book the day before to refresh his memories. 118.  Vernehmung Hermann Langbein, 6 March 1964, AP, 5,457. 119. Langbein, Auschwitz-Prozeß, 613–18. 120.  For example, Peter Hayes relies on Naumann’s acceptance of Lucas’s biography and protective claims (Industry and Ideology, 365), but Lucas was not demoted, did not go from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen, and was not awaiting a court martial prevented by war’s end. A few others who mention Lucas in passing or in more detail are Beischl, Dr. med. Eduard Wirths, 95; Eckart, Medizin in der NS-Diktatur, 401–2; Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 254; Jasch and Kaiser, Holocaust vor deutschen Gerichten, 238; Kaul, Ärzte in Auschwitz, 100–2; Klee, Auschwitz, 34; Scharsach, Ärzte der Nazis, 210; Wachsmann, KL, 658. 121. Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 303–36; 194–95. Raul Hilberg quotes Lifton to draw attention to Kulka’s distinction. See Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 69. 122.  Boozer, “Children of Hippocrates,” 90. 123.  Boozer, 91. 124.  Lippman, “War Crimes Prosecutions,” 44–45. 125.  Greenberg, “Theology after the Shoah,” 229. 126.  Greenberg, 230. 127. Hoedeman, Hitler or Hippocrates, 52–53. 128.  Hoedeman, 199. 129.  Hoedeman, 200. 130.  See esp. Renz, “Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess,” expanded on in his much longer “Auschwitz vor Gericht.” 131.  A commemoration volume of 872 pages documents the exhibition: Wojak, Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63. 132. Wojak, “Gerichtstag halten” and Im Labyrinth der Schuld. For titles of articles about the trial and analyses written by trial participants, see Renz and Balzer, Das Urteil, 606–10. 133.  Shenker, “Through the Lens,” 145. 134.  Concerning the effect of the trial audiotapes, see Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 4, 9–10. On the history and use of the tapes, see Renz, “Anmerkungen zum Tonbandmitschnitt.” 135. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial; Wittmann, Beyond Justice. 136. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 261–64. 137.  Hans Holder, “Lokaltermin in Auschwitz,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 17 December 1964. 138. Orth, Konzentrationslager-SS; Klee, Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich; Paul, “Von Psychopathen”; Paul and Mallmann, Karrieren der Gewalt. A truncated list of other perpetrator historiographies and collections: Rolf Pohl, “Gewalt und Grausamkeit”; Dieter Pohl, “Die Holocaust-Forschung”; Herbert, “Extermination Policy”; Kühne, “Der nationalsozialistische Vernichtungskrieg.”

introduction  •  41 139. Kramer, NS-Täter aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. 140.  Winfried Meyer, “Dr. Franz Lucas,” cited in Kramer, “Tätertypologien,” 306. 141. Iris Wachsmuth, “NS-Täter aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive,” conference report, Freie Universität Berlin, 15–16 April 2005. Organized by Helgard Kramer. Posted to H-Net Discussion Networks on 27 June 2005. 142.  Kramer, “Tätertypologien,” 268, 279. 143.  In his “Rechtfertigungsschrift” from 1945, shortly before he took his own life in English captivity, Dr. Eduard Wirths attempted to justify his Auschwitz actions. See Völklein, Eduard Wirths, 38–57; Kramer, “SS-Mediziner in Auschwitz.” 144. Dirks, Verbrechen der anderen, 13. 145.  Karin Orth’s System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager may have misinterpreted Ernst Günther Gründel’s designations from Die Sendung der jungen Generation (1932), which reserves the category Kriegsjugendgeneration for those born between 1900 and 1910, and Nachkriegsgeneration (postwar generation) for those, like Lucas, born between 1910 and 1920. 146.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner.” None of Lucas’s extant military records show that he tested as unfit for deployment at the front, however. By the end of 1943, he had done a stint as paratrooper, and at that point no SS doctors usefully deployed at the front were in the camps. Lucas began his camp service at the end of 1943. 147.  Pukrop, 374. 148.  Pukrop, 422. 149.  Pukrop, 497. See Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, esp. 83 ff. 150.  See especially Mary Fulbrook’s essay “Bystanders.” 151.  Williams, “Agency, Responsibility, Culpability,” 41. 152.  Williams, 41–42. 153. Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 193. 154.  Lifton, 196–98. 155.  Lifton, 213. 156.  Lifton, 443. 157.  Lifton, 444. 158. Lower, Hitler’s Furies, 81. 159. Kühl, Ordinary Organizations, 48-49. 160. Browning, Ordinary Men, 159–89. See also Paul, Täter der Shoah, 37–38. On the basis of his own study, Herbert Jäger gave the participation in these three categories (excess, initiative, and following orders) as 20 percent, 60 percent, and 20 percent, respectively. See Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 21–75. Hermann Langbein distinguished between zealots, methodical performers of duty, and reluctant participants. Menschen in Auschwitz, 377. 161. Browning, Ordinary Men, 161. 162.  Browning, 170–71. 163.  Browning, esp. 185; Paul, Täter der Shoah, 38; Welzer, Täter, 23–32. 164. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 245. 165.  Friedlander, 225–26. 166.  Career opportunism for doctors parted ways with what motivated the members of the police battalion: “Those who admitted being among the shooters did not justify their behavior on the basis of career considerations. In contrast, however, the issue of careerism was most clearly articulated by several of those who did not shoot.” Browning, Ordinary Men, 169. 167.  Venema and Jettinghoff, “Biographical Approach,” 153. 168. Welzer, Täter, 37, 42. 169.  See Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 51–64. 170.  Fogelman, “The Rescuer Self,” 664. 171.  Messenger and Paehler, Nazi Past, 5–6.

part i

L ucas

the

SS D octor

•••

1

R adicalization (1933–1943)

••• Before Franz Bernard Lucas entered Auschwitz to serve as SS doctor in late 1943, he underwent a decade of radicalization. In 1933, his Meppen preparatory school diploma and start of university study in Münster coincided with the first year of the Nazi regime. As a member of the SA, he began his days with training drills followed by medical lectures in an atmosphere of upheaval. He lived in the Kameradschaftshaus (comradeship house) of his nationalistic-Catholic fraternity Saxonia. After moving to Rostock in 1937 to continue his studies, he joined the SS and completed his preliminary exam shortly after German forces marched into Poland in September 1939. He then moved to Danzig, volunteering for the Waffen-SS and having military commitments deferred until finishing his medical dissertation in 1942. After two months of training at the SS Military Medical Academy in Graz, he was promoted, sent to Nuremberg as an assistant SS troop doctor, promoted twice more, and sent to the front near Belgrade for paratrooper training. At the close of 1943 he was in Auschwitz. This chapter uses the backdrop of Lucas’s SS and educational records to interpret his claims of reluctant participation in radicalization. If Lucas ever had misgivings about his allegiance to Nazism, they were not apparent before 1944. The traces we have of his voice also reveal where this future gynecologist stood with regard to Nazi population policy. Lucas submitted one biographical sketch for the SS and another for the last page of his medical dissertation. The tone he struck in the first vita applies to the entire decade leading up to his duty at Auschwitz. In February 1938, three months after applying to the SS, Lucas submitted his vita as part of his membership questionnaire to the Race and Settlement Main Office.1 Lucas noted that in the Carolinum, the humanistic preparatory school in Osnabrück, he made up two years of Greek and Latin not taught in the middle school. Because athletic interests took his mind off schoolwork, his parents transferred him to Meppen/Ems in 1930 to live with his uncle while completing his classes. In this small town

46  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

of eight thousand, Lucas’s Jesuit teachers were members of the Catholic Center Party. He wrote: “In spite of that, three of my friends and I made no attempt to hide our National Socialist leanings and received counsel and teaching from the district supervisor of the NSDAP, Egert, in whose apartment we often met.” Much later, in 1962, he called his association with Egert a mere embellishment that helped him join the SS cavalry in Rostock.2 By 1970 the association with Egert became “nothing but juvenile name-dropping,” since it was really his uncle who knew Egert.3 This transformation of the narrative shows his ability to deny an association that earlier had worked to his advantage. Few people wanted anything to do with Josef Egert after the war. Egert had rallied the SA in Meppen against the district superintendent and the mayor and forced the two newspapers to consolidate into a Nazi paper, Der Emsländer.4 He was among four decidedly antisemitic district officials out of seventy serving in Weser-Ems.5 His reputation for violence put him at odds with much of the Catholic Meppen population.6 Egert and his brother Philipp, leader of the local SA, took the lead in setting the Meppen synagogue ablaze on Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass, 9 November 1938) while breaking shop windows and stealing property from Jewish citizens.7 Egert set up an NSDAP discussion group in October 1931 but was considered too radical for higher bourgeois circles in Meppen. Neither Nazis nor Catholics supported his efforts to become mayor. Laborers who sympathized with the NSDAP kept a low profile out of fear of alienating their many Catholic customers.8 Disapproving of SA tactics was not uncommon, although Catholics approved of the SA’s main enemies, the city’s Jews. Meppen was under ecclesial control of the Osnabrück bishopric. Until he became bishop, Wilhelm Berning taught religion, Hebrew, philosophy, and history from 1901 to 1914 at the Windhorst-Gymnasium in Meppen.9 It is conceivable that as a pupil or student Lucas met his bishop. Lucas claimed to have visited him during furloughs from camp service, and that Berning advised him “to follow given orders so as not to become the victim of a rigorous justice or of a liquidation without formal trial.”10 Berning espoused a milder version of Egert’s radicalism. As with other Catholic leaders, his opposition to Nazism was inconsistent. At the start of the Reich, the Catholic notion of sanctity of life, including anti-abortion sentiments, dovetailed with Nazi population policy for the Volk community. The Reichskonkordat, a treaty signed by German and papal representatives on 20 July 1933 in the Vatican, pledged to preserve the religious autonomy of German Catholics in confessional matters and protect its properties. In practice, the Concordat aimed at securing more popular support among Catholics, enhancing the Nazi regime’s reputation abroad, and securing allegiance against communism. A policy of non-intervention applied even where Nazi ideology and Catholic faith parted ways, such as in the question of which lives were “defective” enough to warrant sterilization, abortion, or “euthanasia.” The

radical iz ation  •  47

fact that the Concordat was signed at roughly the same time as the Sterilization Law (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Disease) on 14 July 1933 served to tie the hands of Catholics caught between protesting the regime’s anti-natalist stance toward the erbkrank—those considered genetically unfit to play a role in Germany’s destiny—and not jeopardizing the autonomy promised by the Concordat. The Nazi regime also showed it had no interest in abiding by the agreement. Doubtless it took the courage, however belated it came, of bishops such as Berning in Osnabrück and Clemens August Graf von Galen in Münster to oppose “euthanasia” policies that purported to steer the racial health of the “German” population. However, there are fewer references in their sermons and circulars to taking a stand on behalf of non-“Aryans”—the Sinti and Roma who were Catholic and especially the Jews, who featured as the enemies of Catholics in Berning’s sermons.11 Marginalized groups were not worth risking one’s life for, and this is clear from the conversations Lucas reported in which Berning advised him to keep his head down, obey orders, and not tempt fate in the latter stages of the war. A comprehensive project by Peter Junk and Martina Sellmeyer has documented practices of discrimination, persecution, and expulsion of outsiders in Osnabrück from the Middle Ages onward, especially after 1933. One wonders which harassments documented in the volume would have been supported by Lucas’s family. Did it boycott Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 or thereafter?12 Did it benefit from the “Aryanization” that left Jews without homes and a way to earn a living, or with barely enough money to pay their humiliating emigration tax? Did Lucas’s father, a master butcher, benefit from the expulsion of the Jews who made up roughly half of his community’s twenty-two cattle and horse traders?13 What about the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Osnabrück?14 Lucas told his lawyer Aschenauer that in 1932 or 1936 his father had been accused of doing business with Jews, which resulted in a “Jewish trial” in Osnabrück. His father appears to have denied the rumor and to have gone to court against the spreaders of the rumor, supposedly in the effort to protect his son, who was not yet a member of any Nazi organization.15 Whatever the case, of most significance here is Lucas’s claim to have turned his back on the Catholic Center milieu to follow the fringe Nazi Josef Egert. As Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald memorial site, has noticed, statements of SS members from 1932 or 1933 are better indicators of their fundamental allegiances than statements from 1944 or 1945: “Then it’s a question about courage, but not a matter of life and death. And it’s not one you can answer by saying there was no chance for effective political resistance.”16 Lucas received his diploma (Abitur) in Meppen on 9 March 1933. By the end of April, he was already enrolled at Westphalia Wilhelm University in Münster under Reich number 47742, with a stamp that certified his “Aryan” ancestry.17 The university was only half an hour south from Osnabrück by train. Lucas be-

48  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

came part of the SA while in Meppen, a week before passing his Abitur. On at least two questionnaires, Lucas gave the extent of his SA brownshirt involvement from 1 March 1933 to 1 November 1937.18 These same questionnaires recorded that he traded a brown shirt for an SS black shirt a week after leaving the SA: his SS membership began on 9 November 1937 and his membership in the NSDAP on 1 March 1937.19 The SS date was important even before Reichskristallnacht a year later because it was an official Reich holiday to commemorate Hitler’s putsch attempt in 1923. While a student, Lucas took part in three sports courses and received a bronze medal for SA sport in 1934.20 Much later, he claimed that many of his soccer teammates were social democrats or communists and that he himself ignored politics. He also claimed to have joined the Stahlhelm—this is nowhere in his records—which was incorporated into the SA during the Gleichschaltung (synchronization) of university organizations, including longstanding fraternities. Simultaneously, Lucas claimed to have distanced himself from the SA student ranks and to have dropped his membership in 1934 because of the “disagreeable spirit” of many of its members.21 It also worked to his advantage in 1938 to state his disapproval of SA tactics on his SS Race and Settlement Main office application, after mentioning that in November 1937 he had moved to Rostock and joined the SS on the advice of a friend, Untersturmführer Böttcher. In 1970, Lucas added that witnesses could confirm that he had submitted a written request to withdraw from the Stahlhelm group when it was taken over by the SA: “I was never a member of the SA. In 1933 I was in the Stahlhelm and participated in militia training. When the Stahlhelm was transferred to the SA, I left the SA.”22 The inconsistency of the dates invites the conclusion that Lucas manipulated them according to the goal of the application. While he was certainly in the SA and in the Catholic fraternity Saxonia, it is doubtful that he was in the Stahlhelm, whose clear antidemocratic and antisemitic positions were hardly exculpatory anyway. Upon entering the SS in 1937, then, Lucas distanced himself from the SA and in 1970 denied ever having joined it. In this way he was following the tone of Münster’s university leadership. As rector of Münster’s university, Hubert Naendrup, a veteran of the Freikorps (paramilitary) and a convinced Nazi, sought to militarize Münster’s university in a way that won over students and faculty without resorting to SA hooliganism.23 Like his rector, Lucas could disagree with violent SA tactics against faculty members but endorse the nazification of the faculty. Whatever else he thought of nazification, by the time Lucas took the first part of his preliminary exam in May 1934, lecturers were dressed in SA or SS uniforms.24 Officially Lucas relinquished his church membership when he became an SS member and became gottgläubig, a theist or believer in a deity. It was an encouraged but not mandatory step, and in 1938, as Richard Steigmann-Gall’s figures show, approximately a quarter of SS officers had chosen to do so—about half re-

radical iz ation  •  49

mained Protestant and about 23 percent remained Catholic.25 Rainer Kampling has interpreted the dueling scars on Lucas’s left cheek as de facto excommunication, because joining a dueling fraternity to draw blood, a pseudo-teutonic ritual, supported völkisch ideology incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy.26 Those scars were still visible in 1965 and helped two witnesses in the Auschwitz Trial identify Lucas.27 In practice, however, piety and nationalism were not incompatible. Catholic fraternities supported the ideals of National Socialism without understanding why they should relinquish their longstanding traditions. On 1 May 1933 Lucas joined the Catholic fraternity Saxonia and lived in a Kameradschaftshaus beginning in the summer semester of 1933. These houses were the Nazi version of a fraternity house but with mandated ideals of community and military regimen designed to transform students into Nazis. In 1967, two members of Saxonia who knew Lucas wrote letters to clear him from any affiliation with Nazism. They had been approached during an effort by Lucas’s wife and his lawyer to gather character appraisals. One of them, a dentist who had overlapped with Lucas in Meppen, Münster, and Rostock, wrote: “Since we belonged to no party organization and the exam was approaching, and because belonging to a party formation became a question of existence, we decided to join the SS, as most of the lecturers and assistants in the Rostock clinics and many other personalities were members of the SS.”28 One may question whether SS membership was such a last resort as the dentist let on, but he was correct in assessing the heavy confluence of medicine and politics in Rostock. Only a minority of Catholic student organizations opposed the Gleichschaltung. Lucas was part of the two-thirds of the students of Westphalia Wilhelm University who were Catholic. Slightly over a quarter of its student population belonged to Catholic fraternities, the most of any German university.29 Saxonia belonged to the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen (Union of Catholic German Student Fraternities), the umbrella organization for German Catholic fraternities. Lucas’s experience appears to have been the common one: a gradual departure from views of the Catholic Center Party since 1918 and an alliance with antirepublic, antidemocratic, antiparliamentary, antiliberal, anticommunist, and anti-Jewish views. Nazis had already infiltrated the fraternities before 1933. As mentioned, Nazi views did not cancel out Catholic views or vice versa. But republic-hostile groups needed to be dissolved into nation-raising sameness through Nazi propaganda and violence.30 Apart from militia training in Münster, Lucas’s summer of 1933 included lectures in inorganic chemistry, physics, zoology, and botany. From fall 1933 to fall 1934 he studied anatomy, physiology, and physiological chemistry. On the first part of the preliminary medical exam that he took on 14 May 1934, Lucas failed the chemistry portion (ungenügend, insufficient) due to what his examiner called “great gaps” in knowledge of the material, but received a gut (good) in physics, zoology, and botany. His retake of the chemistry portion on 30 March 1935

50  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

changed his grade to genügend (sufficient) and passed him through the first component of the preliminary exam.31 He passed the second component four years later in Rostock. The clinical semesters he completed in Danzig. In the eyes of radicalized students, the allegiance of instructors to the Nazi movement was more important than their disciplinary qualifications. Nazi students identified Jewish students and faculty as a threat to the new revolutionary spirit. The university fired 26 of 218 faculty members for political or racial reasons.32 At the same time, 6 of the 15 directors of its medical clinics and institutes became Nazi Party members.33 The Nazi revolution in Münster drove at least two faculty members to suicide. The radiologist Walter Gross Figure 1.1.  Osnabrück studio portrait of Franz Lucas from his student file, University of Rostock. poisoned himself on 14 September Universitätsarchiv Rostock, 1.09.0, Studenten1933 and the pathologist Paul Krause, akte Franz Lucas; Fotograf Alfred Lohmann, former rector and prorector, shot him- Photographisches Atelier Osnabrück, Schützenself on 7 May 1934, just a week be- straße 16. Used by permission. fore Lucas’s first major exam.34 Two of Gross’s students had pressured him to retire. Wilhelm Benecke, the father of one of the students, was asked to control his son Eric-Emil’s belligerence, but it was too late to prevent Gross’s suicide. The elder Benecke was the botany professor on the committee that tested Lucas in May 1934.35 Lucas’s other examiners reacted in different ways. A half year after Lucas’s zoology exam, his examiner Leopold von Ubisch, who was Jewish, was hazed during lectures and chose early retirement in October 1935.36 Von Ubisch had little control over events,but Lucas’s examiner in chemistry, Rudolf Schenk, took advantage of the historical moment. Schenk directed the chemical institute, taught military science, and had served as rector of the university in 1929, the year he invited Reich marshal Hermann Göring to speak at the annual commemoration of German soldiers who died in the Battle of Langemarck in 1917.37 It is difficult to gauge how caught up Lucas was in the revolutionary spirit of his peers, although his facial scars show at least his readiness to defend his student honor. Less difficult to gauge is the increasingly popular vernacular of racial hygiene, a discourse that did not diminish at war’s end but kept attracting former Nazis to the university. For example, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was

radical iz ation  •  51

appointed to chair the Department of Human Genetics in 1951. Verschuer, a racial hygiene expert, was Josef Mengele’s mentor and former director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. The medical faculty also attracted the application of Fritz Lenz, a leading Nazi geneticist and eugenics expert, in July 1945.38 The Department of Anatomy featured Johann Paul Kremer’s lectures in Human Heredity, although he is better known for the journal that documented his brief stint as SS doctor in Auschwitz in 1942.39 The lack of a chair or institute for racial hygiene in Münster during the 1930s and 1940s did not signal a lack of commitment to the new cause. Eugen Kurz held lectures on Rassenkunde (Racial Affairs) from 1920 on, and beginning in 1937 Cuno Peter offered a lecture and seminar in Erbpflege- und Rassenschutzgesetzgebung des Dritten Reiches (Hereditary Care and Legislation of Racial Protection of the Third Reich).40 From 1927 on, Karl Wilhelm Jötten lectured on hygiene and his colleagues held lectures on racial and reproductive hygiene. The psychiatrist Ferdinand Kehrer sat on a hereditary health court and directed the university’s nerve clinic, while his senior physician Wilhelm Klimke lectured on questions of hereditary pathology, heredity theory, and sterilization. From 1939 on, racial hygiene became a testable category on the medical state exam—a moot point for Lucas, who passed the exam a year earlier in Rostock.41 A week before the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring), referred to in the following as the Sterilization Law, became public on 25 July 1933, Münster’s law faculty organized a lecture series on sterilization and “euthanasia.”42 One enthused advocate, Eugen Kurz, was quoted in the local newspapers as prepared to convert biological knowledge into action for the sake of the German Volk: “We must consciously reverse the unnatural means of mercy and pursue the goal of a new form of selection in which we decide who should or should not be eligible for reproduction. The severity of measures such as sterilization is unavoidable. No objective law forbids us such measures, as we carry law and justice within ourselves to take the right steps for helping our Volk to new life.”43 Kurz’s statement captures the “unavoidable” biopolitical violence mobilized against outsiders judged too weak, feebleminded, or otherwise disqualified from regime support. He argued that National Socialism was forced to consolidate its ethnic identity along the lines of “Aryan-Nordic” blood community as a bulwark against Jews and persons who were “detrimental, inferior, mentally disabled, and criminals.”44 Eugenic practices were not limited to Münster any more than to Rostock, where Lucas enrolled on 10 November 1937, the day after taking the oath for SS membership. One third of the Rostock medical faculty made up the vanguard for racial ideology and “euthanasia.”45 In the summer semester 1938 Lucas studied physiology and anatomy, followed by human development and physiological chemistry in the winter semester 1938–39. After applying for the second (clinical) portion of his medical exam on 4 March 1939, Lucas requested a

52  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

postponement on 5 April 1939, citing bronchial illness in a note he signed “Heil Hitler!” Instead, the exam happened on 13–14 September 1939, two weeks into the euphoria of Germany’s invasion of Poland. His overall score was satisfactory, awarded by test committee chair physiologist Kurt Neubert (physiology) and Kurt Wachholder (anatomy).46 These examiners stand out for two reasons. First, while Wachholder was not politically active, he was a reliable Nazi sympathizer who fought to have a Jewish coworker named Hirschberg fired in 1933—a detail missing from Wachholder’s narrative of Nazi opposition after the war.47 Second, on 18 September 1939 Neubert was informed that Lucas had not paid his semester bill for winter semester 1938–39 and the registrar had thus stricken the semester from the record. Asked if this news impacted the exam Lucas had just completed, Neubert replied that he had no concerns about the test’s validity.48 Thus, it appears that Lucas either lacked the funds for student fees or spent them elsewhere. How much his own family supported him during the university years is unknown. A week after passing his exam, Lucas withdrew from Rostock on 19 September 1939 and from 15 October to 20 December, as reported on a military form, served in an SS Sonderkommando (special command unit) in Kralupy, just north of Prague, at the rank of SS-Mann (private).49 In 1970, he reported that his SS unit, made up of students, had guarded an oil refinery and that he was given credit for the Prague semester when he began to study in Danzig.50 In Danzig-Langfuhr, on 5 February 1940, he signed the following statement: “After careful examination, I can think of no circumstances that could justify the assumption that I am of non-Aryan lineage or that one of my parents or grandparents belonged at any time to the Jewish religion. I realize that I can expect immediate expulsion from active military duty, should this explanation prove to be untrue.”51 Lucas received his military ID and service record booklet in Danzig-Weichsel on 13 September 1940, two days before turning twenty-nine. His identification card shows him in a white shirt and dark tie, with thinning hair. He was appraised as fit for military service as a conscript. Two years later, on 30 July 1942, he was accepted for the Waffen-SS in Gotenhafen.52 His enlistment day was 1 September 1942 to the Sanitätsamt (medical service) of the SS-FHA (Führungshauptamt, Leadership Main Office). He was named SS-Oberscharführer and received combat training immediately in hand grenades from 1 to 24 September 1942. His commanding officer lacked the time to form an adequate impression of his soldierly qualities.53 At thirty-one, Lucas was older than the other conscripts, but still athletic enough to pass muster. In the short vita included with his medical dissertation, Lucas noted that after passing the preliminary medical exam in 1939 in Rostock, he had volunteered for military service and in January 1940 was released to continue his studies.54 The clinical vita changed the information from his SS vita. Now he claimed to have

radical iz ation  •  53

Figure 1.2.  Page from the Waffen-SS service booklet of Franz Lucas, 1939–45. Source: Bundesarchiv ZM 0885 Akte 3. Used by permission.

54  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

studied philology at Münster and to have begun medical studies as late as 1937 in Rostock. He also claimed that his father was a merchant instead of a master butcher, and that he finished gymnasium in Meppen because his family moved there from Osnabrück. This contradicted his earlier story about being sent to Meppen to live with his uncle.55 Manipulation of the facts came naturally. It enhanced his profile to come doubly qualified as a quick-learning medical student who could also discuss literature and language. Besides modifying his accomplishments to suit himself, he was also proud of them, prepared by a decade of saturation in a militarized climate to practice medicine in an SS uniform.

Lucas’s Dissertation and the Sterilization Law of 1933 Lucas’s 1942 dissertation, Symptomatologie, Diagnose und Therapie der Extrauteringravidität (Symptomatology, Diagnosis, and Therapy of Extrauterine Pregnancy), analyzed existing data from the women’s clinic of the Medical Academy in Danzig and built on the findings of Hilde Dorothee Müller’s 1936 dissertation on the same topic.56 Lucas combined Müller’s conclusions regarding 206 ectopic pregnancies from 1 January 1930 to 30 April 1934 with data from 306 subsequent ectopic pregnancies from 1 May 1934 to 31 December 1940.57 His dissertation director Professor Dr. Joachim Granzow and a certain Dr. Erichsen supplied the data for Lucas’s analysis of laparotomies performed at the women’s clinic. On the surface, Lucas’s gynecological mentors do not appear to have been politically active or sympathetic to Nazi tenets.58 According to Granzow’s editor Siegfried Suckut, he was even removed from his position because he refused to perform sterilizations.59 Before discussing Lucas’s dissertation, a few details about the Sterilization Law of 14 July 1933 and its practice help us understand what a doctor like Granzow claimed to be refusing. The Sterilization Law famously listed congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorders, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary deafness or blindness, severe physical deformations, and severe alcoholism as grounds for forced sterilization.60 Medical historian Herwig Czech has pointed out that by 1944 in Vienna, records compiled on some 767,000 persons included information not on genetic diseases but mostly on psychiatric conditions, behavior considered deviant, learning disabilities, youth welfare, venereal disease, alcoholism, and sex partners.61 Thus the Sterilization Law evolved as an instrument less concerned about curbing questionable genetic conditions than about “protecting” the “national body” from crime and disorder, and it needed a surveillance system of detailed records and willing whistleblowers to do so. Even the main eugenicist commentators on the law, the doctor Arthur Gütt and the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, pushed for it to become a social directive for cleaning house by sterilizing social undesirables. As Richard Wetzell puts it,

radical iz ation  •  55

public health officers construed the spirit of the law as inviting them to judge psychopathological factors of “emotion, will, or character.”62 Nazi affiliation was not, of course, a prerequisite for eugenicists to identify the groups they considered “inferior,” predisposed to act in certain ways due to ancestry and thus burdensome to the state. The all-male hereditary health courts featured a jurist and two medically trained experts, such as a doctor and a psychiatrist, while the sterilization appeals courts boasted even more experienced experts and a jurist with appeals court connections. However, as historian Gisela Bock has shown, such hereditary health courts were not immune from replacing clinical observation with misogynous stereotypes and double standards that reinforced Nazi ideals of masculinity and morality. Instead of protecting individual rights, the Sterilization Law became a political hammer looking for nails to pound to secure the biological future of the Volk community.63 Bock argues that by 1939, hereditary court judges had changed the modal verb can in “Whoever is genetically ill can be made sterile” to the modal verb must.64 Over time, courts diagnosed what they claimed was “inborn feeblemindedness” or perceived “asocial” behavior in order to punish persons, primarily single and poor women, who fell short of community ideals. In a sense, sterilization candidates were guilty until proven innocent, forced to find exogenous proof to explain, say, that flunking two grades of school was due to the aftereffects of an accident not attributable to an innate or endogenous condition.65 In other words, the Sterilization Law was interpreted narrowly or broadly from court to court. One court might weaponize it against so-called criminals and asocials, but at the same time overlook a woman’s “innate feeblemindedness” if she worked hard and required no welfare assistance for herself and her children. Whether a leading gynecologist like Granzow agreed across the board with Nazi reproduction principles is less important than envisioning his benefit from German territorial victories. Compromises, collaborations, tacit approvals, and official or off-the-record remarks and agreements often left no paper trail that could be followed after the war. Changing one’s mind was not a sign of fickle character so much as the attempt to fit in while opting out, or it was a sign of contributing expertise to a cause that one may not have fully endorsed but that bestowed benefits.66 One can imagine Granzow’s agreement with some sterilization cases and practices. As with Gerhard Wagner, Reich Leader for Health, or Walter Stoeckel, the well-known gynecologist who mentored Lucas’s later Ravensbrück colleague Percy Treite, Granzow likely stood on conservative principles cautioning moderation. Wagner was not alone in protesting neither the notion of the state cutting into the bodies of its citizens, nor the tenets of racist eugenics. Any second thoughts revolved instead around praxis.67 The unifying factor across disagreements was to expand the circle of lives considered “unworthy of life” or “ballast existences,” to underscore the chilling phrases chosen by jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in their 1920 booklet.68 This is all the more reason

56  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

to take claims of protesting sterilization with a grain of salt. Fundamentally, the right of the state to use violence to achieve its ends, to permanently invade the private sphere, was never in question. Opposing the sterilization of one’s own daughter, say, hardly precluded supporting the sterilization of “asocials,” which for Nazis included Sinti and Roma—precisely Lucas’s target late in the war. Granzow had space to maneuver, notwithstanding opposition to Nazis in private. He was invited to present the seventh and final main report at the biennial conference of the German Society for Gynecology, held in Vienna in 1941 and framed by Hitler’s telegram of well-wishes. While Granzow’s talk was cancelled because the conference was shortened by a day, a long fifty-page version did appear in the proceedings. The spirit of the times is apparent in Hans Fuchs’s opening address in the proceedings as society president. Fuchs was Granzow’s predecessor at the Gau (regional) Midwife Training Center and Women’s Clinic of the Medical Academy in Danzig. Obstetrics and gynecology, he raved, had become the guardians of reproduction and the ascending life impulse in the body of the German Volk. All doctors, especially obstetricians, were inspired by their colleagues on the outer front to fulfill their obligations on the inner front. Before leading his colleagues in a Sieg Heil, Fuchs reminded them that “after the war, whose victorious conclusion is being prepared with iron-clad certainty, there await tasks of unheard-of dimensions.”69 In 1935, Fuchs had published an article on tubal sterilization, based on a method he developed for carrying out compulsory sterilizations at the Danzig clinic.70 It is difficult to tell whether Lucas’s own work on ectopic pregnancies drew from Fuchs’s pool of female patients. Established doctors in the German Society for Gynecology considered themselves in the vanguard of soldiers fighting for the health of the nation. Membership in the NSDAP was a popular option for young and old, and for doctors produced the highest percentages of any career track. As Gisela Bock reports, 45 percent were in the NSDAP, 26 percent in the SA, and 7 percent in the SS. The motto Jeder Arzt ein Erbarzt (Every Doctor a Eugenic Doctor) formed the title of a popular medical periodical.71 Lucas’s dissertation of 1942 falls within this context of population policy that valued the German collective over individual well-being. Nazi doctors like Lucas learning their craft were charged to care for the national body over curing individuals, which solidified their role as genetic police officers. What, then, does Lucas’s research topic of ectopic pregnancy have to do with Nazi population policy? To be clear, most ectopic pregnancies occur when a fertilized egg attaches itself to the fallopian tube instead of the lining of the uterus. Frequently, inflammation or scarring from venereal disease or abortion prevents the zygote from reaching the uterus. A laparotomy is the incision made in the abdomen to allow the surgeon access to the uterus and fallopian tubes to remove the ectopic pregnancy. Lucas was disturbed to discover that patients treated for ectopic pregnancies had shown preexisting gonorrhea. It is possible that these

radical iz ation  •  57

patients were among the fifty-three “indolent” patients in the sample whose misleading self-reporting encumbered a precise case history, which annoyed Lucas.72 Decrying an “abortion epidemic,” he wondered “how many of the miscarriages and abortions to which our patients admitted were complicated by inflammation during the process” and wagered that “[t]he number of especially suspicious artificial or criminal abortions is still underestimated today, despite all measures to the contrary.”73 Therefore, in his conclusion, Lucas proposed a bevölkerungspolitisch (population-political) solution to gonorrhea and ectopic pregnancies.74 The adjective suggests that Lucas was becoming an expert on preventing sterility in a healthy population, a pro-eugenic posture. But a biopolitical solution was also hinted at by his annoyance that the women referred to the Danzig women’s clinic of the Medical Academy were mostly Poles whose sexual practices predisposed them to ectopic pregnancies. A radical anti-eugenic solution from a surgeon trained in racial privilege would be to sterilize women who were not only failing to bring pregnancies to term but also spreading venereal disease.75 It is a small step to then suggest the more radical solution of sterilizing these non-German women before they became sexually active.

Graz and Nuremberg On its face, Lucas’s dissertation does not invite the label of anti-eugenic. Likely, a more radical inculcation of selection and racial difference came immediately after his dissertation defense, during the eleventh installment of the “Reserve-Führer-Anwärter-Lehrgang im Sanitätsdienst” (Reserve Officer Candidate Course in Medical Service) of the SS Medical Academy, which took place from 25 September to 1 November 1942 in Graz. The academy had shifted headquarters from Berlin to Graz in September 1940, where it was housed in the Taubstummenanstalt at Rosenberggürtel 12. The giant building close to the university housed SS members who displaced deaf and hard-of-hearing tenants. The secretive training course extended the conventional academic and medical training already completed by the SS applicants. Besides showing physical fitness, applicants had to demonstrate unconditional allegiance to National Socialism and the SS, prove their “Aryan” ancestry, and supply three SS references.76 Training involved all aspects of troop doctor service, sports (fencing, horseback riding, gymnastics, automobile driving), and foreign languages. The military and ideological part of the training happened where the cadets resided, but medical lectures took place at the university.77 If not prepared for deciding the fate of prisoners still alive, the recruits received abundant practice cutting into bodies of murdered prisoners. The SS Medical Academy was supplied with organs and heads of noma patients who had

58  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

wasted away or had been killed in the Gypsy camp.78 It also received skeletal and body tissue from murdered inmates of Buchenwald and Mauthausen/Gusen.79 In July 1943, Eduard Krebsbach, chief doctor at Mauthausen, sent the remains of the Dutch Jewish prisoner Alexander Katan to the SS Medical Academy for teaching purposes, monitored under strict confidentiality.80 Medical and worldview training was followed by short internships. According to Josef Podlaha, SS doctors came to Mauthausen from “the SS University in Steiermark” [i.e., Graz] with or without diplomas and lacking adequate medical knowledge. Podlaha recalled: “Almost all of them had the morbid urge to perform operations in spite of the fact that they were absolutely without previous experience.”81 Dachau was another destination for Graz SS doctors to practice on prisoners. From mid-May 1941 to the end of 1942 (including Lucas’s stint), students or recent graduates of the Graz academy caused multiple deaths by operating on the stomachs, gall bladders, appendixes, and hernias of some five hundred prisoners. Operations on appendixes and hernias were minor enough that students also decided to perform sterilizations while the prisoners were under anesthesia.82 In Graz’s women’s clinic, gynecologists went beyond compulsory sterilizations and abortions to perform abusive medical interventions on Ostarbeiterinnen (female Eastern slave workers). As Gabriele Czarnowski points out, despite the youth and health of women who visited the clinic only rarely, their classification as “racially inferior” made them targets for criminal experimentation. These women were unprotected because they had no rights, which in the minds of the doctors who experimented on them made them fair game.83 At least one other recruit from Lucas’s cohort can be identified: Alfred Kurzke, who at the conclusion of the course was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer (sergeant or junior squad leader). Lucas was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (master sergeant or head squad leader) of the reserve. Kurzke’s membership in the Nazi Party and the SS since 1932 showed his fundamental allegiance, but it did nothing to help him complete his medical studies.84 Like Lucas’s later Ravensbrück replacement Adolf Winkelmann, Kurzke became an occasional informant for the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service).85 Political and racial differences, magnified by a eugenicist political agenda, characterized Lucas’s milieu. His silence about his Graz training is not definitive proof that he participated in the practices of the SS Medical Academy, but it is also no sign that he ignored them, either. After his Graz training, on 1 November 1942, SS-Hauptscharführer Lucas began service officially as Abteilungsarzt (divisional physician) for the SS Nachrichten Ersatz Regiment (training and replacement signal unit for the Waffen-SS)in Nuremberg, SS Kaserne IVb. In mid-February 1943, Dr. Katz proposed Lucas’s promotion to SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant): “His demeanor is very good both in and out of service. His character is firm. His worldview is strictly National Socialist. He is fully cut out to be an SS officer. His work ethic is admirable. In the recent past he contracted

radical iz ation  •  59

pneumonia partly due to overworking, but he still fulfilled his duties without complaining. In the interest of his performance and his position as divisional doctor, his promotion to SS-Untersturmführer is urgently endorsed.”86 The promotion, effective 20 April 1943, certified that Lucas was making the practical and ideological progress expected of him.87 Katz’s remark about Lucas’s pneumonia is easy to overlook but shows Lucas’s work ethic. Unlike his complaints about his superiors that surfaced later, it appears that proving his conscientiousness and trustworthiness at least early on was important enough to keep a stiff upper lip to the point of overworking. Ongoing education in Weltanschauung (worldview, ideology) was a regular part of the weekly schedule in Nuremberg. Assent to Nazi principles was a prerequisite for Lucas to have gotten this far. As Bernd Wegener points out in his study of the Waffen-SS, ideological instruction was less about indoctrinating members with memorizable facts, and more about fostering a posture of sharing the triumphs of the SS and taking personally any attacks against it.88 It was possible for a smart cadet to know all the right answers without exhibiting the traits the SS looked for in a leader. Kampf (struggle) was the most substantial expression of life.89 Graphic antisemitic propaganda was unnecessary because cadets held the same ubiquitous, internalized image of Jewish “otherness” as the German civilian population did.90 Weltanschauung instruction offered in Lucas’s Nuremberg unit during June and July of 1943 included such topics as “Jews and masons,” “From victory of weapons to victory of the cradles,” “Racial care and population policies of the National Socialist state,” “Keeping military secrets,” and “The final struggle of the Reich against its external enemies.”91 A few months after his promotion to Untersturmführer, Lucas’s supervisor Dr. Fritz Baader praised his sense of self-confidence and vigilant self-improvement.92 On 9 September 1943, the document for promotion justified the new rank of Obersturmführer on the basis of Lucas’s investment in his work, medical ability and service, maturity, organizational skills, correct military bearing, and responsibility for the well-being of his subordinates.93 Before the promotion went into effect on 9 November 1943, however, Lucas received orders to report by 1 October 1943 to the SS Leadership Main Office, Concentration Camps, Medical Corps, Waffen-SS Berlin.94 Then came his marching orders to Chlum (near Prague) for duty in an SS paratrooper unit, Bewährungseinheit B-Battalion 500, a “rehab unit” understood as reserved for wayward SS officers.

Chlum/Kraljewo, Dr. Erwin von Helmersen, and Dr. Fritz Baader Lucas maintained that his transfer to Chlum, and from there to Kraljewo, Serbia, was punishment for defeatist remarks he made over beer one evening in Nuremberg—although at first he had wondered what exactly had offended his

60  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

commandant, Richard Sansoni.95 But Lucas could never explain why, if he really was being punished and demoted, his promotion to Obersturmführer became effective while he was offering medical care to SS paratroopers. This contradiction irritated Christian Raabe, adjunct prosecutor in the Auschwitz Trial.96 Was the transfer a standard probation? The alleged defamation would have had to happen during the three weeks between Baader’s promotion request and Lucas’s transfer to Chlum. Because they showed a lack of loyalty, defeatist utterances were a serious breach of military discipline punishable by court martial. Failure to carry through with an order was a more tolerated sign of weakness, as legal scholar Herbert Jäger makes clear.97 In criminal court Lucas argued repeatedly that his transfer to a dangerous zone that involved parachute jumps made him fear for his life. But did his fear derive from jumping from planes or from the perception of being singled out for hazing? Lacking courage to carry out criminal orders would not have been punished. The key argument against Lucas’s account was that the SS paratroopers did not engage in heavy combat against Tito-led partisans in Yugoslavia until 1944, when Lucas was already in Auschwitz. Jäger insists that only already condemned SS men had the chance to rehabilitate themselves.98 Lucas made no such convincing case about himself. Another possible explanation for his transfer is that a portion of the paratrooper brigade, newly established in October 1943, was comprised of ranked Waffen-SS volunteers, not offenders.99 Volunteering for combat was a chance to gain combat experience on the front and prove valor without a blemished record. In all probability, Lucas either elected to pursue a chance at proving valor or was recommended to do so. In any case, he accompanied the medical and dental staff of a battalion transferred to Mataruschka-Banja, Serbia, in December 1943 for training at the Fallschirmspringerschule III, the paratrooper school of the Luftwaffe at Kraljewo.100 Three other sources provide clues for how to interpret Lucas’s claim that the paratrooper brigade was punishment. The first is the experience of SSObersturmführer Dr. Erwin von Helmersen. Lucas’s exit from Chlum to Oranienburg WVHA D/III headquarters was announced on 14 December 1943 and became effective the next day. Helmersen had been serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau since 1 August 1943, largely as Mengele’s assistant in the Gypsy camp. What happened was that Lucas and Helmersen simply exchanged assignments.101 Fallschirmschützenlehrgang (paratrooper track) was entered as the service term during which Helmersen was promoted to Hauptsturmführer on 21 June 1944, suggesting probation (Bewährung) not as his punishment but as his chance to prove valor. Despite the high demands placed on the SS battalion troop doctor, Helmersen’s leadership and achievements “justified his promotion to Hauptsturmführer,” wrote his superior.102 Before his assignment to Auschwitz, Helmersen was affiliated with the SS hospital in Berlin-Lichterfelde and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthro-

radical iz ation  •  61

pology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem during the time that Mengele was a guest scholar there. Shortly after defending his medical dissertation under Institute head Fritz Lenz in August 1943, Helmersen began working in the Gypsy camp and the prisoner’s hospital in Birkenau.103 His transfer gave him the opportunity to prove himself outside a camp where he had already mercilessly selected prisoners. The second reason to challenge Lucas’s explanation for his paratrooper stint is the testimony of SS paratrooper veterans called as defense witnesses at Lucas’s retrial in 1970. Battalion 500 veteran Wilhelm Schubert testified that while officers and NCOs made up most of the “B-men” (those to be rehabilitated), the commandant and the doctors in the battalion had a clean record and were exempt from rehabilitation. Schubert remembered Helmersen from the unit, but not Lucas. During the parachute training itself, movement was constricted, but never by barbed wire. The battalion was not supposed to be “wiped out” but only employed for certain missions. On the mission in April 1944 to take President Josip Broz Tito captive, only half of the nine hundred men returned.104 According to Gerd Kemper, a Luftwaffe trainer in Kraljewo, it was general knowledge that the men in the battalion were mostly stripped of ranks as high as Sturmbannführer (major), but not abused or placed under tight surveillance. That said, the risk intrinsic to paratroopers was common knowledge.105 Hermann Harms, from Lucas’s town of Elmshorn and also a trainer, reported that the SS men were trained like all other paratroopers, without extra strictness, but paratroopers were deployed to areas with high risk, and the Tito mission was especially dangerous.106 Josef Seidel, from Ramsbau, was part of the battalion from December 1943 to January 1945, but not as a trainer. He remembered battalion members who, despite having stolen or plundered, were treated like soldiers with freedom of movement. He thought that perhaps some of the officers were in the unit because of speaking out against the Reich. He himself had read his files before they were burned, one of which mentioned his strong tendency to question authority.107 While Lucas was unfamiliar to him, Seidel knew the troop doctor Helmersen as one who engaged strongly in the men’s rehabilitation, and Seidel had met him again in captivity in Regensburg. For his part, Lucas was puzzled that the veterans had no recollection of him, since he was there—and clearly remembered barbed wire surrounding the training camp. He concurred that high losses were the norm where the B-unit was deployed, and his impression had been that it was a suicide mission.108 Understandably, Lucas wanted to be validated as having undergone the same combat pressures as the witnesses. However, the witnesses failed to recognize him because their stint coincided with Helmersen’s training time, after Lucas replaced Helmersen at Auschwitz. . Shortly after Lucas’s retrial began in August 1970, Frankfurt state attorney Wiese received a letter from WASt explaining a list of persons ordered to the SS

62  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

paratrooper Battalion 500 on 15 December 1943. This list deserves mention because Nuremberg is among the five units listed as resupplying troops to the battalion. The WASt letter indicated that there was no evidence that the units were probationary in nature. Nor had SS-Fallschirmjäger-Bataillon 500 reported any losses before 13 July 1944. Soldiers on probation were doubtless part of the battalion, but it was unclear to what extent it resembled the Dirlewanger brigade. Names of former members of the battalion, including the witnesses Seidel and Schubert, were on the list.109 There is a third reason to examine why, as late as 1970, Lucas continued to associate Battalion 500 with the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade, as though his paratrooper training had kept him in perpetual fear. Lucas supported his fear claim by requesting his immediate boss from Nuremberg to testify on his behalf. Dr. Fritz Baader, who happened to live in Nuremberg where he was earlier based, testified on the morning of 5 October 1970, after both prosecution and defense had already called for Lucas’s acquittal. Baader’s evaluation of Lucas in 1943 had conveyed the image of a trustworthy and assertive SS officer. Now, however, twenty-seven years later, Baader depicted Lucas as extremely reclusive, absent from the heavy drinking of his fellow officers, but not reserved when it came to expressing political opinions. The two of them had sat together in the casino and become friends. Even though Lucas and the commandant Sansoni were increasingly at odds, Lucas lacked the rank to ask Berlin for a transfer. Baader asserted: “When Sansoni said, I don’t get along with that man, transfer him, then the man was transferred by Berlin. I no longer know where Dr. Lucas was transferred from Nuremberg.”110 Baader also stated that he himself had no chance to intervene to instigate a transfer to the front. Due to Baader’s switch from talking about Lucas specifically to about how Sansoni operated generally, it is unclear whether Baader would have requested Lucas’s transfer if he had had the chance—and if so, whether he would have wanted Lucas moved to the front.111 It would have meant sending Lucas to a place he feared, unless both men thought that, no matter how dangerous, anything was better than the ongoing friction between Lucas and his commandant. But as it stands, Lucas did find himself in a place where he claimed to feel afraid, not because of the enemy or a natural fear of parachuting, but because of the “friendly fire” of SS officers who had it out for him. Was Chlum/Kraljewo a punishment or was it simply a chapter in which neither he nor Baader had a say?112 When Lucas wrote him upon arrival in Auschwitz to ask how he could be transferred, Baader had entreated him not to write so openly, and “for God’s sake to be careful.”113 Entrapment and helplessness were the lot of any conscientious doctor, according to Baader: “In 1940, I myself was doctor in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Only through personal connections did I succeed in getting transferred to the front. I was unable to help Dr. Lucas.”114 There is cause to ques-

radical iz ation  •  63

tion his account, however. Like Lucas, Baader provided a handwritten vita for the SS. Baader’s vita reports the joy that came from shaping his career path through the SS-TV (Totenkopf-Verband, Death’s Head Unit).115 Even allowing for probable opportunism, Baader’s enthusiastic tone undermines his purported memory of Flossenbürg concentration camp as a hardship. In addition, Baader was the medical officer for a cavalry brigade led by Hermann Fegelein, known for his purges of partisans during Operation Barbarossa. In a letter supporting Baader’s promotion to SS-Sturmbannführer, Fegelein wrote that Baader provided excellent and quick care for the wounded in the battle of Bialystok on 27 June 1941.116 During that battle, Police Battalion 309 of the German Order Police burned down the Great Synagogue in Bialystok with hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children inside while killing hundreds more on the outside, some two thousand altogether.117 Baader’s further promotion to Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) followed on 23 June 1943, shortly before recommending Lucas’s promotion to Obersturmführer (first lieutenant). Regiment commandant Sansoni, Baader’s rank equal, praised Baader’s care of the troops, his sense of clarity, cleanliness, and order. Baader was a good comrade and soldier with a pronounced sense of purpose, duty, and worldview.118 Furthermore, Baader was on the staff of the Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and Police Leaders) in Hungary in 1944. On the other hand, Toni Siegert, a historian of Flossenbürg, calls Baader an exception to the chief medical officer who followed him a year later at Flossenbürg (Richard Trommer, notably Lucas’s later antagonist at Ravensbrück), lauding Baader’s resistance to criminal orders and his admonition that his medical assistants follow his cue. Siegert notes that Baader left Flossenbürg in the summer of 1940, while Trommer began killing prisoners there in 1941.119 There is less inconsistency here than might appear at first glance. It is understandable that an officer like Baader would prefer to treat German soldiers in a mobile killing unit behind the eastern front or in a reserve signal unit in Nuremberg, rather than neglect prisoners or carry out orders to kill the prisoners in a German concentration camp. Treating their own men, even on the front, was preferable to the relative safety of the camps, whose prisoners were daily reminders of the effects of German ideology. This preference applies to former Ravensbrück camp doctor Walter Sonntag, who in a letter to his wife Gerda Sonntag on 7 March 1942 stated his predilection for doctoring on the front: “Much work day and night . . . a different work than in Ravensbrück. Our patients are wounded German soldiers who did their duty and risked their lives for their Volk. When you think of that, there is no tiredness and you can work all hours, day and night. You should see how grateful the boys are for everything that is done for them.”120 While Lucas never sounded as keen as Baader or Sonntag about duty in a field hospital on the front, he was also not enthusiastic about duty in an extermination camp. Rather, if he sought consolation at all, it came from carving himself a niche within the

64  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

Gypsy camp and gaining medical experience by shadowing experienced and wellpublished prisoner doctors such as the pediatric specialist Berthold Epstein. Baader declared having no information from press, trial proceedings, or personal contact with Lucas after the war until receiving the telephone call on 2 October 1970 that summoned him to testify. More than likely this was a lie. Shortly after his sentencing in August 1965, Lucas had asked Aschenauer to find Baader’s address in Nuremberg, which Aschenauer then forwarded to him on 5 October 1965.121 Why would Lucas have requested Baader’s address unless he intended to write him (granted, letters from prison were censored)? We may, then, wish to reassess Baader’s credibility as a witness concerning a juncture that served Lucas’s narrative about the start of his outspokenness against the regime. To sum up, one cannot rule out completely that Lucas’s SS paratrooper training was punishment for defeatist remarks, but it makes more sense to suppose that his time near Prague and Belgrade involved giving medical care to paratroopers. This explanation would accord with the experience of his replacement Erwin von Helmersen and with the testimony of the battalion veterans who testified in his retrial. Evoking an association with Dirlewanger was meant to validate his claim of fear, adding credence to his argument of duress in performing ramp selections. Moreover, the mission of the paratroopers was not all about fear, because it was not the goal of the SS to send troops on suicide missions simply to punish wayward behavior. Despite the casualties that accrued from such missions, their goal really was to root out partisans within the civilian population loyal to Tito. As a medical student who considered himself more gottgläubig than Catholic, Lucas was immersed in an atmosphere of radical Nazism. No doubt his formation in Osnabrück and Meppen was radicalized by the politicized climate of medical studies in Münster, Rostock, and Danzig, followed by short stints in Prague and Graz. Eugenics became so integral to the medical curriculum that it integrated seamlessly with most worldviews. While Lucas’s dissertation does not exactly pulsate with racism, it hardly emerged in a vacuum either. His pro-eugenic, biopolitical contribution to increasing the German population came from developing the expertise to decrease ectopic pregnancies. He blamed the population downturn on persons outside the Volk community who sought abortions and birth control. Lucas appears to have accepted his role in administering compulsory sterilizations, however, as the chapter on Ravensbrück will discuss. A dedicated player in the alliance of public health and policing, he helped weed out what Michael Burleigh calls the perceived criminal and inferior “germ plasma” from the national gene pool.122 Perhaps the most maddening aspect of Lucas’s silence about all this is that it leaves us in the dark about how such signs of radicalization from 1933 to 1945 came across to doctors who also aspired to be resolute soldiers.

radical iz ation  •  65

Notes 1.  Franz Lucas, RuSHA Fragebogen, 15 February 1938, HHStAW 37638/109, Hauptakten Bd. 96, Hauptverhandlungsprotokolle Bd. 2. 2.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,181–82. 3.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 2, 41. 4. Rademacher, Kreisleiter der NSDAP, 238–39, 259. 5.  Rademacher, 293. 6. Kleene, Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus, 653–91. 7.  Kleene, 670. 8.  Kleene, 662. 9.  Kleene, 658. 10.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,177. 11. Kleene, Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus, 666; for a critical discussion see also Recker, “Wem wollt ihr glauben?,” 316–20. 12.  Junk and Sellmeyer, Stationen auf dem Weg, 43. 13.  Junk and Sellmeyer, 146–48. This percentage was an exception. In many trades Jews were barely represented in Osnabrück, or not at all, especially in the free and manual trades. 14.  See Panayi, “Persecution of German Romanies” and Life and Death in a German Town. 15.  Rudolf Aschenauer, undated note, BArch N642-138, 024. 16. Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 286. 17.  Student card of Franz Bernhard Lucas, University of Rostock Archive. 18.  SSO Lucas, 565, 587. 19.  SSO Lucas, 564, 585. His SS number was 350,030. 20.  SSO Lucas, 585. On that questionnaire he shows receiving his diploma in 1932, studying for seventeen semesters, and taking exams in “Phil-Medizin,” as though he had studied both philology and medicine (SSO Lucas, 586). 21.  It is doubtful that Lucas withdrew his membership from an organization he claimed never to have joined, of course. 22.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 2, 11. 23. Richter, “Verhältnis der Universität Münster,” 79. See also Pöppinghege, “Ein herrliches Sommersemester,” 203–4. 24.  For the change in hierarchy and communication generally, see Heiber, Kapitulation der Hohen Schulen, 138. 25. Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 221. 26.  Kampling, “Religiöse Motivation der Täter,” 248. 27.  Vernehmung Eugeniusz Motz, AP 25,728; Vernehmungsprotokoll des Zeugen Zygmunt Gawlowski vom 15.1.1965. Anlage 3 zum Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung vom 28. Jan. 1965, Bl. 28,516, HHStAW 37638/121, Hauptakten Bd. 107, Vernehmungsprotokolle Bd. 13. The journalist Dietrich Strothmann noticed that the scars were barely recognizable during the trial. See Strothmann, “Der gute Mensch von Auschwitz. Dr. med. Lucas—Die Wandlungen eines Angeklagten,” Zeit, 26 March 1965. Lucas’s dueling scars on his left cheek, dating to the period 1937 to 1939, are quite prominent in the pictures that were shown to Dov Paisikovic in the 1970 trial. Strafsache Lucas 1970, 47a. 28.  “OB” to RA, April 28, 1967, HHStAW 461/37638 Bd. 168, Bl 32. 29.  Pöppinghege, “‘Ein herrliches Sommersemester,” 196. 30.  Pöppinghege, 197–98. 31.  Student record (Münster) for Franz Bernhard Lucas, University of Rostock Archive. 32.  Ferdinand, “Die medizinische Fakultät,” 444–45. 33.  Ferdinand, 449.

66  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 34.  Ferdinand, 457. 35.  Ferdinand, 460–61. 36.  Pöppinghege, “Studentische Repräsentationsorgane,” 203. See also Vieten, Medizinstudenten in Münster, 261. 37.  Hörster-Philipps and Vieten, “Westfälische-Wilhelmsuniversität,” 85. 38.  Kröner, “Die Fakultät,” 999. 39.  Kröner, 995. 40.  Kröner, 994. 41.  Kröner, 995. 42.  The Sterilization Law was passed on 15 July 1933 but remained unannounced for ten days to allow for the passing of the Concordat, as the Catholic Church would likely have withheld its acceptance in light of the Sterilization Law’s tenets. See Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 88–89. 43.  Westfälische Landeszeitung, 21 July 1933, and Münsterischer Anzeiger, 21 July 1933, both quoted in Witt, “Karl Wilhelm Jötten,” 975–76. 44. Witt. 45. Heiber, Universität unterm Hakenkreuz, 140–41. 46.  Student record for Franz Bernhard Lucas, University of Rostock Archive. 47. Heiber, Universität unterm Hakenkreuz, 141–42. 48.  Student record for Franz Bernhard Lucas, University of Rostock Archive. 49.  SSO Lucas, 587. The general draft in Germany took effect on 16 March 1935. 50.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 11–12. 51.  Sonderarchiv Moskau, Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, D1A FOND 1367, Konzentrationslager und Kriegsgefangenenlager in Deutschland und in den besetzten Gebieten, 1/122, T.1 (1-476), 238 M 187, Personalakten, Wehrpässe, Sanitärpässe von SS-Wachmännern des KZ. 1940–1944, Wehrstammbuch Franz Lucas, Bl. 148 T1, 150. 52.  Sonderarchiv Moskau, 153. 53.  Assessment of Franz Lucas, Oranienburg, 25 September 1942, Sonderarchiv Moskau, 157–58. 54.  Lucas, “Extrauteringravidität,” 45. 55.  Lucas, 45. 56.  Müller, “Erkennung und Behandlung der ektopische Schwangerschaft.” 57.  Lucas, “Extrauteringravidität,” 1. 58.  Neither name is listed among the Nazi gynecologists reported in Dross et al., “Ausführer und Vollstrecker,” S1–S158. 59.  Granzow and Suckut, Löwengrube, 3–4. 60.  See Czech, “Nazi Medical Crimes,” 228–29. 61.  Czech, 225. 62.  Wetzell, “Eugenics,” 149-51. 63. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 317. 64.  Bock, 205. 65.  Bock, 286. 66.  Another example of changing viewpoints is the eminent Berlin psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, who was an expert appraiser on an appeals court for compulsory sterilization. See Härtel, “Karl Bonhoeffer als Gutachter.” 67. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 343. 68.  Binding and Hoche, Freigabe der Vernichtung. 69.  “Eröffnungs-Ansprache des I. Vorsitzenden H. Fuchs, Posen,” Verhandlungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie, 26. Versammlung, Vienna, 27–30 October 1941, in Archiv für Gynäkologie. Organ der deutschen Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1942), 4–5. 70.  Dross et al., “Ausführer und Vollstrecker,” S18–19.

radical iz ation  •  67 71. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 183. 72.  Lucas, “Extrauteringravidität,” 13. 73.  Lucas, 4. 74.  Lucas, 39. 75.  Racial hygienists explained syphilis as a disease of the higher classes who married later and spent more time in urban areas. See Heitkötter, Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie, 77. 76. Harten, Himmlers Lehrer, 304-5. 77.  See “Die SS-ärztliche Akademie in Graz.” Haus der Geschichte Österreich, retrieved 20 December 2022 from https://www.hdgoe.at/ss-aerztliche-akademie-graz. 78.  Kubica, “Crimes of Josef Mengele,” 320. 79. Czarnowski, “Vom ‘reichen Material,’” 225. See also Lichtenegger, “Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Nachgeschichte,” 62, and Kernbauer, “Ende der freien Wissenschaft.” 80.  Hopfer, “Die Spur führt nach Graz,” esp. 49–53. 81.  Podlaha, “Surgery and Medical Care,” 62. 82.  In Klee, Auschwitz, NS-Medizin (34), citing Bláha, “Mediziner” (56). 83.  Czarnowski, “Vom ‘reichen Material,’” 231. 84. Pukrop, SS-Mediziner, 509–10. 85.  Pukrop, 511–12. 86.  Document of the SS-Nachr. Ers. Rgt. Regimentsarzt, Nürnberg, 15 February 1943, SSO Franz Lucas, 589–90. 87.  SSO Franz Lucas, 582. 88. Wegener, Hitlers politische Soldaten, 165–66. 89.  Wegener, 169. 90.  Two examples in passing: Raphael Gross mentions advertisements for “Jew-free” beach vacations on the Baltic and North Sea in Anständig geblieben, 20–21. Wendy Lower describes the visceral reactions of young German women who visited the Polish ghettos in Hitler’s Furies, 82–85. 91. Dienststellen und Einheiten des Ersatzwesens und Ergänzungswesens der Waffen-SS, SSNachr.Ausb.u. Ers. Rgt. Nürnberg, Mai—15. Aug. 1943, BArch Freiburg, RS 5, 903, Bd. 3, 6049/1610. 92. SS-Obersturmbannführer und SS-Standortarzt Fritz Baader der Waffen-SS Nürnberg, Beurteilung von Franz Lucas, 1 September 1943, SSO Lucas, 578. 93. SS-Obersturmbannführer und SS-Standortarzt Fritz Baader an SS-FührungshauptamtAmtsgruppe D Sanitätswesen der Waffen-SS IIa, Beförderung von Franz Lucas in der Waffen-SS, 9 September 1943, SSO Lucas, 576–77. Lucas had not seen combat and his only award was in horseback riding (“Reitersportabzeichen”). 94.  Lucas’s Nuremberg duties were transferred to Dr. Minke, an assistant physician in the Luftwaffe (SSO Lucas, 578). 95.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,188. 96.  Conversation with Christian Raabe, 12 May 2011, Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main). 97. Jäger, Verbrechen, 139. 98.  Jäger, 137. 99.  Kunzmann and Milius, Fallschirmjäger der Waffen-SS, n.p. 100.  Kunzmann and Milius, 11–13. During the Chlum segment, according to one account, there was little for the paratroopers to do except enjoy the hot springs. 101.  SSO Helmersen, Erwin von, 743–44. 102.  Helmersen, 744. 103. Schmuhl, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 370. See also Lasik, “Personalbesetzung,” 307 ff. 104.  Testimony of Wilhelm Schubert, 17 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 75–76. 105.  Testimony of Gerd Kemper, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 77. 106.  Testimony of Hermann Harms, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 78–79.

68  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 107.  Testimony of Josef Seidel, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 80. 108.  Seidel, 81. 109.  The document in question, “Verordnungsblatt der Waffen-SS,” Jahrgang 4, Nr. 24, is dated 5 January 1944 and published by the SS-Führungshauptamt in Berlin. It is included as part of the Strafsache Lucas 1970 transcript, Anlage zum Protokoll vom 4.9.70 (handwritten), between pages 48 and 49. 110.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 96–97. 111.  Baader is sufficiently unclear, saying, instead of “with Lucas,” “mit diesem oder jenem” (with this one or that one), “der Betreffende” (the one concerned), and “einer” (one). Strafsache Lucas 1970, 97. 112.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 96–97. The transcript misspells Baader as Bader. 113.  Schlussvortrag des Staatsanwaltes (Jürgen) Hess 4 Kz. 2/63, (FBI/LF) p. 98. Thanks to Werner Renz for alerting me to this unpublished document. 114.  Schlussvortrag Hess, 96–97. 115.  SSO Baader, Dr. Fritz, 9.4.09, page number illegible. 116.  Hermann Fegelein, letter on behalf of Dr. Fritz Baader, SSO Baader, Dr. Fritz, 9.4.09, 35,624. 117. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, 345–48. 118.  SSO Baader, Dr. Fritz, 9.4.09, 25,665–66. 119.  Siegert, “Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg,” 470–71. 120. Ravensbrück-Dokumentation, Büro für angewandten Realismus (ed.), Ludwigshafen, 1997, Bibliothek KZ-Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, Sign. 4988. My thanks to Marco Pukrop for this reference. 121.  RA to FL, 5 October 1965, 307. 122. Burleigh, Third Reich, 345.

2

A uschwitz -B irkenau (D ecember 1943–A ugust 1944)

•••

From 15 December 1943 to 6 August 1944, Franz Lucas spent his first and longest term of service as camp doctor in Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and as troop doctor three kilometers away in Auschwitz I. Thanks to the publicity of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, he is best known for his selections in Birkenau. What were his medical duties in the compounds to which he was assigned as camp doctor? How did he get along with other SS doctors, prisoner doctors, and prisoner populations? What can we conclude about his involvement in selections? These questions yield few comprehensive answers. It is at least clear that the dates of his SS records correct his own vacillating memory of events. Does this mean we can count on memories of prisoner doctors instead, especially their habit of contrasting him to Josef Mengele? Lucas’s story emerges in his denials, forgetfulness, claims, and concessions, beginning with his dates of arrival and departure. In his meeting with Frankfurt prosecutor Joachim Kügler in Elmshorn on 15 November 1961, Lucas reported arriving at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. In his follow-up letter of 5 December 1961, Lucas maintained that he spent no more than two months at Auschwitz.1 This time span became “two or three months” in his interrogation on 14 February 1962, carried out by Frankfurt court magistrate Dr. Heinz Düx.2 In his cross-examination on the eleventh day of the main trial, on 27 January 1964, Lucas avowed that he was transferred to Auschwitz in early 1944 and stayed five months. Reluctant to commit to a particular date of arrival, he claimed a poor memory and openness to correction: “I indicated above having come to Auschwitz in Spring 1944 but added right away that I didn’t want to be tied to that as a result.”3 Claiming a poor memory was Lucas’s way of avoiding association with the “liquidations” of the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb), in March and July, and

70  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

of the Gypsy family camp (BIIe), at the beginning of August. Over time, he also denied associating with or knowing much about SS personnel, notably Mengele, a mentor to him early on who was involved in small- and large-scale murders. Besides the military records that show Lucas’s WVHA transfer to Auschwitz before Christmas 1943, a vivid corrective to Lucas’s poor memory comes from his signatures on death certificates. On Christmas Eve 1943, he certified the deaths of thirty prisoners in Birkenau. On Certificate 35365/1913, for example, “recorded according to the written instructions of the medical doctor Lucas,” the cause of death of Piotr Borejko, 33, a farmer from Tarnopol, was heart failure from pulmonary edema and dysentery.4 Another prisoner, the seventeen-year-old Warsaw mechanic Jan Domanski, died of heart failure stemming from enterocolitis (inflammation of the small intestine).5 For all thirty prisoners, such conditions as enteritis, pneumonia, typhus, and renal failure had combined with heart failure to cause death. The wide array of causes provided believable-sounding euphemisms for malnutrition and exhaustion. The witness Jenny Schaner, responsible for typing information on these death certificates, remembered Lucas’s name during her court testimony in April 1964: “Most of the recorded causes of death were fictitious. Thus, for example, we were never allowed to enter ‘shot while escaping’ in the book; I had to write ‘heart failure.’ And ‘cardiac weakness’ was the cause listed instead of ‘malnutrition.’” But beginning in 1943, Schaner stated, “the Jews died without special entry.”6 After a year into the trial, it was by reading aloud a sampling of the 151 death certificates from volumes 24 and 25 of the Sterbebücher (death records), all of them showing Lucas’s signature, that the court settled on his arrival date. The signatures were two months earlier than the date of late February 1944 that Lucas and one of his witnesses, the prisoner doctor Tadeusz Śnieszko, gave for his arrival in Auschwitz.7 Other documents with his signature, though unavailable to the court at the time, help establish his location and allegiances between mid-December and early August. First are the customary SS oaths of secrecy. On 5 January 1944, Lucas’s boss Dr. Eduard Wirths presented Lucas with a document certifying that Lucas had been informed of his general responsibilities in Auschwitz and that anything he encountered in the course of his duties required his oath of secrecy, even upon leaving the SS.8 A similar signed pledge of 19 May 1944 addressed issues arising from increased transports of Hungarian Jews arriving in Birkenau. It stated that death was the punishment for misappropriating Jewish possessions, that unconditional silence on all measures taken in the “evacuation of the Jews” was demanded, and that complete commitment was expected for ensuring the smoothest success of the mission. Disobeying orders incriminated him; any infraction of the document meant treason; only the Führer could decide the life or death of a state enemy; only the commandant could punish a prisoner; and only the Reichsführer-SS (Heinrich Himmler) and associated personnel had authority

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  71

to carry out executions. A handshake sealed the pledge to carry out duties punctually and conscientiously.9 The prohibition against booty did not stop Auschwitz doctors and their wives, such as the Rohdes and Kitts, from enhancing their living spaces outside the camp with possessions that Jewish deportees had brought with them. Hermann Langbein recalled overhearing the wife of Dr. Werner Rohde commenting on how she was looking forward to the next transport of Jewish deportees in order to take advantage of the loot gathered by the Kanada commando, named after “the land of plenty” because of the vast amount of warehouse space required to stockpile the belongings confiscated from the deportees.10 Prakseda Witek, a Polish girl of fourteen who cleaned house for the Rohdes, insisted their house was free of booty, but that Dr. Bruno Kitt and his wife occasionally “sent off to Germany a large steamer trunk full of the most various valuables.”11 How seriously Lucas took the oath is unknown. Writing about the misappropriation of valuables, Stefan Kühl argues convincingly that goods seized in the camps and ghettos enriched the German guards in the same way Jewish bank deposits, homes, and businesses enriched non-Jewish German citizens, and that “comrades who played a particularly active role in the deportations and mass shootings would not be reported to their superiors.”12 As far as one can tell, Lucas’s oath signature coincided with the second of his trips from Auschwitz to Osnabrück. His first furlough came in the second half of February 1944 after his mother’s death and an Allied bombing raid on Osnabrück. From Osnabrück, Lucas sent a telegram to Auschwitz on 23 February

Figure 2.1.  SS Oath of Responsibility signed by Franz Lucas at Auschwitz on 19 May 1944. Source: Bundesarchiv ZM 0885 Akte 3. Used by permission.

72  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

requesting a three-day extension.13 Three months later, Lucas requested another trip to Osnabrück.14 This came after receiving a Lebenszeichen (sign of life) telegram from his sister on 13 May that another Allied “terror attack” had destroyed his family’s home. It was addressed to Lukas (with a k) at the Auschwitz SSLazarett (clinic).15 Indeed, this RAF bombing, which claimed 239 lives and left six thousand homeless, followed bombings on 7 and 8 May that claimed 160 lives.16 On 19 May, Eduard Wirths and Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer approved a ten-day leave for Lucas. On 31 May, Lucas telegraphed from the Wehrmacht commandant’s office in Osnabrück to request a four-day extension. On 2 June, Baer asked for a justification of the extension, as Lucas’s absence was disruptive. Lucas had already requested an extension during a previous home visit, and now his engagement (Einsatz) was urgent.17 These telegrams give critical information about Lucas’s ramp duty. His twoweek absence came during the height of the RSHA Hungarian transports. Is it a coincidence that he asked for a leave of absence on the very day he signed his name to carrying out and keeping silent the so-called “evacuation” (i.e., murder) of the Jews? Did his request for more time reflect his aversion to returning to the killing center? His oaths showed Lucas at the scene of the Hungarian campaign while his telegrams removed him from it, at least temporarily. This hard evidence helps us examine Lucas’s self-justifying remarks. Lucas claimed ignorance of Auschwitz before arriving there, surprise at the condition of the prisoners, and disgust at learning about the gas chamber. He insisted that his identity as a physician was to preserve lives, not to exterminate them. It follows that his first return to Osnabrück was an occasion to vent his dismay about his duties to two authority figures in Osnabrück, one of which was Archbishop Berning.18 Both Berning and Baader had advised a low profile, with no mention of religious conviction or civil courage. To believe Lucas, he was forced to muffle his humane instincts. In Baader’s view, orders were orders, while Berning discouraged resistance to criminal orders if it endangered his life. In 1970, Lucas remembered the name of another authority he had consulted, a judge named Krämer, who “knew nothing about such things and could also give me no rules for behavior.”19 Lucas was thus careful to declare that legal, military, and clerical representatives from his hometown had advised him from February 1944 onward to carry out orders he received in Auschwitz, no matter how morally repugnant.20 On 1 November 1964, Rudolf Aschenauer petitioned for Lucas’s sister, Leni Ochs, to testify that Lucas’s letters home communicated the pressure he was under. In court on 5 December 1964, Ochs confirmed that her father had always been agitated until the daily post arrived to dispel his fear that Lucas was in trouble. She too claimed that Lucas had visited Bishop Berning in Osnabrück, but at the end of 1943. Prosecutor Joachim Kügler and adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond wanted her left unsworn as a witness—that is to say, the presiding judge did not request her to swear on the truth or comprehensiveness of her remarks,

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  73

since she was related to the defendant.21 Ochs suspected that Lucas had told their father about Auschwitz but had said nothing to her, his own sister.22 There is no sign that the court heard her discuss their mother’s death or Lucas’s visit home in late May 1944. Lucas never mentioned that May trip either, even though it would have provided an alibi for his absence from two weeks in Birkenau’s selection rotation of the SS doctors, during which tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews perished. During his furloughs, if Lucas had indeed conveyed the conditions of Auschwitz and his fear of disobeying orders there, he would have broken his signed vow of silence and Fritz Baader’s advice to avoid drawing attention to himself. He would have had cause to fear—though not so much for not carrying out orders as for breaking the code of silence about their content. Conveniently enough, religious authorities gave him a reason to do nothing except keep silent, giving reason to believe that renouncing his own church membership in favor of the SS had not imposed a crisis of conscience. So far, I have established that Lucas began at Birkenau in mid-December 1943 and took Osnabrück trips in late February and late May 1944. His oversight as camp doctor of the Gypsy and Theresienstadt family camps, his alleged short relocation from Birkenau to become troop doctor in Auschwitz, and his departure from Auschwitz in early August also require careful discussion of dates. According to Tadeusz Szymański, the prisoner doctor in charge of the infectious diseases division for women in Block 26 of the Gypsy camp, Lucas took over as camp doctor for Mengele for six weeks to two months, beginning in February 1944.23 Szymański’s colleague Tadeusz Śnieszko treated patients in Block 32 who suffered from typhus, dysentery, malaria, and tuberculosis.24 He became aware of Lucas after Mengele came down with typhus, which Śnieszko (mis)remembered as happening at the end of February 1944 (Mengele actually confirmed his positive test for typhus on Christmas Eve 1943). He had not seen Lucas in the Gypsy camp before then.25 Śnieszko estimated Lucas’s time there as between four and six weeks. Having heard of Mengele’s service in other Birkenau sectors, including the women’s camp (BI), he was uncertain whether Lucas substituted in other areas besides the Gypsy camp during Mengele’s bout with typhus.26 Previously, Szymański and Śnieszko remembered the SS Gypsy camp doctors as, “in succession, Dr. Josef Mengele, then for some months Dr. Franz Lucas; others such as Dr. Heinz Thilo and Dr. Fritz Klein were engaged for short periods as substitutes.”27 Another prisoner doctor of the Gypsy camp, Aron Bejlin, wrote in a 1962 statement that Lucas first arrived there in late 1943 or early 1944 in the company of Mengele. Later he came alone and spoke to Professor Berthold Epstein, a wellknown pediatrician from Prague who was assisting Mengele on a noma project. Epstein reported approvingly of Lucas after the conversation and said that Lucas had come from Buchenwald (untrue) and had expressed his consternation about the intolerable conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Either Epstein or another pris-

74  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

oner doctor had mentioned that Lucas had studied at the German university in Prague and had passed the pediatrics exam under Epstein. From fellow prisoner doctors in the adjoining camp BIIf (men’s hospital), Bejlin heard that Lucas had been ordered to Birkenau to substitute for Dr. Thilo. During his stint of two to three months, no selections took place. But when Thilo returned to BIIf, so did the previous fear, tension, and selections. The prisoners spread the rumor that Lucas had volunteered for the front because he could not watch the horrors of the camp. What is meant by this is uncertain, although those horrors were more than likely the result of his SS duties. Usually, it was the medical orderlies who spread rumors to the prisoners out of boredom, Bejlin maintained.28 Lucas’s recollection that his trip to Osnabrück followed shortly upon his arrival at Auschwitz and that he was given the care of both family camps upon his return appears unlikely and incomplete.29 It is unlikely in light of the telegram that he sent from Osnabrück on 23 February, and incomplete in that he was not limited to the family camps. Likely he also shared the responsibility for the hospitals of the quarantine camp (BIIa) and the men’s camp (BIIf). What inhibits our knowledge of his sphere of action is the fact that from Birkenau we hear only from prisoner doctors close enough to observe him in the Gypsy camp. Many were transported to different camps (Śnieszko to Ravensbrück/Barth, Szymański to Mauthausen) after the “liquidation” of the Gypsy camp. There is no record that Theresienstadt prisoner doctors ever testified about Lucas. The prisoner doctors in the Gypsy camp were more intent to contrast Lucas to Josef Mengele than to document the dates and spheres of his responsibilities. Władysław Fejkiel remembered that Lucas had treated the prisoner doctors and the patients kindly and had stopped all selections in the prisoner infirmary.30 But it became apparent that he knew this by hearsay from fellow prisoner doctor Tadeusz Szymański.31 It is also worth noting Rudolf Aschenauer’s suggestion that Szymański consider, before taking the stand in January 1965, a claim Lucas had made almost a year earlier: “For the general behavior of my client, it would be instructive and meaningful for the court if you could confirm that, in the Gypsy Camp, where he was together with you, Dr. Lucas did not select.” Besides leading his witness, Aschenauer also informed him that Lucas’s transfers were punitive, due to resistance—but this was only Lucas’s claim, not an established fact.32 In court, Szymański stressed that Lucas’s behavior as a true doctor allowed prisoner doctors to save the lives of Sinti and Roma in a manner impossible under Mengele.33 Aron Bejlin was struck by Lucas speaking with Dr. Berthold Epstein about the terrible sanitary conditions in the camp. Like Fejkiel, Bejlin relied on hearsay. While Fejkiel claimed that Lucas had come to Auschwitz from the front, Bejlin heard from his colleagues in BIIf that Lucas was transferred back to the front as punishment for associating with prisoners.34 In her book on Auschwitz survivor witnesses, Katharina Stengel notes that Polish prisoner doctors who tes-

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  75

tified were correct to keep the court’s attention on SS perpetrators and prisoner victims, instead of getting lost in reports of prisoner hierarchies and conflicts according to religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Still, this universalizing of victims came at the cost of making it seem that the SS treated all prisoners the same. But non-Jewish Polish medical functionaries had benefits that increased their chances of survival, and they rarely mentioned the terrible prison conditions and selections of Jewish prisoners. Stengel wonders why Polish doctors were silent about ethnic, religious, and national markers in their testimony. Did antisemitism make them numb to the murder of Jewish children and adults, or did their proud antifascist universalism prevent them from addressing hierarchies of persecution? They spoke of “getting Dr. (Friedrich) Entress sent away” to Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), for example, without mentioning that Entress had free reign there to persecute almost exclusively Jewish prisoners. Such were the inclusions and exclusions of a witness group willing to clear Dr. Lucas’s name.35 Fejkiel and his compatriots, impressed with Lucas’s divergence from Entress, may have kept quiet about Lucas’s actions not affecting them personally. In his opening statement on 27 January 1964, Lucas reported the appalling conditions in the Gypsy family camp (BIIe). Barracks had no windows or bunks but only crates that each slept five or six cramped prisoners. There were no real toilets and water was scarce. Between six and eight thousand prisoners, little more than skeletons, lived in the camp. During his daily rounds, Lucas could do little about the ulcers and boils resulting from malnourishment.36 While prisoner doctors performed most of the medical tasks, Lucas recorded and photographed “for study purposes” the rampant cases of noma, a disease that produced gangrenous cavities in the cheeks, most noticeably of starving Sinti and Roma children. The suggestions he claimed making to improve the catastrophic sanitary conditions were ignored by his superiors, despite his duty as camp physician to maintain hygiene.37 Yet Lucas mentioned nothing about the study that Mengele recruited Berthold Epstein to undertake (assisted by Rudolf Vitek) or what treatment was found for the disease; nor did he note that Mengele viewed noma as a curious proclivity of Sinti and Roma children and was uninterested in giving them sustained nutrition to help them heal.38 Conditions in the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb) were only slightly better. Families wore the clothing they had on when they arrived. Food and medicine were slightly better, but barracks lacked windows.39 For both camps, Lucas identified his supervisor as Dr. Heinz Thilo, whose lack of support made Lucas responsible by default.40 Prisoner care rested in the hands of some thirty to forty prisoner doctors, with whom Lucas made morning rounds.41 Lucas estimated that the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau complex had ten SS doctors. His job was to oversee the medical care of the inmates, their hospital, the distribution of their food, and the signing of their death certificates. Professor Epstein filled out the death

76  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

certificates for him to sign, which according to Lucas were never contrived. He was confident that mistreatment was the exception in the Gypsy camp.42 Because the hospital was always overflowing, many of the sick excused from work were released back into the camp. Lucas also claimed to have created separate barracks for tuberculosis and infectious diseases.43 Other requests he made were considered superfluous in the fifth year of the war. The watered-down barley soup came nowhere near the recommended daily allotment of 1,680 calories. Fritz Hartjenstein, commandant of Birkenau, told Lucas not to make so much of an issue involving “only Gypsies.”44 Lucas’s explanations emphasized resistance and initiative, along with complete absence from selections, floggings, and executions.45 He was horrified to hear from Dr. Thilo that Dr. Mengele had once selected all inmates for the gas chamber who showed symptoms of scarlet fever.46 Lucas favored interaction with prisoner doctors while monitoring sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene as best he could.47 That he volunteered information at all about his actions made him stand out from his fellow defendants, which helped the court overlook that he was less than forthcoming about his sordid duties. These were left to adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond to bring out into the open. In his closing statement on 25 May 1965, Ormond reminded the court that SS doctors selected Jewish men and women on the ramp, ensured the safety of the medical orderlies at the gas chamber, and certified completion of the execution process. Along with the orderlies—men like Herbert Scherpe, Emil Hantl, and Josef Klehr—they administered lethal injections to prisoners, especially in Block 11 of the political division. They attended secretive or public executions ordered by the RSHA or the Security Police. Their job was to interrupt corporal punishments that became too severe, but to Ormond’s knowledge not a single Auschwitz flogging had been suspended. Furthermore, SS doctors had to perform abortions as late as the fifth month on “alien” women (outsiders to the Volk community). Beyond all this, they carried out experiments on prisoners. Chief medical officer Eduard Wirths was complicit in experiments involving cancer, Josef Mengele did research on twins, Lucas sterilized Sinti prisoners, and Werner Rohde and Victor Capesius tested drugs on prisoners. Though not SS camp doctors themselves, Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann had permission to explore noninvasive and radiation sterilization techniques on prisoners.48 In none of these experiments could Ormond identify an impulse of preserving life that was supposed to motivate medical studies.49 Thus, SS doctors concentrated on three main areas. First, on the level of intervention, they sterilized, aborted, and experimented, along with monitoring prostitutes and their visitors in the camp bordellos. At the level of personal contact—this is also the reason Ormond rehearsed their duties for the court—SS doctors killed by injecting, giving barbiturate overdoses, and selecting for the gas chamber. Second, in an administrative capacity, they monitored disease, nu-

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  77

trition, hygiene, and sanitation, attempting to keep contagions away from the SS. Third, SS doctors attended floggings, hangings, and shootings, certified the deaths of prisoners, and delivered the coup de grâce when necessary. They entered mostly false causes of death on the certificates they signed. None of these tasks were haphazard or avoidable, because chief physicians posted service plans regularly, and no SS doctor could claim being assigned exclusively to care for SS troops and their families.50 SS medical duties were broader and more sinister than Lucas ever conveyed. Floggings or executions fell outside his orbit of responsibility and personal mandate to heal. Selections on the Birkenau platform or in the hospital wards triggered his resolute opposition. In Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen especially, he shrugged off responsibility for generating lists or meeting quotas that reduced the prisoner population. Even after admitting to a handful of ramp selections under duress, Lucas never admitted to performing duties at the gas chamber. No doubt Lucas disliked repulsive duties that came with SS camp medical service. Still, the ability to choose when to show interest in individual “cases” allowed him the time and space to gain experience as a young doctor, all the more as he gained the trust of prisoner doctors. In court, he fostered the sense that he was at permanent odds with his bosses, trying to do more than they cared about and less than they demanded. Given his job description, though, he was guilty of neglect if nothing else. Perhaps he had less control in matters of nutrition, medical treatment, and typhus or typhoid fever—real threats that never made it into Lucas’s narrative. The more measurable neglect was his hesitation to shed his SS uniform for a less predictable but more conscionable medical commitment to healing. Some SS doctors had proof of being refused when requesting a return to the front. Others could prove that they persisted and returned to physical discomforts and dangers, but with the relief of performing surgeries on their own men, not selecting prisoners for the gas. Still others insisted on doing their best to escape the strictures of camp duties. Despite such claims, many had the comfort of going home to wives and children on the other side of the electric fence. This safety and comfort should be the backdrop for weighing postwar claims about fighting to improve conditions with one’s hands tied by war shortages, or being badgered by heartless commandants, shifting camp priorities, and orders from Berlin.

Theresienstadt Family Camp (BIIb) Ironically, although he insisted on never having seen inmates punished, it was an inmate’s punishment that helped Lucas explain a major shift in his duties. As he told it, a German capo from the Gypsy camp suffered a detached retina after a beating by an SS man. Lucas drove the capo to the main camp, Auschwitz I, for

78  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

treatment by a specialist. When Lucas reported the event to Wirths and the camp commandant (Fritz Hartjenstein), a trial was initiated against Lucas.51 Claiming that the trial never materialized, he nevertheless insisted that it brought about his punitive transfer to Auschwitz I, the main camp, to serve as troop doctor.52 Leaving Birkenau (Auschwitz II) hardly counts as a punishment, but that is not the point. It seems reasonable that by identifying his new job as troop doctor in Auschwitz I, Lucas exempted himself from complicity in the first “liquidation” of the Theresienstadt family camp on 8–9 March and the second “liquidation” on 10–12 July 1944—as though his tasks in Auschwitz precluded his reappearance in Birkenau. Lucas claimed only secondary knowledge of the “liquidations.”53 The court never pressed him on whether he was referring to the March or July gassings. It had to have been the March event, because his shifting answers conveyed that he was long since gone from Auschwitz by 10 July, not to mention by the start of the “liquidation” of the Gypsy camp on the evening of 2 August 1944. His papers show his transfer to Mauthausen on 6 August. He manipulated his dates to avoid culpability. Explaining that a main assignment in Auschwitz disqualified him from involvement in the “liquidations” ignored Lucas’s place in the regular rotation for selections. Some of the best information about Lucas’s role in the Theresienstadt family camp massacres comes through the perspective of one of its few survivors, the historian Otto Dov Kulka. The second witness from Israel, Kulka was considered “very intelligent” by the Frankfurt court on the basis of his appearance on 30 July 1964. Katharina Stengel notes that Judge Hofmeyer was as mesmerized by Kulka’s testimony as the defense was threatened by it. Kulka spoke with authority, partly because he had dealt with the topic in previous statements and in his own historical pursuits. Hofmeyer let him talk much longer than the forensic facts might have warranted.54 As a child, Kulka arrived with his mother in the first transport of five thousand Jews from the Czech ghetto and former fortress of Theresienstadt to the BIIb camp on 8 September 1943. His father Erich Kulka had been imprisoned for months elsewhere in Auschwitz as a skilled plumber.55 Nearly a tenth of the deportees were seventeen years old or younger. A month later, on 7 October 1943, another 1,260 Jewish children and 53 adults were sent from Theresienstadt to Birkenau, where all were gassed upon arrival. On 16 and 18 December, two more transports totaling 4,964 Jews arrived, this time with more than a tenth of them children and youth.56 By the beginning of March 1944, 1,100 Jews from the September transport died under the horrible conditions in the overcrowded camp. Beginning about ten o’clock on the evening of 8 March, in a sequence that lasted the entire night, trucks arrived to take away forty prisoners at a time, first the men to crematorium III and then the women to crematorium II. SS guards Wilhelm Boger and Stefan Baretzki were among the guards who maintained order as the women and men

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  79

were separated, and Boger checked the lists to ensure that all prisoners from the September transport were included on the trucks.57 Altogether, 3,792 prisoners from the September transport perished. Only seventy-five prisoners, mainly doctors and sets of twins, remained. According to Erich Kulka, Otto and his mother were in the infirmary and escaped the gassing “because the truck on which he rode could not start in the deep mud of the camp road.”58 On 16, 17, and 19 May, another 7,449 Jews arrived from Theresienstadt, raising the number of prisoners in BIIb to around ten thousand. In early July, Mengele and other doctors, along with camp leader Schwarzhuber, selected some 3,080 healthy young women and men to provide labor for other camps. On 6 July, in the children’s block, out of several dozen boys ranging in age from twelve to sixteen (reports vary), some ninety boys were selected for labor and moved into BIId, the men’s camp.59 Kulka was a part of this group.60 The boys were housed in Block 13, the punishment block, under the supervision of Emil Bednarek, a German prisoner appointed as block elder.61 On 7 July, a thousand of the selected prisoners were transported to Sachsenhausen. On 9 July, two thousand more were moved to BIa, the women’s compound.62 On the evening of 10–11 July, three thousand women and children who remained in BIIb were taken to the crematorium and gassed. On the evening of 11–12 July, the remaining four thousand Jewish men and women in the compound were also murdered.63 Lucas’s responses to testimony offer clues to his involvement in the liquidations. In court on 30 July 1964, Kulka recalled seeing Baretzki frequently in the family camp, including during the massive selection that took place before the second liquidation in July. He had also seen Mengele come into the children’s block with “the second camp doctor,” a man interested in the children’s education there who also came frequently into the infirmary. This second doctor had accompanied Mengele, Schwarzhuber, Baretzki, and Martin Buntrock, the block leader. Kulka had not actually seen the second camp doctor select in the Theresienstadt compound because he and the other children did not undergo selection at this point. 64 The adults were forced to undergo five to seven selections preceding the second liquidation.65 It was usually Mengele or this second doctor who selected. The selected prisoners told Kulka and the others about it.66 In court, Kulka identified Lucas as this second camp doctor he had seen in the children’s block.67 He remembered seeing Lucas before the first liquidation in March 1944, perhaps in February or even earlier.68 He had seen Lucas while convalescing in the hospital there.69 But it was only Lucas’s ramp selections that Kulka witnessed. From the children’s barracks (Block 31), he could identify the men selecting on the ramp: Mengele was elegant with quick and effortless gestures; Lucas was heavier, slower, less frequently on the ramp; Baretzki was crude and yelled.70 Whereas Mengele always appeared elegant and smart, Lucas was more paternal, kinder to the children.71 Lucas’s response to Kulka’s recollection was blanket denial:

80  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r Regarding the date that the camp was liquidated, I was already replaced to become troop doctor. I just wanted to say that the witness surely knows me as camp doctor, but in no way did I come into the compound daily with Mengele. I was in the camp daily, but not with Mengele. That was one Dr. König, who was also present at the liquidation of the camp, as witnesses here have already expressed. About the second liquidation, I don’t have to say anything at all. In that respect, the witness, who was eleven years old at the time, is making a mistake.72

Assistant Judge Hummerich recalled Lucas’s insistence during his first crossexamination that his arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau was later than mid-December 1943 and that he had taken ten days of vacation at the end of February 1944: “And now you want to move forward your entire sojourn in the Theresienstadt compound . . . and tell us now from January to beginning of March. Which is correct? . . . Herr Lucas, we can’t orient ourselves so as to move forward the date of arrival in order to avoid colliding with the first liquidation of the Theresienstadt compound. What is true? When did you arrive?” Lucas responded: “Things were such then that I really can’t give an exact time and I am tempted, due to the serious events in the Theresienstadt compound, to say that at that time I was no longer camp doctor but was troop doctor in Auschwitz.”73 Lucas was clearly unprepared for the question. Kulka was not the only witness to place Lucas in the Theresienstadt family compound at the time of the liquidations. Months after Kulka’s testimony, Lucas’s fellow defendant, Stefan Baretzki, did so as well, as we will discover later when examining Baretzki’s role in prying a confession from Lucas about his ramp selections. Despite Kulka’s claim that the “second doctor” had been seen with the other SS officers and guards involved in selections, the court’s justification of its verdict made no mention of Lucas’s connection to Theresienstadt family camp BIIb, although it did find credible Kulka’s identification of Lucas as a doctor he saw selecting Jewish prisoners pushed and shoved onto the ramp.

Comradeship On the basis of activities that required his pledged silence, Lucas was bound together with fellow secret bearers of Himmler’s elite corps in a community of fate. Spending time with fellow officers was essential to ensure the fulfilment of duties graver than sorting the belongings of deportees. To believe Lucas’s account, though, both companionship and mentorship excluded him. His military medical peers held no interest for him, and his sole mentor knew enough about Auschwitz to admonish him to “lie low.” Fraternization with prisoners was subject to reprimand. Lucas’s claim of being punished for helping a German capo is made less credible by the fact that the capo was German, probably a criminal or political prisoner. No record of punishment is found on Lucas’s record either, whereas his

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  81

colleague Dr. Willy Frank received an official warning from Eduard Wirths for becoming too familiar with his dental staff.74 A photo album belonging to trial defendant Karl Höcker, discovered by a US lieutenant colonel in a Frankfurt hotel room in 1946, was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, seven years after Höcker’s death. This album gives clear evidence of companionship among SS leadership and doctors. It includes images dating from June 1944, a month after Höcker arrived as adjutant for Richard Baer: relaxed group outings to the SS retreat lodge in Solahütte, hunting trips, and music. In the photographs, Höcker eats blueberries with SS women while a man plays accordion. A group of photos labeled “After the Excursion” show Drs. Klein, Schumann, and Wirths with other physicians around a table. Another series captures an SS sing-along featuring the relaxed and smoking figures of Karl Höcker, Otto Moll, Rudolf Höss, Richard Baer, Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Josef Mengele—in short, important SS leaders bonding off duty. It is chilling to remember that their comradery was happening at the end of a successful campaign of killing and burning hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.75 Lucas does not appear in any of the photographs of off-duty behavior and special occasions. In early June, he was on special leave in Osnabrück, after learning from his sister that the family home had been leveled by Allied “terrorist bombs.” He could have attended the sing-along on 15 July 1944, in honor of Rudolf Höss’s

Figure 2.2.  Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, and Anton Thumann (from left to right), 15 July 1944, during an excursion of SS Auschwitz officers to Solahütte. Höcker Album, Photograph 34755, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of anonymous donor.

82  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

departure from Auschwitz two weeks later on 29 July 1944, but for whatever reason did not. The men most prominent in the photographs are the ones on whom he pinned his misfortune, such as Josef Kramer and Eduard Wirths, or whose reputation made him guilty by association, such as Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss. Of course, Lucas might have been ill or uninterested in celebrating the conclusion to the massive killing campaign. His departure from Auschwitz was only three weeks away. He may have felt self-conscious alongside the architects of extermination, especially Kramer. The introvert Lucas professed only superficial cordiality: “Mostly I avoided the cafeteria, since enough food came from home. There were SS doctors whom one could influence. Repeatedly I told my colleagues that what happened here was a crime. I criticized on a massive scale— except against Dr. Wirths. Several times I tried to convince Dr. Wirths to send me away from Auschwitz. He maintained that camp service was front service. He did not threaten me in a crass way, however.”76 To believe Lucas, his social interactions consisted of encouraging trustworthy doctors to resist the antimedical mission at Auschwitz. But if Wirths was concerned about Dr. Frank becoming too close to prisoners, he would have also noticed if Lucas was too removed from his peers. From his self-description, Lucas comes across as an arrogant loner, a soldier suffering, as Thomas Kühne describes it, under a system that tested his manliness. For such a personality, the so-called German Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community knit together by fate) became a prison.77 Its local installment was a Stubengemeinschaft (parlor community) of chance affiliations into which Lucas was thrown by serving a month in a camp here, a few months in a camp there.78 His superiors in such temporary alliances felt the effects of Lucas’s sullen demeanor and sent him to other camps—if one accepts the pariah image Lucas conveyed. As a single man, Lucas could expect less affirmation than his married medical colleagues. Alcohol, driving privileges, and letters home were ways to fill the loneliness. During his 1970 retrial, Lucas reported sharing his room with a German shepherd from home in the barracks for SS officers just outside the main camp, which included a few of the doctors, two pharmacists, and one dentist.79 He claimed the dentist Dr. Willi Schatz as his conduit for news about Birkenau.80 In 1970 Lucas referred to Schatz, exonerated in the 1965 trial, as his closest colleague. Both men described themselves as slinking around the ramp and escaping back to their rooms as soon as possible.81 Nevertheless, photos prove otherwise. The man identified as Schatz in the Höcker album was recognized as the officer who selected on the ramp in photographs compiled in the Auschwitz (Lili Jacob) album. The court had seen that album without identifying either Schatz or Stefan Baretzki at the time.82 Being an ignorant recluse was Adolf Winkelmann’s less than credible ploy for explaining why he was picked to change places with Lucas at Ravensbrück:

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  83 [I]t was known about me that I lived in a very retired way and had no social intercourse whatsoever . . . and that I did not know anything about the conditions in Germany at that time because no person in the SS was known to me. That is why Dr. Lolling told me when I received my posting instructions that I could take my family with me, that it was a pleasant part of the country, and that as a general practitioner of long standing I could assist in births, and also because affairs had taken place between SS doctors and prisoners and in view of my age they were not to be expected from me, and in any case I should know enough about it.83

On the one hand, it was standard practice to deny affiliation with fellow defendants or anyone else endangered by testimony. Sitting through evening concerts or Nazi ideological presentations by Kurt Knittel at Auschwitz might have made anyone squirm.84 On the other hand, it is hard to believe that Lucas or Winkelmann avoided all such social events that were not required, and even harder to believe that SS doctors received their news of atrocities from prisoner doctors. Thomas Kühne remarks that group solidarity was a precondition for unleashing revenge, such that extending mercy to enemies betrayed one’s comrades. If Commandant Fritz Hartjenstein was thinking thus, it is conceivable that assisting a capo would unleash a trial against Lucas.85 In this reading, it is not so much that his good deed for an outsider sealed his fate, but that Lucas had yet to prove his place in the circle of comrades. According to Kühne, men like Lucas were rewarded with certain freedoms only after accepting the “unfreedom” of the Schicksalsgemeinschaft.86 No matter how standoffish his self-description, Lucas followed authority figures at Auschwitz, but in his postwar narrative he dissociated himself from Josef Mengele and focused on Josef Kramer as his antagonist. In his version of events from late 1961, when Lucas began admitting Auschwitz involvement, Mengele was his camp guide, and either Mengele or Heinz Thilo had explained his duties in the Gypsy camp.87 Along with Wirths, Mengele took him along to the Birkenau arrival ramp. “I was there more with Mengele than with Dr. Wirths. I was taken along so I could become familiar with the activity on the ramp. I was supposed to be instructed according to which criteria the prisoners were to be selected for work or for the gas chamber.”88 When it came his turn to select alone, he usually got Mengele or Thilo to do it for him.89 When he selected with Mengele and Wirths, he never went to the crematorium afterwards and could not say whether they did. Then came the curious comment Lucas made to Joachim Kügler in November 1961 that Heinz Düx referred to three months later: Mengele had brought him to a crematorium “that looked like a horse barn” and inquired whether he wanted to look through a porthole into the crematorium (i.e., the gas chamber), whereupon Lucas declared that he “declined the inside view.”90 Later this sordid detail slipped his mind, as did any information about ratios that applied for gas chamber selections versus the selections for camp la-

84  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

bor.91 Here one notices increasing aloofness, ignorance, and indifference toward the issues he denied. But by the time of his retrial in 1970, Lucas implied that his memory had improved with time: Dr. Thilo was camp doctor in the Gypsy camp before me, I wasn’t intending to say anything different. Dr. Mengele was sick with typhus during this time. By the way, I have to stick with my current memory; what I’ve said today is correct. The entrance to the Gypsy camp led past the ramp. Why I said what I said back then, I cannot say. But what I’ve said today is correct: I didn’t take part in fifteen selections. . . . I wasn’t with Dr. Mengele at the crematorium. Of course, it’s possible that I spoke with Dr. Mengele about the crematorium, I just can’t remember doing so, and I don’t remember having been with Dr. Mengele on the ramp.92

Willing it made it so: it was not Lucas’s memory that had improved, but his ability to expunge Mengele from his narrative and nullify his pretrial interrogation answers. By 1973, his lies became even bolder, especially when he was interrogated in Hamburg during the manhunt for Mengele.93 He told Judge Glasenapp that he could remember Mengele only faintly. Certainly, there was an SS doctor named Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. In this connection I can remember a man who stood out due to the shape of his head and the placement of his teeth in his upper jaw. This doctor also wore the Iron Cross, first and second class. I had no professional contact with this man. Socially I had as little contact to this man as I did to the other SS doctors. I note particularly in this connection that I consciously held back from all personal contact with other SS members. If I am reminded today that I am alleged to have said in the past that I am supposed to have stood with the accused on the ramp, I can only say to this that my memory of Mengele is extremely weak. Try as I might, I cannot come up with any spatial or temporal circumstances, professionally or socially, where I encountered Mengele.94

Lucas could afford to squelch any knowledge of a former colleague, now that he had had his citizen’s rights restored and was practicing medicine again. Lucas’s passing mention of Mengele’s Iron Cross medals may be a reminder of a distinction that eluded him, and perhaps a subconscious reason for his absence from the Solahütte gathering in mid-July 1944 that featured decorated SS officers. As French MacLean shows, medals and decorations showed distinguished Waffen-SS service or performance in a concentration camp.95 The War Service Cross Second Class, for example, was awarded not only to Mengele, but also to the Auschwitz doctor Bruno Kitt, whose complicity Hermann Langbein downplayed, and to the dentist Willi Frank. The awards had to come from something other than standing firm in the face of enemy fire. Mengele’s medal for a “single act of valor” was awarded to him by Wirths for his commitment to the slaugh-

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  85

ter of Hungarian Jews that the Solahütte gathering was celebrating. That same commitment must have applied to other doctors who received medals while in the camps. If they were rewarded more than just extra sausages and schnapps for selecting arriving deportees on the Birkenau ramp, it was for their dependability to finish the “unpleasant but necessary” slaughter required of them. They were ruthless toward outsiders to the racial community and pushed themselves to overcome any squeamishness they might have over monitoring the crematoria or giving prisoners lethal injections. Kitt and Frank, along with Lucas’s fellow camp doctor Horst Fischer at Auschwitz and his predecessor Benno Orendi at Ravensbrück, were four of 269 SS officers who received that particular War Service Cross Second Class medal. The medals were also a way to compensate for the stagnation of promotion for officers serving in the camps.96 What work was so unpleasant that it deserved extra rewards? It was the sort of work that bred further unpleasant work for others who remained unrewarded. Alfreda Babiuch, a Polish girl forced to work for Dr. Willy Frank and his family, remembered forty years later in an interview that for her, “the most unpleasant work was shining Frank’s boots. To me, they stank of corpses. Once they had some visitors, and Frank took them for a tour of the camp. When they came back I was supposed to clean all their shoes, but I couldn’t do the job because the shoes were so stinking that I had to turn away and kept feeling nauseous.”97 Part of the dental work Frank supervised involved cutting gold out of the jaws of crematorium corpses, which accounted for the smell. It is no wonder that such chores as cleaning boots, as well as more banal tasks such as grocery shopping or babysitting, fell to the servants, who are our source of information for topics the defendants kept silent about. Describing the task of murder or the stench of corpses as unpleasant is troubling enough. It helps us understand how kinship bonds could be formed around blood—a sort of proving ground for the hardness SS men were supposed to exhibit, although their shared disgust for the unending sea of corpses was a reason to assign the most horrible, tasks surrounding murder to the crematorium commandos composed of the victims themselves. It was her gratitude for not landing in the gas chamber that animated Dina Gottliebová’s memory of Lucas during an interview in 1998.98 Fredy Hirsch, the prisoner youth leader, had brought her the painting supplies for her whimsical paintings on the walls of the Theresienstadt children’s barracks, which recalled for example the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She recalled that Lucas was impressed with the colors and shapes of her Disney figures. Lucas must have known that Mengele was looking for an illustrator to assist him in his studies on noma and on twins. Mengele derived most of his subjects from the Gypsy camp, until the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews arriving in May 1944 provided more “material” in the form of twins, giants, and dwarves.99 Sometime in February 1944, Lucas opened the jeep door for the young Czech Jewish prisoner and drove her from the Theresienstadt family camp to the Gypsy camp

86  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

to present her to Mengele, now out of typhus danger, who had returned to work. Gottliebová then expressed relief that after the meeting Lucas returned her to the children’s barracks, not to the crematorium.100 Lucas’s polite behavior toward a Czech Jew is in itself no surprise, as Nazi men did not consider the women whom they knew personally as representative of the enemy race. More importantly, Lucas knew that Mengele was dissatisfied with the inability of photography to show subtle color gradations. For Lucas, Gottliebová’s painting talent answered Mengele’s wish to see as accurate a depiction as possible of eye and skin color, hair, and the contour of ears and mouth in twins of non-“Aryan” origin. There is no way to know whether Lucas himself followed Mengele’s research, but it is likely that he was involved with or at least interested in the noma investigations. But his mention of taking his own photographs of the condition disappeared after his interrogation by Heinz Düx—likely because it showed he had more interest in documenting noma than healing it.

Selections One of the most obvious criminal-biological tasks of the SS doctor was to select prisoners. Positive selection from within the death camp Auschwitz meant that prisoners strong enough to work might be transported to a work camp. Negative selection meant the certain murder of those deemed unable to provide such labor. Especially with the onset of the RSHA Hungarian campaign, selections on the Birkenau arrival ramp became even more cursory and hurried. A deportee’s survival of the initial selection brought no guarantee of immunity to later selections, announced or unannounced, that took place in prisoner hospitals or during roll calls and barracks lockdowns. The outcomes of these more localized selections hinged not only on a doctor’s habits and volatility, but also on the occasion, the health markers, the desired quotas, the bed capacity, the gravity of epidemics, and the level of cooperation among prisoners and prisoner doctors to shield the more hopeless cases from an SS doctor’s gaze. In 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau was expanded to account for the new direction of the SS leadership, which merged the idea of mass murder of the Jews with the idea of raising the labor potential by working the productive prisoners to exhaustion. The first transport was selected at the end of April 1942, and from July onward selections became the norm, as members of arriving families were separated according to their ability to perform work. In 1942, 162 RSHA transports brought 180,000 Jewish deportees to Auschwitz; the next year 174 transports brought another 220,000 deportees; and in 1944 three hundred trains brought 650,000 Jews, the majority from Hungary.101 These separations belong among the most cataclysmic memories of the Holocaust. Prisoners arrived in transports of usually over a thousand, sometimes over two thousand. They were stripped of

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  87

belongings and placed into rows of five by gender, which separated many from relatives and friends. This was the first selection, performed by SS men such as Stefan Baretzki. The second selection was at the end of the ramp, where a doctor might ask about career, age, or sickness before pointing to the line for either camp labor or for the gas chamber.102 According to SS doctor Horst Fischer, a typical ramp selection lasted between sixty and ninety minutes.103 During the Hungarian campaign beginning mid-May 1944, transports arrived both day and night, and two doctors, or a doctor assisted by a dentist or pharmacist, shared the duty on the ramp.104 The charge against Lucas from the Frankfurt prosecutors’ bill of indictment of 16 April 1963 read: “The defendant Dr. Lucas, as SS-Obersturmführer and camp doctor in the spring and summer of 1944, and in an undetermined number of cases, carried through or supervised selections after the arrival of Jewish prisoner transports, in which an undetermined number of prisoners was selected and transported thereafter to the gas chambers for gassing; there he supervised the throwing-in of Zyklon-B by the medical orderlies.”105 The indictment relied on a remark by Friedrich Ontl, the medical orderly and sergeant at arms who assisted Eduard Wirths, that a typed duty schedule for handling the increase in transports was displayed in Wirths’s office and in command headquarters. The indictment also acknowledged the comment of Franz Hofmann, former camp leader of Auschwitz III (Monowitz), that doctors supervised the medical orderlies who dropped the gas granules into the gas chamber. Hubert Christoph, an SS chauffeur, had confirmed the comment.106 Not only had Dr. Friedrich Entress declared in 1947 that camp doctors took part in selections and gassings, but Dr. Fritz Klein’s list of them included Lucas’s name.107 Somehow, Lucas’s reluctance to discuss ramp and gas chamber duties featured both fear of and disregard for the consequences of noncompliance. Both Lucas and the Frankfurt court charted his progression from timid to bold. In 1965, the court identified Lucas as “too weak to resist participation in the murderous action. Prone to following orders, he traveled the path of least resistance to avoid unpleasant results, but not because a real or imagined threat existed on his life. It was in Ravensbrück that he finally had the courage to refuse selection duty. There too, no dangers accrued to life and limb, for he was simply transferred to another camp.”108 At the time of his acquittal five years later, Lucas’s version of that “path” sounded more heroic: “In Auschwitz I had followed orders only insofar as I felt directly threatened. Over the months I developed a thicker skin, as my own life didn’t mean as much to me after what I had experienced. But with Kramer I couldn’t have taken liberties to resist orders.”109 Thus, Lucas agreed that he had finally summoned the courage to refuse selection duty, but not that he would have been unscathed by refusing to select much earlier. He depicted himself as turning reckless out of despair. By conceding to some but not all of the verdict’s logic, he made the court sound too obtuse to understand the pressure he

88  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

faced at the time. Aschenauer used the same tone to reproach the much younger adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe for failing to appreciate the sacrifices of his parents’ generation. Lucas’s explanation for his Auschwitz actions started with resistance from discomfort and ended with knuckling under to criminal orders out of fear for his life. To explain post-Auschwitz actions, he started with fear and ended with a reckless moral outrage at “Auschwitz methods.” In his fanciful explanations, Lucas was careful first of all to deny all selections he made alone on the ramp—that is, designating which line for the deportees to join as they filed past him. At the start of the preliminary investigation, Lucas maintained that he had been ordered a handful of times to appear alone on the ramp but had always found another doctor to substitute for him. Selection duties contradicted his training as a physician so radically that he made himself scarce at the first opportunity.110 To debunk this main charge against him, Lucas used only eight lines out of his ten-page explanation. Examining magistrate Heinz Düx found Lucas more forthcoming two months later. Lucas asserted that when Wirths or Mengele were with him, they determined which prisoners survived or perished. Other SS officers were present, especially Josef Kramer and Auschwitz commandant (Rudolf) Höss.111 As the Hungarian transports increased, Wirths ordered Lucas to perform selections by himself. At first able to pass the job on to Thilo and Mengele, Lucas was then forced to report for duty “two or three times” as the sole selecting doctor. When he rode his motorcycle to the ramp and explained to Kramer that he was too ill to select, Kramer proudly agreed to select in his place.112 Lucas lingered in the background until Kramer was finished, then rode back to the SS troop area in Auschwitz, even though he conceded that it was customary for the selecting physicians to continue on to the gas chamber. He could not say whether Mengele or Wirths ever did so when he shared the ramp with them.113 Kramer’s name occurred to him while answering Düx’s questions, and he recognized him through photographs. Upon hearing Lucas assert that his individual ramp appearances all fell within two weeks, Düx gave Lucas the chance to revise his low number of four ramp selections. Lucas hesitatingly estimated twenty occasions at most, four in which he admitted being unable to avoid selecting because they coincided with the mass influx.114 Lucas’s concession to selecting four transports “at the most” was forgotten once the formal hearings began. In court almost two years later, Lucas claimed to have complained to Wirths about doctors selecting prisoners without knowing their health history. Watching Wirths select repulsed him to the degree that he ducked to the side and drove back to headquarters early. Declaring his physical incapability to select had eased the pressure on him.115 Following Wirths’s special meeting at the start of the Hungarian transports, doctors could count on a dentist or a pharmacist to assist them. When Lucas’s turn came, he

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  89

found a substitute but went to the ramp anyway, fearing that his colleague might not otherwise appear.116 As in his response to Düx, his claim in court was twenty ramp appearances, four times as the sole doctor. When he complained about intestinal pains, Kramer agreed to step in for him.117 This initial statement in court in late January 1964 set his tone of denial for over a year. As medical historian Benno Müller-Hill has made clear, Nazi science tried to codify the rules of selection to control a process hitherto deemed a natural “survival of the fittest.” Promoting the “healthy” at the expense of the “diseased” was how scientific evolution would replace natural evolution. As the war worsened for the Germans, of course, pragmatic concerns of staffing munitions factories took priority.118 But in general, empirical selection criteria held great importance: For only scientificity—that is, clear decision criteria—guaranteed the German populace the feeling of both superiority and legal certainty. German non-Jews had to know that they were not Jewish, and those who were healthy had to know that they were not insane. The circle of persons to be exterminated (auszumerzen) had to be clearly defined. For that, scientifically educated doctors were responsible.119

Doctors were involved in selections on a symbolic level, Müller-Hill argues, because they were the “direct or indirect students of the racial hygienists” and “no anthropological knowledge was necessary for their task.”120 Müller-Hill’s argument sounds familiar to anyone acquainted with compulsory sterilization. Somehow, having the Sterilization Law in place, with hereditary health courts made up of two doctors and a judge to reach decisions that justified it, was a guarantee of scientificity. In addition, it was already an antinatal practice on the level of the German gene pool (Ausmerzung, eradication of reproductivity) that went handin-hand with the pronatal practice of Aufartung (protection of fertility).121 Sterilization thus practiced selection on the eugenic level of reproductive control. Camp and ramp selections were biopolitical, not medical, and decided a prisoner’s fate in an instant. But as with sterilization, interpreted by different doctors more broadly or narrowly, selection criteria were a moving target. If Müller-Hill addresses the “subjective legal certainty” held by non-Jewish Germans, historian Christian Gerlach shows how the selection principle established which Jews non-Jewish Germans could kill. Granted, after mid-1941 the ramp selections performed by SS doctors and officers at Auschwitz are the most widely known, yet Gerlach reminds us that “sorting according to labor ability or usefulness was carried out thousands of times, frequently by labor officials— and those deemed unproductive were killed.”122 In Auschwitz, Gerlach argues, the funnel of extermination had changed by 1944 to selection by age and gender, a tiny fraction less murderous than the so-called Reinhardt-Aktion, which had sorted prisoners at their point of origin before stuffing them into freight cars bound for Sobibor and Treblinka. Yet selections for labor purposes “accelerated

90  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

and intensified, rather than impeded, the mass murder of Jews.”123 Those deported to Auschwitz who were selected for labor made up 20 to 25 percent of a typical transport. Gerlach estimates that around “700,000 Jews were murdered in Auschwitz upon arrival and thus never became prisoners of that camp.”124 In this number is included the percentage most pertinent to a discussion of Lucas’s involvement: selection for labor of 25 percent of 430,000 Hungarian Jews from May through July 1944. Gerlach points out that the system of selecting for labor “was not necessarily designed to kill inmates—though it often did, usually after months of suffering—but importantly, it was not designed to keep them alive either.”125 To strengthen Gerlach’s point, there is no way to redeem selection in theory or practice. It was not battlefront triage, as though a doctor were deciding which soldier needed attention first. Selecting some lives for labor automatically selected other lives for death. Determining human value was murder, no matter how many prisoners a doctor deemed arbeitsfähig, capable of work. Highlighting some doctors as more generous in their selections than others played a cynical game of contrast. And yet consigning 30 percent instead of 25 percent of deportees to labor, which bought them a few more weeks or months of death by degrees, was seen as proof of courage that merited the court’s special consideration. Defense lawyers shifted attention away from choice and responsibility to claim their clients’ helplessness against an oppressive collective. It was too easy to look past the corpses produced by the crime, to fixate instead on the German legal question of what motivated the criminal to kill. Retracing Lucas’s perspective has been the goal of this first pass at understanding Lucas’s ramp duty. The chapter has mapped out Lucas’s duties in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the epicenter of the SS activity for which he was called to account. Until forced to reconfigure his narrative in February and March 1965, Lucas maintained he avoided the unpleasantness of selecting by feigning illness and finding substitutes. Although admitting early on to four stints of independent selections of prisoners on the ramp as the Hungarian transports increased, in court two years later he began by claiming that even when he was assigned on the ramp alone, others agreed to select for him. In the space between admitting and fabricating lay denial. Thus, a truer understanding of Lucas’s involvement, from the perspective of mostly accusatory witnesses, awaits in the second section of the book. Lucas was culpable in the places from which he insisted he was absent, and this is the thrust in the chapter to follow. It is tempting to simply doubt the credibility of a defendant permitted to lie in his own defense. I would rather view Lucas not just as a defendant but as a doctor trained by selection discourse to designate Jewish prisoners for extermination, which he could do no matter how disapproving and aloof he claimed to be.

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  91

Notes 1.  Unlike in his Elmshorn meeting with Kügler, in his follow-up statement Lucas claimed no longer to remember the name of the pharmacist who had alluded to the atrocities of Auschwitz without providing concrete details. FL to Staatsanwaltschaft LG/FaM, 5 December 1961, AP 4,172. 2.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,153. 3.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,869. 4.  Sterbebücher 1943 von Auschwitz (vol. 24), HHStAW 461/37638 Bd. 382, 2 (unnumbered). 5.  Sterbebücher, 3 (unnumbered). 6. Naumann, Auschwitz, 129. 7.  Mitschrift des beisitzenden Richters vom 128. Verhandlungstag (15.1.1965). Vermerk zu dem Angeklagten Dr. Lucas, AP 28,002–3. 8.  “Verhandlung,” 5 January 1944, Franz Lucas, BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3, Bl. 00019. 9.  “Verpflichtungsschein” (SS-Ostuf. Dr. Lucas), Auschwitz, 19 May 1944, BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3, Bl. 00020. 10. Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, 517. 11. Setkiewicz, Private Lives, 23, 28. On the Kitts, see Schwarz, Eine Frau an seiner Seite, 156–58. 12. Kühl, Ordinary Organizations, 98, 100. 13.  Franz Lucas, Telegram of 23 February 1944, Deutsche Reichspost, BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3, Bl. 00046. If Lucas did in fact ask moral advice of authorities as he claimed, this would have been the time he did so. 14.  It is possible that the furlough request was the catalyst for signing the pledge. 15.  Telegram of Leni Lukas to Franz Lukas, 13 May 1944, BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3. 16.  Of the 13 May 1944 bombing of Osnabrück, Panayi writes: “The Osnabrück air raid police recorded that ‘290 buildings were completely destroyed,’ while a further 3,507 were damaged to varying degrees. . . . A total of 239 people lost their lives (including 67 foreigners), while a further 6,000 had to find new accommodation.” Panayi, Life and Death, 103. 17.  Telegram of Richard Baer to Franz Lucas, 2 June 1944, BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3, Bl. 00044. 18.  Lucas was mostly likely in Osnabrück in the middle of the month. 19.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 10. 20.  As Devin Pendas notes, the prosecution tried arguing that because Lucas asked the advice of Osnabrück authorities, he knew that what he was doing was wrong. See Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 119. 21.  Anlage zum Protokoll vom 2. 11. 64, HHStAW, 461/37638 Bd. 1071, Akte 107. 22.  Gerhard Kloft, “Mordszenen am Tatort rekonstruiert.” Saarbrücker Zeitung, 5 December 1964. 23.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Szymański, 11 January 1965, AP 27,652. 24. Szymański, Szymańska, Śnieszko, “Das ‘Spital’ im Zigeuner-Familienlager,” 201–2. 25.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Śnieszko, 11 January 1965, AP 27,742–44. 26.  Śnieszko, 27,774. 27. Szymański, Szymańska, Śnieszko, “Das ‘Spital’ im Zigeuner-Familienlager,” 201. According to Ulrich Völklein, SS doctors who oversaw the Gypsy camp during Mengele’s absences, vacations, and illness were Fritz Klein, Heinz Thilo, and Franz Lucas. See Josef Mengele, 114. 28.  Aron Bejlin to Oberstaatsanwalt FaM, 15 October 1962, BArch N642-139, Bl. 62–63. 29.  FL to Staatsanwaltschaft LG/FaM, 5 December 1961, AP 4,175. 30.  Vernehmung Władysław Fejkiel, 29 May 1964, AP 9,291–93. 31.  Fejkiel, 9,272–73. 32.  RA to Tadeusz Szymański, 5 November 1964, BArch N642-142. 33.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Szymański, 11 January 1965, AP 27,658–62.

92  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 34.  Vernehmung Aron Bejlin, 28 August 1964, AP 16,338. Here one must caution against gullibility, since prisoners, their SS captors, and trial spectators were rarely unified about whether the front constituted a punishment or a reward, or the greater or lesser of two evils. 35. Stengel, Die Überlebenden, 253–55. 36.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,870. 37.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,191. 38.  Kubica, “Crimes of Mengele,” 320. 39.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,197. 40. Lucas. 41.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,194. 42.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,873. 43.  Lucas zur Sache, 4,872. 44.  Lucas zur Sache, 4,872–73. 45.  Lucas zur Sache, 4,873. 46. Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,196. Mengele was praised by Wirths for his comprehensive “cleansing” techniques. See Kubica, “Crimes of Mengele,” 328. 47.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,877. 48.  On Clauberg, see Grosch, “Kieler Gynäkologe.” 49.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Ormond zu Broad, Capesius, 24 May 1965, AP 34,008–12. On camp doctor duties see also Bromberger and Mausbach, “Tätigkeit von Ärzten,” 186–262. 50.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 84–85. 51.  Lucas’s use of the passive voice conveyed a vagueness that his interlocutors chose to accept instead of probe. 52.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,194. 53.  Lucas, 4,198. 54. Stengel, Die Überlebenden, 349–50. 55. Freund, After Those Fifty Years, 197. 56.  Czech, “Kalendarium der wichtigsten Ereignisse,” AP 748. See also Keren, “Family Camp,” 428–40; and Kárný, “Theresienstädter Familienlager,” 133–237. 57. Naumann, Auschwitz, 124–25. 58.  Kulka was ill with diphtheria, which he remembers as paradoxically saving his life. Whether his mother was as gravely ill as her son is unclear. Kulka, Landschaft des Todes, 37. 59.  Czech, “Kalendarium der wichtigsten Ereignisse,” AP 781. See also Yehuda Bacon’s comments in Freund, After Those Fifty Years, 35. Kárný puts the total number of boys at five hundred, from which the ninety were selected in the washroom. See “Theresienstädter Familienlager,” 219. 60.  Kulka claims that he was selected along with ninety or so boys (Landschaft des Todes, 51); another source attributes his survival to the intervention of his father, who took him on as a plumber’s apprentice (Freund, After Those Fifty Years, 197). 61.  Bednarek was the sole prisoner held accountable in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. 62.  According to Kárný, 3,500 able-bodied men and women were selected. The men’s commandos went to Auschwitz subcamps Schwarzheide and Blechhammer, the women to Christianstadt, Stutthof, Neuengamme, and other camps. “Theresienstädter Familienlager,” 222. 63.  Kubica, “Children and Youths at KL Auschwitz,” 127. See also Czech, “Kalendarium,” AP 782. 64.  Vernehmung Otto Dov Kulka, 30 July 1964, AP 13,566. 65. Kulka, 13,567. The dreaded six-month “quarantine” deadline for the 20 December 1943 transport from the Theresienstadt ghetto was 20 June 1944. The “Birkenau boys” were selected on 6 July 1944. These other selections took place mostly between about 25 June and 6 July 1944. See Kárný, “Theresienstädter Familienlager,” 219.

aus chw itz -birke nau  •  93 66.  Vernehmung Otto Dov Kulka, 30 July 1964, AP 13,598. 67.  Kulka, 13,632. 68.  Kulka may have been remembering 23 January 1944, the date given for the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” performance in the children’s block, where Dina Gottliebová painted her Disney murals. The Disney film had appeared in 1937. See Paldiel, Saving One’s Own, 388. 69.  Vernehmung Otto Dov Kulka, 30 July 1964, AP 13,575. 70.  Kulka, 13,558–59. Baretzki was involved in the preliminary ramp selections, which arranged deportees in rows by gender, age, and mobility. 71.  Kulka, 13,577–79. 72.  Kulka, 13,618–19. It is unclear to which witnesses Lucas was referring; indeed, it was his frequent ploy to promise witness corroboration of his claims. 73.  Kulka, 13,620–22. 74.  Wirths evaluated Frank on 19 August 1944. See Huber, SS-Zahnarzt, 83. 75.  See Hördler’s discussion in “Gesichter der Gewalt.” 76.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,878. 77. Kühne, Kameradschaft, 516. 78.  Kühne, 514. 79.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 3–4. 80.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 5. 81.  Der Schuldvorwurf gegen den Angeklagten Dr. Schatz, 20 August 1965, AP 38,392–400. 82.  Hördler, “Gesichter der Gewalt,” 111. 83.  Cross-examination of Adolf Winkelmann, 22 January 1947, WO 235/307, 315. 84.  On Knittel, see Hördler, “Gesichter der Gewalt,” 110. 85. Kühne, Kameradschaft, 519. 86.  Kühne, 521. 87.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,191. 88.  Lucas, 4,195. 89.  Lucas, 4,195. 90.  Lucas, 4,199–200. 91.  Lucas, 4,197–98. 92.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 18. 93.  Vernehmung Dr. med. Franz Lucas, Hamburg, 3 September 1973, In der Voruntersuchungssache Mengele wegen Mordes: Az.: 4 Js 340/68, HHStAW 461/37976 Bd. 017, Bl. 102–5. 94.  Franz Lucas, 104. 95. MacLean, Camp Men, 277. 96.  MacLean, 277. 97. Setkiewicz, Private Lives, 17. 98.  Dina Gottliebová (Babbitt), interviewed by Hilary Helstein on 26 September 1998, Felton, CA. USC Shoah Foundation, Testimony Part 1, at 3 hours 50 minutes, retrieved on 20 December 2022 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRMWD8L1xDg. 99.  Kubica, “Crimes of Mengele,” 323. 100.  In a 17 May 2010 interview with Rafael Medoff, published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gottliebová gave the date 22 February 1944 for Lucas driving her to meet Mengele. See Medoff, “Überleben durch Talent: Schneewittchens Alptraum,” retrieved 30 May 2020 from http://www.sued deutsche.de/kultur/ueberleben-durch-talent-schneewittchens-albtraum-1.696655. Lucas was almost certainly in Osnabrück at the time, however, because on 23 February 1944 he sent a telegram from Osnabrück to Auschwitz requesting an extension to his vacation (BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3). See also Reymer Klüver, “Mengele’s Malerin,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 May 2010, retrieved 30 May 2020 from https://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/auschwitz-zeichnungen-mengeles-malerin-1.255756.

94  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r 101.  Renz, “Völkermord,” 17; Piper, Zahl der Opfer, 31. 102. Sofsky, Ordnung des Terrors, 293. 103. Dirks, Verbrechen der Anderen, 108. 104.  Dirks, 105, 112. 105.  Schwurgerichtsanklage, AP 1,891 (i.e., Bl. 14,648). 106.  Schwurgerichtsanklage, 15,210. 107.  Schwurgerichtsanklage, 15,211. 108.  Schwurgerichtsanklage, 37,926. 109.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 23. 110.  FL to Staatsanwaltschaft LG/FaM, 5 December 1961, AP 4,176–80. 111.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,195. 112.  Lucas, 4,194–96. 113.  Lucas, 4,197. 114.  Lucas, 4,202–3. 115.  Vernehmung Lucas zur Sache, 27 January 1964, 4,875–76. 116.  Lucas zur Sache, 4,877. Lucas claimed that there was not enough space on the ramp for two men to select anyway (4,878)—a weak argument at best. 117.  Lucas zur Sache, 4,878-79. 118.  Müller-Hill, “Selektion,” 146. 119.  Müller-Hill, 146–47. 120.  Müller-Hill, 151. 121.  See Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 88. 122. Gerlach, Extermination, 196–97. 123.  Gerlach, 198. 124.  Gerlach, 212. 125.  Gerlach, 210.

3

M authausen and S tutthof (A ugust –D ecember 1944)

•••

Lucas was transferred from Auschwitz in early August 1944, a few days after the “liquidation” of the Gypsy family camp. His WASt records show his service as camp doctor beginning in Mauthausen on 10 August and ending on 23 October 1944. In his 1961 interrogation by Joachim Kügler, he alleged that the transfer came about due to disagreements with Wirths, who accused him of being homosexual.1 In Mauthausen, Commandant Franz Ziereis had greeted him with a threat about how the camp dealt with homosexuals: “We know how to take care of 175ers here.” In the same way that his first report about punishment for defeatist remarks in his Nuremberg unit indicated his puzzlement, here too Lucas insisted that he was ignorant of any transgression.2 Even though the Nazis considered homosexuality a sickness remediable by extreme labor, placement in extreme work commandos was no protection against castration, which was supposed to render “175ers” (from Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code forbidding homosexual behavior) unschädlich (unharmful).3 This was a brutal punishment. Did Lucas claim early on that the camp leadership had considered him homosexual because he wanted the sympathy of the court for his position as victim of unrelenting pressure—not so much out of sympathy for gay officers but for being unjustly accused of being gay? From a Nazi viewpoint, Ziereis’s crass threat would have sounded credible directed toward an unmarried officer in his early thirties serving in Himmler’s family-rich SS. Lucas’s claim to be ignorant of his guilt is equally troubling, however. Why would one commandant agree in principle to take on another commandant’s “problem officer” unless Berlin ordered it in the belief that a change of personnel constellations would solve the “problem?” Later it will become evident that it was only after confessing to ramp duty that Lucas attributed the transfer

96  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

to Mauthausen to Josef Kramer’s belligerent reaction to Lucas’s reluctance to select prisoners. In Mauthausen, Ziereis emerged as persecutor from start to finish. Lucas noted that his marching orders from Mauthausen to Stutthof ensued after his refusal to sign the death warrants of forty Dutch Jews shot to death, falsely recorded as “trying to escape.”4 In his 1970 retrial, Lucas claimed that Ziereis once ordered him to stop operating on a prisoner. When Lucas refused, and despite no warning from chief doctor Waldemar Wolter, he was transferred two or three days later to Stutthof.5 Wolter’s appraisal for Lucas’s file falls somewhere between criticism and praise: His scientific and practical knowledge in medicine may be labeled as good, and he tries to make up for any existing gaps through diligence and hard work, so that it can be predicted that SS-Ostuf. L. will be, in the course of time, a diligent and experienced physician. He shows interest in all areas of medicine and has special knowledge in obstetrics and gynecology. Among the troops and their family members, whom he treated occasionally as a substitute, SS-Ostuf. L. had good respect and was trusted as a physician and for his medical knowledge.6

In addition to identifying his nemesis as Ziereis, Lucas remembered the prisoner doctor Josef Podlaha (German: Podlacher) as his advocate.7 Podlaha, a professor at Masaryk University and head doctor of the surgical clinic in Brno, belonged to a group of Czech intellectual prisoners arrested by the Gestapo and assigned to assist SS doctors in the Mauthausen hospital.8 In statements to the American Criminal Investigation Committee and in an essay, Podlaha described the activities of the twenty subaltern doctors: “Only one doctor, Lucas of Münster, who had studied for a short time at the University of Prague, dared to oppose the camp commander’s orders if he felt that they were against his medical conscience.”9 In another affidavit supporting Lucas, Dr. Podlaha noted that SS doctors in uniform were self-conscious about their lack of preparation for treating the prisoners toward whom they were already inhumane: “Latin terminology and basic medical knowledge were foreign to them. Almost all of them had an unhealthy fascination with surgery, although they themselves could show no prerequisites for practicing it.”10 Dr. Podlaha was a prisoner in Mauthausen from February 1942 onward. After noticing his successful operations on SS family members, Hermann Richter brought Podlaha to Gusen in July 1942 as his captive medical mentor. Richter removed stomachs, livers, kidneys, and parts of the brain to see how long victims could live without them. In 1942, Richter operated on three hundred healthy inmates who, if they survived the experiments, died from his lethal injections. A few months later, Karl Böhmichen reciprocated by having Podlaha sent back to Mauthausen, where he remained chief prisoner doctor until liberation.11 In the SS hospital, SS doctors assisted Podlaha occasionally on aseptic interventions.12 Unless SS doctors found their cases “interesting,” however,

mau t haus e n and s tutthof   •  97

prisoners who required difficult operations waited in limbo or until Podlaha was free to help them. Podlaha’s note about Lucas’s exceptionalism was echoed by Hans Marsálek, former prisoner and chronicler of Mauthausen, who doubted whether Lucas was tempted by experiments on prisoners. To him, Lucas stood out because he disregarded SS injunctions and smuggled medicine into the camp. After learning about Lucas’s mass selections in Birkenau, Marsálek modified his praise, writing that the German military losses in 1944 were reason enough for SS doctors and medics at Mauthausen to behave kindlier toward prisoners.13 Like Lucas, the prisoner doctor Tadeusz Szymański transferred to Mauthausen at the time of the Gypsy camp’s liquidation. He testified that while working in the quarry, he was summoned during roll call in late August 1944 to report to Lucas. Lucas had been assigned to set up clinical care in Mauthausen for thirteen thousand evacuees expected to arrive from the Warsaw uprising.14 Having had their assistance in Birkenau, Lucas suggested that Szymański and twenty-seven of his comrades trade their back-breaking quarry labor for the chance to care for their countrymen in the hospital.15 Corroborating Szymański’s account about medical reorganization was Zygmunt Gawlowski, another medic who overlapped with Lucas in the Gypsy camp, and who also had heard Lucas talk about reorganizing medical service in Mauthausen.16 Surprisingly, Ernst Martin, prisoner secretary for chief doctor Waldemar Wolter, testified late in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial to having seen Lucas’s name in conjunction with Mauthausen’s large subcamp Gusen. Lucas insisted that his service was limited to Mauthausen’s chief doctor and a second camp doctor.17 While Lucas was struggling to explain his responsibilities, Rudolf Aschenauer quickly protested that his client was being interrogated about Mauthausen at all, especially about killing, but adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe contended that Lucas’s answer would offer a picture of his personality.18 As expected, Lucas avoided mentioning any names of notorious SS doctors who tested typhus and tuberculosis on Mauthausen prisoners.19 Lucas remembered being stationed “on the hill” in the surgical division with Professor Podlaha. Martin could remember a doctor named (Hermann) Richter and a medical student (Karl) Böhmichen who worked with Podlaha, but not Lucas. As was his habit, Lucas removed himself from the crime scene by insisting that he had first learned about lethal injections inside the camp and gassings outside the camp during his interrogation by Heinz Düx. Lucas had also substituted as a troop doctor but had contributed nothing to the internal medicine division at the foot of the hill. Because he had never set foot inside the camp, he knew nothing about where the inmates lived.20 Ziereis had confronted him for refusing to sign death certificates, a confrontation that escalated due to Lucas’s care of quarry workers, some of them bitten by the guard dogs.21 Martin continued to puzzle over why he would not have met Lucas at some point, since a doctor’s signature was required

98  •   t h e t r i al of a n a zi d o c t o r

in the event of an unnatural death. Nor did Martin recall any Dutch prisoners entering Mauthausen after the autumn of 1941.22 Although it was not an item that surfaced in the trial, a document of former Mauthausen prisoner Quirin Flaucher mentions Lucas in the context of another SS doctor. Flaucher testified on 13 November 1947 to an American military court that the medical orderly Christian Wohlrab entered the sick camp (Russian camp) at Mauthausen in April or May 1943, but that he never saw him mistreat prisoners or select them for transport to Hartheim Castle, the “euthanasia” killing center about twenty-three miles away on the opposite side of Linz. As Flaucher notes, “The prisoners for such transports were picked out and assembled by O.Sturmf. Dr. Richter, O.Sturmf. Lukas [i.e., Lucas] and, when he was absent, Oberscharf. Richard Merz.”23 Although Flaucher erred in his appraisal of Wohlrab, there is little reason to doubt his mention of Lucas as one of the selectors for the Hartheim transports.24 In mid-October 1944, Richter came from Gross-Rosen to replace Lucas at Mauthausen at the same time that Lucas replaced Erich Kather at Stutthof.25 There is no known connection between either Richter and Lucas or Lucas and Böhmichen, although Böhmichen and his friend Heinz Baumkötter (Lucas’s Sachsenhausen boss), began attending medical lectures at Münster in the winter semester of 1934, a little more than a year after Lucas enrolled there. It is unknown whether Lucas knew them as a student.26 After Mauthausen, Lucas traveled 650 miles north to Stutthof near Danzig, where he remained from mid-October to mid-December 1944. In Danzig, his clinical studies and medical dissertation had deferred his Waffen-SS conscription of 13 September 1940 until 1 September 1942. It is possible that Lucas was sent to Stutthof in response to Stutthof commandant Paul Werner Hoppe’s complaint to Enno Lolling in Oranienburg about the camp’s crowded conditions and lack of personnel.27 Lucas’s gynecology credentials may have played a role in determining his suitability, in the same way that Dr. Rudolf Horstmann was transferred to Auschwitz at the same time expressly because of gynecological training.28 The same principle could explain Lucas’s transfer to Ravensbrück, as his expertise became less crucial in light of Stutthof’s upcoming January 1945 evacuation. Shortly before Lucas’s Stutthof arrival, the camp received transports of 49,000 mostly female Jewish prisoners. About half of them came from the Baltic camps Riga, Kauen, and Vaivara, which had been dissolved in August 1944. Another five thousand came from Warsaw, and some 22,000 arrived from the holding zones in “Mexiko” (BIII of Auschwitz-Birkenau), where they had languished after arriving on transports in the spring and summer of 1944 from Hungary.29 The influx of all these prisoners changed Stutthof’s function from redirecting so-called healthier prisoners to points farther west, to collecting prisoners too weak to provide slave labor for the SS and marking them for systematic murder.30

mau t haus e n and s tutthof   •  99

Lucas reported to the chief doctor Otto Heidl and took the place of camp doctor Erich Kather, who had served in Stutthof for only a month and left on 24 October 1944. After the war, Kather described how hidden guards shot prisoners in the back of the neck in the crematorium, but unsurprisingly he claimed no personal role in the killings.31 This “inefficient” and “inhumane” method gave way to the use of a small gas chamber that coincided with Lucas’s arrival. In Stefan Hördler’s view, Lucas’s transfer to Stutthof cannot be considered a direct cause for the change from neck shots to gas chamber, and one finds nothing in the transfer orders to that effect either. But to Hördler, it was no coincidence that Lucas was transferred to the camps where systematic killings with poisonous gas had begun.32 Among Lucas’s duties as camp doctor was selecting mostly female prisoners too weak or sick to provide slave labor. As a rule, twenty-five to thirty-five women at a time were shoved into a building repurposed from delousing clothing to killing with Zyklon-B. One prisoner claimed that four thousand especially frail women had been designated for this form of murder, and that in its four days of operation the gas chamber killed more than four hundred of them. The SS then converted a freight car into a gas chamber on the tracks behind the crematorium, where they killed another thousand women. The medical orderly Otto Karl Knott, who had received training in handling Zyklon-B, testified in 1975 that three to four thousand women had been killed by Zyklon-B until a typhus outbreak made intentional killing superfluous. The SS then had to find a way to dispense with the corpses in the crematorium.33 Whether by lethal injections, shots to the neck, or suffocation from Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, such mass killing methods stopped at the latest in December 1944, when the number of natural deaths from starvation and disease made a quarantine of the camp necessary.34 Besides carrying out selections under Heidl’s supervision, Lucas also removed appendixes, treated skin infections, and splinted broken limbs.35 Without witnesses, it is difficult to say much more about a role that Lucas always downplayed by insisting that he was not at the camp long enough to remember anything. Only once, during his retrial in 1970, did he venture more information about Stutthof, but as usual it was to depict himself as attracting the negative attention of the camp commandant and hearing secondhand from prisoners about inhumane practices. He maintained that before his arrival, prisoners had received lethal injections in the central medical treatment area, after which their corpses were taken out a different door into the mortuary. Having refused the commandant’s order to kill by lethal injection, Lucas instead ordered the exit door to the mortuary bricked shut, which put him at odds with the camp leader. “I had learned with time how to deal with commanders and didn’t let them intimidate me so easily any longer. Auschwitz was the beginning; I’d learned more since then, and anyway I no longer cared what happened to me. In Auschwitz I saw no way to defend myself.”36 Such a statement reflects the strategy Lucas developed

100   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

during the 1960s of sounding courageously reckless and helpless at the same time. Whether delivered in court with what was probably an uncomfortable stammer or transcribed as it is here, it may sound convincing enough to elicit sympathy, but one must remember that Lucas’s explanations always proved amorphous enough to fit the situation. Lucas’s memory of Stutthof was not so poignant that it could not shift by 1977. As he continued to be questioned, his under-duress-but-resistant trope became the assertion that he had served in Stutthof only as a troop doctor. Injections with air or petroleum must have ceased by the time he arrived, and he was hearing only now about gassings. He knew nothing about public executions, except that once he was ordered to participate in an execution by shooting. When he asked why, he received no answer, but only the order to participate. His refusal to do so escalated the conflict with Heidl into a full-fledged quarrel that brought his marching orders to Ravensbrück.37 Over time, then, Lucas offered less substantive information about his role in the camps, including Stutthof, from which few if any witnesses emerged to report either positive or negative memories of him. Interrogations of Lucas always seemed to produce one of two strategies. In the first instance, he denied any association with prisoners except as a fellow sufferer who learned from them about the unethical practices of the SS, and he preferred to muffle his selection duties by asserting his full-fledged deployment as a troop doctor. In the second instance, he maintained an unending tension with camp commanders—a strategy we can call dubious on account of his initially unspecific reasons for his transfers. If the tension had been so pronounced, he would have had no problem recalling it from the start. After his acquittal in 1970, Lucas’s answers became careless and insolent. With denial of involvement his mainstay, he referred increasingly to the court record as a kind of canonized version of his camp history that rendered further explication unnecessary. In this respect, one might wonder whether Lucas suffered a form of trauma as a perpetrator weighed down by the knowledge of his role in the Holocaust, however small he claimed it to be.38 It is entirely possible that his lies were an unconscious strategy of “working through” his past, an expression traditionally applied to Holocaust victims, but one can imagine that to live with himself meant, for Lucas, scrubbing over his role in sending thousands of Jewish deportees to their death.39 In other words, he could have been lying in “good faith” for the sake of being able to sleep at night. But even if one understands Lucas’s plight as Verstrickung (becoming entangled in crime), one still yearns for acknowledgment, which was impossible when Lucas deceived himself and others. It is possible to understand Lucas’s reasons for flippancy after acquittal without endorsing them, of course. It is at least clear that Lucas fulfilled the typical role of SS camp doctor in both Mauthausen and Stutthof. He maintained a pretense of orderliness and inhibited prisoner panic. He singled out weak prison-

mau t haus e n and s tutthof   •  101

ers for injection, bullet, or gas. While it is likely that various actions benefitted prisoners at Stutthof, there are no testimonies to that effect the way there are for Mauthausen—and even there, few accounts exist outside of Lucas’s circle of appreciative prisoner doctors. It is a different story with Ravensbrück, the camp Lucas entered next from Stutthof, exactly a year after having entered the extermination camp portal at Auschwitz. Now he brought a wealth of experience to bear on his duties there, but more importantly, he attracted the support of more postwar witnesses from Ravensbrück than from all other camps combined. One wonders what would have been the result if Lucas had actually been present at the first Ravensbrück trial, the central point of the next chapter. Would he have been pardoned in light of a hero’s greeting from former medical functionaries, or would he have been hanged along with the defendants who knew Ravensbrück just as intimately as he did before he was transferred to Sachsenhausen in late February 1945?

Notes 1.  Vermerk [15 November 1961] von Staatsanwalt Kügler betr. die Vernehmung des Beschuldigten Dr. Franz Lucas, HHStAW 461/37638 Bd. 58, Bl. 10,525. 2.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,185–86. 3.  See Hax, “Sterilisierung und Kastration,” 84. 4.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,186–87. 5.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 20. Wolter was transferred to Mauthausen at the same time as Lucas. He selected some prisoners for transports to Hartheim and gave lethal injections to others. He was involved in phlegmon experiments in 1942–43 (as became known in the Nuremberg doctors trial), was tried in the Mauthausen trial of 1946, and executed on 28 May 1947. 6.  Standortarzt Mauthausen, 16 November 1944. Fachliche Beurteilung des SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Franz Lucas. BArch ZM 0885 Akte 3, Bl. 00013. 7.  FL to Staatsanwaltschaft LG/FaM, 5 December 1961, AP 4,179. 8.  Wolter’s predecessor as chief medical officer, Eduard Krebsbach, sent Podlaha to Mauthausen’s largest subcamp, Gusen, to assist SS Dr. Hans Richter in operations on prisoners who were healthy. See Jardim, Mauthausen Trial, 130. 9.  Podlaha, “Surgery and Medical Care,” 62. 10.  Archiv M.M, H 9/4, Bericht des Univ-Prof Dr. J. Podlaha über Dr. Luccas [sic], P 19/29, 30, 31, 32, cited in Marsálek, Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, 180. 11.  Marsálek, 168. 12.  Marsálek, 159. 13.  Marsálek, 180. Marsálek does not include Lucas, however, in his list of doctors, dentists, and pharmacists (173–74). 14.  The Warsaw uprising took place between the beginning of August and the end of September 1944. 15.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Szymański, 11 January 1965, AP 27,680–82. 16.  Vernehmungsprotokoll Zygmunt Gawlowski, 15 January 1965, AP 28,516. 17.  Vernehmung Ernst Martin, 12 April 1965, AP 31,561. 18.  Martin, 31,562–63. Hofmeyer, supported by Aschenauer’s protest, wondered whether Martin had mistaken Lucas for a different Dr. Lucas, given Martin’s self-avowed poor sense of time.

102   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 19.  These doctors included Helmut Vetter, Aribert Heim, Karl Gross, Eduard Krebsbach, and also Ernst-Günther Schenck, who had no duties but only performed medical experiments. 20.  Vernehmung Ernst Martin, 12 April 1965, AP 31,565–68. 21.  Martin, 31,569–70. It was not common for SS doctors to tend to prisoners attacked by guard dogs. 22.  Martin, 31,572–73. On the Dutch Jews, see Kranebitter, “Aribert Heim,” 91. Kranebitter suggests that more than eight hundred Dutch Jews died in Mauthausen and its subcamps (93). 23.  AMM, Bestand Dachauer Mauthausen-Prozesse, NARA, RG 549, US Army Europe, Cases tried, Case 000-50-5-21, Box 393. Thanks to Gregor Holzinger of Mauthausen Memorial for this information. 24.  Hördler documents how Christian Wohlrab, Willi Jobst, and Gottlieb Muzikant selected and killed prisoners. Ordnung und Inferno, 439. 25. Enno Lolling, Verfügung, Oranienburg, 9 October 1944, Stutthof Museum I-IE-673, CC120150313.0000, BArch ZM 0714 Akte 7. 26.  See Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 545. 27. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 267. See also: Urteil vom LG Bochum gegen Paul Werner Hoppe und Otto Karl Knott vom 16.12.1955, Lfd. Nr. 446; Rüter and De Mildt, Justiz und NSVerbrechen, 155. 28.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 505. 29. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 235–46. 30.  Hördler, 254. 31.  Hördler, 265–66. 32.  Hördler, 265–71. 33.  Hördler, 272. During October and November, some 850 Jewish women lost their lives to Zyklon-B poisoning (299–301). Nikolaus Wachsmann reports that by late summer 1944, Stutthof camp SS officials “stepped up the systematic murder of weak, elderly, sick, frail and pregnant prisoners.” See Wachsmann, KL, 551–52. 34. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 274. See also Grabowska, Stutthof, 58–66. 35.  Balis Sruoga, Las bogó (Gdynia, 1965/66), p. 81, quoted in Grot, “Indirekte Extermination,” 197–98. 36.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 21–22. 37.  Vernehmung Franz Lucas, Staatsanwaltschaft Köln (Dederichs), 130 (24) Js 981/63 (Z) Itzehoe, 11 November 1977, NRW Gerichte Rep 158, Nr. 1286, Bl. 66. 38.  Perpetrator trauma has been examined relatively recently by scholars such as Knittel, Historical Uncanny, esp. 137–74, and Mohamed, “Of Monsters and Men.” See also Morag, Waltzing with Bashir. 39.  On “working through,” see especially LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.

4

R avensbrück (D ecember 1944—F ebruary 1945)

•••

The distance from Stutthof to Ravensbrück, an hour north of Berlin, spanned some 285 miles. Lucas spent from mid-December 1944 to the end of February 1945 in the men’s camp and the women’s camp. Witnesses attest that he helped prisoners and argued with his superiors, but also that he sterilized Sinti and Roma prisoners, primarily veteran Wehrmacht soldiers and their male relatives, in the first half of January 1945. Showing Lucas as both rescue figure and sterilizer supplements the scholarship on SS perpetrator roles at Ravensbrück, which understandably has lagged behind the efforts to compile the stories of survivors and to honor the prisoners murdered by intention and neglect. Because Lucas’s humanity has served so long as a contrast to his uncaring colleagues, his rescuer aspect all but swallows up the footnotes that mention his sterilization role. The majority of representations come from survivor memoirs, such as those of the Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen and the German communist prisoner Erika Buchmann, which echo the affidavits offered for British preliminary investigations in the six Ravensbrück trials.1 The most scholarly representation is contained in Bernhard Strebel’s daunting work on the entire Ravensbrück complex. To him, Lucas gained scruples over time to become a humane SS doctor. Strebel’s assessment echoes Lucas’s own claim, which the Frankfurt court believed, that he overcame his fear and became more reckless by refusing criminal orders.2 While Strebel considers sterilization the only factor slowing down Lucas’s moral improvement, Michael Zimmermann’s groundbreaking study on Sinti and Roma mentions Lucas only as a sterilizer, using the testimony of sterilized Sinti and Roma as a necessary counterweight to exculpatory testimony.3 Other scholarship on Ravensbrück has addressed ethnicity or gender or taken the medical arena as a starting point. Dunja Martin lauds Lucas’s efforts in tan-

104   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

dem with Nazi nurse Gerda Schröder, calling them the sole Ausnahmeerscheinungen (exceptions) in the system of inhumanity at Ravensbrück.4 Silke Schäfer’s dissertation offers brief sketches of perpetrators, including an entry on “Lukas”— his SSO file in the Federal Archive at Berlin-Lichterfelde is also misspelled— that is mostly accurate, thanks to being based on the SSO files. To her credit, instead of relying solely on former prisoners, she quotes SS gynecologist Percy Treite’s evenhanded description of Lucas’s complicity in Ravensbrück executions, suggesting a broadened scope to Lucas’s involvement.5 Anette Kretzer’s book NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht: Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47 in Hamburg (Nazi perpetration and gender: The first British Ravensbrück trial 1946/47 in Hamburg, 2009) discusses the linkages of doctoring, soldiering, and manliness in the self-understanding of defendants. Her discussion of how the court considered group participation sufficient grounds for guilt points to the chief difference between British and German approaches in the courtroom. The idea that Lucas haunted the Hamburg courtroom springs from a passage in Kretzer’s book. In it, she depicts Major Stewart, the British prosecutor, reminding Dr. Gerhard Schiedlausky that he could have placed doctoring over soldiering without fearing for his life, as witnesses testified that Dr. “Lukas” had done. Instead, Schiedlausky was too cowardly to resist orders.6 Although Kretzer mentions Lucas only in a footnote, she does not repeat the mistake made by the witnesses who accepted at face value Lucas’s claims and hearsay about his transfer. The British court accepted those claims in turn, seemingly in no real hurry to track down Lucas. Lucas might have been more forthcoming in the forties than he was in the sixties, surrounded as he was by overwhelming exculpatory support and not yet associated with murder through his selections at Auschwitz. Most assuredly, though, he was happy to avoid British military courts that adjudicated crimes against British citizens committed by SS doctors in camps liberated by the British, whose photographs associated the Holocaust with Bergen-Belsen. Such courts left little room for either excuses or for mercy. Granted, it is difficult for courts, or anyone for that matter, to categorize without comparing and contrasting on scales of high and low, good and evil. However, this chapter argues against Strebel’s view of “increased scruples,” which he applied to Lucas’s trajectory from fear to courage, caution to recklessness. Instead, I propose understanding Lucas through the view that fellow defendant Stefan Baretzki advanced. Tired of seeing Lucas’s exceptionalism paraded in court, Baretzki insisted that this steady praise was biased, even though it bought Lucas a return ticket to civilian life. In support of Baretzki’s misgivings, I consider the accounts of Sinti and Roma sterilized in the men’s camp and the information about Lucas that fellow Ravensbrück doctor Percy Treite provided in affidavits and in court. What emerges is the portrait of an SS doctor at odds with himself and his environment, driving, so to speak, with the brakes on—trying to resist while not

rave ns brück  •  105

standing out, and partnering with the Nazi nurse Gerda Schröder to expedite International Red Cross aid and liberation for large groups of mostly Scandinavian women imprisoned at Ravensbrück. Lucas worked concurrently with many of the sixteen Ravensbrück personnel who became defendants in the first Ravensbrück trial, convened by the British authorities in the Curiohaus in Hamburg from 5 December 1946 to 3 February 1947. Absent from that trial, Lucas was referred to by survivor witnesses and defendants alike and was used by the prosecutor to judge the medical doctors Percy Treite, Gerhard Schiedlausky, Rolf Rosenthal, and Adolf Winkelmann. Along with the dentist Martin Hellinger and the nurse Elisabeth Marschall, these medically trained defendants were six of the sixteen defendants, a number that included seven women. Lucas had also worked with the deputy camp leader Johann Schwarzhuber at Auschwitz. Lucas’s predecessor at Ravensbrück, Benno Orendi, was tried in the fourth Ravensbrück trial and hanged in Hameln on 17 September 1948. Even though Lucas followed the proceedings of the Curiohaus in Hamburg from his home in Elmshorn, less than an hour away, little effort seems to have been expended to find him.

Lucas’s Role in Ravensbrück Sterilizations of Sinti and Roma Lucas’s role in sterilizing Sinti and Roma has long remained a footnote even in major studies of Nazi sterilization policy. Most accounts merely acknowledge in passing that sterilization occurred and that Lucas carried the blame.7 His role in sterilization complicates the picture of his character that Ravensbrück witnesses conveyed.8 Michael Zimmermann’s study of Sinti and Roma reminds us that Lucas sterilized the Sinti Wehrmacht veterans at Ravensbrück in early 1945 after failing to do so as part of his duties in Birkenau, thus suggesting a continuity of violent practice that challenges the narrative of Lucas’s increased scruples. In fact, Lucas may have been prevented from carrying out the sterilizations because they coincided with the Hungarian mass transports. At the apex of increasingly severe roundups and deportations of German Sinti and Roma, Himmler’s sordid Auschwitz Decree of 16 December 1942 ordered the deportation of Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where extinction through labor, starvation, disease, or ultimately “liquidation” awaited most of them. To enforce the order, the Reich Criminal Police Office, which under its leader, Arthur Nebe, had already formed the Reich Office for Combating the Gypsy Menace in May 1938, worked together in Berlin with Dr. Robert Ritter’s Race Hygienic Research Branch. In Hitler’s Chancellery, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Genetic Ailments also played a major role.9 Having already directed the “euthanasia” of children deemed “unworthy of life,” the Reich Committee’s responsibilities came to include implementing the Auschwitz De-

106   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

cree by carrying out sterilizations of Sinti and Roma Mischlinge (hybrids, meant in a derogatory sense) inside and outside of the concentration camps.10 The Gypsy family camp BIIe received the first deportations in February 1943. Exemptions to deportation applied to “pure” and “Lalleri” Roma and other documented situations.11 Sinti and Roma still serving in the military or honorably discharged (decorated or injured) were also initially spared from deportation, along with their spouses and children.12 The condition for avoiding deportation was sterilization, which involved signing consent forms. Soon this was not enough, as many branches of the criminal police erred on the side of deporting more, not fewer, “potential criminals.”13 Rudolf Höss, former Auschwitz commandant, returned for seven weeks in May 1944 to help launch the killing campaign against the Hungarian Jews. Preparing for the mass deportations meant finding a space for prisoners not killed immediately upon arrival. This had been the argument for the Theresienstadt Family Camp liquidations as well: “to make more room.” In his memoir, Höss claimed that the camp’s “Gypsies” were too simple and trusting to see their end coming.14 This view is uncorroborated by the victims themselves. On the contrary, argue Auschwitz Museum historians Helena Kubica and Piotr Setkiewicz, Sinti and Roma could not help but interpret an SS plan in early April 1944, which involved selecting young and strong Sinti and Roma for industrial labor elsewhere, as a planned murder of those left behind. Sinti and Roma prisoners had witnessed the murder of Jews in the Theresienstadt family camp (BIIb) on 7 March 1944, because the BIIe camp adjoined the crematoria.15 Presuming that the deception deployed against the Jews was now directed at them, they resisted the order to leave for Germany.16 Some 2,300 Sinti and Roma were selected in the second half of May 1944 for labor in Germany and were deported in early June. Earlier in the month, Criminal Police head Arthur Nebe had broached with Himmler the idea of sterilization and war service for the Sinti soldiers in the camp.17 Then, on 17 May 1944, the camp clerk’s office registered the German and Austrian Sinti and Roma (along with their family members) who had served in the Wehrmacht or had earned military distinctions.18 All were promised freedom if they agreed to sterilization.19 Prisoners who agreed to be sterilized were relocated with their families from Birkenau to Blocks 10 and 11 of Auschwitz. Later in court, Lucas, who had substituted for Mengele as camp doctor of the Gypsy camp for various periods after arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in mid-December 1943, took credit for the idea of relocating the veterans—“I counted it a success for me that they got pulled out at all”20—but did not bother to mention that sterilization had been the stipulation for leaving the Gypsy camp. Bruno Stein, one of the soldiers selected for labor and war service in Germany, testified that Lucas was behind the sterilization-for-freedom proposal announced during a roll call one morning in Birkenau.21 The sterilizations had to

rave ns brück  •  107

be postponed until Lucas saw the same soldiers again. On 31 July the 1,621 Sinti and Roma who had been moved to Blocks 10 and 11 left Auschwitz-Birkenau on a transport.22 Most were bound for Buchenwald, but 213 of them arrived at Ravensbrück, including the veterans slated for sterilization. Two days later, on the night of 2 August, the 4,200 to 4,300 prisoners left behind in the Gypsy camp were rounded up and murdered in the gas chambers.23 It is unknown whether Lucas assisted his colleagues in the massacre, which came only four days before his marching orders to Mauthausen. At any rate, his name does not appear in the accounts.24 Lucas arrived in Ravensbrück on 15 December 1944 and began sterilizing the Sinti men and boys two weeks later. Whether he was assigned to Ravensbrück to complete his Auschwitz task is open to question. If his plan had been to sterilize a larger number than the forty Sinti prisoners ascribed to him by witnesses, other distractions may have prevented him from doing so, as had been the case in Auschwitz. By his own account, the order to select sick prisoners for extermination in the adjoining youth camp Uckermark was the main reason for interrupting the sterilizations. Despite the promise that they would be freed if they consented to sterilization, 211 of the veterans (two had escaped) were transferred to Sachsenhausen on 3 March 1945 in a “partial evacuation” of the men’s camp. From Sachsenhausen they were forcefully conscripted into the SS Dirlewanger Division on 13 April 1945 to be used as human ammunition at the Oder River against the advancing Russians.25 This, then, is the background of the Sinti and Roma veterans and their families who escaped the 2 August 1944 massacre in Birkenau, which was justified as creating necessary space for the arrival of Hungarian Jews and was carried out by killing the prisoners too weak to be transported for work elsewhere. It must have fallen to Lucas to organize and carry out mass sterilizations of once and future soldiers—but also of Sinti and Roma women in Ravensbrück. The historical reconstruction of this is complicated, but it begins with the testimony of Nazi doctors and nurses and their prisoner assistants. After his capture, Ravensbrück camp doctor Percy Treite admitted to performing traditional operations ordered by genetic courts on “feebleminded” Germans, but he was less keen to discuss his own involvement in sterilizing Sinti and Roma women and girls. Girls as young as eight years old were forced to undergo excruciating “operation-less” methods carried out by Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann (in the camp only briefly as “guest sterilizers”), only to be subjected to Treite’s traditional method thereafter.26 As part of his research on naming the victims, Paul Weindling has identified at least 432 women who underwent injections or X-rays in Ravensbrück against their will.27 Clauberg’s technique was inflicted on family members of the combat veterans. While there is testimonial evidence that Lucas was involved in sterilizing women at Ravensbrück as well, the focus here is on the evidence of his sterilization of Sinti prisoners in the men’s camp.

108   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

By the time Lucas appeared in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, sterilization was not a concern of German courts, as forced sterilizations from 1945 had ceased to be prosecuted by May 1955 under the ten-year statute of limitations. In fact, Lucas’s thirty-nine-month sentence for accomplice to murder was ultimately shorter than the five- to ten-year sentence he could have received for “causing grievous bodily harm” through sterilization.28 Adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe argued that even though testimony about sterilization was useless for proving murder, it could at least challenge the character profile that Ravensbrück survivors had fashioned of Lucas and rebut the claim of the defense that he had behaved the same way at Auschwitz as he did later at Ravensbrück.29 Thus, ethnic prisoners targeted by Lucas’s eugenic acts were the best rejoinders to any statements by political and medical prisoners wanting to clear him. Depositions that downplayed Lucas’s role as sterilizer appeared early after the war. In a deposition filed in 1946 against most of the Ravensbrück SS defendants standing trial in Hamburg, former “brown” nurse Gerda Schröder recalled that Carl Clauberg—though not a defendant—had sterilized thirty to fifty Sinti children in late December 1944, and that she herself had assisted Percy Treite with “about thirty sterilizations” in the months prior to that.30 Only in passing did she list Lucas among the doctors on staff.31 Seventeen years later, Schröder was questioned by State Attorney Völker in Itzehoe as part of a pretrial investigation, ultimately dropped, that involved a complaint brought by the Sinti prisoner Heinrich Schenk, to be discussed shortly. In her 1963 responses to Völker, Schröder disclosed that she had assisted Lucas in his operations on women—not sterilizations—in the camp hospital, stating that he did not operate on male patients.32 She did not specify how many of those operations were abortions, and nothing about sterilizations emerged under interrogation. However, Margareta Armbruster, a Catholic nurse who cared for young Sinti girls after they underwent sterilization, confirmed that Lucas too had sterilized female prisoners due to pressure from Dr. Trommer and Dr. Treite.33 As far as Armbruster remembered, “Dr. Lucas was not involved in experiments. On the other hand, he was present at sterilizations of women. How this was carried out, I cannot say. This was carried out by the doctors and Nazi nurses.”34 Predictably, when he was called to Itzehoe four months after Armbruster, Lucas denied sterilizing women prisoners.35 Like her fellow prisoner Armbruster, French ethnologist Germaine Tillion depicted Lucas as a good and honest doctor who nevertheless “personally practiced systematic sterilization of Gypsies, without discussion, without a murmur, and apparently without remorse.”36 Another witness, the medical aide B. Quartero, noted in an unsolicited letter to Lucas’s wife Susanne that although Lucas had been powerless to refuse sterilizing 140 Sinti and Roma women, he still supplied her with some two hundred tablets to help ease their pain.37 Such largely anecdotal accounts lack specific details due to SS policy that generally excluded prisoner doctors and nurses from the actual operations.38 With these few exceptions,

rave ns brück  •  109

then, most prisoners in the women’s camp, including Armbruster and Quartero, downplayed Lucas’s sterilization of female Sinti and Roma if they knew about it at all, and justified it as unavoidable. These Itzehoe statements were conspicuously absent from the Frankfurt investigation, but not only because the statute of limitations for sterilization had expired and rendered the crimes no longer prosecutable. Schröder, Armbruster, and others considered the good Lucas accomplished for them as a reason to keep quiet about the incisions he made on other prisoners against their will. The fractious subpopulations in Ravensbrück agreed with the Nazis that Sinti and Roma belonged at the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy. Any protests that privileged prisoners made to the Nazi doctors and nurses came when they saw young Sinti and Roma girls being sterilized, not their older sisters and mothers. Antagonism toward Sinti and Roma prevailed inside and outside of the camps. Along with the prisoners, the prosecution, defense, judges, and juries shared this sentiment. There is also no evidence that Lucas echoed camp leader Johann Schwarzhuber’s wistfulness about having to “liquidate” the Gypsy camp; Commandant Rudolf Höss reported that Schwarzhuber had formed sentimental attachments to a few of the prisoners.39 No Sinti and Roma witnesses from any camp spoke out for Lucas. This explains the lack of interest in following up on the sterilizations of women and men that Lucas carried out. Testimony from two German communist prisoners in medical roles forms the basis for discussing the sterilized Sinti and Roma prisoners. Conrad Finkelmeier and Karl Gerber both highlighted Lucas’s resistance to carrying out the sterilizations on men and boys. They shifted the blame not only onto Commandant Fritz Suhren and chief doctor Richard Trommer, but also onto the affected prisoners themselves. In his 1947 memoir, Die braune Apokalypse (The brown apocalypse), Finkelmeier, a secretary in the men’s hospital, noted that after Suhren and Trommer had announced sterilization as the condition for their freedom. Sinti veterans were harder to dissuade from the operation than their children: “Only three of them had the courage to accept the consequences of refusal . . . among them a fifteen-year-old, who announced to the doctor that he would never allow himself to be sterilized and would kill anyone who tried to perform it on him with force.”40 At this juncture Finkelmeier left out the name of the doctor who sterilized children as young as ten and twelve years old. Only later, under questioning about remarks his comrade Karl Gerber had made, did Finkelmeier reveal Lucas’s name, thus repeating the pattern of witnesses from the women’s camp of silencing and downplaying Lucas’s role. Karl Gerber wrote a letter to the Frankfurt state attorney’s office recalling that because of being tricked before, the “Gypsies” had been skeptical of advice from the SS leadership. They kept trusting that their German citizenship left them better off than Jews: “They waited and waited until one day the camp leadership again promised their release, and then had only to declare themselves willing for

110   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

their sterilization.”41 Suhren recruited them for the Dirlewanger brigade by reminding them how alluring the life of the soldier was. Despite being admonished by prisoner doctors such as Dr. Frantizek Šíl, hospital aides, Finkelmeier, and Lucas to endure the short months until war’s end, “the skeptical Gypsies acted out of fear, in effect giving their signature to request their own infertility.”42 They had also heard that an incised seminal duct could be restored with a tubal insert.43 Gerber considered Lucas a rare SS supporter of communist prisoners, caught between confused Sinti prisoners and his impatient garrison boss, Dr. Trommer. Gerber’s letter on Lucas’s behalf resulted in his call to testify before the Frankfurt court on 11 January 1965, when he asserted that the six sterilizations which he had witnessed Lucas perform one day in January 1945 had transpired only due to Dr. Trommer’s insistence.44 Finkelmeier, questioned on the basis of Gerber’s letter, echoed Gerber’s assertion that pressure from the Sinti prisoners below and from Trommer above had forced Lucas’s hand.45 It had cost Lucas enormous effort: “While he could not prevent the voluntary sterilization of the male Gypsies due to their expressed willingness, he did strictly refuse to sterilize children.”46 Finkelmeier thus named Lucas responsible, but reversed the assertion from his 1947 memoir that had listed children among the sterilization victims. Lucas, Finkelmeier asserted, had told him about his heavy arguments with Dr. Trommer, but also that he could no longer resist Trommer’s order once the “Gypsies” signed their declarations. Everyone had the impression that it cost Lucas a great deal to carry out the operations. Still, he refused to operate on children.47 The most compelling testimony solicits no pity for the sterilizer because it comes from the victims themselves and those who knew them. Although Bruno Stein had himself avoided sterilization in Birkenau and Ravensbrück, the memory was still vivid twenty years later in court in Frankfurt, when he named two brothers in Bavaria affected by the operation.48 After identifying Lucas from the lineup of defendants, Stein continued weeping into the witness microphone long after adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe began questioning Lucas.49 Stein’s appearance in the last full month of the trial’s evidentiary phase might have been anticlimactic in a courtroom focused on murder charges, but it still illustrated the psychological scars that sterilization left on the entire Sinti community, not just on its immediate victims.50 Still, the most alarming testimony against Lucas had already been offered during the pretrial phase. In a statement offered to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg in August 1960, the Sinti Heinrich Schenk recalled being sent to the political division in Ravensbrück to sign a form, and that a few days later he was exempt from work: The men were sent to the hospital and sterilized one after the other. My turn came on 10 January 1945. The surgery was performed by the SS doctor Lucas, Obersturm-

rave ns brück  •  111 führer, who cut through my vas deferens from the outside. The operation clearly served Dr. Lucas as an experiment, because we were not given any local anesthetic. Once the wounds were healed, Dr. Lucas came to rip them apart again, in order to see how it looked now on the inside. When I protested and said that I was in pain, he answered me with, “Be quiet, you swine.” While the average surgery patient was released after a few days, I myself remained in hospital for around six weeks.51

Under questioning by Itzehoe state attorney Völker three years after his Ludwigsburg statement (the same one who questioned Armbruster, Schröder, and Lucas), Schenk indicated having known about Lucas in Birkenau before being transported to Ravensbrück. He had not witnessed Lucas selecting for the gas chamber or beating prisoners in Birkenau, but insisted that his own sterilization without anesthetic was in keeping with Lucas’s ruthless treatment of prisoners.52 After being read Erika Buchmann’s glowing vindication of Lucas from her booklet Frauen von Ravensbrück (Women of Ravensbrück), Schenk conceded that Lucas had probably treated women less roughly than men like himself.53 Seemingly void of ill will, Schenk identified an obvious double standard in Lucas’s behavior toward female functionaries versus the Sinti soldiers and their male relatives that he was obliged to sterilize.54 Yet the double standard was not along gender lines so much as a difference in practice between ethnic and political prisoners. Carl Clauberg sterilized Jewish and Sinti women in droves. As early as the pretrial interrogations in 1961, Lucas had claimed that his few sterilizations were demanded by a hereditary health court.55 These were district courts outside the camps, composed of a judge and two doctors sympathetic to Nazi eugenic goals.56 He had no answer to Völker’s objection in 1963 that a verdict of a genetic court would not have applied to prisoners of a concentration camp.57 In Lucas’s defense, the procedures for sterilization and castration were admittedly complex, not the least for the victims affected. As Iris Hax notes, camps and surrounding towns made up a network. Sachsenhausen’s political division, for example, was the pivot point between the camp physicians and the external structures such as criminal police and prison offices, Oranienburg district hospital, and hereditary health courts.58 Occasionally genetic courts would send civilians to a camp hospital to have SS doctors perform the operations, but it was also possible for SS camp doctors to send prisoners to district hospitals. In this case the SS doctors would secure the prisoner’s signature to the effect that he was voluntarily submitting to the operation either because he saw the need or had been promised freedom for doing so.59 As mentioned, the Reich Committee oversaw sterilizations that occurred increasingly within the camps, at the same time that Himmler gave Carl Clauberg room to experiment on Jewish women in Block 10 of Auschwitz.60 Lucas was reluctant to acknowledge the true number of his sterilization victims. He conceded that he might have sterilized Schenk, but not without an-

112   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

esthetic—and certainly not while calling him a swine and later ripping apart his incisions.61 Adamant that ripping open a vasectomy scar yielded no medical knowledge, he ventured that Schenk had confused him with another doctor. Lucas had no recollection of the witness Margareta Armbruster either, who had recalled Lucas’s sterilization of women. Ultimately, State Attorney Völker dropped his case against Lucas in Itzehoe on 28 November 1963 because sterilization was no longer prosecutable nearly twenty years after the fact.62 Paul Morgenstern appeared in court on 16 July 1964 and surprised Judge Hofmeyer by reporting that Lucas had sterilized him on 4 January 1945, at around the same time that Carl Clauberg had sterilized Morgenstern’s wife in the women’s camp. Lucas, the sole SS doctor in the men’s camp, had spoken with the prisoners while operating on them.63 In response, Lucas admitted to only “two to three” sterilizations and recommended that the court focus on Dr. Treite, Dr. Trommer, and Dr. Šíl instead. As though it had just occurred to him, Lucas insisted that his transfer from Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen had happened in early January—that is, at the time of the sterilizations—but really, he left in late February. With no memory of Morgenstern, he was offended to hear such accusations from the very Sinti and Roma prisoners he had helped earlier during his two to three months of supervising the Gypsy camp in Birkenau.64 In his usual insistent manner, adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe pressed Lucas to become more forthright, in light of Morgenstern’s memory that a twelveyear-old boy from the sterilized Höllenreiner family had screamed in his pain that “Hitler could go to hell.”65 Lucas claimed that he had only been in the men’s camp to perform two sterilizations.66 He had shown the two hereditary health court edicts to Šíl, whom he called the doctor responsible for the men’s camp. After Morgenstern reminded him that Šíl was every bit as much a prisoner as Morgenstern was, Lucas declared that he had meant to call Šíl a prisoner doctor.67 He himself had performed three irreversible sterilizations. “As far as the others . . . those were fake operations. Those were incisions that were made, and a bit of connective tissue removed, and that was pretty much it.”68 Lucas complained about the surge of Gypsy prisoners who insisted on receiving the operation that they had been promised would secure their freedom. When Trommer arrived with the hereditary health court papers to remind him that it was something the Gypsies wanted, Lucas found resistance no longer possible.69 Thus, Lucas aligned himself with the claims of Finkelmeier and Gerber that Sinti prisoners had envisaged sterilization as the price for freedom.70 In all of this, Lucas appears the victim of pressure from above and below, while the consequences of sterilization for the prisoners is conveniently sidelined. Lucas sterilized at least forty Sinti prisoners at Ravensbrück. The names of the victims are contained in a transport list of prisoners transferred to Sachsenhausen on 3 March 1945.71 Thus, sterilization was not the price of Sinti freedom af-

rave ns brück  •  113

ter all but a lie for inflicting more damage on the enemies of what was now only a German community of fate. In a 1991 interview with the brothers Walter and Erich Winter, Michael Zimmermann established that it was Lucas, not Mengele or Clauberg, who was the operator.72 Walter Winter wrote later in his memoir: “My brother Erich was sterilized in the hospital of the men’s camp. . . . The camp doctor Dr. Lucas carried out the sterilizations. He sent his people into the barracks, and they always had to pick up five men at once and bring them to the hospital. Anyone who happened to be standing in the way was taken away.”73 Here one must decide whose account is more trustworthy: that of a German political prisoner unaffected by the sterilizations, or that of a Sinti survivor whose brother underwent the forced operation. Testimony of the sort given by Finkelmeier and Gerber sounds patronizing in its depiction of Sinti soldiers as irrational and gullible. After months or years of captivity, having been discharged from active service on the whim of racial edicts and deported to an extermination camp, Sinti soldiers were making decisions for themselves and their families difficult to judge in retrospect.74 When they had choices at all, prisoners usually chose one horrific option among many. Parents who refused to consent to their children’s sterilization invited potentially fatal consequences. Granting consent, however, practically guaranteed social isolation for their children later in life.75 Helgard Kramer has conjectured that Lucas was unsettled by the mass murder of Jews but could still agree to sterilize prisoners stigmatized as eugenic and racial outcasts.76 Whatever the case, in Lucas the tension between doctoring the patient and doctoring the Volkskörper (the body of the Volk) was especially vivid. At times the individual prisoner was worth his energy, while at other times the goals of the ethnic community held sway. Finkelmeier’s claim that Lucas drew the line at sterilizing children not only contradicts Sinti testimony but also invites the question why such a line was necessary to draw in the first place. Just as repugnant as drawing such a line, if in fact he did so, was Lucas’s habit of describing his own alleged helplessness rather than acknowledging the plight of his victims. He justified his actions as either resistant to orders or as unable to escape them, depending on which explanation served him best. In this respect, he was no different from his fellow defendants in the Auschwitz trial. It is unfair, however, that Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses should bear the entire blame for the lack of details about the sterilizations that occurred at Ravensbrück. In both law and historiography, the culpability of SS doctors for sterilizations has long taken a back seat to the importance accorded selections for murder. As Donald Bloxham has remarked, Sinti and Roma saw their wartime fate relegated to “the shadow of supposedly greater ‘civilizations’ and more ‘important’ international developments.”77 The focus of Allied tribunals on certain crimes, criminals, war arenas, and didactic agendas meant ignoring a myriad of areas worth adjudicating. For example, if the French and British prosecuted foremost

114   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

the crimes inflicted upon their citizens, and the Soviets trumpeted the efforts of antifascist resistance, then less space remained for groups such as “Jews, homosexuals, or ‘gypsies.’”78 The IMT trial also set a precedent. It removed sterilization from the crimes requiring the tribunal’s judgement, largely because the judging countries themselves practiced it.79 The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial also failed to inspire historians to pay attention to persecution of Sinti and Roma under the Nazi regime.80 In general, the German press was reluctant to publish on a subject in which readers showed no interest.81 Guenter Lewy’s ledger of postwar investigations of crimes against Sinti and Roma does not list a single conviction of officials who were put on trial or had to try escaping trial.82 The inability to convict perpetrators of crimes against Sinti and Roma connects to the lack of advocacy for them. Even after 1949, West Germany insisted that if hereditary health courts had listed feeblemindedness to justify sterilization, victims were not entitled to compensation on the basis of racial persecution.83 The reason given by the Stuttgart state attorney’s office for halting the probe of Robert Ritter’s colleague Paul Werner in 1961 was that deportations of Sinti and Roma had been legal until the Auschwitz Decree in December 1942, based as they were on “crime prevention” and not on race.84 This view still had currency in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, as Aschenauer reminded the court that if “gypsies” were sent to camps before the Auschwitz Decree, it was on the basis of crime, not ethnicity. Furthermore, Sinti and Roma victims of sterilization were called upon only slowly to testify in postwar trials.85 Ethnologists, jurists, and criminal police accepted reified images of “gypsies” as criminals with no credibility in court. In perhaps the most infamous example, Frankfurt state attorney Hans-Krafft Kosterlitz closed the case against Robert Ritter in 1950 by arguing that the court could disregard the statements of the more than sixty Sinti and Roma who had testified.86 Kosterlitz accepted Ritter’s explanation that the illiterate, “asocial elements” could not distinguish between events they had experienced and those they merely imagined.87 Indeed, for decades, German courts considered Sinti and Roma naturally and legally incapable of bearing witness.88 In Frankfurt as well, not a single statement of the four Sinti-Roma witnesses who testified in the Auschwitz trial reached the level of criminal-legal status for the court.89 In 2015, German Appeals Court president Bettina Limperg visited the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg to apologize for the shameful role that German law played in prolonging such indignities.90 These are all reasons to reassess the sterilizations Lucas performed on Sinti prisoners as weightier than the kindness he showed non-Sinti prisoners. Not surprisingly, Heinrich Schenk could imagine Lucas being kinder toward women prisoners than to him. Christian Raabe was right to point out what sterilization said about character, although the courts were preoccupied with proving murder.

rave ns brück  •  115

Ravensbrück Women’s Camp While Lucas’s sterilizations in the men’s camp made him unwelcome to the Sinti and Roma there, the women’s camp hospital told a different story. His resistance to SS exploitation of prisoners endeared him to medical functionaries who assisted him in the so-called Revier (Hospital) II for infectious diseases. The judges in the Ravensbrück trial seized up on the anecdotes and rumors that developed during Lucas’s absence from the trial, using his good character to judge the doctors on trial who had variously kicked, beaten, or avoided treating the prisoners. Percy Treite, Rolf Rosenthal, and Herta Oberheuser had been affiliated in some way with Karl Gebhardt (Himmler’s personal physician) and his fellow physicians at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium, about eight miles east of Ravensbrück. This group had made forays into Ravensbrück to conduct sulfonamide drug or bone transplant experiments on mainly Polish prisoners.91 While not affiliated with Hohenlychen, Adolf Winkelmann was identified by witnesses as the worst of the doctors, incapable of performing any doctoral functions at all. He filled his time by selecting prisoners either directly for the gas chamber or indirectly for its way station Uckermark, the repurposed adjoining youth camp that camp leaders touted deceptively as a rest camp. The witnesses and the court alike sized up Treite as falling somewhere between Lucas and Winkelmann. A brilliant surgeon who made some improvements in hygienic conditions, Treite also performed the usual forced sterilizations and abortions along with unnecessary experiments outside his gynecological expertise. After setting up a maternity ward in 1944, for example, he lost interest in it, thus contributing to the mortality of babies born in the camp to severely undernourished mothers. The transcripts of the Ravensbrück trial pinpoint the issues that pertain to Lucas either directly or by extension. Even when the transcript of the hearings does not mention his name in certain contexts, we can infer that he carried out most of what was expected of him. If he carried out a militarized SS role in one place, he could also present a traditional doctor’s face toward a different prisoner population. He could switch back and forth according to the orders he received and the prisoners they affected. For example, a refusal to select was not a refusal to sterilize. Less measurable but still pertinent were such factors as his personal initiative and energy level, degree of support from others, news from the outside about his family or the state of the war, verbal exchanges, and anything else that determined his mood more than his supposedly stable character.92 After his arrival at Ravensbrück on 15 December 1944, Lucas assumed responsibility for Revier II, the hospital for infectious diseases. Revier I was headed by Treite and handled surgical operations. In the hallway connecting the two blocks, Treite and Lucas shared a secretary, Tusia Winkowska.93 Block 10 fell un-

116   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

der Lucas’s responsibility and was filled with patients suffering from tuberculosis (TB). It also contained the so-called Idiotenstübchen, a cramped office space that Lucas’s predecessor, Benno Orendi, had transformed into a living hell for dozens of “insane” women.94 The deplorable treatment of these women became the object of the court’s horrified fascination. Because the women who did not die of neglect were sent to the gas chamber at Hartheim Castle, Treite and Carmen Mory, Blockälteste (block elder) in charge of Block 10 until shortly after Lucas’s arrival, were eager to blame others for the conditions of the cramped room. The French witness Violette Le Coq made Carmen Mory responsible for Block 10, and upon prompting admitted that Benno Orendi and Treite were the doctors in charge. Treite was to blame for the condition of the insane women, since he looked in on them only once a month between December 1944 and March 1945. She could not confirm any visits that Lucas or Winkelmann had made either.95 Treite insisted that he had sent a hospital aide into Block 10 after he “discussed the affair with Dr. Lukas. Dr. Lukas gave immediately his consent because he did not like Mory.”96 The absence of Orendi and his successor Lucas from the trial made it easy for the witnesses to blame Treite for everything that transpired on Block 10. Prosecutor and Judge Advocate General, Major S. M. Stewart, promised that every effort had been made the past four months to find Lucas and Orendi, and that the defense could call them as witnesses if they were found.97 Dr. Metzler insisted that it was a mistake to assume that his client Treite was Lucas’s superior when in fact the two doctors were on equal terms and responsible for different domains, with neither one superior to the other. Lucas even outranked Treite with two more years of Waffen-SS service.98 On the other hand, Orendi deferred to Treite as a mentor for surgery and for the arena Orendi was responsible for on paper. But Treite was unwilling to carry the blame for Orendi’s foolhardy brain operations on insane prisoners. During cross-examination, he was asked by Mory’s lawyer, Dr. Zippel, whether Mory had asked him to stop it “because these operations had no purpose,” but Treite could not recall Mory having done so.99 While Zippel was trying to paint his client Mory as concerned enough to stop unnecessary operations on helpless prisoners, Treite neither denied that it took place nor ventured any indignation at the idea. Similarly, he had expressed no indignation upon discovering that six healthy Polish women had been the subjects of experiments. In short, no one admitted responsibility for the women Treite claimed were isolated for posing a danger to others. When Lucas arrived in Ravensbrück in mid-December 1944, the cramped wood-paneled room was under Mory’s control. She testified that Treite “refused to alter the horrible circumstances in the lunatic’s room. When I asked him in December if he would not take over Block 10 and help those prisoners he refused and he left it to the Jew-baiter, Lukas.”100 She claimed to have heard from Ann Spoerry, a medical student who assisted her, that in the middle of January Dr. Lucas had crammed the room with invalids who

rave ns brück  •  117

had to die.101 From the SS point of view, the women were not worth blaming any doctor for neglect. Lucas called the overcrowded room a circumstance beyond his control for which the most he could do was find a stove to heat it.102 The curious statements by Carmen Mory about Lucas as “Jew-baiter” notwithstanding, Lucas’s attention appears to have been directed toward the typhus and tuberculosis patients of Block 10. One of the TB patients, Johanna Dyer, testified first by letter and then in person on 11 March 1965 (the day of Lucas’s confession) that Lucas released her from the ward because an X-ray showed no visible mass on her lung. Although using X-rays alone to determine symptoms was against protocol and Treite’s wishes, it was how Lucas saved her from a selection to Uckermark, where she almost certainly would have perished.103 Claiming no memory of Dyer, Lucas responded that he had occasionally released patients still TB positive—“because to have TB in the hospital was an absolute death sentence”—telling them to seek medical treatment and take seriously the danger they posed to others.104 Resisting the standard method of selection and murder of TB patients, Lucas took on the responsibility for their return to health.105 He prescribed medications and therapies while “organizing” thermometers, calcium, bandages, and cod liver oil for them out of the SS pharmacy.106 Treite, on the other hand, sent internees with slight lung problems to Block 10, where they immediately contracted TB.107 One evening in early 1945, the SS nurse Martha Haake gave overdoses of a long-acting phenobarbital to critically ill patients in Block 10.108 The witness Le Porz claimed that it was on Treite’s order, but Treite blamed Trommer.109 Elisabeth Marschall, the head nurse, contended that the view that Nurse Martha had followed Trommer’s order to treat insomniacs was false, given that twenty-eight women received the soporific powder. The next day Erika Buchmann told Marschall that two women had died.110 Claiming that Trommer had told him about a Veronal substitute, Treite recalled either two or ten prisoner deaths without conceding that it was poisoning, “because most of the patients had taken to it very well.”111 After he and Lucas asked Doctor Trommer to have the powder analyzed, the powder was never used again.112 This aura of ignorance was of course a ruse, but perhaps even more disturbing is Treite’s nonchalance about how many died: “I myself do not know the figures and I did not trouble very much about this affair.”113 Despite Nurse Marschall’s admonition to her nurses not to tell Lucas about it, he was the first to offer antidotes and help revive the patients.114 Le Porz attributed Lucas’s transfer from Ravensbrück eight to ten days later to this intervention.115 This and other anecdotes reinforced his reputation as healer and saboteur: performing an appendectomy, splinting an arm, helping deliver a Dutch prisoner’s baby while bringing her extra milk.116 Supporters were more eager to discuss Lucas’s interventions than his neglect of the Idiotenstübchen. As a crime, of course, omission is harder than commission to prove. Understandably, what

118   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

stood out to his supporters was that Lucas countered the brutality and nonchalance of his coworkers. His highest marks came from refusing to select prisoners for the gas chamber during his ten weeks at Ravensbrück. Witnesses recalled Lucas’s public persona—the doctor they knew who, unlike Rosenthal or Schiedlausky, declined to use whips and dogs against women prisoners, and refrained from ramming them intentionally with his bicycle during roll call to knock them over.117 If Lucas did select prisoners, it was kept quiet. Sylvia Salvesen records noticing Lucas after a “tremendous quarrel” involving Trommer, Treite, and Lucas. Lucas emerged from Treite’s office “white with fury, but his eyes were shining. I only saw him for a moment, but he seemed to be transfigured. He noticed none of us. It was as if he were walking towards a far distant light.”118 She learned later that Lucas’s refusal brought on Trommer’s threats of “death and all sorts of devilments.”119 Most of Salvesen’s references to Lucas retained this mystical tone. The widely divergent dates that Lucas and his witnesses gave for his arrival and departure complicate the question of selections. Like Treite, another convenient scapegoat for Lucas was Adolf Winkelmann, whose previous assignment and date of arrival witnesses remembered wrongly: Auschwitz instead of Sachsenhausen, and far earlier than 26 February 1945.120 Most survivors dated the personnel switch far earlier. For example, Louise Le Porz reported that Winkelmann made the first selection in Block 10 for the gas chamber on 8 February.121 Neeltje Epker reported that Winkelmann selected prisoners in Uckermark on 17 February.122 Erika Buchmann wrote that Winkelmann came from Auschwitz along with Johann Schwarzhuber (the latter fact was correct).123 Renee Lacroux insisted, despite being corrected during cross-examination, that Winkelmann had come from Auschwitz in January 1945.124 Germaine Tillion wrote that Lucas left Ravensbrück on 10 January 1945 and that Winkelmann arrived in late January, making his first block selections in early February.125 Recent scholarship has repeated these errors.126 A more trustworthy set of dates and probable complicity comes from recognizing that in SS networks transfers were neither coincidental nor inherently punitive. Systematic killings of sick and feeble prisoners coincided with the arrival of Franz Lucas in Ravensbrück in mid-December, and with the arrival of Rudolf Höss, Johann Schwarzhuber, and Otto Moll in late 1944 and early 1945—all of them key players in the killing of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau the previous spring and summer. The presence of Moll and his mobile killing commando is proof of an order issuing from beyond the camp to isolate the women unable to work and murder them along with sick prisoners.127 Despite Commandant Fritz Suhren’s claim that he was busy in the subcamps and thus the operation of the gas chamber was attributable to his deputy Albert Sauer, Schwarzhuber and Treite claimed that Suhren was in fact impatient with the pace of shooting by Moll’s execution squad and had thus ordered women who had been selected to

rave ns brück  •  119

be gassed.128 While the planned gas chamber was being constructed in early 1945 outside the camp wall near the hospital, a shed next to the crematorium was made into a provisional gas chamber that held 180 to 200 persons.129 Targeted killings thus began in January and February, likely following the sterilizations that Lucas carried out. Prisoners were selected for killing and taken in some cases directly to the gas chamber, but more frequently indirectly by way of the adjoining youth camp Uckermark, another deception intended to prevent panic. Prisoners were also subjected to shots in the neck at the crematorium, lethal injections, the aforementioned forced overdoses, and systematic starvation and neglect in the half dozen Uckermark barracks where they languished. Uckermark transferred the locus of killing just far enough to puzzle the prisoners. Uckermark was first staffed with a few doctors and nurses, but only while being repurposed. Since there was no need for medical staff in an eliminatory context, the doctors and nurses soon returned to Ravensbrück, which alerted the prisoners to Uckermark’s true purpose. Treite claimed that both he and Lucas were part of the original staff asked to establish the hospital barracks (Block 5) in Uckermark.130 During the cross-examination of Zdenka Nedvedova, Treite’s lawyer, Dr. Metzler, asked if she knew that the youth camp had a hospital and that Dr. Lucas was in charge of it. She replied: “I do know that Dr. Lucas would have worked in the jugenlager [i.e., Jugendlager, youth camp] but all I know is that when the first convoys went to Uckermark Dr. Treite sent to Uckermark a French prisoner doctor, Dora Revier, and one nurse, Noel, who both however returned in three days’ time which shows that the camp administration did not worry about any medical aid to be given in Uckermark; instead Salvequart was sent there.”131 It is unclear whether Uckermark was intended first to reduce crowding and contagion in Ravensbrück and then evolved into a killing site, or whether extermination was its purpose all along. In the middle of January, prisoners arrived from other transports, not just from Ravensbrück, notably Hungarian Jews, Warsaw ghetto survivors, and injured women from Ravensbrück subcamps. One of the earliest dates given for the transport of Ravensbrück prisoners to Uckermark—210 French women with red or pink cards—is 10 January 1945.132 A nearly identical number, the remaining 209 female youth prisoners from Uckermark, was transferred to Ravensbrück on 24 January. Around 20 January the systematic selections began in the hospitals and sick blocks of Ravensbrück.133 Erika Buchmann contended that Treite gave her an order on 20 January to compile a list of the sickest tuberculosis patients on Block 10. Believing his promise that “Mittwerda” (Uckermark) was a rest camp, she complied. A week later the thirty-two worst cases were sent to Uckermark, then another thirty invalids followed, and on 9 February another seventy-two. On 27 January Vera Salvequart, also a defendant in the first Ravensbrück trial, was transferred to Uckermark. A medical doctor in training, she kept lists, wrote the numbers on the arms of the selected prisoners, injected other prisoners, and

120   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

forced still others to ingest the white powder.134 From January to April, some four to five thousand prisoners were transferred to Uckermark altogether. With already thin food rations sliced in half, they were forced to endure hours of standing in winter temperatures with no protection. As many as fifty women starved and froze to death daily. Women were selected in groups of fifty, pressed into the former gymnasium for up to three days without food, drink, blankets, or sanitation, then loaded onto trucks and driven off to be executed.135 The first phase of shootings organized by Moll began while Uckermark underwent its transition to a killing center and lasted until the end of January 1945.136 Prisoners were shot in the neck with small caliber rifles or pistols, both with silencers. Rudolf Höss and Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren occasionally supplemented the two doctors who were always there.137 In a pretrial statement and again in court, Treite described taking part in an execution of fifty women at the camp crematorium one evening near the end of February 1945, and on the following day telling Trommer he refused such duties going forward. As a result, Trommer enlisted Lucas for the next execution and received a similar refusal from him after he had carried out the same duties. Since it is doubtful that Treite would try to frame his colleague Lucas in a voluntary statement—no one had accused Treite of this “illegal” execution—his description of participation likely applies to Lucas as well. In his first statement to his British captors on 5 May 1945, Treite explained that shooting fifty women in the neck daily in front of the crematorium came about because he had previously refused to select women for Uckermark or to give lethal injections. The repercussion was that Chief Doctor Richard Trommer had selected five thousand women superficially for Uckermark, while Höss and Sauer carried out the process of eliminating them. Treite’s role was to identify the prisoners who did not die immediately from the bullet to the neck. Since neither he nor Lucas could stomach more than a day of this, Schwarzhuber had to carry out the shootings without a physician’s supervision. In his final pretrial statement of 3 October 1946, Treite included the fact that two prisoners from the men’s camp carried the corpses, but his handwritten corrections of the interrogation downplayed his habitual participation.138 In court, he stressed how much the execution had taken him by surprise. Treite. These prisoners were not quite dead yet and my duty was to see to it that they were not dragged like animals to the crematorium, but that they were carried in a proper manner. Major Stewart. What sort of shots were they? Treite. They were shots in the back of the neck. Major Stewart. And it was your duty to certify the death of these prisoners? Treite. Yes. It lasted a few minutes until these prisoners, after this shot, died.

rave ns brück  •  121 Major Stewart. And why, when you saw what happened, did not you refuse to participate in this execution? Treite. I could not go away because the furnaces were burning, and if I had left, those habitual criminals would have just thrown the prisoners, even before being dead, into the furnace. Major Stewart. So what do you mean to say then? Treite. For medical reasons I had to stay there; I could not go away.139

Treite objected more to the way the women died than to the fact that they were being killed. It was indecent to drag and throw women alive into the furnace. Instead, it was proper to carry them and make sure that they were dead before they hit the fire. Despite testimony to the contrary, there is little reason to doubt that Lucas made selections for the youth camp along with Treite. Many women were selected from Block 10, for example, although both Lucas and Erika Buchmann, the block elder for Block 10 who replaced Mory, claimed that they refused to compile lists of the sickest and weakest women for transport. Buchmann recalled that she and Le Porz resisted Treite’s request for a list of the TB-positive, feebleminded, and extremely weak patients in Block 10. As mentioned, however, earlier accounts have Le Porz and Buchmann compiling the lists when they still believed that “Mittwerda” was the rest camp that Schwarzhuber claimed it was, unaware that it was actually Uckermark, ten minutes away.140 Lucas told Buchmann that he had a case pending against him for refusing to compile such a list, and that if not arrested he would most likely be punitively transferred for the fourth time. Lucas had asserted that Treite lacked the courage to oppose the gassing of prisoners. Buchmann agreed: “Dr. Treite was a spineless man and rather cowardly.” She interpreted Lucas’s transfer three days later as the consequence of his resistance and called his replacement, Dr. Winkelmann, “absolutely one of the most brutal and unscrupulous doctors of our concentration camp.”141 Thus Buchmann was one voice among many that attributed Lucas’s departure from Ravensbrück to his refusal to select. The only contrary voice appears to be Carmen Mory, still the block elder for Block 10 when Lucas arrived: “Hauptsturmführer Lukas [i.e., Obersturmführer Lucas] carried out selection of prisoners assigned to be sent to the Jugendschutzlager [youth protection camp]. Whether he knew that these prisoners were destined to be gassed I do not know. This was in December 1944.”142 Such a remark is difficult to assess, because it may stem from revenge against Lucas or Treite or both. Treite claimed to have sent Mory away from Ravensbrück because of her connections with Ludwig Ramdohr, head of the political division, who tortured prisoners. It was rumored that Mory had denounced a hospital worker. When Treite was asked how he could have sent away a hospital worker in Block 10 if he

122   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

was not its supervisor, he replied: “I discussed the affair with Dr. Lukas. Dr. Lukas gave immediately his consent because he did not like Mory.”143 If Lucas did make the decision to send her away, it may be why Carmen Mory called him a “Jewbaiter.” But the accusation is also a reminder not to dismiss testimony of vengeful defendants out of hand, just as one must be aware of “Stockholm syndrome” on the opposite extreme, where prisoners grow attached to their captors. In another important respect, Treite and Lucas were linked by their specialty of gynecology and the population-political views that Lucas proposed in his dissertation. At issue for the British prosecutor Major Stewart were the abortions performed on German women with non-German POW partners. Did Treite interrupt a pregnancy because it posed a danger for the woman—or was it incumbent on a Nazi doctor to halt the births of children who compromised the “Aryan” bloodline? Treite maintained that he performed the abortions because the babies had even less of a chance than their mothers of leaving the camp alive.144 Abortion prevented an infant’s eventual mortality in a camp that presented the roughest conditions for newborns and whose improvement was out of everyone’s control.145 To follow Treite’s reasoning, preventing the birth of “racially compromised” children in order to prevent their later deaths delivered the mercy blow before their inevitable suffering instead of after it. Treite’s responses to Major Stewart showed acceptance of the ideology at its core. He did not protest the laws on abortion and sterilization so much as justify them. His sterilization of Sinti women and girls was legal because “the gypsies were German and therefore came under that law” and he was “ordered by Berlin” to perform the sterilizations. Like Schiedlausky, Treite was swayed by reputation and authority, in this case by hereditary health courts that were “composed of doctors and lawyers.”146 Major Stewart. Can you think of a more appalling thing for any doctor [than] to sit in a court and say that he sterilized two young children of twelve? Treite. With regard to German law it seemed desirable to sterilize those children before they reached the age of puberty. Major Stewart. Are you telling us that the German law lays down that any child of twelve can be sterilized when there is no medical reason for doing it? Treite. In all these cases there was a medical reason. Major Stewart. And what was the medical reason for these children? Treite. Mental deficiency.147

Sterilization was justified because hereditary health courts said it was, and because certain people who were mentally deficient did not deserve to become parents. It is instructive to compare Treite’s responses to those of Adolf Winkelmann. Asked whether he had ever “carried out abortions, sterilizations, and accelera-

rave ns brück  •  123

tions of death with seriously ill patients and similar things,” Winkelmann replied that “[his] respect for the life of others was always too great to allow [him] to take part in such actions.”148 For Treite, then, duty justified the abortions and sterilizations he performed, as though they were right legally but wrong medically. For Winkelmann, respect for life was allegedly the reason to forego such practices— although respect for lives ended when they became the object of his selections.

Lucas’s Departure from Ravensbrück Functionaries working under or alongside Lucas shielded him from the postwar scrutiny they found better directed at his SS colleagues. In 1946, Sylvia Salvesen requested and received statements from prisoners who praised Lucas and the SS nurse Gerda Schröder for refusing to compile lists of sick and fragile prisoners. Instead, these two were remembered for delivering Salvesen’s lists of Norwegian and Danish prisoners to diplomats outside Potsdam, who delivered them to the Norwegian government exiled in London. Schröder especially played a role in securing the early release of those prisoners from Ravensbrück by the Swedish Red Cross in Operation Bernadotte. Lucas and Schröder both left Ravensbrück at the end of February 1945. Lucas was transferred to Sachsenhausen, while Schröder began assisting at a civilian hospital and then at an SS hospital in Berlin. Both claimed that their transfers resulted from resisting systematic murder. Schröder, who assisted both Lucas and Treite in the prisoner hospital, administered painkillers to sterilized women, despite being warned about showing favoritism. Lucas claimed that he refused to falsify and sign death certificates of prisoners killed in February 1945. Schröder and Lucas worked closely to support Sylvia Salvesen and prisoner groups in the final months of the war.149 Schröder made a furtive visit to the Groß-Kreutz estate near Potsdam on 1 March 1945, but Lucas visited six weeks later, after deserting the SS from Sachsenhausen in the middle of April. Operating on the estate with their families, the lawyer Johan Hjort and the rector of Oslo University, Didrik Arup Seip, worked for the release of Scandinavian prisoners from the camps following a meeting between Count Folke Bernadotte, president of the Swedish Red Cross, and Heinrich Himmler in Berlin on 16 February. To expedite the release of Scandinavian prisoners in Ravensbrück, Hjort’s daughter Wanda and her eventual husband Bjorn Heger, representing the German Red Cross, had begun visiting Ravensbrück’s political division in February, and Lucas alerted Salvesen to their weekly visits. On one Monday, Hjort’s son was in the camp, but Ludwig Ramdohr, head of the political division, sent him away while Lucas was bringing Salvesen to meet him.150 In Salvesen’s chronology of events, “a couple of weeks passed” before Lucas’s quarrel with Trommer and Treite, the pivotal episode that led to Lucas’s

124   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

departure from Ravensbrück.151 A few days later, Lucas asked Salvesen for the address of the Hjort family, and the day after that gave her ten minutes to write her “first letter in Norwegian for two and a half years.”152 Nevertheless, this letter failed to reach Attorney Hjort and Professor Seip until they had received three other letters from Salvesen, all delivered by Schröder. It is likely that when Lucas transferred from Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen, he was unable to deliver the letter personally but instead gave it to Norwegian prisoners at Sachsenhausen.153 According to Salvesen, as Lucas left Ravensbrück, he said to Schröder: “‘Goodbye, Sister. I’m off. I’m a soldier and I’m going to fight the enemy, but I don’t fight prisoners.’”154 Salvesen’s chapter closes with the same mystical language of light she used for describing Lucas after his argument with Trommer: “A strong man had fought an inner battle between his conscience and that which had been implanted in his mind from childhood, namely a blind obedience to orders. Would what he believed to be the voice of duty conquer? Or had the light which followed in the wake of right and truth reached him? I slept and dreamt of Dr. Lukas. I saw his tall figure fighting its way through storm and bad weather towards a strong light in the far distance.”155 Salvesen described Schröder’s helpfulness the same way. Schröder had asked her to write a letter for Hjort and Seip, then had quarreled violently with Trommer, had been subsequently ordered to Mauthausen, and had left Ravensbrück at the end of February.156 Schröder managed to deliver that letter and list of prisoners to Gross-Kreutz, then return to Ravensbrück early April 1945 to pack her things and add more names to the list. Ultimately the list resulted in the Swedish Red Cross rescue of Norwegian and Danish prisoners from Ravensbrück on 8 April 1945 as part of Operation Bernadotte.157 Salvesen linked Lucas and Schröder symbolically in her poem “Christmas Eve in Ravensbrück”: “A light in the operating-room—a shriek—‘was ist denn das?’ / Oh, just an appendicitis case, and the new Doctor—Lukas. / But farther along the corridor of a figure we catch a sight, / A fair-haired sister, the prisoner’s friend, Ravensbrück’s ray of light.”158 By resisting selections and finding medicine for the prisoners, this Nazi doctor and this Nazi nurse stood in stark contrast to their Nazi colleagues. Knowledge of their friendship helps us interpret Schröder’s postwar statements that convey no particular vindictiveness toward Treite and downplay the SS components of Lucas’s role as camp doctor. In her interrogation by Itzehoe state attorney Völker in 1963, Schröder recommended reading Salvesen’s book—but only the chapter on Lucas.159 Salvesen’s memoir was a tangible way to protect Lucas and Schröder after the war. She directed her testimony against the defendants, but her memoir toward her fellow prisoners. Her exception is to describe Treite as “too cowardly to lift a finger in opposition, and even too cowardly to follow Dr. Lukas’s example and go if he were secretly disturbed about these deeds of shame. How far can such weaknesses of character as egoism, vanity, idleness, and cowardice lead a human being? They brought Dr. Treite to the scaffold.”160 Salvesen’s memoir ignored the

rave ns brück  •  125

Figure 4.1.  Sylvia Salvesen (front, second from right) with dinner guests at her home in Oslo, presumably in 1947. The group requested reparations and social benefits for disabled Norwegian political prisoners. NHM 175. Sylvia Salvesen. Norway’s Resistance Museum. Used by permission.

question of whether Lucas acted differently in situations that she and her circle did not witness. During the Ravensbrück trial, neither the court nor the defense protested the collusion among witnesses that became an issue later for German courts. But there is unmistakable collusion among the twenty-one survivor witnesses who testified in court or offered pretrial statements. Collusion reflected the lines of religion, ethnicity, political persuasion, and prisoner roles. The group around Salvesen included medical prisoners identified by ethnicity and religious inclinations; another group around Erika Buchmann, examined next, included mostly German political prisoners who shaped their testimony along communist lines.

Erika Buchmann In her 1959 booklet, Frauen von Ravensbrück, Buchmann called Lucas the only SS doctor who showed appropriate medical concern for TB patients in his ward,

126   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

including raiding the SS pharmacy for supplies and saving patients affected by sleeping powder overdoses. After Lucas refused to select prisoners, Trommer reported him for cowardice and sabotage and removed him from the camp.161 Well before her tribute, in June 1945, eight women received Communist Party approval to issue a press release that Lucas resisted all efforts of his Nazi medical colleagues to harm prisoners and deserved to be shielded from British justice not only because of his courage and decency, but because praising a good Nazi made the occupiers more likely to pursue the sadists who had made life hell for the women.162 On behalf of eighty German political prisoners, Buchmann briefed Major Stewart and the court about SS crimes committed against them long before ethnic prisoners arrived. Buchmann was offered the chance to testify in the Ravensbrück trial but had to decline because of her advanced pregnancy. Stewart promised to consider their testimonies in subsequent trials. The timing of all of this is significant. Had Buchmann’s materials reached Stewart earlier, he might have tried harder to identify Lucas’s whereabouts, not just extol his virtues, and Lucas would have been forced to come up with answers a decade earlier. Had Stewart received the group’s testimonies in 1950 or later, however, following the founding of the Ministry for State Security in the German Democratic Republic (Stasi) he might have hesitated to use the testimonies of communist witnesses. The Stasi decided not only which criminals should stand trial from among the camp personnel but also which witnesses should testify against them.163 There is a curious memorial to Lucas in Hedda Zinner’s Ravensbrücker Ballade, a five-act play that reflects Zinner’s conversations with Buchmann. Dr. Hartmann is a character modeled after Lucas who appears in the fourth act with one arm in a sling. He has been injured at the front, and “although he too wears an SS uniform, he seems out of place here.”164 Dr. Clausen, based on either Dr. Treite or Dr. Trommer, brags about the opportunities Hartmann has for experimenting on prisoners, but Hartmann only points to his injured arm and asks how the sick prisoners will cope with the upcoming evacuation.165 In a reference to the Hohenlychen group, Clausen compels a prisoner to introduce Hartmann to the ongoing experiments on the human “guinea pigs” in the camp, whose legs the camp doctors fill with sand, glass shards, wood, and metal. The resulting infection will imitate the effect of shrapnel wounds. “Reproductions of typical front injuries. Without tetanus injection, without any corrective the lethal outcomes are, relatively speaking, astonishingly low: not even 70 percent. . . . Hartmann can scarcely contain his rage.”166 Hartmann takes on the role of sobriety and medical dedication in the face of drunken excess and cruelty. “I’ve been a Nazi since 1930. Only I never expected it would end this way. You have to be blind not to see it. . . . Absurd.”167 Hartmann’s character is above reproach, and the audience forgives his fifteen years of Nazi Party membership. The effect of Zinner’s memorial is clear. Casting Lucas as one of the “good ones” contributed to

rave ns brück  •  127

the myth that only sadistic Nazis had to account for their actions. Hartmann’s appearance also supported Lucas’s myth of arriving at Ravensbrück from the front, not from Stutthof. As Grit Philipp reminds us, Buchmann’s depiction of Lucas as a sheep among fascist wolves broke the rule that Communist prisoners should only provide exculpatory statements “in those cases where they helped the prisoners by investing their own person to create special relief or advantages for them. It cannot simply be a case of helping individual prisoners here and there, but only their entire posture toward all prisoners can be evaluated.”168 Were the witnesses in a position to evaluate Lucas’s posture toward all prisoners, though? What Buchmann, Tillion, and others saw as Lucas’s exceptional acts of civil courage prompted them to advocate openly on his behalf, Philipp writes, although other survivors insisted that camp activity automatically made an SS physician culpable.169 Whether Lucas’s commitment to the women of the tuberculosis block was comprehensive, Philipp finds difficult to assess.170 Much later, Buchmann flipped her position on Lucas, partly from following the Communist Party press coverage of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and especially in light of his 1970 acquittal. The Ravensbrück trial amplified the voices of Lucas’s supporters. His contrast to Percy Treite, Richard Trommer, Adolf Winkelmann, and other SS doctors was a surprising encouragement in the final weeks of the war. Nevertheless, whether during the Ravensbrück or Auschwitz trials or in volunteered statements, medical functionaries were as reluctant as Lucas himself to discuss his sterilization of Sinti and Roma prisoners and its failure to buy promised freedom. Karl Gerber conveyed that Lucas was somehow a victim of compulsory sterilization, albeit on the other side of the scalpel from his Sinti victims, ordered as he was to finish the dirty work of the real perpetrators in Berlin. Rather than start with his victimhood or success as a TB doctor, it is better to view Lucas as sharing the biopolitical viewpoints and the camp doctor tasks expected of his colleague Percy Treite. Strange as it may sound, and as cowardly as witnesses remembered Treite to be, at least he was on trial to answer for himself. If not legally, at least historically the absence of Lucas’s voice from the trial reveals a contempt of court. The rescuer and victim status accorded him by his supporters should not distract from the fact that a Nazi who hides wants to keep hidden the experiences that made him at least a bystander and often a perpetrator. Court transcripts would have us believe that camp doctors were fed up with determining the fates of their prisoners or carrying out orders from Berlin. Closer examination shows their indifference and neglect—not caring about twenty murders in their wards or about fifty women crammed into an office space—because both Treite and Lucas were intent to avoid association with the murders of thousands in Uckermark in order to welcome the liberation of Operation Bernadotte. Lucas’s transfer to Sachsenhausen shows him in an even greater hurry to leave the camps behind and reinvent himself in a few short weeks as a civilian assistant doctor in Elmshorn.

128   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Notes 1. Salvesen, Forgive, and Buchmann, Frauen von Ravensbrück. 2. Strebel, KZ Ravensbrück. 3. Strebel, KZ Ravensbrück, 245–46, 314, 467, 527; Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 341, 346, 358. 4.  Martin, “Funktion des Krankenreviers,” 147. 5. Schäfer, Selbstverständnis von Frauen, 133–35. 6. Kretzer, NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht, 196. 7.  Besides Zimmermann’s Rassenutopie, studies of persecution of Sinti and Roma include Bock, Zwangssterilisation, esp. 297–364; Riechert, Im Schatten von Auschwitz; and Krokowski, Last der Vergangenheit. Lewy mentions Lucas’s involvement briefly in Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (321), as does Martin in “Menschenversuche” (103). Fings mentions Lucas in passing and in conjunction with Clauberg in Sinti und Roma (79). 8.  For more on the victims of Lucas’s sterilizations, see Wisely, “War against ‘Internal Enemies.’” Portions of that article have been rewritten for this chapter by permission from Cambridge University Press. 9. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 346. 10. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 106. 11.  Due to influence from Ahnenerbe (the SS Office for Ancestral Heritage), Himmler wanted to research the “pure Gypsies” of Indian descent for signs of “Aryan” traits. See Fings, “Die ‘gutachtlichen Äußerungen,’” 449. 12.  Fings, “Wannsee Conference,” 181. 13.  Fings, “Die ‘gutachtlichen Äußerungen,’” 448–53. 14. Höss, Death Dealer, 135–37. 15.  Kubica and Setkiewicz, “Last Stage,” 10. 16.  The explanation offered by Kubica and Setkiewicz challenges the long-accepted notion, offered by inmate Tadeusz Joachimowski, that on the evening of 16 May 1944 the first attempt that SS guards made at extermination was thwarted by forewarned prisoners who refused to leave their barracks. See Czech, Kalendarium, 774–75. 17. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 341. 18. Czech, Kalendarium, 777. 19. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 341. On 11 February 1941, the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht ordered the dismissal of Sinti and so-called “Gypsy hybrids” from active military service, downgrading them to inactive National Guard reserve status and withholding them awards for service. Most Sinti were cut from the ranks by early 1943, while those who had proven bravery or were “undetectable” remained until another order of 12 July 1944 removed all loopholes. Zimmerman, 198–99. 20.  Vernehmung Bruno Stein, 22 April 1965, AP 31,965. 21.  Stein, 31,937. 22. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 342–43. 23.  The figure 4,200–4,300 derives from Kubica and Setkiewicz, “Last Stage,” 15. See also Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 339–44 and Czech, Kalendarium, 837–38. 24.  On Lucas’s denial, see Vernehmung zur Sache, 27 January 1964, AP 4,873 and 4,877. Zimmermann lists Josef Kramer, Johann Schwarzhuber, and Otto Moll among the murderers (Rassenutopie, 342–43), but Josef Mengele, Stefan Baretzki, Wilhelm Boger, and Pery Broad also played major roles. See also Heuß, “Der Fall Pery Broad.” 25.  Danckwortt considers Lucas together with the doctors Walter Sonntag, Horst Schumann, Carl Clauberg, and Percy Treite in “Sinti und Roma,” 95. 26.  For several Sinti accounts and references, see Danckworrt, “Sinti und Roma,” esp. 92-98, and Schikora, Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung. See also Salvesen’s short chapter on sterilization in Forgive, 149–51.

rave ns brück  •  129 27.  Weindling, “Opfer von Humanexperimenten,” 91. See also Saavedra Santis and Wickert, Schrecken, 66. 28.  Section 226 (“Causing grievous bodily harm”) reads: “(1) If the injury results in the victim losing his sight in one eye or both eyes, his hearing, his speech or his ability to procreate . . . the penalty shall be imprisonment from one to ten years.” Section 78 (“Limitation period”) limits the imposition of punishment to “ten years in the case of offenses punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of more than five years but no more than ten years.” Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz, German Criminal Code, trans. Michael Bohlander, retrieved 20 December 2022 from https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1867, 29.  Vernehmung Paul Morgenstern, 16 July 1964, AP 12,445–46. 30.  Schröder’s deposition was among witness testimonies compiled by Major Keith Mant of the Royal Army Medical Corps, originally concerning sulfonamide drug experiments and bone transplantations at Ravensbrück. See Schmidt, “‘Scars of Ravensbrück,’” 130. 31.  Deposition of Gerda Schröder, 25 September 1946, WO 235/318. Schröder recalled that Treite’s sterilizations consisted of tying or excising part of the Fallopian tubes of “mostly debilitated German women and gypsies and gypsy children from twelve to fourteen, perhaps also some younger ones.” 32.  Vernehmung Gerda Schröder, 7 August 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 33.  Schwester Felixina (i.e., Margareta Armbruster) to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 3 January 1963, FBI/LF. 34.  Vernehmung Margareta Armbruster, 30 July 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 35.  Vernehmung Franz Lucas, 18 November 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 36. Tillion, Ravensbrück, 110. Based on Tillion’s eyewitness perspective, Danckwortt (“Sinti und Roma,” 95) and Martin (“Funktion des Krankenreviers,” 150), also mention Lucas’s role in sterilizing women at Ravensbrück, including Sinti and Roma children under ten years old. Martin thus reversed her earlier assertion that Lucas had refused to sterilize. Christa Schikorra lists “Lukas” as sterilizing women as well. See Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung, 176. 37.  B. Quartero to SL, 11 January 1964, BArch N462-139, Bl. 7. 38.  Vernehmung Margareta Armbruster, 11 January 1965, AP 27,624–25. 39. Höss, Death Dealer, 137. 40. Finkelmeier, Die braune Apokalypse, 139. 41.  Karl Gerber to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 29 January 1964, FBI/LF. 42. Gerber. 43. Gerber. 44.  Vernehmung Karl Gerber, 11 January 1965, AP 27,547–51. 45.  Vernehmung Conrad Finkelmeier, 10 March 1964, FBI/LF. 46. Finkelmeier. 47. Finkelmeier. 48.  Vernehmung Bruno Stein, 22 April 1965, AP 31,921–27, 31,940–45, 31,957. 49.  Stein, 31,962. 50.  See Feyen, “‘Wie die Juden?’” and Goltermann, “Kausalitätsfragen.” 51.  Statement of Heinrich Schenk, 18 August 1960, FBI/LF. 52.  Vernehmung Heinrich Schenk, 10 July 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 53. Schenk. 54. Schenk. 55.  Staatsanwalt Kügler, Vermerk, 15 November 1961, HHStAW 461/37638 Bd. 58, Bl. 10,525. 56.  Hax, “Sterilisierung und Kastration,” 77. 57.  Vernehmung Lucas, 18 November 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 58.  Hax, “Sterilisierung und Kastration,” 69–79. 59.  Hax, 82.

130   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 60.  See Lang, Frauen von Block 10. The standard work that spells out the brutality behind compulsory sterilization is Bock, Zwangssterilisation. 61.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,205. In that turn to racial persecution, the Reichsausschuß zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden (Reich Committee for the Scientific Assessment of Serious Hereditary Illnesses) was responsible among other things for sterilizations in the concentration camps. See Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 210. 62.  Vernehmung Franz Lucas, 18 November 1963, SHLA, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806. 63.  Vernehmung Paul Morgenstern, 16 July 1964, AP 12,445–59. In a different context, Morgenstern’s wife declared that a doctor unknown to her at the time sterilized some seventy women, including her (Statement of Elma Morgenstern, 1 March 1957, SHLA, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16,447). Five months after Morgenstern’s appearance in court, Max Friedrich testified that the Sinti veterans, himself included, had been transferred to Ravensbrück for the purpose of sterilization and release, but he made no mention of Lucas (Vernehmung Max Friedrich, 11 December 1964, AP 26,861–62). 64.  Vernehmung Paul Morgenstern, 16 July 1964, AP 12,459. 65.  Indeed, the Sachsenhausen transport list of 3 March 1945 records the birth year of Josef Höllenreiner as 1933. Archiv des Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), Warsaw, Nummernbuch des Männer-KL Ravensbrück 135/GK 50, Bl. 47–50. 66.  Vernehmung Paul Morgenstern, 16 July 1964, AP 12,459–60. 67.  Morgenstern, 12,462–66. 68.  Vernehmung Bruno Stein, 22 April 1965, AP 31,966. 69.  Stein, 31,967. This is contradictory information. Court records would have provided proof of compulsory, not voluntary sterilization. Even then, it is hard to believe that the records would have listed any factor beyond “racial” reasons for mandating the operation. 70.  Vernehmung Karl Gerber, 11 January 1965, AP 27,548. 71.  Archiv des Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), Warsaw, Nummernbuch des Männer-KL Ravensbrück 135/GK 50. 72. In Rassenutopie (346, 358), Zimmermann gives the number of 213 persons to be sterilized, but mistakenly assumes that Lucas came directly to Ravensbrück from Auschwitz in early 1945. 73. Guth, Walter Winter, 133. 74.  Sinti did occasionally receive better positions based on their ability to communicate with their captors. This was the case in Mittelbau-Dora due to the smaller number of German-speaking criminal and political prisoners in functionary positions. Wagner, “Sinti und Roma,” 103. 75. Krokowski, Last der Vergangenheit, 67–68. 76.  Kramer, “Tätertypologien,” 287. 77. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 89. 78.  Bloxham, 93–94. 79.  Bloxham, 107. 80. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, 23. 81.  Wagner, “Sinti und Roma,” 125. 82.  Lewy’s list includes the trials of Robert Ritter of 1948–50 and of Eva Justin from 1959 to 1960, their coworkers Ruth Kellermann, Sophie Ehrhardt, and Adolf Würth, as well as Nebe’s deputies Paul Werner (1961) and Hans Maly (1970, suspended for health reasons), and dozens of other Kripo officials and Ritter institute officials. See Nazi Persecution, 378–85. 83. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 359. 84. Lewy, Nazi Persecution, 378. 85.  No Sinti and Roma, for example, testified in the Dachau Dora trial of 1947. See Wagner, “Sinti und Roma,” 102. See also Margalit, “Justice System.” 86.  Hohmann, “Persilscheine,” 54.

rave ns brück  •  131 87.  Hohmann, “Persilscheine,” 56–58. 88.  Saupe, “Zur Kritik des Zeugen,” 75. 89.  See Stengel’s riveting discussion in Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 380–99, esp. 397. 90.  See Arnold Roßberg’s press release of 12 March 2015 on the website of the Central Council (Zentralrat), retrieved 20 December 2022 from http://zentralrat.sintiundroma.de/wp-content/up loads/presse/345.pdf. 91.  Schmidt, “Scars of Ravensbrück,” 130–31. 92.  For an extensive discussion of such “facilitative factors,” see Williams, Complexity of Evil, 127–64. 93. Salvesen, Forgive, 162–63. 94.  Salvesen, 99. 95.  Testimony of Violette Le Coq, 18 December 1946, WO 235/305, 316–17, 333. 96.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 193. Matron nurse Marschall also listed Lucas among the doctors responsible for Block 10 and the isolation ward. Marschall made Trommer the scapegoat and praised Treite and Mory. Cross-examination of Elisabeth Marschall, 14 January 1947, WO 235/307, 61, 69. 97.  Testimony of Violette Le Coq, 18 December 1946, WO 235/305, 330. 98.  Winkelmann maintained that Treite was neither his nor Lucas’s superior with regard to Block 10. Cross-examination of Adolf Winkelmann, 22 January 1947, WO 235/307, 319. 99.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 178. 100.  Cross-examination of Carmen Mory, 9 January 1947, WO 235/306, 267. 101.  Cross-examination of Carmen Mory, 8 January 1947, WO 235/306, 247–48. Mory claimed that as block elder she had hidden “all Jewesses I had in my barracks—I had some Jewesses in my barracks who had been in Auschwitz—and I have kept them hidden from Dr. Lucas who was a Jewbaiter” (236). 102.  Whether the stove was an asset or liability and who was responsible for it is unclear. Some attributed it to Lucas directly and others claimed that it was always broken. In a deposition of 29 November 1946 read in court, Spoerry testified that Mory demanded and received the stove. Testimony of Ann Spoerry, 10 January 1947, WO 235/306, 295. 103.  On 22 December 1964, Johanna Dyer wrote to the court: “If Dr. Lucas is the doctor, who was in Ravensbrück in February 1945, then I have to thank him for my life. He, against the previous decision of Dr. Treite, smuggled me out of the camp with about fifteen others at three o’clock in the morning of February 3, 1945.” Anlage zum Protokoll vom 25. January 1965. 104.  Vernehmung Johanna Dyer, 11 March 1965, AP 30,463. 105.  On Nazi views of tuberculosis, see Heitkötter, Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie, 76–77. 106. Buchmann, Frauen von Ravensbrück, 88–89. 107.  Testimony of Wisia Zurkowska, 30 December 1946, WO 235/306, 33. It is unclear why Treite would have had anything to do with Block 10 matters anyway, unless he was substituting for Lucas. 108.  Grit Philipp’s (Kalendarium, 189) date for the overdose is 14 January 1945. See War Crimes Group (NW Europe) to Major S. Stewart, 24 March 1947, “Analysis of White Powder Used in Ravensbrück,” WO 235/315, 112. Martha Pauline Haake stood trial along with Lucas’s predecessor Benno Orendi in the seventh Ravensbrück trial (JAG Nr. 335) of May 1948 and was sentenced to ten years prison. Elling and Krause-Schmitt, “Ravensbrück-Prozesse,” 28. 109.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 196. 110.  Cross-examination of Elisabeth Marschall, 14 January 1947, WO 235/307, 55. 111.  Testimony of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 45, 168. 112.  Treite, 168. 113.  Treite, 196.

132   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 114. Buchmann, Frauen von Ravensbrück, 89. 115.  Vernehmung Dr. Louise Liard le Porz, 27 November 1964, AP 25,976–77. 116. Salvesen, Forgive, 193. 117.  See Kretzer, NS-Täterschaft, 201. 118.  Salvesen, 164. 119.  Salvesen, 164. 120.  Testifying on the second trial day, Sylvia Salvesen was one of the few who accurately remembered Winkelmann’s arrival as late February. See Testimony of Sylvia Salvesen, 6 December 1946, WO 235/305, 83. 121.  Deposition of Dr. Louise le Porz, 22 July 1946, WO 235/318, 88. 122.  Testimony of Neeltje Epker, 11 December 1946, WO 235/305, 168. 123. Buchmann, Frauen in Ravensbrück, 107. 124.  Testimony of Renee Lacroux, 1 January 1947, WO 235/306, 75. 125. Tillion, Ravensbrück, 402. Tillion is also mistaken about Benno Orendi. He was not transferred to the eastern front in February 1945, as Tillion supposed (136). It appears that he was either transferred in December 1944 to Stutthof—Hördler lists a Stutthof Kommandatur transfer order from 11 December 1944 (Ordnung und Inferno, 270)—or to Sachsenhausen, as Alois Gaberle remembered. See Vernehmung Alois Gaberle, 25 July 1958 (Schwedersky), Hamburg, NRW-Duisburg Ger. Rep 388, Nr. 0015, Bl. 1–5. 126. Philipp, Kalendarium, 188; Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung, 43, 75; Wickert, “Insel der Politischen,” 109. 127. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 410–12. The order for extermination originated with Himmler and was conveyed, via SS-Obergruppenführer August Heißmeyer, to either Commandant Fritz Suhren or his deputy commandant Albert Sauer. Heißmeyer, general of the Waffen-SS and Higher SS and Police Leader, was responsible for Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen from February 1945 onward. 128. Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung, 70. 129.  Erpel, 72–73. See also Helm, Ravensbrück, 490. 130.  Testimony of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 57-58, 180–81. 131.  Testimony of Zdenka Nedvedova, 20 December 1946, WO 235/305, 377. 132. Philipp, Kalendarium, 188. 133. Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung, 183–84. 134.  Erpel, 188. 135. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 357–58. 136. Erpel, Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung, 77. 137. Hördler, Ordnung und Inferno, 416. 138.  For example: “I usually stood in the entrance of the crematorium and fulfilled my duty before the corpses were carried into the crematorium” became “I stood in the crematorium and fulfilled my duty.” 139.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 171–72. Horst Schmidt, prisoner in the men’s camp, confirmed Treite’s statements about the shootings. See Strebel, KZ Ravensbrück, 476. Strebel adds that after Schwarzhuber took over without the doctors, another 150–200 women were shot by Otto Moll’s squad (476). 140. Helm, Ravensbrück, 495. 141.  Sworn statement of Erika Buchmann, 8 May 1946, BArch NY 4178-55, 33–34. 142.  Deposition of Carmen Maria Mory, 4 November 1946, WO 235/317, 61. Mory’s December 1944 date for the selections to Uckermark is too early. 143.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 193. 144.  Treite, 187–88.

rave ns brück  •  133 145.  Ultimately, the scapegoat for all the defendants, including Matron nurse Marschall, was Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren, absent from the trial, who would likely have maintained that Berlin was ultimately at fault. 146.  Cross-examination of Percy Treite, 17 January 1947, WO 235/307, 188. 147.  Treite, 204. 148.  Cross-examination of Adolf Winkelmann, 21 January 1947, WO 235/307, 312. 149. Heger, Jeden Freitag, 197. The assertion that Lucas and Schröder became lovers (Helm, Ravensbrück, 541) has no identifiable source. 150. Salvesen, Forgive, 164. Ludwig Ramdohr was a codefendant of Treite and Schwarzhuber in the first Hamburg Ravensbrück trial. 151.  Salvesen, 164. 152.  Salvesen, 167. 153.  Salvesen, 168; Helm, Ravensbrück, 541. 154.  Salvesen, 168. 155.  Salvesen, 168. 156.  Salvesen, 180–81. The departure was most likely on 27 February, as the letter Schröder delivered for Salvesen was dated 26 February 1945. Schröder reported later that she was able to avoid the punitive transfer and was transferred instead to a civil hospital in Berlin-Lichtenburg, then to an SS hospital in Lichtenfelde-West, although it appears that she did not report to Berlin until 17 March 1945 (Salvesen, 211). Strebel, who interviewed Schröder on 30 March 1997, notes that she used vacation time and did not linger long at Ravensbrück (KZ Ravensbrück, 248). Salvesen reports that until 1950, Schröder worked as a nurse in Denmark and Norway. In 1946, she received a “clean sheet” when Major Mant and his “War Crimes Investigation Unit” visited Norway (“Gerda Schröder,” 116). In 1947, the Norwegian Red Cross awarded her an honorary commemorative medal for her extraordinary efforts from 1940 to 1945. The ceremony took place in Salvesen’s home in Oslo. See the September 2002 tribute by her cousin Heinz Schröder, in “Gerda Schröder,” 66–68. 157.  Salvesen was also able to exempt Norwegians from the Uckermark list, since they were considered “prisoners who could be used as hostages for exchange.” Treite told her to restrict her saving efforts to Norwegian prisoners (Salvesen, Forgive, 176). 158.  Salvesen, 193. 159.  Vernehmung Gerda Schröder, 7 August 1963, Gohfeld-Melbergen, SHLA, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 806, Bl. 50–51. 160. Salvesen, Forgive, 231–32. Like Mory, Treite committed suicide before he could be hanged; Winkelmann died of heart failure as the trial ended. 161. Buchmann, Frauen von Ravensbrück, 88. 162.  Nachlaß Erika Buchmann, BArch NY 4178-54, 0020/0961. 163.  Eschebach, “Ermittlungskomplex Ravensbrück,” 95–96. 164. Zinner, Ravensbrücker Ballade, 111. See also Philipp, Erika Buchmann, 231. 165. Zinner, Ravensbrücker Ballade, 117. 166.  Zinner, 123. 167.  Zinner, 145–46. 168.  Statement of Emmy Handke, quoted in Philipp, Kalendarium, 175. 169.  Philipp, 175–76. 170.  Philipp, 176.

5

S achsenhausen and E xit from (M arch –A pril 1945)

the

SS

•••

Only a handful of testimonies from former prisoners and SS medical colleagues describe Lucas’s six weeks at Sachsenhausen, roughly from 27 February to 15 April 1945. The few comments that Lucas supplies deal with his arrival, intimidation, and desertion, as though his final camp saw the pinnacle of his resistance and the irritations of all previous commandants and chief doctors. His first explanation of arrival at Sachsenhausen mentioned treason and insubordination.1 Next, he imagined that it must have been the result of his refusal in early January 1945 to sign death certificates for the eight Ravensbrück women who had been given the white powder overdose.2 Then he claimed that the transfer ensued at the end of January 1945 after he complained to the chief doctor about inadequate rations and the imprisonment of Catholic nuns without arrest warrants. Finally, he decided that his transfer must have been the outcome of his refusal to select prisoners for the gas chamber and the youth camp and to falsify death certificates. The shifting explanations are not exactly a cause for trust. A transfer in early January to Sachsenhausen would have been two complete months before the real date, but it removed his association from sterilizations and selections. In the last two decades, the scholarship on Sachsenhausen, like the articles and books dedicated to Ravensbrück thirty-five miles away, has steadily invested more interest in the experience of prisoners and of SS personnel while researching the structure of the camp and its subcamps. At the forefront of the widening interest are the publications by Sachsenhausen camp historian Günter Morsch and medical historian Astrid Ley on camp subpopulations and practices.3 As seen already, the starting point for knowledge of SS doctors who worked there for any length of time, and especially as colleagues of Lucas in March and half of April 1945, is Marco Pukrop’s thoroughgoing 2015 dissertation. Pukrop combines a formidable grasp of existing literature with his own deep archival investigation.

s ac h s e n h au s en a nd e xit f rom the s s   •  135

Older memoirs and tributes published soon after war’s end, meanwhile, relate the experiences of mostly political prisoners from a sanctioned point of view.4 The best resource for discovering what perpetrators claimed about themselves and others inside and outside of court, however, are the state archives. This is especially true for the Münster trial against the Sachsenhausen doctors Heinz Baumkötter, Alois Gaberle, and Otto Adam. It is now possible to compare Allied, German, and now Soviet interrogations of Baumkötter, on the basis of recently available records from Moscow. The Moscow records provide insight into the aggressive, relentless questioning of the October 1947 Soviet military tribunal trial of sixteen Sachsenhausen personnel in Berlin, fourteen of whom received life sentences after only a week-long trial. Trial transcripts reconstruct the actions of camp doctors, since they contain not just interrogations but also reports from survivor witnesses. Furthermore, as Hans-Walter Schmuhl has written, when medical trials themselves become objects of historical reflection, they also reveal the discourses of medicine, doctors, and professional ethics.5 Along with Sachsenhausen historian Astrid Ley, scholars such as Iris Hax and Dorothee Wein have analyzed medical practices in Sachsenhausen.6 Lucas took part in these practices by sterilizing prisoners, attending floggings and executions, and preventing the spread of diseases such as typhus. At the same time, he was treating prisoners as real patients, or so claimed the vast majority of testimonies from former prisoners and SS doctors. These accounts help to retrace the broad outline of Lucas’s six weeks in Sachsenhausen. They point both backward to his time in Auschwitz and forward to his civilian refashioning in Elmshorn. Lucas’s account from 1959 had him stripped of his SS uniform and papers, forced to wear a Wehrmacht uniform, and escorted by an SS-Unterscharführer (another version mentions two SS men) in a military vehicle from Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen equivalent to Lucas’s detractors Kramer at Birkenau and Ziereis at Mauthausen was Enno Lolling (1888–1945), who as chief of WVHA Amt D-III in Oranienburg was the head of all concentration camp doctors. Lucas recalled Lolling threatening him in the presence of chief medical doctor Heinz Baumkötter to stop further opposition or face devastating consequences.7 He was forbidden to leave the camp and spent the next two months in the camp hospital and the pathology lab. In another account, Lucas claimed that he was alone under house arrest in barracks and not allowed to leave the camp once the arrest was lifted. He gave the date of his desertion from Sachsenhausen as mid-March, a month before the actual mid-April 1945 time. As was his norm, Lucas claimed that witnesses could substantiate these confrontations. The protocol of Lucas’s 1970 retrial records only seven lines about Sachsenhausen, including the change that he was not a prisoner after all, and two sentences recalling the commandant’s order to select TB prisoners and his avoidance

136   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

by fleeing the camp and seeking refuge with Dr. Hjort in Gross-Kreutz.8 All accounts have Lucas coming across as a resistant doctor pushed to the edge. Yet the time he gave for Sachsenhausen, three to four weeks, was really six weeks. Under questioning, he gave the time for the order to select prisoners as occurring sometime in April. His plan was to desert the SS while at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, but he had no idea where he would go.9 Somehow Lucas managed to convince the court that he had followed the advice of his Nuremberg boss Fritz Baader to lie low and keep out of sight at the same time that he was building a reputation of resistance. Lucas’s superiors listed him among the camp doctors without noting that he stood out in any way. During questioning in July 1946 that led up to the Soviet Sachsenhausen trial in Berlin (October 1947), Schutzhaftlagerführer (camp director) August Höhn admitted to shooting over fifty prisoners and instructing his henchmen to carry out other executions in the presence of doctors Adam, Gaberle, Horstmann, Lucas, Kurzke, and König.10 Lucas was among the doctors who attended the hangings of men handed over to Sachsenhausen by the Gestapo, the SD (Security Service), and the Criminal Police.11 Similarly, in 1960, Lucas’s boss Heinz Baumkötter revealed to Münster judge Schmalacker that it was possible for doctors serving only briefly at Sachsenhausen to avoid attending executions, but doctors on duty confirmed prisoner deaths. He declined to say whether Lucas had done so, but confirmed that Lucas worked in places other than the pathology lab and considered it likely that Lucas was the occasional doctor on duty.12 In 1956, Schmalacker stumbled across Lucas’s name while interrogating Hans Fabisch, a medical orderly and clerk in Sachsenhausen who claimed to have been pulled from the eastern front in late 1942.13 Fabisch remembered Lucas having come from Auschwitz and declaring that he was at his wit’s end: “He mostly told me about his experiences in Auschwitz.”14 Fabisch mentioned Lucas again in July 1958 during the preliminary investigation against August Höhn, Schutzhaftlagerführer of Sachsenhausen.15 When Schmalacker finally questioned Lucas in late January 1960, Lucas insisted that he had never mentioned Auschwitz to Fabisch and must have been referring to Ravensbrück.16 Schmalacker then questioned Fabisch and Lucas separately on 5 April 1960 in Lübeck. Fabisch remarked that Lucas had noted a reluctance to enter the crematorium to perform duties at odds with his medical beliefs. Fabisch assumed that Lucas was not referring to the crematorium at Auschwitz, but at Sachsenhausen, and that Lucas’s reluctance to fulfill criminal expectations had inspired his desertion.17 Asked to respond, Lucas insisted that he was never assigned to the Sachsenhausen crematorium and must have been discussing his reluctance to do duty in the pathology department, where he “saw corpses with teeth broken out of the mouths.”18 Fabisch retracted his account and conceded that Lucas might have been exempt from the regular crematorium rotation.19

s ac h s e n h au s en a nd e xit f rom the s s   •  137

This sequence makes it look like Fabisch either doubted his own memory or was reluctant to push back against Lucas, perhaps fearing reprisal. An example of such caution came during the Münster trial of Baumkötter, Adam, and Gaberle, when the court escorted Baumkötter from the room while Adam was being asked about selections and lethal injections. The court had reason to doubt Adam’s statements, but it also attributed his dishonesty to his discomfort in testifying against his former boss Baumkötter.20 Still, the amount of detail in Fabisch’s account renders it authentic, despite at least one prisoner, Hans Rosenberg, describing him as a brutal medical orderly and calling Lucas the only exception to the spirit of extermination.21 Like Lucas, the Sachsenhausen camp doctor Heinrich Nevermann also discussed his previous experiences in an extermination camp (Majdanek)—not with Fabisch, but with Baumkötter, who later reported in a letter that Nevermann spoke frankly as a newly married man who “had imagined the life of a soldier to be different” from what his first military assignment, Majdanek, showed.22 Fabisch’s unguarded remarks before Lucas’s response of denial offer a reason to assume that Lucas fulfilled, at least on some occasions, his SS camp doctor duties at the Birkenau crematoria as part of his ramp selection assignments. Notwithstanding Lucas’s consistent denial of having avoided such duty, the Frankfurt district court was just as consistent to insist that he was lying. One prisoner in particular who praised Lucas’s behavior in Sachsenhausen was Tadeusz Kowalczyk, a Polish Jewish prisoner who also overlapped with Lucas at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and remembered Lucas declaring his determination to keep Ravensbrück from becoming another Auschwitz.23 On 3 March 1945— only a few days after Lucas’s transfer—Kowalczyk was among a thousand prisoners transported to Sachsenhausen from Ravensbrück. Lucas, whom he happened upon in the hospital, secured him a position as a medical orderly, a position that fortified him enough to survive the starvation march when the camp was evacuated.24 During a conversation with Lucas’s lawyer Hans Peter Ivens in August 1963 in Hamburg with Lucas present, Kowalczyk remembered Lucas authorizing him, a Jew, to give an injection to another Jewish prisoner with a kidney condition. Like all Jewish prisoners lucky to receive kindness, the prisoner was also astounded.25 In general, Kowalczyk’s testimony, seemingly offered on his own initiative, appears trustworthy and, at least at the time, a ringing endorsement of Lucas’s behavior in the three camps where captor and captive overlapped. Sachsenhausen survivors responded to coverage of Lucas in the press by mailing letters of praise within a week of his first cross-examination on 27 January 1964. Gunther Lys, a political prisoner of fifty months (albeit with extensive privileges, as fellow prisoners recalled), remembered how Lucas did everything possible to help prisoners.26 Lys regretted not being able to testify for Lucas, having not been at Auschwitz himself, but he ventured that Lucas had suffered as much as some prisoners there and had been forced into violence while the real perpetrators could withdraw from responsibility.27 Jakob Rotterschmidt gave a statement

138   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

recalling how Lucas told the camp leader at Sachsenhausen that prisoners in this “pigsty” were too weak to work or have a chance to heal, and that when the leader threatened him with a trial, Lucas only insisted that he was acting as a human and a doctor. Shortly thereafter, Lucas classified Rotterschmidt as work-worthy even though he was too weak for it, which brought about his transfer to a subcamp and saved him from murder.28 Finally, in a letter to Fritz Bauer, who was the attorney general of Hesse instrumental in bringing about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Max Geissler expressed that Lucas had worked with the Norwegian prisoner doctor Sven Oftedal in the R II Division (internal medicine), and that after Oftedal died, Lucas and Heinrich Nevermann, now in Costa Rica, were the only two true physicians who avoided “the usual Nazi medical nonsense.”29 From all indications, Lucas fled Sachsenhausen on Sunday 15 April or Monday 16 April 1945.30 He was officially missing on 16 April. One camp report published in the German Democratic Republic records his disappearance on that day.31 Geissler corroborated the date during the Auschwitz trial, saying that one Monday morning there was uproar in the camp because Dr. Lucas was missing. From what he and fellow medics could ascertain, Dr. Lucas was called a scoundrel and a traitor for not heeding his responsibility to the fatherland.32 As the SS tried to ascertain whether prisoners knew Lucas’s plans, Geissler hushed up the fact that he and other inmates had helped Lucas locate a civilian business suit after Lucas spoke of an upcoming trip.33 Hans Fabisch indicated that Lucas had procured a service bicycle shortly before his escape.34 If indeed he fled on a bicycle, Lucas would have likely required a night or day to travel fifty miles to Groß-Kreutz near Potsdam. Of course, he may have simply pedaled to the closest train station. Lucas’s desertion was one of the three things that his Sachsenhausen colleagues remembered about him under questioning by Schmalacker in Münster. Also memorable were his origin in western Germany and his distaste for Nazi medicine. Surgeon Alois Gaberle recalled that Lucas came from the Oldenburg region and, shortly before fleeing, had spoken of going into hiding there.35 Lucas “belonged to the doctors who resisted orders that were not in keeping with professional ethics.”36 Herbert Siggelkow, Sachsenhausen pharmacist, remembered that Lucas came from Westfalen and disappeared before the camp’s evacuation, unable to square with his conscience what was expected of him in the final days.37 Eduard Kreibich, a troop doctor, remembered Lucas’s disappearance having been the talk of the camp.38 Fritz Schmidt from the political division recalled setting in motion a manhunt for an SS doctor who had deserted the troop in March or April 1945: “The name was, as I recall, either Dr. Lucas or Dr. Marcus. He came from the Osnabrück area.”39 Lucas’s boss, Baumkötter, remembered Lucas’s disappearance a week before the SS evacuated the camp, but not whether he had reported Lucas missing. He at least knew that delaying the report would have given Lucas more time.40 There is no indication whether the manhunt continued past 21 April, as the

s ac h s e n h au s en a nd e xit f rom the s s   •  139

camp SS and prisoners were evacuating, although Lucas claimed to have heard that the search for him was very extensive. By 26 April 1945, he had registered himself as a resident in Elmshorn, telling all manner of tales except how he had spent the last sixteen months as an SS doctor in concentration and death camps. Two gaps complicate the reconstruction of Lucas’s transition from SS doctor to civilian doctor. The first is Sachsenhausen and the second is his arrival in Elmshorn. First, his narrative about Sachsenhausen is less concerned with identifying specific points of resisting orders than with finding an opportunity to escape. During those six weeks he was able to cultivate longstanding gratitude from prisoners like Kowalczyk, Lys, Geissler, and Rotterschmidt, along with a reputation of humane doctoring even among his SS colleagues. Only the medical orderly Hans Fabisch remembered different conversations. Did Fabisch back down because he was intimidated by the three Obersturmführer stars that Lucas had worn on his collar? Chief doctor Baumkötter also disrupted the narrative by describing the Januskopf effect of inhabiting the position of perpetrator and resister simultaneously, something with which he himself could identify and which accounted for Lucas’s sickliness. Seen in this light, one wonders whether Lucas’s kindness came naturally. Was it perhaps not only a return ticket to civilian life but also a form of penance on behalf of the thousands he had sent to the gas chamber from the ramp at Birkenau? Second, the details of Lucas’s journey to Elmshorn are lacking. Did he always have this destination in mind? How secretively did he travel westward and how serious was the manhunt for him? Did he try to contact Gerda Schröder in Berlin? Did he simply abandon his SS uniform somewhere along the way? How did he spend his week in hiding in the Gross-Kreutz villa where the Norwegian political prisoner Johan Hjort was staying? Hjort provided some facts, although he never seemed eager to do so. In a letter of September 1946 solicited by Sylvia Salvesen for the British authorities, he wrote: “With illegal help from the German personnel of the camp Mrs. Salvesen was able to send me reports of essential importance for the work of the prisoners. One of the persons who helped her with this was the doctor of the camp, Doctor Lucas. I suppose it was one or two weeks before the capitulation that he negotiated a message that was very important in connection with the repatriation of the female Norwegian prisoners. Mrs. Salvesen therefore asked me already that time to help Doctor Lucas if he should be in want of help.”41 Hjort hid Lucas “about eight days”: “When the Russians approached, he made up his mind to run away towards the west. I fitted him out with a cycle and a map, and he disappeared in the direction of Magdeburg. Since then I never have seen him or heard anything from him.”42 Another letter on 14 December 1962 to the Elmshorn magistrate added that Lucas appeared on his doorstep in uniform, holding a recommendation from Salvesen and claiming that he had received an order he could not carry out, causing him to run away (ausrücken). Hjort remembered Lucas speaking very little those few days.43 At the end of October 1964, Hjort declined a summons

140   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

to appear in Frankfurt, as there was nothing to add to his Elmshorn letter, a copy of which he attached.44 Obliged to answer questions in Oslo in March 1965, though, Hjort remembered the Russians reaching Gross-Kreutz on 23 April 1945. Hjort now stated explicitly that Lucas said he had deserted from Ravensbrück, not Sachsenhausen, after receiving an order he could in good conscience not carry out, and that he was in a state of high fear.45 Lucas would have had to pedal about sixty miles through hills to reach Magdeburg. From there, the trip northwest to Elmshorn was another 165 miles. With at least a few belongings and hoping the manhunt for him had abated, Lucas likely found a train or a ride on a military or civilian vehicle, even though he maintained having made his way (durchgeschlagen) to Elmshorn by bicycle. Was he still in the uniform that Hjort noticed, in the civilian suit that Max Geissler described, or even in a Wehrmacht uniform? All options would have required false papers, unless Lucas was already inventing a reason for lacking identification. Whatever the case, if he left on 20 or 21 April, he was in Elmshorn in time to register as a city resident on 26 April. It is unclear whether he hid in plain sight or hid among the thousands of refugees who streamed westward. It made sense for an SS officer to seek out Schleswig-Holstein, Festung Nord (fortress north), as a hiding place in the final days of the war, as Germany was being crisscrossed by Allied forces. Himmler and other leading Nazis had assembled in the Flensburg area as part of the so-called Dönitz government. Elmshorn formed part of its southern defensive belt. Still, with Lucas claiming to be hiding from the SS, why Elmshorn? Alois Gaberle had mentioned Lucas’s wish to hide in Oldenburg, some seventy miles north of Osnabrück. Osnabrück came under British control on 4 April 1945, but Oldenburg was overtaken by Canadian troops a month later. By the time Lucas arrived in Elmshorn, Bergen-Belsen, near Hannover, had just been liberated by the British. British and Canadian forces were pressing their way northeastward in late April. The last bombs on Elmshorn were dropped on 26 April, Lucas’s first day as an official citizen of the town. British forces occupied the city, which had already capitulated voluntarily despite its Nazi mayor, two days after Germany’s capitulation on 8 May 1945.46 Lucas could count on escaping detection in Schleswig-Holstein and begin putting his medical training into practice. In this northwestern state, as Klaus Bästlein has written, “wide circles of the populace and the reigning powers in politics, administration, and justice had no objection to the renewed rise of Nazi perpetrators.”47 It was not so important how or where employment credentials were acquired. “The demand for a clean break with the past was considered a public good,” Bästlein writes.48 Elmshorn was a perfect refuge for a man of few words who simply wanted some stability after sixteen months of the camp system, and a chance to put his gynecological training into practice. In this small town, even though by degrees he became the accused, Lucas continued to collect positive reviews for his kindness—no longer for helping Norwegian prisoners or refusing to

s ac h s e n h au s en a nd e xit f rom the s s   •  141

compile selection lists, but for helping the women in Elmshorn and surrounding communities deliver healthy babies.

Notes 1.  Vernehmung Lucas, 12 October 1959, Elmshorn, BArch B162/460, Bl. 300. 2.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,190. 3.  Morsch and Ley, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Other collaborations include Morsch and Ley, Medizin und Verbrechen and (with Perz) Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen. See also Morsch, “Oranienburg—Sachsenhausen, Sachsenhausen—Oranienburg” and Sachsenhausen: The Concentration Camp. Since her 2004 dissertation, Zwangssterilisation und Ärzteschaft, Ley has written on SS and prisoner doctors, such as “Kollaboration mit der SS,” and coedited with Eschebach a volume on gender, racism, and Nazi medicine, Geschlecht und ‘Rasse.’ Other standard works stem from Kaienburg, Der Militär- und Wirtschaftskomplex and Das Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. 4. Examples: Komitee der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer, Damals in Sachsenhausen; Weiss-Rüthel, Nacht und Nebel; and Naujoks, Mein Leben im KZ Sachsenhausen. 5.  Schmuhl, “Nürnberger Ärzteprozesse,” 268. 6.  Wein, “Das Krankenrevier,” and Hax, “Sterilisierung und Kastration.” 7.  Vernehmung Franz Lucas, 28 January 1960, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 12, Bl. 105. A slightly different account is in Strafsache Lucas 1970, 13. 8.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 23–24. 9.  Strafsache Lucas, 90. 10. Vernehmung August Höhn, 13 July 1946, Berlin, USHMM 1831B, 12. The mention of König is dubious, as his name does not appear in any other accounts of Sachsenhausen doctors. 11.  Vernehmungsprotokoll August Höhn, 19 July 1946, Berlin, USHMM 1831D, 38. 12.  Vernehmung Heinz Baumkötter, 20 April 1960, Münster, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 36, 2, Bl. 162. Interestingly, Lucas was the fiftieth and Kreibich the fifty-first witness on 18 December 1961 in Münster in the trial of Baumkötter, Gaberle, and Adam. See 6 Ks 1:61: Öffentliche Sitzung des Schwurgerichts Staatsanwaltschaft Münster, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 32, Bl. 62–63. 13.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 179. 14.  Vernehmung Hans Fabisch, Lübeck, 8 December 1956, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Staatsanwaltschaft Münster Q 225, Nr. 390, Bd. 16, Bl. 5. 15.  Vernehmung Hans Fabisch, Düsseldorf, 24 July 1958 (LG Düsseldorf 601015 8 Ks 2/59). 16.  Vernehmung Franz Lucas, Hamburg, 28 January 1960, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Staatsanwaltschaft Münster Q 225, Nr. 390, Bd. 22, Bl. 106. 17.  Vernehmung Hans Fabisch and Franz Lucas, Lübeck, 5 April 1960, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Staatsanwaltschaft Münster Q 325, Nr. 390, Bd. 25, Bl. 7. 18.  Fabisch and Lucas, 8. 19.  Fabisch and Lucas, 9. 20.  6 Ks 1:61 Öffentliche Sitzung des Schwurgerichts Staatsanwaltschaft Münster, 17 November 1961, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 32, Bl. 12. 21. See Deposition of Hans Rosenberg, 5 March 1946, File 1849, War Crimes Investigation Committee Berlin, RIOD Amsterdam, Bestand Sachsenhausen, c[19] 313/314, 4. Rosenberg, who accused Fabisch of selecting prisoners for “liquidation,” described Lucas as the only doctor at Sachsenhausen who refused to be a part of the selections and exterminations that involved the camp’s doctors from mid-1944 onward. 22.  Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 266, 457–58.

142   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 23.  Tadeusz Kowalczyk to FL, 6 December 1962, FBI/LF. 24. Kowalczyk. 25.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Kowalczyk, 19 August 1963, HHStAW, 461-37638, Bd. 88a. 26.  On Lys’s dubious credibility thanks to his relatively comfortable position in the prisoner hierarchy, see Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 58–59. 27.  Gunther Lys to FL, 30 January 1964, BArch N642-137, 396. 28.  Statement of Jakob Rotterschmidt, 6 February 1964, BArch N642-139, Bl. 21–22. 29.  Max Geissler to Fritz Bauer, 3 February 1964, BArch N642-140, Bl. 159. 30.  15 April 1945 was the day that Sinti and Roma prisoners who had been transferred from Ravensbrück in early March left Sachsenhausen to fight the final three weeks of the war with the Dirlewanger Division. Whether Lucas planned his escape to coordinate with this transition of prisoners is unknown. 31.  Komitee der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer, Damals in Sachsenhausen, 150. 32.  Vernehmung Max Geissler, 11 January 1965, AP 27,695. 33.  Vernehmung Max Geissler, 13 August 1956, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 17, Bl. 42; Geissler, Bl. 17b; Bl. 156. 34.  Vernehmung Hans Fabisch, 24 July 1958, NRW-Duisburg Gerichte Rep. 388, Nr. 0014, Bl. 199–200. 35.  Vernehmung Alois Gaberle, 25 July 1958, NRW-Duisburg Gerichte Rep 388, Nr. 0015, Bl. 5. 36.  Vernehmung Alois Gaberle, 25 July 1958, NRW-Duisburg Gerichte Rep. 388, Nr. 0122, Bl. 13. 37.  Vernehmung Herbert Siggelkow, 10 July 1956, NRW-Duisburg Gerichte Rep. 388, Nr. 0122, Bl. 8. 38.  Vernehmung Eduard Kreibich, 4 September 1956, Kiel, Bl. 59. 39.  Vernehmung Fritz Schmidt, 27 September 1956, Münster, Landesarchiv NRW Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390 Bd. 12, Bl. 40b. See also: Vernehmung Fritz Schmidt, Düsseldorf, 17 October 1956, Staatsanwaltschaft Düsseldorf, Voruntersuchung gegen Höhn u.A (8 Ks 2/59), Bl. 80. 40. Video Interview of 19 February 1995 of Bodo Michael Baumunk with Heinz (Heinrich) Baumkötter, Sachsenhausen Gedenkstätte, R 63/38/1, P 4 Baumkötter, Heinrich/2. In the Ravensbrück trial, Dr. Percy Treite said that the last he heard of Lucas was at the end of April 1945 (WO 235/307, 206–7). 41.  Johan Hjort to Sylvia Salvesen, 24 September 1946, Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum 175.3, mp.2. 42. Hjort. 43.  Johan Hjort to Magistrat Elmshorn, 14 December 1962, FBI/LF. 44.  Johan Hjort to Oberstaatsanwalt LG/FaM, 30 October 1964, FBI/LF. 45. Vernehmungsprotokoll Johan Hjort, Oslo, 23 March 1965 (Anlage 9 zum Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung vom 26. April 1965), AP 32,518–23. Sarah Helm mistakenly gives Lucas’s departure as his arrival date: “Johan Hjort said Lucas turned up at Gross Kreutz on about 23 April, pleading for refuge.” See Women of Ravensbrück, 702. 46.  Danker and Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein, 50. 47.  Bästlein, “Eine andere Heimatgeschichte,” 155. 48.  Bästlein. See also Gerhard Paul’s discussion of denazification in Schleswig-Holstein in Landunter, esp. 345–402.

part ii

L ucas

the

A ccused

•••

6

U nder S crutiny : B ecoming (1956–1963)

the

A ccused

•••

Dr. Franz Lucas’s decision to settle in Schleswig-Holstein, a haven for Nazis, was no haphazard choice, although he was painfully aware of the consequences of desertion. His silence about all that he had seen and done in a Waffen-SS uniform helped him avoid denazification and aided his disappearing act in a state known for its “renazification.”1 After arriving in Elmshorn before the end of the war, less than an hour by train from Hamburg, he registered himself with the city and entered clinical employment with the city hospital. To show his qualifications and whitewash his past, he provided false accounts of how he spent the war years. Had he been forthcoming about performing selections, for example, he would have destroyed his employer’s trust, thus putting his career in jeopardy and damaging his good standing. This assumes, of course, that most fellow citizens were concerned about where and how Lucas gained his experience. His gynecology patients clearly were not. If Lucas’s desertion from the SS concluded the first half of this book, the second half reconstructs his attempt to avoid justice. Lucas started lying to avoid detection, then kept on lying to avoid admitting to criminal participation. When rumors of his SS membership surfaced in the press, Lucas approached the Elmshorn magistrate and threatened to sue his accusers. By the time of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Lucas had fielded questions not only from prosecutor Joachim Kügler and court magistrate Heinz Düx in Frankfurt, but also from attorneys in Münster, Nuremberg, Verden, and Itzehoe, and from city council members in Elmshorn. Initial denials gave way to alleged confusion about dates, a poor memory of fellow SS personnel, and an increasingly bold if inconsistent account of himself as a victim of the Nazis. Franz Lucas married Susanne Hinsch in 1950. One daughter was born in 1952 and another in 1955. In 1956, the family moved into a new house, built for

146   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

80,000 DM, which the couple owned equally.2 This is a sign that Lucas’s in-laws supported him financially—and ideologically too, since his father-in-law knew Norwegian well enough to translate Sylvia Salvesen’s Ravensbrück memoir Forgive—But Do Not Forget from Norwegian into German and visited Salvesen in Oslo during his son-in-law’s trial to counter negative media coverage.3 By 1962, Lucas was earning 30,000 DM a year and had bought another plot of land for 6,000 DM. The family enjoyed the symbols of middle-class comfort, although Susanne Lucas was forced to sell the grand piano to pay legal fees during the sixties while her husband served his sentence. She was a committed homemaker, mother, and churchgoer. Lucas went along with her Christian loyalties without signs of similar piety. Although the children spent most of their school years living in the shadow of accusations against their father, Susanne Lucas’s letters reveal no sign that they resented him for it. To receive approval to direct the Gynecology Division of Elmshorn City Hospital in 1954, Lucas would have had to lie to the medical board in Bad Segeberg. Whether Susanne Lucas knew about her husband’s past at the time of his appointment is unknown, but she probably would have excused any lies about his past due to the amount of good he was doing since war’s end. After more than a decade of establishing a marriage, career, home, and a savings account, watching his two daughters baptized in the local Lutheran church, and building a future in the shadow of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), Lucas was sleeping less with one eye open. It looked like he had successfully recast himself as a man without a past, no different than the other members of the German Community of Fate. But ingrained in him was the determination to avoid standing out so long as Nazi trials were still the norm. Avoiding criminal status was only part of the challenge, for Lucas also had to avoid detection by former prisoners zealous to find him. After years of trying, for example, former Ravensbrück prisoner Helene Schwesig finally found Lucas’s address in late 1961 and wrote him to tell him about another kind of manhunt that the political prisoners had unleashed in 1945 to protect him from the military government, medical boards, and denazification.4 Almost a year after writing Lucas, Schwesig wrote Elmshorn magistrate Kurt Semprich, most likely in response to a request from Lucas or his lawyers for a character reference. She explained that although it was forbidden for members of her survivor organization, the VVN (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime) to speak on behalf of former SS officers, she had seen fit to echo the impression her Ravensbrück group had gathered of “a firm Christian that had been forced to join the SS.”5 Lucas made such support letters increasingly available to his lawyers over time. Nevertheless, he avoided responding, as it would have meant admitting his proximity to great crimes. Denial was thus his mode of response to Commissioner Belgard of the Elmshorn/Pinneberg Police, who questioned Lucas at home in October 1959 about Erika Buchmann, one of his

unde r s crutiny   •  147

most ardent supporters. Lucas denied knowing Ravensbrück personnel and only vaguely recalled someone whose name “sounded like Buchmann.”6 Recasting himself as a gifted gynecologist without a past required not just silence and denial, but increasingly daring deception to explain the war years. In his first account, Lucas claimed spending the year 1944 in a hospital in Danzig and in a repurposed hospital (Ausweichkrankenhaus) nearby. He knew nothing about Ravensbrück until receiving orders to report to Dr. Trommer at Ravensbrück, who assigned him to the operating division (Revier 1) under Dr. Treite.7 In reality, Lucas was head of Revier 2. His most brazen lie under oath was that he had never been an officer in the SS.8 Then came his interrogation in late January 1960 by Schmalacker in Hamburg. Now Lucas replaced any mention of Danzig hospitals with the claim that he had spent all of 1944 as a camp doctor in Ravensbrück women’s camp.9 A week later, he was in Elmshorn police headquarters to answer questions from the Nuremberg/Fürth district court about August Kolb, former Schutzhaftlagerführer (protective camp leader) and one of the most powerful men in Sachsenhausen. Noting that he knew nothing about Kolb, Lucas recalled being transferred from Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen in mid-January 1945 for high treason, and being warned that he would “disappear” if he continued in that vein.10 In August 1960, Lucas told the Verden (Aller) district court that he could not remember which high-ranking officer had given him his ultimatum upon his arrival in Sachsenhausen. He remembered discharging his duties in the prisoner hospital, and that “fellow prisoners” helped him escape in mid-March, which launched an SS manhunt for him. But the object of the Verden investigation, Heinrich Wessel (adjutant for Commandant Anton Kaindl in Sachsenhausen), he claimed not to know.11 Acting separately, Joachim Kügler and fellow prosecutor Georg Friedrich Vogel were compiling evidence for Attorney General Fritz Bauer in the preliminary investigation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.12 The first full narrative of Lucas’s involvement in Auschwitz emerged when Kügler questioned him in November 1961, followed by Lucas’s letter of explanation the following month and Heinz Düx’s juridical interrogation in February 1962 in Frankfurt. A year after Kügler’s first visit to Elmshorn, Magistrate Kurt Semprich wrote the senior public prosecutor in Frankfurt, Hanns Großmann, for help in deciding whether to dismiss Lucas from the city hospital, whose gynecology division Lucas had served since 1 June 1945 and directed since 1954. Since the spring of 1962, the newspaper of the survivor organization VVN, Die Tat, was reporting that Lucas was accused of having selected prisoners for the gas chambers.13 On 7 December 1962, Semprich received from Großmann the preliminary investigation petition of 12 July 1961, the petition of 23 January 1962 to extend the preliminary investigation to include Dr. Lucas, and a copy of the fourteen-page protocol from Heinz Düx’s 14 February 1962 interrogation of Lucas.

148   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

This was enough for the city of Elmshorn to fire Lucas on 18 December 1962. Düx’s protocol formed the backbone of the Elmshorner Nachrichten article the next day that reported that Lucas had been relieved of his duties for suspicion of participating in concentration camp crimes.14 Lucas’s attorney in Hamburg, Hans Peter Ivens, criticized the magistrate for firing a man with an unblemished rec­ ord, and announced that his client was holding the city responsible for all damages resulting from his illegal dismissal.15 On 4 January 1963, some two hundred townspeople and journalists packed a meeting that revealed the city council’s political allegiances and divisions. Councilman Werner Foth explained that the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) had requested the meeting for the sake of protecting human rights and democratic institutions. Although the CDU agreed with Lucas’s dismissal, it found that head council member Horst Rosenbusch had dealt with the “difficult and tragic case” inappropriately. For the sake of Lucas’s children, the council should have waited until after Christmas to release press information and fire Lucas.16 Ignoring the good of Lucas’s family was a crime heavier than Lucas’s guilt, the CDU members claimed, citing Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses as more convincing than any charges against him.17 Defending Rosenbusch’s actions, three FDP (Free Democratic Party) councilmen reminded Foth and his supporters that no protest had come from the city council in 1934, when three hundred fathers were arrested in Elmshorn shortly before Christmas.18 A camp survivor himself, Councilman Lentfer cautioned against guessing at Lucas’s character on the basis of testimonies from privileged prisoners on good standing with their captors.19 Councilman Fehrs added that Lucas had already compromised himself by denying any previous SS activity and by threatening legal measures against anyone who associated him with the SS. Fehrs also wondered whether one could expect a gynecologist so accused to treat the wives of former prisoners.20 The Elmshorner Nachrichten reported that Councilman Weinhold, a former camp inmate, had called out: “The dead cannot speak!” But Foth, for the CDU, insisted on drawing a parallel between Rosenbusch’s efforts to dig up dirt and the perversions of justice in the Hitler era.21 At 10:30 in the evening, four hours after the meeting began, twenty-two council members voted to approve the magistrate’s dismissal of Lucas, with six members voting against the measure. Deeply grateful patients in Elmshorn and surrounding towns immediately assured Franz and Susanne Lucas of their support. Like the medical and political prisoners who sent him letters a year later in February 1964, Lucas’s patients also asserted that he had saved their lives—or, in this case, helped them deliver healthy babies by performing C-Sections and calming them with his professional demeanor. Many were deeply offended by the “monstrous” charges against Lucas and wished him success in his fight for justice against the city.22 One woman, thanking him for bringing her twins into the world, remarked: “It’s appalling that someone has the gall to dig up dirt from that era—when all of us were more

unde r s crutiny   •  149

or less stuck in straitjackets—to throw at Herr Dr. Lucas.”23 Thus, these women took their own gratitude for his professionalism as symbolic of Lucas’s entire career, so that anyone who doubted his complete honesty was calling into question their own trust of him. It is no wonder they perceived Lucas as needing their protection. Two weeks after the tumultuous town meeting, Councilman Rosenbusch wrote a letter to the Elmshorn Labor Court announcing the magistrate’s rejection of a proposed settlement for Lucas’s reinstatement. Upon investigating Lucas’s certifications, the magistrate had found perjury in several files.24 In the vita provided to Elmshorn on 4 July 1945, Lucas had claimed passing the state medical exam with a “better than average” score after twenty-nine months of study under four professors at the Medical Academy in Danzig. He had first been released from military duty, so he claimed, then been considered fit for it, then ultimately exempted from it to serve instead in the women’s clinic of the Medical Academy. After the evacuation of Danzig in March 1945, he arrived in Müncheberg (an hour east of Berlin by rail), where he lost all his belongings and important papers during a Russian assault.25 This, then, was Lucas’s third version of how he had spent the war years. As the magistrate’s office was discovering, Lucas began his tenure in Elmshorn under false pretenses. In 1950, Lucas had repeated, with variations, the tale of his medical training and degree from Danzig. If in 1945 he had remarked that his training in internal medicine and surgery had lasted six months, in 1950 he listed a duration of nine months for internal medicine and three months for surgery. Moreover, Lucas now produced a transcript for his medical degree that showed a result of “satisfactory,” not “better than average,” but during his interrogation by Heinz Düx on 14 February 1962, he had indicated a score of “good.”26 The story he told Düx about his medical training had nothing to do with twenty-nine months in Danzig that involved four professors. There was even a fourth account Lucas gave of his war years. During his certification in 1954 by the medical board in Bad Segeberg, Lucas had reported working from 1 August 1942 until 15 February 1945 at the city hospital of Königshütte (i.e., Chorzów in upper Schlesien, fifty kilometers northwest of Auschwitz). This account had him starting employment twenty-five days before passing the state medical exam. As proof for his employment, Lucas produced a certificate signed by a certain Dr. Szymański that contained the name Professor Dr. Clauberg and “Städt. Krankenhaus Königshütte” on the letterhead.27 In Rosenbusch’s view, the mere mention of Carl Clauberg meant that Lucas had clearly lost track of the statements he had given to various authorities. Rosenbusch included a copy of the 1954 memo in which Lucas had declared to the mayor that he would sue for libel any person claiming he had been a member of the SS. What is more, on the questionnaire filed with the medical board, Lucas had denied SS membership and activity and withheld his signature.28 Lucas’s dismissal without notice was

150   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

scarcely as alarming, Rosenbusch asserted, as the erosion of trust between Lucas and the city. Moreover, the medical board now demanded evidence from Elmshorn to help determine whether it should revoke Lucas’s medical license.29 Based on his negative discoveries about Lucas, Rosenbusch feared he might lose his own position within the Elmshorn magistrate’s office, and his 18 January letter to the Elmshorn Labor Court appears to have lacked the intended effect.30 In its verdict on 7 February 1963, the labor court ordered the city to pay 14,000 DM to Lucas according to §8 of the Employment Protection Act and to desist in claiming that Lucas had admitted to performing four selections on the ramp in Birkenau.31 On 20 May, Rosenbusch received the Frankfurt prosecutors’ bill of indictment of 16 April 1963.32 That charge read: “The defendant Dr. Lucas, as SS-Obersturmführer and camp doctor in the spring and summer of 1944, and in an undetermined number of cases, carried through or supervised selections after the arrival of Jewish prisoner transports, in which an undetermined number of prisoners was selected and transported thereafter to the gas chambers for gassing; there he supervised the throwing-in of Zyklon-B by the medical orderlies.”33 The city reached a settlement with Lucas on 24 May with the help of the labor court of appeals in Kiel. Lucas’s employment with Elmshorn was no longer possible, but Elmshorn agreed to withdraw all assertions regarding Lucas’s pretrial interrogation, to compensate Lucas for unused vacation time from 1962, and to pay out previously withheld arrears for Lucas’s physician services. Perhaps the most chilling agreement was that all conclusions reached as a result of the facts of the case at the base of the litigation were to be considered unfounded. The magistrate affirmed the agreement on 28 May, and Lucas received the promised vacation money and arrears, but not the 14,000 DM.34 The appeals court was unable to roll back the majority vote in city council to relieve Lucas of his duties. By taking his Nazi crimes lightly, though, it did the next best thing in Lucas’s eyes by legally shielding his reputation and advancing the views of the minority votes in city council that reflected the majority of the populace. After all, Elmshorn was still as brown as the whole of SchleswigHolstein. This was the state in which high-ranking former Nazis continued to receive state pensions in the 1950s, including the widow of Reinhard Heydrich.35 Dr. Max Timm, whose wartime job involved deporting millions of forced laborers to Germany, found postwar employment in Schleswig-Holstein’s Division of Labor, ironically enough.36 And in Flensburg, less than two hours from Elmshorn by car, Dr. Werner Heyde spent the 1950s calling himself Dr. Fritz Sawade, shielded by the same loyalties that restored Lucas’s reputation. As a trusted expert on “euthanasia” in the Chancellery of the Führer, Heyde had appraised thousands of mostly asylum patients beginning in 1939 during “Aktion T4,” after which he did the same on camp inmates during “Aktion 14f13.” His first career was thus spent sending thousands of persons deemed “unworthy of life” to their deaths.37 Under

unde r s crutiny   •  151

the pseudonym of Dr. Sawade, he continued writing appraisals in his second career as neurologist, while jurists and doctors stood by and did nothing. Thus, it appears that while Lucas and his wife denied any association with SS aid organizations such as Stille Hilfe (Quiet Aid) or HIAG (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit, Mutual Aid Society), no formal connections were necessary when a beloved gynecologist began being asked to answer for his past.38 Lucas benefitted tangibly from settling in Elmshorn, although there were enough dissenters there from the ranks of former political prisoners, usually SPD voters, to unsettle him. To sum up Lucas’s deceptive explanations in the order they were given: On his vita from 1945, Lucas alleged spending over two years studying at the Medical Academy in Danzig before working in its women’s clinic. Second, during certification by the Bad Segeberg Medical Board in 1954, he claimed spending the war years in the city hospital in Königshütte, seemingly oblivious to Clauberg’s name on the letterhead of his recommendation. Third, in a 1959 interrogation about Ravensbrück, he claimed working at two Danzig hospitals in 1944 before being ordered to Ravensbrück. Fourth, in 1960 he told Schmalacker in Münster that he had spent all of 1944 working in Ravensbrück. Added to this was the discrepancy in test scores that so disturbed Rosenbusch. This strategy points repeatedly to a deceitful posture less interested in consistency than desperate to erase the past. Common in all of these haphazard lies is the tone Lucas invokes of both importance and helplessness. Important enough to have his services required, Lucas was innocent by virtue of being forced to render them. Whenever he asserted helplessness or others assessed his complicity, names and memories failed him. If it was possible to implicate still-living fellow criminals, he shrank his acquaintance with them to a single encounter or third-party hearsay. Alleging that prisoners were his source of information about other SS doctors, he shaped his own persona as a doctor who enjoyed the trust of prisoners and like them was held captive against his will. But when it suited him, he still chose to deny knowing prisoners despite their descriptions of his heroic actions. To maintain that he had never been an SS officer was possible only by trusting in the erasure of documentary evidence. When lies failed, Lucas finally accepted the role ascribed to him by thankful witnesses, asserting that he was perpetually at odds with SS leaders. Lucas’s closely guarded past thus revealed itself only very reluctantly after twenty years. Hired by Elmshorn in good faith, Lucas kept silent while building his professional reputation. News of his SS involvement eroded the city’s trust in their chief gynecologist. Still, Lucas’s good standing as a citizen suffered only in some circles. Without the remarkable engagement of council members such as Horst Rosenbusch and those who had personally experienced concentration camps in Fühlsbüttel, Lucas’s CDU supporters might have dispelled the accusations in the press as unfounded rumors and helped Lucas to keep his secret for a much longer time.

152   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Notes 1.  Bästlein, “Eine andere Heimatgeschichte,” 164. 2.  Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,189. 3.  Sylvia Salvesen to FL, 18 February 1964, BArch N642-139. 4.  Helene Schwesig to FL, 19 December 1961, HHStAW 37638/063, Hauptakten Bd. 62, Bl. 11,548. 5. Helene Schwesig to Elmshorn Magistrate Kurt Semprich, 21 January 1962, HHStAW 37638/063, Hauptakten Bd. 62, Bl. 11,549–50. 6.  Vernehmung Lucas, Elmshorn/Pinneberg Police, 12 October 1959, BArch B162-460, 301. 7.  Lucas, 298–99. 8.  Lucas, 301. 9.  Vernehmung Lucas, 28 January 1960, LG Münster (Schmalacker), Landesarchiv NordrheinWestfalen, Abt. Westfalen, Q 225 Nr. 390, Bd. 2, Bl. 104. 10.  Vernehmung Lucas, 4 February 1960, LG Nürnberg/Fürth, FBI/LF. 11.  At Wessel’s sentencing as accomplice to murder, the Verden judge proclaimed: “The need for conciliation is not as great after twenty years. Time has mercifully wrapped a veil of forgetting over the suffering of the victims and the tears of family members.” See G. Z., “Auschwitz vor Gericht,” Zeit, Nr. 51, 20 December 1963, 34. 12.  See Renz, “Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß.” 13.  Die Tat, Nr. 43, 27 October 1962. A similar charge appeared in Stimme des Widerstandes, Nr. 8/62. 14.  “Chefarzt Dr. Lucas fristlos entlassen. Er soll an KZ-Verbrechen beteiligt sein,” Elmshorner Nachrichten, 19 December 1962. 15.  Hans Peter Ivens and Albert Wilms to Stadt Elmshorn, 21 December 1962, FBI/LF. 16.  Protokoll der Sitzung des Stadtverordneten-Kollegiums der Stadt Elmshorn, 4 January 1963, Archiv Stadt Elmshorn, 1–3. 17.  Protokoll, 3–4. 18.  According to local records, two hundred ninety members of the Elmshorn Workers’ Movement (not all of them “fathers”) were rounded up between December 1934 and February 1935 and taken to police headquarters. Several were roughed up and sent to the concentration camp in Hamburg-Fühlsbüttel. A former Elmshorn Reichstag representative of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party), Reinhold Jürgensen, was murdered there on 29 December 1934. Industrie Museum Elmshorn (website). Retrieved on 20 December 2022 from https:// www.industriemuseum-elmshorn.de/elmshorn/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/stadtrundgang-Verfolg ung-in-Elmshorn.pdf. 19.  Protokoll der Sitzung des Stadtverordneten-Kollegiums der Stadt Elmshorn, 4 January 1963, Archiv Stadt Elmshorn, 3. 20.  Protokoll, 4. 21.  “Wir handeln nicht aus Rachedurst! Große Debatte über den Fall Dr. Lucas im Stadtparlament,” Elmshorner Nachrichten, 5 January 1963, 4. 22.  Letters of “E. S.” (23 January 1963) and “O. H.” (5 February 1963), BArch N642-162. 23.  Letter of “H. T.,” dated January 1963, BArch N642-162. 24.  Elmshorn Magistrat to Arbeitsgericht Elmshorn, 18 January 1963, FBI/LF. 25.  Elmshorn Magistrat. 26.  Elmshorn Magistrat. See also Richterliche Vernehmung Lucas, 14 February 1962, AP 4,184. 27.  If the name was Tadeusz Szymański, it was the prisoner doctor from the Gypsy camp who testified on Lucas’s behalf on 11 January 1965. 28.  Elmshorn Magistrat to Arbeitsgericht Elmshorn, 18 January 1963, FBI/LF.

unde r s crutiny   •  153 29.  Elmshorn Magistrat. Adding to the concerns, the newspaper had reported on Lucas’s falsified questionnaire, his refusal as doctor on duty to assist a pregnant woman in 1955, and his recent tendency to drink more than was suitable for his tasks. See “Wir handeln nicht aus Rachedurst! Große Debatte über den Fall Dr. Lucas im Stadtparlament,” Elmshorner Nachrichten, 5 January 1963. 30.  Rosenbusch to Grossmann, 5 March 1963, FBI/LF. The Elmshorner Nachrichten commented that the labor court did not consider Lucas’s association with Clauberg, “who carried out experiments on Jewish women in Auschwitz,” as important as the City of Elmshorn did. See “Dr. Lucas kehrt nicht zurück,” 8 February 1963. 31.  Bild-Zeitung (Hamburg edition) had reported on 8 February 1963 that Elmshorn had been ordered by the labor court to pay damages to Lucas of 14,000 DM and to desist from assertions that the doctor, employed seventeen years by the city hospital, had participated in concentration camp crimes. 32.  Rosenbusch to Oberstaatsanwalt LG/FaM, 16 April 1963, FBI/LF. 33.  Der Angeschuldigte Dr. med. Lucas, Anklageschrift, 16 April 1963, AP 1,891. 34.  Elmshorner Nachrichten reported on 27 May 1963 that Elmshorn was no longer bound to pay 14,000 DM to Lucas. See “Auch Dr. Lucas unter Mordanklage: Die Stadt zahlt keine 14000 DM.” 35.  Bästlein, “Eine andere Heimatsgeschichte,” 154. 36.  Bästlein, 152. 37.  On Heyde’s first career as expert psychiatric appraiser (Gutachter), see Godau-Schüttke, Die Heyde/Sawade-Affäre, 13–59. 38.  The standard work on organizations for Waffen-SS veterans is Wilke, “Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit.”

7

“W hite R aven ” of the F rankfurt A uschwitz T rial (1964)

•••

Like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem two years earlier, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, referred to as the “Proceedings Against Mulka and Others” (file name: 4 Ks 63), sent a shudder through millions of listeners, viewers, and readers worldwide. Media in West and East Germany crowded the Römer (the city hall in the old city) for the first thirty-one hearings from 20 December 1963 until 26 March 1964. From 3 April 1964 until 20 August 1965, the court then convened in the newly renovated Haus Gallus, west of the main train station, for a total of 180 hearings. Twenty thousand trial attendees heard witnesses describe the crimes of the twenty defendants from two decades earlier.1 Most witnesses who testified about Lucas’s activity at Auschwitz (although more talked about Ravensbrück) claimed he was too good to be in the same courtroom as the others. For the first year of the trial, Lucas contributed little except denial of having selected Jewish prisoners or supervised killings at the gas chamber.2 Lucas’s assertion of innocence reached a high point in mid-December 1964 when, as the sole defendant, he accompanied a court team to Auschwitz to examine the forensic claims of the witnesses. This was a bold, even arrogant move, because his confession three months later required the court to rethink his claims. Lucas’s decision to return to Auschwitz with the court was a kind of offensive thrust to match his defensive parry a decade earlier threatening to sue anyone who associated him with Nazism. Mostly, Lucas fashioned his narrative in response to the testimonies about him, which were first incriminatory, then exculpatory, then again incriminatory. This chapter covers the first two phases. My focus on witnesses is animated by my view that it is better to view testimonies through the eyes of the real victims, not primarily as support for an indictment. Accusatory witnesses experienced renewed humiliation on two levels. First, they were faced by hostile defense attorneys and an incredulous court that

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  155

often dismissed their evidence. Second, they watched the court treat most defendants as default accomplices of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, barring any strong evidence to the contrary that defendants zealously initiated murders on their own. The German judiciary understanding of subjective will that dominated its postwar trials was every bit as tangible in Frankfurt. Understanding the legal distinctions between accomplice and perpetrator should not, I argue, drown out the voices of the persecutees who experienced little legal credibility. Like so many other Nazis after the war, Lucas reentered the civilian world hoping to suppress twelve swastika-shaped years. Simply relaying his deception would give, as Marion Kaplan writes, “the impression of the ‘morally neutral ordinariness of the average German’s experience.’”3 Kaplan suggests considering how the intentionalism-functionalism divide sounds to persecutees of the regime: “What is striking in the victims’ accounts is not whether the Nazis intended the destruction of the Jews due to their unmitigated and unparalleled hatred or whether they backed into it, but the speed and the ambiguities of the attack against Jewish life.”4 In this understanding, the “social death” imposed by approving non-Jewish onlookers was “a prerequisite for deportation and genocide.”5 To be sure, a victim’s sense of time and place was destroyed long before deportation, and the camps only sharpened the bewilderment. As Mark Roseman explains, courts wanted reports on “large-scale murder,” but witness accounts “are as full of willful individual gestures of humiliation, sadism and torture as of the systematic execution of genocide.”6 A deep literature stressing the memory of Holocaust witnesses over their epistemological function has developed around this point.7 As Devin Pendas remarks, witnesses were caught between describing what happened (forensic truth, requiring the court to hear) and how they experienced it (experiential truth, requiring the court to really listen).8 As a result, “the emotionalism that renders testimony valuable as evidence of experiential truth may undermine its forensic value—and, one could add, though a court of law would not—that the reverse is true as well. A purely factual statement may tell us nothing about the experience of the witness.”9 The least a historian can do is offer experiential truth as a stark contrast to a court and society that for decades had little interest in listening to witnesses. During the trial, headlines featured the sadism of the victimizer instead of the pain of victim memories. And with the sadism of perpetrators luridly in view, readers and viewers forgot that the presiding judge was leading his witnesses to comment on this or that defendant and the witness’s relationship to him. As accusatory witnesses began to cast doubt on Lucas as the “white raven” his Ravensbrück witnesses described, Lucas asserted that his fear at Auschwitz had turned into courage at subsequent camps. Beyond Lucas, witnesses, and cross-examiners, we must also ensure that journalist Inge Deutschkron’s description of Lucas’s pitiful body language remains as vivid in our minds as journalist Peter Jochen Winters’s stylization of Lucas as entangled (verstrickt) in Nazism and deserving of our pity.

156   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Genesis and Contours of the Auschwitz Trial Of the seven thousand SS members who served at Auschwitz, nearly eight hundred were brought to trial, forty of them in West German courtrooms, and half of these in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.10 Two catalysts were important for the trial. The first involved Adolf Rögner, a former criminal prisoner in Auschwitz, who wrote the Stuttgart State Attorney’s Office on 1 March 1958 with accusations against Wilhelm Boger, former interrogator in the Auschwitz political division and now employed by Heinkel Motor Works in the Stuttgart area. Two months later, Hermann Langbein began supplying names, addresses, and statements, which led to Boger’s arrest in October 1958.11 The second catalyst came from Frankfurter Rundschau reporter Thomas Gnielka. In early January 1959 he sent documents to Hesse attorney general Fritz Bauer given to him by Auschwitz survivor Emil Wulkan, who had discovered them in May 1945 in Breslau (Wrocław), Poland. Stefan Baretzki was among the names of SS guards mentioned in the documents as shooting prisoners “attempting to escape.” Bauer forwarded the documents to Karlsruhe, where the BGH decided on 17 April 1959 that the Frankfurt District Court would investigate ninety-four SS members of the Auschwitz camp.12 In the summer of 1959, Bauer enlisted Joachim Kügler and Georg Friedrich Vogel to work on the preliminary investigation. Along with Langbein, adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond was helpful for soliciting witnesses, as was the Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes and the World Jewish Congress in New York. Vogel and Kügler sent questionnaires to prospective witnesses, met with Langbein, and viewed Central Office documents in Stuttgart in June 1959. In August 1960 they viewed documents in Auschwitz and met with Jan Sehn, Polish judge, historian, and member of the Main Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes, who along with Ormond helped arrange the later site visit in December 1964.13 After two years of prosecutors assembling materials and witnesses, the judicial preliminary investigation was opened on 9 August 1961, bringing systematic interrogations of the defendants that included Joachim Kügler’s conversation with Lucas on 15 November 1961. Court magistrate Heinz Düx added Lucas and Auschwitz adjutant Karl Höcker to the indictment list on 29 January 1962 and interrogated Lucas on 14 February 1962.14 To recall, Lucas was then fired by Elmshorn at the end of 1962. On 16 April 1963 the prosecution presented the results of the preliminary investigation and petitioned for opening the main hearings against the twenty-four men it accused of committing murder partly alone and partly as a group. They supplied admissions made by the defendants, interrogation transcripts of 252 witnesses, and seventeen volumes of certificates, camp plans, and photographs.15 The prosecution’s bill of indictment charged all the defendants as perpetrators of murder, either in the generalized role of selections and gassings or in the specific role of torture and

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  157

lethal phenol injections. As Pendas notes, if the concrete actions of a defendant could not be demonstrated by eyewitness testimony, the indictment fell back on what the defendants “must have done,” based on their positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy.16 On 7 October 1963, however, the court signaled its deep disagreement with the prosecution by reducing the charges of more than half the defendants, including Lucas, from perpetrator to accomplice to murder.17 This was at odds with the concept of ideal concurrence argued by Attorney General Fritz Bauer, by which the defendants had been effectively united in one ongoing process of murder. As Pendas writes, “any participation in that crime whatsoever would constitute at a minimum aiding and abetting and, if a perpetrator’s will could be demonstrated, co-perpetratorship.”18 Opposing this concept was the court’s reliance on real concurrence, which broke down the factory-like genocide into specific, identifiable crimes. For proof of such premeditated killings, the necessary eyewitnesses (usually the victims themselves) were frequently lacking. “Atomizing” the events was like saying that mass murder resulted from “countless decisions of the will,” as the court called it, as though each arrival of a transport required a decision to kill or abstain from killing, and that pouring Zyklon-B into the gas chamber demanded “special activations of the will of the persons in responsibility.”19 This was preposterous to Bauer, who argued that the mere presence of SS men at Auschwitz constituted a natural unit of action and made complicit anyone who performed a function in the machinery of murder. But the court thought in terms of individual, not natural units of action, such as exterminating one RSHA transport at a time. Theoretically, Lucas could be on the ramp anytime, but only guilty if he “engaged his will.” Nevertheless, the prosecution did not consider ideal concurrence an excuse to ignore specific aspects of a crime but worked on ascertaining the exact scope of the crimes within the total larger crime of Auschwitz. This was one reason to exonerate the defendant Johann Schoberth, who showed no identifiable initiative in killing.20 The Frankfurt district court consisted of presiding judge Hans Hofmeyer and assistant judges Josef Perseke and Walter Hotz, with three women and three men on the jury. There were two substitute judges (Werner Hummerich and Günter Seiboldt) and five substitute jurors. Each defendant had one assigned lawyer and one substitute lawyer from among the twenty-three defense attorneys. As adjunct prosecutors, Frankfurt lawyers Henry Ormond and Christian Raabe represented fifteen survivors or relatives of victims (Nebenkläger), while East Berlin lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul advocated for six from East Germany.21 On the first day of the main hearings, Joachim Kügler explained to the international press that in German criminal courts, jury members and judges decided on the question of guilt together, as each vote was equal. The judge was not the referee of a bout between prosecution and defense, but instead the lead questioner in the hearings. The public prosecutor gathered evidence for both guilt and exoneration.22 The defen-

158   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

dant was not a party in a dispute with the accuser, but the object of the investigation and thus not obliged to provide proof of innocence. Only the actions listed in the indictment could form the basis for judgment. The defendant was not sworn in, because he had the right to defend himself using “untrue assertions.” A confession did not halt the hearings, because the court had to verify its accuracy by reconstructing the “material truth” of the events.23 Kügler’s lesson for trial reporters would have helped accusatory witnesses understand how German criminal courts operated. That coaching role fell instead to Hermann Langbein, who gave them suggestions on delivering statements and double-checked their knowledge of Auschwitz and the crimes committed there.24 Many of the witnesses had communist leanings that made them fair game for the mostly anticommunist defense attorneys, defendants, and judges. In addition, as his biographer Katharina Stengel notes, Langbein hoped that besides volunteering information about specific crimes, witnesses would recall other criminals and crimes. In this sense, Langbein and Fritz Bauer agreed that the trial should lay the foundation for historiography that featured knowledge from the bottom up, not the top down. This might shatter the claim of Hans Buchheim and his colleagues from the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, summoned as expert witnesses in early 1964, that they were more objective because they were neither Nazis nor Nazi victims.25 Langbein and Henry Ormond produced a wider sampling of witnesses than the public prosecutor’s office, which included former SS members and other criminals.26 More than sixty percent of all witnesses came from within Germany.27 Without Langbein’s ruthless diplomacy, many Polish witnesses would not have bothered to testify, aside from the difficulties of traversing political borders. Some of the initially reluctant witnesses finally did agree, such as Karl Lill, Filip Müller, Milton Buki, and Dov Paisikovic. Appearing on behalf of Ormond and Raabe, the latter three testified about their service in the Sonderkommandos (work units of Jewish prisoners forced to dispose of corpses in camp crematoria), and their memories brought about key indictments.28 For example, the court trusted Paisikovic’s recognition in court of Lucas as one of the doctors he saw supervising medical orderlies at one of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria in 1944. The impact of including 85 former SS members among 360 total witnesses was great. Although it was assumed that they could lend expertise on the historical backdrop of Auschwitz, it became obvious that they censored statements detrimental to the defendants. With his appeal to duress under orders, for example, the high-ranking Nazi Werner Best sounded more like a defense lawyer than like an expert witness. Whenever the prosecution had doubts, they could ask the court not to swear in such witnesses who were befangen (disqualified due to bias), which happened with Nazi clerk Charlotte Bartsch and Lucas’s sister Leni Ochs.29 All but 9 out of 220 victim witnesses summoned to Frankfurt had survived Auschwitz, but only 26 of them were women, because the crimes in the women’s

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  159

camp were not part of the bill of indictment. Several of the women were Jewish secretaries for the political division, as Katharina Stengel has discussed.30 Travel burdens and Cold War politics aside, survivor witnesses were either eager to contribute toward bringing SS guards to justice, or reticent to engage traumatic memories.31 Few were neutral. Visceral memories of oppressors were reignited by having to share hotels with them in Frankfurt. The Pole Józef Mikusz even bought a switchblade knife for self-protection.32 Norbert Wollheim was reticent to testify, because a German court had rejected his earlier testimony and allowed a major war criminal to go free.33 One witness had not been told about Langbein’s requests for testimony, due to her husband’s fear that revivified memories would put her over the edge.34 The most witnesses were Polish non-Jews, followed by German Jews, followed in turn by mostly Jewish witnesses from Israel and Czechoslovakia. Eighteen countries were represented altogether.35 As coach, mentor, and counselor, Langbein insisted that survivors bear witness for their dead comrades. Langbein was especially persuasive for the Polish witnesses, many of whom had not really reflected on their persecution, as Dagi Knellessen has shown, until having to prepare their testimony.36 Whatever else the witnesses thought they were contributing, their statements had to be accurate, which accounts for Langbein’s preference for functionaries whose slightly better survival conditions had allowed them personal contact with SS guards.37 Proximity to the SS also meant distracting the court less with accounts of rivalries among prisoner subpopulations.38 SS defendants liked nothing more than to see blame shifted onto a brutal capo. While Langbein declined to dictate statements for witnesses, he did remind them that the best evidence against SS doctors, dentists, and pharmacists was their own subjection to selections.39 The Münster trial against the anatomist Dr. Johann Paul Kremer (author of an infamous diary that chronicled his short SS medical service in Auschwitz), which ended in late November 1960, helped set the precedent for considering selection on the ramp and in the camp as murder.40 Even the peripheral involvement Kremer claimed for himself made him an accomplice to murder.41 This precedent steered Langbein’s search for witnesses who could claim having seen the Auschwitz trial defendants playing a part in the selections. Otto Dov Kulka, a survivor of the Theresienstadt family camp who flew from Israel to Frankfurt in late July 1964, thanked Langbein for helping keep him calm and focused during his testimony. Without such preparation, volunteer witnesses such as Helen Goldman and Lili Zelmanovic from Miami in September and December 1964, and all three Jewish witnesses from Amsterdam who testified against Lucas in March and April 1965, lost track of details and became disoriented under cross-examination. As a result, their information was deemed unreliable, aimed at the wrong defendant, and motivated by revenge. Judge Hofmeyer occasionally caught witnesses by surprise by asking them what they knew about defendants outside their personal experience. Secondhand

160   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

information or noncontradictory rumors rounded out impressions of behavior or opened up other avenues of analysis. Still, the main task of the witnesses was to identify the defendants in the courtroom that they had seen selecting on the ramp, in the camp hospital, or in the barracks. What witnesses had seen, heard, or felt was of utmost importance. Where had the defendant stood, what were his physical features, what was he doing, and how far away was the witness? Did the identification come from memory, or had the media shaped the witness’s opinion during the intervening twenty years? The more penetrating questions aiming to raise doubts stemmed from the defense attorneys. With accusatory witnesses asked to recognize and identify defendants, character witnesses (Leumundszeugen) could supply the court with evidence of good character that required less precision, helped along as they were by leading questions from Judge Hofmeyer and the defense attorneys. With such emphasis placed on recognition and identification, Franz Lucas’s strength lay in unrecognizability and fading into the background. Absence was his defense. He dodged duty on the ramp, he alleged, by slinking along the freight cars and announcing that he was too sick to select arriving prisoners. He remained unmentioned in the testimonies of high-profile “milieu” witnesses early in the trial, such as prisoner secretary Hermann Langbein, SS doctor Hans Münch, and prisoner doctor Ella Lingens. Langbein could not recall seeing Lucas in Wirths’s office or any other place, and Münch denied knowing him.42 Although Lingens knew about doctors making selections, all she knew about Lucas, since he was not a constant in the women’s compound, was that he was one of the camp doctors and was rumored to collect gold from corpses.43 Unlike such milieu witnesses, though, most witnesses stood little chance of observing, bribing, influencing, or even befriending SS doctors. When asked to identify Lucas and his actions, his accusers gave confident responses that became uncertain and contradictory under questioning. At times, their own criminal records discredited their motives for testifying. And in contrast to the collusion overlooked in the first Ravensbrück trial, the defense lawyers in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial argued point of order if witnesses were spectators in the courtroom or communicated with other witnesses and influential persons such as Langbein before testifying. In his earnestness, Langbein did influence the witnesses, as Stengel has pointed out.44 It was the task of Assistant Judge Perseke to write court protocols that contained information about courtroom choreography—what body language conveyed that trial transcripts did not. Judge Hofmeyer frequently asked a witness to identify Lucas from among the defendants, and a successful identification was as powerful as a failure was unsettling. Witnesses were most effective when, after identifying Lucas, they remembered him from Auschwitz-Birkenau between mid-December 1943 and early August 1944. Simply put, confusion about time and place was the most common reason to disregard testimony.

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  161

As a result of media coverage, a flurry of support erupted for Lucas early in the trial. Former prisoners, many of them medical professionals, wrote letters to Judge Hofmeyer, to Lucas, to his wife, to his lawyers, and to the prosecutors. Others volunteered statements in regional police headquarters. Most letters recalled Ravensbrück. A deeply impassioned letter from Sister Cilka, a nurse, depicted Lucas as an exception and loner whose forced departure robbed the women of help and counsel.45 An interpreter had observed Lucas closely for two to three weeks and assured Judge Hofmeyer that he made no selections.46 A worker in the tailor shop insisted that it was impossible to charge Lucas with crimes against humanity, and offered to furnish a statement “for the sake of justice.”47 Norwegian political prisoner Sylvia Salvesen wrote that Lucas should be praised instead of punished for his behavior toward the political prisoners.48 On the men’s side, a Polish prisoner at Ravensbrück whose facial burns Lucas had treated with “fatherly goodness” recognized him from the newspaper photo.”49 Then came medic Karl Gerber’s letter explaining that it was more of a hardship for Lucas to administer sterilizations than for the Sinti and Roma to submit to it.50 Sachsenhausen privileged political prisoner Gunther Lys wished him much courage: “In a tragic way you stand today before earthly judges, having been forced into service of a violence that you resisted, while the real wielders of power were able in perfidious ways to escape responsibility.”51 Max Geissler asked Fritz Bauer to take seriously the press reports over the last days about Lucas’s humane behavior, because “it was always up to the individual SS man in the camp whether to be decent or cruel.”52 A third Sachsenhausen supporter, Jakob Rotterschmidt, was saved when Lucas classified him as able to work after a profound illness.53 Concerning Lucas’s time in Birkenau, Zygmunt Gawlowski testified in an Australian newspaper that Lucas had saved him and twenty-six others from being executed in retaliation for the escape of two prisoners. Lucas was able to “convince the Gestapo that we did not help the men to escape.”54 Sara Rothschild, a Jewish prisoner from the women’s camp, offered to help the defense, despite being assessed as eighty percent arbeitsunfähig (unable to work) and carrying external and internal scars. Having spent her teen years in Auschwitz, her conscience would not rest until she bore witness to the man who had helped her.55 A Swedish medic wrote that Lucas showed “great understanding and human sympathy” for the prisoner doctors in the Gypsy camp.56 The same man had earlier written the German consulate in Stockholm, insisting that Lucas “was the only one during my entire camp time who acted humanely toward us prisoners, and my conscience compels me to stress this point.”57 Then came statements from Tadeusz Szymański and Tadeusz Śnieszko. Szymański stressed that as Mengele’s deputy Lucas refused to distinguish among the races and nationalities of doctors, orderlies, and nurses. He stopped the practice of prisoner denunciations by young German Sinti and Roma. After Mengele

162   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

sent twenty-eight “bothersome witnesses” to Mauthausen, Lucas’s intervention moved the entire group from the quarry to the camp hospital, ensuring their survival.58 Similarly, although sent to Ravensbrück instead of Mauthausen, Tadeusz Śnieszko confirmed Lucas’s kindness toward “Polish and Jewish doctors and toward medics and patients.”59 Lucas had pledged to do all he could to improve clinic conditions, asking only that the prisoner doctors trust him and treat him as a colleague. Uniting these medical prisoners was their claim of Lucas’s extraordinary behavior. They felt compelled to volunteer information to set Lucas apart from his inferiors in rank Wilhelm Boger, Stefan Baretzki, Josef Klehr, and Josef Kaduk, who since the beginning of the Auschwitz trial were, for good reason, being depicted in the press as sadistic brutes. It was one thing to offer statements, but it was a bigger commitment to testify in court, to the degree that the defense trusted medical prisoners not to say anything incriminating. Of all the supporters just listed, Lucas’s lawyers successfully petitioned Karl Gerber to talk about Ravensbrück, Szymański and Śnieszko about Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mauthausen, and Max Geissler about Sachsenhausen, all of them on 11 January 1965. But until then, the court also heard from survivor witnesses whose memories of Lucas were not as glowing. In the following, I show the evolution of Lucas’s image in the court and press during the evidentiary phase.

In the Courtroom The idea that Lucas was anything other than a humane contrast to his codefendants and fellow SS doctors came only slowly. Until late July 1964, what prisoner doctors remembered outweighed anything mentioned in passing by other witnesses that could incriminate him, and the court trained its focus on the other nineteen defendants whose incrimination was easier to prove. In fact, Hans Stark, the youngest of the sentenced defendants (only nineteen when he arrived at Auschwitz in late 1940), confessed in mid-January 1964, well before witnesses appeared.60 Adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond noted, however, that partial confessions were given to hide the true extent of a defendant’s crimes.61 The first two witnesses to mention Lucas were from Poland, and Wojciech Barcz, a former clerk in the Gypsy camp, was also the first Polish witness.62 On 9 April 1964, he recalled Lucas treating the prisoners with respect. Nevertheless, Barcz assumed that like Mengele, for whom he substituted, Lucas had similarly selected prisoners and sent a monthly record to Berlin of the prisoners “transferred” (überstellt) to the gas chamber.63 On 29 May 1964, Władysław Fejkiel, a medical professor in Krakow and former prisoner doctor in BIIe, testified that no selections had taken place either in the Gypsy camp during Lucas’s short stint there or later in Mauthausen.64 Believing that Lucas had come from the front, Fejkiel

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  163

called him an approachable “man of honor,” head and shoulders above those who did everything to avoid the line of fire.65 In Przeglad Lekarski (Medical Review), a publication he coedited in 1962, Fejkiel wrote: “The SS doctors carried out with the greatest diligence everything that the commandant’s office wanted, and even thought up various criminal operations. I only know one case where a doctor resisted, and it was the SS physician Dr. Lucas from Danzig, camp doctor in Auschwitz, later in Mauthausen, who was degraded for resisting and transferred to the penal camp for SS men in Stutthof.”66 This was a misunderstanding. Lucas’s transfer from Mauthausen to Stutthof, near Danzig, was not a punitive transfer to Danzig-Matzkau, the disciplinary compound for SS and police. On 8 June 1964, Ignacy Golik, a Polish political prisoner and capo in the Auschwitz SS Medical Headquarters, remembered seeing Lucas’s name on the list of the doctors assigned to selection duty, but not whether Lucas had followed through with the assignments.67 Golik had prepared baths that Lucas could take in the headquarters after signing death certificates. He estimated Lucas’s sojourn in Auschwitz as over a year but remembered nothing about appearance, residence, or departure date.68 On 18 June 1964, Joachim Kügler announced two new witnesses, Alexander Lebedev and Helen Goldman, who could prove that Lucas selected on the ramp. According to journalist Inge Deutschkron, a Jewish correspondent in Bonn from 1958 on for the Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv, this was the first time that “Dr. Lucas gave up the hope for himself.”69 Whether Kügler’s announcement was the cause or not, a day later Lucas gave Rudolf Aschenauer the full authority to represent him as elective lawyer, taking the place of Hans Peter Ivens.70 On 25 June, Aschenauer began representing Lucas alongside Rainer Eggert as the court-appointed defender.71 Aschenauer lost no time petitioning the court to withdraw Alexander Lebedev’s statement of 19–20 May that contradicted earlier witnesses.72 Goldman appeared in court on 3 September and Lebedev on 1 October 1964, over Aschenauer’s objections. The time that elapsed between petitions, summons, and appearances of witnesses explains the protracted nature of a trial against twenty defendants and why Lucas could cede the spotlight for long stretches to his codefendants. The first witness from Ravensbrück to testify against Lucas was Paul Morgenstern, who disclosed on 16 July 1964 that Lucas had sterilized him in Ravensbrück on 4 January 1945. This revelation surprised Judge Hofmeyer, and Lucas claimed no memory of the witness. When Christian Raabe read Heinrich Schenk’s statement that Lucas had treated him like an animal, the court at least became aware of accusations that painted a fuller picture of Lucas’s character. The protocol gives no indication of how sympathetic the court was to Morgenstern’s allegation. It is likely that those present in the courtroom, like the BGH, considered sterilization of Sinti and Roma something less than a crime, even during peacetime.

164   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Two weeks after Morgenstern, on 30 July, Otto Dov Kulka, now a history professor in Jerusalem, identified Lucas as responsible for supervising the Theresienstadt family compound in Birkenau. As seen already, Kulka’s contribution was considered ideal testimony. He had already submitted a statement that Dr. Mengele and Johann Schwarzhuber, the head of the Theresienstadt family camp, had carried out a selection of its twelve thousand inmates. In his Frankfurt testimony, he added that for the second “liquidation” of the family camp in July 1944, a second doctor had come with Mengele and Schwarzhuber to help select prisoners in the blocks, and that as Kulka stood at the end of BIIb by the ramp, he observed the second doctor alone on the ramp, selecting new arrivals as they filed past him.73 Kulka recalled: I mean the way they carried out the selection was the same with Baretzki, Dr. Mengele, and the second camp doctor, whom, as I said already, I did not know by name at the time, but can maybe—it’s possible—recognize. True, Mengele carried out this action more elegantly than most in our block, with swift and light gestures. And he was assisted a great deal in placing the people in rows and separating the women and the men. The second camp doctor, who reacted more heavily and slowly, carried out this activity in a similar way. I saw him less, but still a few times. And Baretzki, with his typical crudeness and shouting.74

In the courtroom, Kulka then examined the defendants at close range, pointing to Lucas: “In this defendant I can recognize the second camp doctor who came with Dr. Mengele into the children’s block.”75 Lucas had appeared with Mengele by February 1944 or earlier, well before the first “liquidation” of the Theresienstadt compound on 7–8 March 1944. But Kulka lost sight of him after the compound’s inhabitants were murdered in July.76 About the same age as the “cunning and elegant” Mengele, the second doctor was kinder and more paternal toward the children, even during the selections.77 For the defense, Rainer Eggert wondered whether Kulka had really seen the man identified as Lucas at the second “liquidation” of the Theresienstadt Family Camp in July 1944. Kulka repeated that this second doctor was present and, along with Schwarzhuber and Mengele, selected prisoners.78 Lucas denied that he was camp doctor at the time of the first “liquidation,” and that his daily rounds in the camp were not with Mengele, but with Dr. König, “who, as witnesses here have already make known, was also present at the ‘liquidation’ of the compound.”79 As to the ramp, Lucas admitted his presence but swore that he had never actively selected.80 During the more than two hours that Kulka was on the stand, Hofmeyer, Raabe, and Hummerich went increasingly on the offensive. Lucas lost confidence, clearing his throat and stumbling over responses. By contrast, Kulka was more impressive during cross-examination, helping to advance the prosecution’s case. Kulka later told Langbein that, while he was at the Frankfurt airport,

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  165

Lucas approached him and “wanted to declare again that he was innocent, although he used to come to the Theresienstadt camp . . . etc. I called a policeman and asked for proof whether Lucas was not attempting an escape. According to him, he wanted to flee to Hamburg. That’s all I know, since I turned over the doctor to the police.”81

Helen Goldman The second major accusatory witness against Lucas, Helen Goldman, appeared on 3 September 1964. Neither the court nor the defense found her trustworthy, because the trauma she had so visibly endured affected the consistency of her testimony. Instead, they interpreted her forensic unreliability as a product of revenge that targeted Lucas as her scapegoat. This is also the view that emerges in Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Bernd Naumann’s English version of trial compilations from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Woven into her essay are references to Lucas that illustrate the topsy-turvy nature of Auschwitz and its afterlife in memory. In her closing paragraph, Arendt marvels that Goldman still regarded Lucas only as the murderer of her mother and siblings, not as the doctor who helped her survive.82 In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt had already expressed her critical reservations about witnesses such as “K. Zetnik” (Yehiel Dinur) from the Eichmann trial, whose fainting on the stand turned the courtroom into a theater. Her model for an accusatory witness was Zindel Grynszpan, who spoke without adornment or mincing his words, but with “shining honesty.”83 Based on Arendt’s reading of Naumann’s report, one cannot help but associate Goldman with K. Zetnik, Kulka with Grynszpan, and Lucas with the army sergeant Anton Schmid, whose martyrdom Arendt conveys after her admiration of Grynszpan. Thus, Goldman’s appearance suspended any success Kulka gained by aligning Lucas with Mengele and with selections. Always nervous, Lucas could nevertheless relax slightly while Goldman unraveled under cross-examination. Arendt was staking a claim for unemotional witnesses who helped establish facts. The opposite of Arendt’s preference for common memory is what Lawrence Langer calls “deep memory,” nonlinear ruptures that look more performative and unstable, as when a Holocaust survivor asks an interviewer to turn off the video camera or tape recorder.84 It is not that Arendt would acknowledge having sought redemptive memories in theory, but aligning Lucas with Schmid made it apparent that she was looking for alternatives in practice. Two terms that the Hamburg literary scholar Sigrid Weigel has offered for regarding testimonial affect and effect are Klage, which denotes mourning, memorial, and justice, and Anklage, which denotes law, punishment, and tribunal.85 By Klage, Weigel means

166   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

an experiential gap that resists empathy and invites trust, if not speechlessness, as a response, resisting empirical verification common to forensic evidence of an Anklage.86 When Goldman discovered Lucas’s name on the list of Auschwitz trial defendants, it was the chance to turn her Klage into Anklage and achieve some semblance of closure. It was precisely her inability to shed the Klage represented by what Langer calls “humiliated memory” that prevented the success of her Frankfurt Anklage. Bringing up humiliated memory is unpopular: “Posterity not only can do without it; it prefers to ignore it.”87 Helen Goldman was born Ilona Kaufmann on 16 February 1925 to Mendel and Ethel Kaufmann in the Ukrainian village of Dubove.88 At nineteen, she was expelled along with her family and a thousand other Jews in April 1944 to the ghetto of Tiachiv, then transported to Auschwitz in the second half of May 1944.89 She was assigned to the kitchen in BIIc, one of the Birkenau transit compounds for female Jewish prisoners, next to the Theresienstadt family camp, where Kulka was imprisoned. In BIIc she was sporadically beaten by a supervisor named Grau whom she called the “bad SS woman” in her narrative.90 From Auschwitz, Goldman was transferred to the Dachau subcamp Kaufering in October 1944.91 At the end of April 1945, Goldman spent a few days in Dachau and then Buchberg, until its liberation by the American army on 2 May 1945.92 With fellow prisoner and future spouse Eric Goldman she made her way to a displaced persons camp in Brussels.93 The couple arrived in the United States in 1948 and became citizens in Pittsburgh in 1954.94 Shortly after Lucas’s cross-examination in January 1964, Goldman’s lawyer Harry Bassett wrote Kügler in Frankfurt to report her discovery of Lucas’s name in the newspaper. Goldman recalled that when her transport arrived at Birkenau, Lucas was the SS officer who tore her two-year-old sister out of her arms to throw to her mother, who was already holding Goldman’s younger brother as another sister stood close by. Goldman was ushered into one line while watching her mother and three younger siblings join the other line. After having her clothes stripped and her hair shorn, she was pushed under a shower and given prisoner’s clothing. An SS woman told Goldman later that day that her family had perished. Goldman remembered Lucas’s name because another officer had addressed him as “Dr. Lucas” on the ramp. Once she was settled in her barracks in BIIc, Lucas showed up to request blood and stool samples to clear her for kitchen work. About a week later, Lucas returned with the news that Goldman had passed the health tests, and she never saw him again.95 In court, Goldman confirmed that she had discovered Lucas’s name among the (then) twenty-two defendants listed in the Jewish Floridian.96 Asked how she could have stumbled across Lucas’s name in an American newspaper, Goldman responded: “Because people are looking for the names. And I was looking for Doctor Lucas because he killed my mother and my two sisters and little brother. He’s the cause of it.”97 She went on to explain:

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  167 I had my little sister, she was two years old, on my arms, you understand. Because somebody had said, if you have a little baby, then you would go with your mother. So my mother dressed me up a little, so I would look a little older. She gave me her little baby, we had a three-year-old and two-year-old. . . . When Mr. Lucas saw that, he saw through me, that I was young and healthy. And he said I would be good for work, strong for work. And he grabbed my little sister and threw her to my mother.98

During cross-examination, doubts surfaced about her account. Who gave her the proof of her family’s demise? How did she know that the man doing the separating was Dr. Lucas? Would he not have been addressed as “Herr Obersturmführer”? Could she please be more specific about his appearance and his “nice” SS uniform?99 As Katharina Stengel has noticed, Hofmeyer was so keen on Goldman getting the identifying characteristics of Lucas straight—the shape of his physique and face, uniform, accessories—that he sidelined the important facets of the discussion. After all, Stengel surmises, the court only knew how to deal with traumatized witnesses by discrediting their testimony.100 Goldman’s memory of Lucas as a “fairly good looking” man of average build in his mid-thirties, slim and fairly tall without distinguishing features, had faded with time, but his name had not.101 She also had little trouble identifying him from among the defendants: “I’m not sure, but it seems to me that this is Dr. Lucas.”102 One detail that disturbed the court was Goldman’s claim that a man from the shower room, claiming to be part of the crematorium detail, inquired about the scars on her back, which stemmed from being hit with a rifle in the freight car: “If Doctor Lucas was at the station picking them right and left, he says, then my mother and the children are not going to be living long, they’re going to be killed the same day.”103 Hence the news, but not proof, of her family’s fate came from a Jewish prisoner and Grau, the “bad SS woman.” Rudolf Aschenauer and Judge Hofmeyer were insistent that no crematorium workers were allowed inside of the women’s shower room. Nevertheless, such boundaries were not impermeable to prisoners assigned to certain work teams, as Sonderkommando survivor Filip Müller has shown.104 The aspect that bothered both court and defense the most was Goldman’s sense of time. As noted, she reported that after her separation from her family on the ramp, she saw Lucas a second time four to six weeks later, when he chose her to work in the kitchen pending the results of her hygiene tests in Berlin.105 Pressed further, she maintained that he had picked her out already at the ramp to work in the kitchen, which was the reason he wrested her sister away from her. Judge Hofmeyer asked her to reconsider her answers, because her lawyer’s letter had indicated that Lucas had approached her about kitchen duty the day after her arrival. The issue was whether she had seen Lucas twice or three times, and now she was insisting that it was twice. But how could Lucas have made such ar-

168   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

rangements with her in all the confusion and chaos on the ramp? For the defense, Rainer Eggert asked questions about blood, urine, and stool samples. He noted contradictions between Bassett’s letter and her current report of how long she waited before Lucas announced the results from Berlin (one to six weeks), and asked Goldman what she was doing while waiting (answer: “Oh, nothing”).106 During Goldman’s five or six months tending the giant cooking kettle in BIIc, the “bad” SS woman never let her forget the fate of her family,107 while a “good” SS woman hid her in barracks during a two-week illness.108 Lucas took issue with Goldman’s dates and denied either meeting her or selecting prisoners for kitchen duty. She had confused him with Thilo, Klein, or Mengele.109 Undeterred, Goldman made Lucas responsible for the postwar malaise that confined her mostly to bed.110 The court remembered this remark in its verdict nearly a year later, pointing out that being bedridden lent no credibility to Goldman’s claims either that Lucas had selected her or that a crematorium worker had infiltrated the shower area.111 The audio portion of Goldman’s eighty-minute appearance records the cross-examination spiraling out of her control. The hesitations of her interpreter are also evident. Following complaints about her translations, Regina SchmidtOtt made a special effort, only to become rattled when Goldman interrupted her translations of the German passages she already understood.112 One also hears Judge Hofmeyer scoffing at Goldman’s claims and grunting his approval as Rainer Eggert wondered why Goldman was searching for Lucas’s name in the newspapers. Judge Hummerich’s probing tone showed impatience with her flustered answers and accelerated her breakdown. None of these paratextual events appeared in Judge Perseke’s notes, and moments of what Noah Shenker calls “testimonial literacy”—sighs and screams “often consigned to the periphery”—show up nowhere in the court transcript.113 In general, newspapers and eyewitness reports commented on volume and tone of voice, hesitations, interruptions, facial expressions, background noise, laughter, and weeping, and this is true especially of Inge Deutschkron’s observations of nonverbal cues, as we will see. The court’s impatience communicated to Goldman that she was wasting its time. But for the defense it was a relief to have help erasing the confidence of the Israeli historian Kulka. Sounding more patronizing than offended, Rudolf Aschenauer politely questioned the length of time it took for Goldman to receive health clearance, and how without evidence she could blame Lucas for the loss of her family. In his closing remarks on behalf of Lucas months later, he seized on forensic inconsistencies: Goldman had been seriously ill without being admitted to the camp hospital, and she could not point to the separate Birkenau compounds on the courtroom map, the touchstone of eyewitness credibility. “On the whole,” Aschenauer concluded, “what we have here is the statement of an unhappy, nerve-shattered woman that cannot serve as the basis of a decision.”114 In his own closing remarks, adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe scolded Lucas for

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  169

not immediately conceding his ramp service after Goldman’s accusation. Raabe saw no reason to doubt the testimony of a distraught woman whose testimony matched other accounts of the ramp. It was beside the point whether Goldman was motivated by revenge to testify.115 Joachim Kügler also considered Goldman credible in crucial points despite what he called her “effusiveness” and “hysteria.”116 As noted already, objectivity was never a guarantee, but it was more likely after coaching in content and form.117 Goldman’s willingness to testify made her an atypical witness outside of Langbein’s purview. Raabe functioned as her ad hoc advocate in Frankfurt. As mentioned, Arendt was struck not only that Lucas denied having the courage to save Goldman’s life, but also that Goldman appeared unaware “that she who had sought out the murderer of her family had faced the savior of her own life.”118 Arendt attended the trial firsthand several days later on 14 September 1964 with historian Joachim Fest.119 Had Arendt observed Goldman a few days earlier, she would have seen her resting on a stretcher during the recesses.120 Two women from the German Red Cross helped this “overly slender witness, her red hair emphasizing the deathly pale face,” walk to the witness chair.121 Even if she thought that she was simply registering one of many ironies of the Holocaust, Arendt’s remark that Goldman had failed to recognize Lucas as saving her life overlooks the prisoner’s forced choice between bad and worse, then living with the unabating consequences of what were effectively nonchoices. As Lawrence Langer notes, “the belief in choice betrayed the victim and turned out to be an illusion.”122 A nuanced understanding of trauma’s effects eluded both a court keen to reach a timely verdict and a commentator so astute as Arendt. Helen Goldman left the impression on the court that revenge motivated her search for Lucas and skewed her memory of events. While it is possible that she sought to punish Lucas, deeper justice for her consisted of getting the court to take seriously her memories and the lasting damage done to her. Failure to do so reinscribed her earlier trauma. The deepest impression on the court should have been of Goldman’s loss, and that someone from the SS, if not Lucas, separated Goldman from her family. Regardless of the outcome, the historian can acknowledge the empirical value of Goldman’s inaccuracies. As historian of memory James Young has remarked, the subjective if flawed perspective of survivors shifts attention from what actually happened to what they actually saw: “By returning their voices and subjectivity to the historical record, however, we restore a measure of contingency to history as it unfolds, opening up the possibility of historical causes and effects otherwise lost in our projection of a hindsight logic onto events.”123 Suspending hindsight logic opens up an appreciation of the lack of redemptive choices and of the real-time effect of rumor among deportees. Given the constriction of time and space that led Goldman from home to ghetto to freight car to arrival ramp, it is obtuse to blame her for assumptions that proved fatal: “Because someone had said, if you have a little baby, then you would go

170   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

with your mother. So my mother dressed me up a little, so I would look older. She gave me her little baby.”124 It is possible that bewilderment prevented Goldman from acting even on false information. Understanding her lack of control helps us piece together how victims understood events as they unfolded.125 Once Goldman became slightly less unsettled after the blurred sequence of ramp events, she may indeed have seen Lucas twice—when he came for the stool and blood samples, and then when he returned to confirm her for kitchen duty—and was thus better equipped to remember his face. It is not quite so surprising that Lucas claimed no memory of Goldman, given the number of prisoners jammed into the transitory camp sectors. But any gap in his memory is no cause to infer his humility, as Arendt did. Missing in the official court transcript is an exchange that Langbein recorded as dramatic dialogue. Adjunct Prosecutor Ormond. Dr. Lucas, just try to be honest. I’m not throwing you into the same pot as the other defendants. Did you want to perhaps save this girl, who at the time was particularly pretty and young? Dr. Lucas. I had nothing to do with selections, I don’t remember it. The witness has made a mistake. Deputy Judge Hummerich. When you saw the witness with the child on her arm, it became clear to you that she was on her way to the bad side. Did you maybe want to do something good by taking the child away from the witness? Dr. Lucas. I’ve always fought on the side of the weak. If at Auschwitz I didn’t resist the commands, it was because I had been in a suicide commando earlier. I was afraid. Deputy Judge Hummerich. You don’t have the courage today, either, because you don’t trust that the truth will be understood. Witness Helen Goldman. Dr. Lucas is lying. He killed my mother and siblings. Since the KZ [concentration camp] I’ve been sick and have to lie in bed most of the time, due to his guilt. During a break in the hearings a stretcher must be prepared for the witness.126

Another version of this exchange comes from Bernd Naumann, who renders Hummerich’s reproach of Lucas as a question: “‘Did you perhaps have the courage to save the witness?’—Lucas remains silent.”127 This was the passage that made Lucas into an object of admiration for Arendt, who chose to interpret his silence as humility instead of shame. During her time in Frankfurt, Goldman was under the care of the Marienschwesternschaft initiative, a diaconal community affiliated with the German Red Cross and based in Darmstadt, which cared for 170 Auschwitz survivors who traveled to Frankfurt to testify.128 Hosts took their guests for walks or fed them

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  171

dinner, but most importantly escorted them to the courtroom and returned them to their hotel rooms.129 One volunteer host was Emmi (Delbrück) Bonhoeffer, who referred to Goldman in one of the letters she wrote to Recha Jászi, a Jewish refugee who had settled in Oberlin, Ohio.130 Goldman struck Bonhoeffer as a woman “so damaged for life that even today she looks as though she had just been released from Auschwitz.”131 The two women spent an entire day together, probably after Goldman’s court appearance.132 Goldman repeated her opening trial line: she had waited twenty years to hear the name of the murderer of her mother and younger siblings in order to testify to the truth.133 But because Bonhoeffer was haunted by the question “Did this doctor murder or save?” she conveyed to Goldman what she imagined was Lucas’s psychological distress. In her view, if Lucas had lacked control over the order to select deportees, he could be considered the rescuer of some 250 laborers for the camp (that is, a quarter of every transport of one thousand Jews arriving in Birkenau). To Bonhoeffer, Lucas’s quandary was like that of so many SS officers who had “offered the devil their little finger.”134 As Bonhoeffer left Goldman’s hotel room, Goldman wept as she embraced Bonhoeffer and whispered: “Might be you are right—vielleicht haben Sie recht.”135 The image of Goldman thanking Bonhoeffer for helping her understand a remorseless victimizer may strike some as a conciliatory gesture. But can Goldman really be expected to muster up sympathy for Lucas’s discomfort with superior orders? Piecing together a perpetrator’s motives should not require a witness who has just been crushed in court do the same. Moreover, while Bonhoeffer was the widow of a man put to death for resisting Hitler, Goldman’s family did not choose martyrdom. Bonhoeffer proved that she was still part of the perpetrator’s universe in spite of herself, echoing defense lawyer Hans Laternser with her suggestion that Lucas was a cut above the rest because he saved a higher percentage of deportees when he selected.136

More Accusations Adjunct prosecutors Raabe and Ormond especially were moved and convinced by Goldman’s testimony, aside from the particulars. This was not their assessment, however, of Aleksandr Lebedev, a journalist and physician from Moscow who took the stand on the first two days of October 1964.137 Lebedev had also testified in the USSR against Clauberg during the gynecologist’s decade in captivity there.138 Imprisoned in Auschwitz since early 1943, Lebedev had helped the underground movement collect information about SS doctors to send to Krakow, thanks to acquaintanceship with the doctors Wirths, Clauberg, Thilo, and König.139 But in Frankfurt, defense and prosecution alike found his performance seriously flawed.

172   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Lebedev claimed to have seen Lucas select once in the camp and once on the ramp. A camp selection in Block 20 took place around the beginning of April 1944, after the roll call and departure of work crews. Lebedev was sorting laundry when, at a distance of fifty or sixty meters, he noticed some 150 to 180 inmates being forced to march past Lucas. “I didn’t know Dr. Lucas by face at the time. I didn’t know it was Dr. Lucas. Only an hour later did a prisoner doctor named Alexander Gorecki tell me who it was.”140 Gorecki also told Lebedev that Lucas was a gynecologist. Although some of the prisoners filing past fell on their knees and assured him that they could still work, Lucas still signaled them to go to the left, where two trucks waited to take them to the gas chamber.141 The second time Lebedev saw Lucas was in early June on the Birkenau ramp, working with another doctor to sort about eight hundred mostly women, children, and elderly persons from a transport.142 Lebedev was part of an electrician’s crew with the Kanada commando. He saw a woman kneel down to grasp Lucas’s boots and plead with him. Lucas took a small girl from her with force and threw the child onto the tracks. Other SS men, obviously drunk, also ripped children away from mothers.143 The cross-examination yielded a rare unified front among judges, defenders, and prosecutors. Judge Hummerich wondered why Lebedev was claiming the opposite of Birkenau prisoner doctors who asserted that Lucas had stopped selections.144 Judge Hofmeyer reminded him not to let his claims be influenced by the persecution endured by Russians in Auschwitz.145 Raabe reminded Lebedev that he had told Kügler that Lucas had taken the child forcefully from the mother without harming the girl: “Do you say that is doing nothing, if one throws a child onto the tracks? I don’t understand that.”146 But Lebedev was also undermining his credibility with his claim to have seen Chief Doctor Kurt Uhlenbroock, who left Auschwitz in September 1942. Lebedev admitted he might have based his information about Uhlenbroock on material he had heard and read.147 In his May 1964 statement, Lebedev mentioned hearing from Polish doctors that Lucas had been sent to the front for “behaving liberally,” and Aschenauer wanted Lebedev to acknowledge that now.148 Vera Kapkajew, Lebedev’s interpreter, recalled Lebedev having made the statement to Kügler.149 Lebedev went from disagreeing that Lucas had been transferred as punishment to claiming no memory of such a transfer—a discrepancy that Aschenauer made transparent: “You just said that you didn’t say that. Now you can’t remember. Which is the truth, Mr. Witness?” Lebedev began to understand Aschenauer’s strategy for discrediting him. “I don’t know which truth is being sought after here. . . . How am I supposed to know where he went off to, to the front or not to the front? I saw him as a murderer, a persecutor. And how should I know whether he really went to the front and for what reason? Why such questions?”150 Aschenauer had scoured the interrogation manuscripts and listened closely enough in court to notice contradictions: “Apparently truth has two faces for you.”151 Aschenauer also wanted

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  173

to know who had told Lebedev that Lucas was a gynecologist, since Lucas was first licensed as such in 1954. Lebedev insisted that Gorecki had told him the specialty of each doctor.152 For Aschenauer, all this indicated secondhand knowledge of Lucas.153 Hermann Stolting II was curious whether Lebedev had published any articles in the last year complaining about the court’s examination of witnesses, because this inappropriate involvement would disqualify his testimony.154 A shouting match ensued between East German adjunct prosecutor Friedrich Karl Kaul, who protested the questions, and the defense attorneys, who depicted Lebedev as a vengeful communist abusing his guest privileges in West Germany and colluding with Hermann Langbein, his old comrade from the communist resistance in Auschwitz.155 Hans Laternser insinuated that Langbein had influenced the witness. Laternser’s leading questions to Lebedev were met by Kaul’s “I protest the question.” Laternser’s law partner Rainer Eggert continued the ad hominem defamation by accusing the witness of having declared the trial a “timid attempt at mastering the past.”156 Thus the defense, the court, and the West German adjunct prosecutor destroyed Lebedev’s credibility, while Kaul came across as Lebedev’s stubborn fellow communist, all the while sidelining any concern with Lucas. A similar discrediting strategy was waged against Dov Paisikovic on 9 October 1964. Paisikovic, assigned to a Birkenau crematorium detail upon arriving there in May 1944, could identify by face but not by name the medically trained defendants he had seen in the crematorium, including Capesius, Lucas, Schatz, and Frank. The transcript reads: “In going through the rows of the defendants, the witness Paisikovic pointed to the defendant Lucas and said: ‘That one I saw too, he was a doctor. . . . I saw him come into the crematorium with transports. I didn’t observe what else he did.’”157 However, Paisikovic’s case shows how proof of error destroyed a witness’s credibility and nullified previous valid statements. His errant statement came when he pointed to Stark and claimed to have seen him frequently in the crematorium in 1944, when in fact Stark had left Auschwitz in 1943.158 In a strange repeat, when Paisikovic testified at Lucas’s retrial in 1970, he was again discredited for breaking the rules five years earlier. Following Paisikovic on 9 October, the Jewish former inmate Artur Radvanský was able to explain how SS doctors received their assignments for ramp duty. Assigned as a spa attendant in the SS headquarters, Radvanský had seen reports in Wirths’s office signed by Lucas and, beginning in 1944, noticed his name on the list of nine doctors assigned to ramp and crematorium duty. Wirths kept the list under a glass plate on his desk.159 When transports arrived, those doctors drove off with their gas masks. Switching duty was not easy. When Kitt and Fischer wanted to trade places, for example, the change took two or three days to show up on the list.160 All doctors met twice a month to consult, but more frequently during the Hungarian transports.161 Orders for ramp selections came from Lolling and Pohl in Berlin directly to Wirths, while orders for camp selections came from

174   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

the Auschwitz commandant’s office.162 Radvanský had seen Fischer, Rohde, and Kitt as troop doctors in Auschwitz, “but never Lucas. Otherwise, I would have known him personally.”163 Such a statement was not in Lucas’s best interests, and Radvanský seemed credible enough, unlike the next witness against Lucas. On 13 November 1964, the Theresienstadt deportee Rudolf Gibian recognized Lucas in court and credited him for saving his mother’s life, at least temporarily, when she arrived with Gibian’s brother on a transport from Theresienstadt in mid-October 1944. Lucas was gone by then, making this assertion easy to dismantle, but Gibian insisted on the date.164 He and a capo had approached Lucas in the selecting line, and when Lucas heard the capo explain that Gibian’s mother was on the ramp, he told Gibian to take his mother to the end of the line. Gibian asked the capo “who this noble person was who saved the life of my mother  .  .  . [H]e answered, ‘Lucas.’”165 While his decrepit mother managed to survive the ramp selection, she was unable to survive a second, unexpected selection under closer scrutiny and was shot to death immediately in a barracks next to the shower area.166 Grateful that Lucas had spared his mother briefly, Gibian was nevertheless aware that Lucas’s goodwill had not extended to “thousands of others.”167 Still, the wrong date disqualified Gibian’s claims. None of these witnesses came to Frankfurt explicitly to testify against Lucas but instead provided memories upon prompting. Lebedev was biased, while Paisikovic and Gibian had their dates wrong. Only Radvanský seems to have offered information that the court did not reject. Lebedev and Gibian claimed more direct connections to Lucas, but Paisikovic and Radvanský merely offered their observations. Almost all the remaining witnesses with something to say about Lucas in 1964 were petitioned by the defense to testify in his favor.

Medical Prisoners from Birkenau and Ravensbrück In the two weeks leading up to the temporary relocation of the court to Auschwitz, the court heard from only one accusatory witness, who failed the consistency test. Three other witnesses depicted Lucas as a suffering hero worthy of their protection, thanks to his protection of them at Ravensbrück twenty years earlier. On 27 November, the French prisoner doctor Louise le Porz remembered that Lucas stood out from the Ravensbrück medical personnel by actually looking at prisoners, examining them, speaking to them as equals, and offering to the profoundly ill his own rations and smuggled medicine. To East German adjunct prosecutor Friedrich Karl Kaul’s question whether any other SS members had shown her such “seltsame Menschlichkeit” (peculiar humanity) four months before the war’s end, Le Porz responded that she could remember only two others.168 Referring to Sylvia Salvesen’s book chapter on Lucas, Hofmeyer contrasted Lucas to Ravensbrück doctors Richard Trommer and Percy Treite. Despite Le Porz’s

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  175

similarity to Salvesen, Lucas murmured that he had no memory of her and did not recognize her.169 As with Goldman, Lucas was refusing to engage the past, despite having worked alongside Le Porz, a privileged prisoner in Block 10, for days on end. Still, since culpability hinged on recognition, a defendant’s denial usually shut down difficult questions. While accusatory witnesses had to identify Lucas correctly, Lucas had the defendant’s prerogative of denying any memory of them. According to a comment by his wife several days after Le Porz’s appearance, Lucas was not feigning ignorance. With his trouble remembering the names of his own patients, how could he be expected to remember prisoners after twenty years?170 The issue for both witnesses and defendants was the memory of faces. Each looked different to the other, often vastly so, after twenty years. In addition to seeing in the other the facial differences brought on by aging, overcoming emaciation, and regrowing the hair that had been shorn, both defendant and witness now saw their earlier enemy in civilian clothing, which removed the earlier gap between prisoner and SS uniforms. Understandably, time could make names and faces elusive identifiers for all parties. Following Le Porz’s exculpatory success, Lili (Jacob) Zelmanovic failed to rally the court a week later against Lucas in an appearance that came exactly three months after Goldman’s. Both women from Miami shared the same lawyer and had arrived in Birkenau at roughly the same time (28 or 29 May 1944).171 If Goldman and Zelmanovic knew each other, neither one said so. Bernhard Walter, the official Auschwitz photographer for the records department in the political division, photographed the deportees from Zelmanovic’s transport on the Birkenau ramp, and the images became part of the album titled “Ümsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn” (Resettlement of the Jews from Hungary), referred to as the “Lili Jacob Album” or the “Auschwitz Album.”172 Zelmanovic (i.e., Jacob) discovered the album in a nightstand of a former Nazi barracks in Nordhausen-Dora where she was convalescing after the war.173 Among the photographs were the rabbi from her hometown, her grandparents, her parents, and herself.174 She allowed the court to see the album only in her presence: “I mean I will not leave them. . . . Because that’s the only possession that I have.”175 When it came time to identify Lucas, Zelmanovic pointed to Klaus Dylewski, Oswald Kaduk, and Herbert Scherpe.176 It was after this failure that she told the court about arriving with her family in Birkenau. Dr. Lucas noticed me as capable of going to the labor camp. And he separated me from my mother and the rest of them. While I was gone in the back I managed to get back to my mother. But unfortunately he recognized my face. He came over to me, he pulled, me and he took out his dagger and he stuck it in my arm. I did go into the labor camp. My arm was very infected. And a few weeks later he came into the camp to make a selection. He saw the big infection on my arm. And he pulled me out to probably go into the gas chambers. I managed to run into the barracks.

176   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r And I was hiding there for two days under the bed. And the Blockälteste told me it was Doctor Lucas. How lucky I am that I remained alive. And from then on, I was clinging to life and hoped that I’d see one of my family again. But unfortunately I wasn’t lucky. I lost everybody.177

This account brought no follow-up questions, but due to her miscues, it was easy for the court to dismiss her testimony.178 The defense and the prosecution suspected she had a revenge agenda, but Christian Raabe disagreed.179 This time the court did not even bother asking Lucas to respond to Zelmanovic’s allegations. Hofmeyer did, however, remark that the album represented potential hard evidence against the defendants if they were depicted in its pages.180 Baretzki was one figure who was clearly identifiable, though not all witnesses at the time reached consensus that he was the SS man in one photograph. Cornelia Brink has noted that photographs were useful for a court’s verdict only when they proved the presence of defendants at the scene of the crime or furnished more information about the scene. Witnesses who were asked about the photographs in the album had to be absolutely certain that the persons depicted from May 1944 were identical with the defendants in the courtroom.181 The court’s narrow frame of questioning missed much of what historians could discover about Zelmanovic’s album after she donated it to Yad Vashem in 1980. For example, doctors selecting on the ramp were identifiable by the medical Aesculapius symbol within the diamond oval on the left sleeve of the SS uniform. Such markings helped Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller identify Dr. Heinz Thilo in photographs showing him selecting on the ramp on 28 May 1944.182 Lucas, however, because he was on furlough in Osnabrück in late May, could not have been present to select the transports on which Helen Goldman and Lili Zelmanovic arrived in Birkenau. Copies of several photographs had been in circulation long before Zelmanovic brought the complete album to Frankfurt in December 1964, both before and during the trial.183 But both Stefan Baretzki and Bernhard Walter, the political division photographer behind most of the photographs who was summoned to testify, tried their hardest to deny being present at the ramp.184 Ultimately, the court argued that Baretzki’s identity in the photograph could not be proven due to lack of consensus among the witnesses.185 The photograph was not necessary anyway to establish the guilt the court used for the life sentence it levied on Baretzki.186 If Zelmanovic failed, it was because the existential importance she attached to her album parted ways with the purpose the court wanted it to serve. Unable to engender any kind of sympathy or respect, Zelmanovic was followed by two former Ravensbrück medical prisoners whose confident testimonies stood out sharply from hers. Quickly and in detail, the nurse Cäcilie Neideck depicted Lucas as the only real doctor and mensch for Ravensbrück prisoners. Without this “brother and father and comrade and friend,” another hundred or thousand prisoners would have “gone kaputt.”187 Repeating Le Porz’s observations, she made

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  177

sure the court knew how much Lucas “was always a loner in the camp, always by himself.”188 After an argument about selecting prisoners to be included in a transport to Denmark using the ship Wilhelm Gustloff, Lucas said to her and others, “Who knows where they’re really supposed to be evacuated to. Count me out of this scandalous mess. . . . I’m a doctor here and nothing else. I’m no oppressor.” In her view, this defiant posture caused his transfer to Sachsenhausen.189 She added another detail: although it was customary to keep the Idiotenstübchen in Block 10 unheated, since the women inside were destined for the gas chamber anyway, Lucas helped Neideck strip the boards off the windows and provide an oven to heat the room. “And as Dr. Lucas was with us, we were so happy. Really, we learned to laugh again after many years of captivity. He cheered us up especially with respect to our care for the other prisoners.”190 Helene Schwesig came next. She had written a grateful letter to Lucas in December 1961, between his first two pretrial interrogations.191 A month later, as Elmshorn was finding out more about Lucas’s Nazi past, she had sent a letter to Magistrate Wilhelm Ulbrich absolving Lucas.192 Now, on 10 December 1964, Schwesig discussed the conditions in Uckermark, where SS overseers with dogs selected and herded prisoners, forcing them to stand for hours on end to hasten their exhaustion and the effectiveness of the gas used to exterminate them. In this context, Schwesig recalled that fellow medical prisoners had told her about the chief doctors’—she meant chief doctor Dr. Trommer and Lucas’s rank-equal and fellow gynecologist Dr. Treite— discussing Lucas’s refusal to select.193 Ravensbrück prisoners were not unanimous about Lucas’s character. After reading highlights of Neideck’s testimony in the newspaper, Renate Margulies, who spent two years at Ravensbrück, gave the prosecutor’s office a letter to forward to Neideck.194 Margulies insisted that she had never encountered a mensch in SS clothing who resembled a “brother, father, comrade and friend.” She listed the humiliation, filth, and terror of Blocks 25 to 32 that Neideck knew nothing about. How can you presume to declare in court that Dr. Lucas taught you to laugh again? What did you laugh about? And even if that was so, you can thank your creator that by virtue of your profession and position in the camp you had it better than thousands of other prisoners. None of us—and rumors spread very quickly in the camp—had ever heard anything about a wonderful SS doctor! You were the only one he taught to laugh! And how do you want to prove through your personal relationship to this SS physician that he didn’t simply act as a beast in Auschwitz until his transfer to Ravensbrück in 1944?195

Getting along so well with Lucas was no reason for Neideck to testify, asserted Margulies, who was herself unwilling to forgive or forget. It is unknown whether Neideck responded to Margulies, but she had assured the court that she was not a privileged prisoner.196 It was the redemptive tone from Neideck and Schwesig,

178   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

not the pointing fingers from Margulies, Goldman, Lebedev, or Zelmanovic, that the court remembered as it prepared to visit Auschwitz two days after Schwesig’s appearance in court.

Convening the Frankfurt Court in Auschwitz Including travel, the court’s fact-finding visit to Auschwitz spanned from 12 to 18 December 1964, but the actual sojourn in Auschwitz began on Monday, 14 December, and lasted two and a half days. Lucas’s ploy was audacious. To be seen as the sole defendant among twenty-four participants emphasized his as-yet unrestricted mobility and unencumbered conscience. His wish was to uncover the truth and speak on behalf of the sixty prisoner doctors who had been his colleagues in Birkenau. He was counting on eventual acquittal.197 For some newspapers, that made him a courageous “white raven” who fit in with the fact finders. But the great mass of microphones and cameras of the international press clearly made him uncomfortable. Had he no scruples in making the trip, did he not sleep poorly, was it not callous to take part in a memorial to the murdered? For that week in particular, his face and stammered answers made him recognizable for thousands of television viewers and newspaper readers. Lucas’s customary silence was reinforced by his hat-in-hand posture of honoring the dead. But after he confessed in March 1965 to the very thing he denied so adamantly and publicly in December 1964, his uncharacteristic boldness became a mockery of the dead. As Sybille Steinbacher observes, footage and headlines featuring Lucas emboldened other survivor witnesses to step forward with testimony against him.198 Adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond first motioned for a site visit on 8 June 1964. Confessions had been slow in coming, and nothing could replace the personal impressions a court gained by visiting the scene of a crime.199 Hans Laternser discouraged visiting a site that the intervening twenty years had turned into a museum, also flatly refusing any visit behind the Iron Curtain. Fellow lawyers Hans Schallock, Gerhard Göllner, and Wolfgang Zarnack did not agree.200 As Steinbacher notes, West Germany was only slightly less reticent than Laternser to make the visit possible. When Bonn did step in, it was to avoid the accusation of lacking any interest in confronting the past.201 The Hesse Ministry of Justice also advised against a trip, but the state attorney’s office argued the benefits for clarifying spatial relationships, verifying or disproving witness statements, and establishing the credibility of both witnesses and defendants. Even so, Judge Hofmeyer initially called Auschwitz “an unattainable means of proof” and declined to make the trip.202 When Ormond repeated his petition three months later, it took Heinz Düx’s reassurance of the merits of a fact-finding trip to convince the court to act. Based on his investigative trip to Auschwitz three years earlier, Düx advised visiting the main camp (Auschwitz I) and the well-preserved ramp and

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  179

tracks of Birkenau (Auschwitz II), even though the crematoria had been blown up. Monowitz (Auschwitz III) was not worth their time.203 The decision to go ahead came on 22 October 1964.204 Perhaps the prospect of exoneration made the quiet defendant more extraverted than usual between Frankfurt and Auschwitz. On 12 December, as flight-canceling fog forced two buses to drive the group from Frankfurt to Stuttgart, Lucas came across to Inge Deutschkron as the “star of the group,” who behaved “like a soccer captain on the way to new victories abroad.” He integrated himself into the group “as if he were happy to be away from home for a time.”205 Gerhard Mauz, court reporter for Der Spiegel, compared the atmosphere in the Stuttgart airport to a tipsy Father’s Day outing. “Finally, they can speak openly with one another in the no-man’s-land between courtroom and scene of the crime.”206 The group’s flight from Stuttgart to Vienna arrived at midnight and was forced to stay overnight because of fog in Warsaw. According to Mauz, the next morning (13 December), on the bus back to the Vienna airport, someone called out: “Stop, where is our defendant?” Lucas was there but just very quiet, recalled Mauz, who considered Lucas “neither black nor white” but simply an introvert uninterested in conversation.207 Despite Lucas’s insistence that he had not sampled the Viennese night life, “someone swore having seen him at 2:00 am in a bar.”208 Jan Sehn, director of the Criminological Institute of the University of Kraków and former investigative judge of the first Auschwitz trial in Kraków in 1947, greeted the delegation at the Warsaw airport on behalf of the Polish government, even shaking hands with Lucas, whom he mistook for a member of the court.209 The delegation and the press rode separate buses to Kraków. The excursion atmosphere lingered after the group reached Hotel Francuski in Kraków, headquarters for over two hundred journalists.210 On 14 December, the delegation entered Auschwitz through the arched gate bearing the slogan “Arbeit macht frei.” Lucas stood with the others in front of the “Black Wall” between Blocks 11 and 12, where thousands of Jews had been shot to death. During the minute of silence to honor the victims, Lucas removed his hat and twisted it nervously in his hands. Hans Holder wrote: Not far from him, the adjunct prosecutor Henry Ormond waits with stony face. He lost seven relatives in Auschwitz. What is going on inside Dr. Lucas? Is his conscience piqued? Presumably so, given the image that the trial has conveyed of him. Lucas too is accused and said to have selected. But many witnesses described him as different from the other SS men, as a man who still saw humans in the bullied prisoners, who showed concern, made the effort to resist, and actually helped them on occasion. Dr. Lucas himself says in Auschwitz today: “I didn’t know what was going on in the camp. I was here only once, and that was for an emergency operation.” In the afternoon, out on the ramp of Birkenau, he admits freely to having been here. But: “I never selected, never decided who among the Jews was sent into the gas.”211

180   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Figure 7.1.  Franz Lucas (second from right) with defense attorney Rainer Eggert during the court inspection of Auschwitz on 14 December 1964. AP Images. Used by permission.

Then the delegation traveled to the Birkenau ramp for measurements and photographs. Deutschkron noticed that Lucas’s memory was as poor in Auschwitz as it was in the courtroom: “He might have said something if his lawyer hadn’t reminded him of their ‘agreement.’”212 Joachim Reifenrath reported that Lucas could not recall whether there were one or two tracks, whether deportees were unloaded to the right or left (i.e., toward BI or BII), or whether they were selected immediately. Addressing Lucas’s assertion that he had only done his duty as an SS doctor and that everything in Auschwitz looked different now, Reifenrath wrote: “Of course everything looks different. Thousands of unfortunate prisoners are missing who were ‘unloaded’ here. So, in a terrible way Dr. Lucas is correct—but to say that supposedly nothing registered in his consciousness—that’s unbelievable.”213 Reifenrath was close enough to see the muscles twitching under the dueling scars on Lucas’s tense cheeks. While Lucas displayed strong nerves by making the journey, Reifenrath could not forget that Lucas was observed on the ramp twenty years earlier.214 By the next day (15 December), most of the defense lawyers agreed that further forensic investigation was pointless. One of them remarked that his task was finished as soon as he set foot in the former camp and noticed how easy it would have been to observe events, no matter where they took place. Some on the defense remained stoic.215 On 16 December, the group concluded its cumulative fifteen hours of work by watching a documentary on the liberation of Auschwitz that left a profound impression. Deutschkron records:

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  181 Kaduk’s lawyer Dr. Reiners cries like a little boy. Judge Hotz is incapable of speech; his eyes seem to seek for a glimmer of hope in the darkness. . . . Attorney Steinacker admits to me that this Auschwitz visit has silenced many of his doubts. He shows how painful it is that he was one of those who had fought so vehemently against a site visit in Auschwitz. “It was only for formal reasons,” he says as he vanishes. Another attorney asks a former witness, whom he met in Kraków by chance, to excuse him for the inane questions he had asked him in the trial. For the first time, the defendant Lucas is not surrounded by company.216

The group was somber upon arrival in Warsaw on 17 December. “Something seems to have broken in these persons,” Deutschkron observed.217 Judge Hotz’s list contained thirty-two items for the site visit to clear up. Most had to do with crimes that defendants and lawyers insisted would have been impossible to see or hear from the standpoint of a witness. The delegation measured the distance between the ramp and the nearest barracks and between the ramp and the crematoria. After returning to the main camp, it analyzed the rooms in Auschwitz featuring phenol injections and medical experiments, and it determined how far away the screams from the bunker of the political division could be heard.218 It turned out that Auschwitz was not vast enough to nullify the witnesses’ claims. Barracks were close enough that curious prisoners could apprehend crimes that determined their fate. It was the large number of prisoners and the many crimes of defendants that had swelled the camp. Photographs could not convey its actual small size, and even Birkenau was not so vast when seen firsthand. Reducing the scope of destruction, then, invalidated claims of powerlessness against a hell that supposedly had stretched on forever. Two lawyers still refused to be influenced by what they saw. Robert Mulka’s lawyer had no interest in visiting Mulka’s former office, situated in plain sight and ten yards away from the nearest barracks, a proximity that Mulka had denied. Similarly, Hans Stark’s lawyer denied that Block 15 would have had a foundation deep enough to collect enough water for Stark to drown prisoners. A group led by Polish officials proved the opposite. Digging through the frozen ground at twilight, it discovered a foundation that would have held two meters of water, more than enough for Stark to carry out his crime.219 Lucas claimed to have not consulted his two lawyers before deciding to assist in the truth-finding mission. He was ignorant about the “Black Wall” at Block 11 and wanted to respect its victims. “There is racial discrimination in America and Africa as well,” Lucas stated, “today still in the beginning phase. But the ‘Black Wall’ here should warn all peoples about where racial hatred can lead.”220 The same reporter quoted Lucas’s comments on Birkenau: “At that time I was gripped by the horror of seeing emaciated figures, starving children, and despairing people in the horse stalls of Birkenau. Now the camp gives the impression as though a bottom line has been drawn under the events there.”221 Lucas’s feeble answers attempted to deflect attention and disengage memory.

182   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Lucas also accompanied the delegation to Block 21 (the surgery division) and Block 10, where, as Herbert Straeten noticed, “Dr. Clauberg and Dr. Schumann (now in Ghana) conducted their experiments on women who were only called ‘rabbits’ in the camp jargon.”222 On the way to Block 20, Reifenrath asked Lucas what sorts of packages prisoners would have received at the prisoner package depot, but Lucas denied ever being there: “His face becomes tense. An astonishing man, this Dr. Lucas. On Monday a Polish colleague who had spent two and a half years in Birkenau told me that ‘Dr. Lucas was always proper. He addressed the prisoners with “Mr.” Yes, even here on the ramp. I never personally saw him select. But all of them were part of it.’”223 In her compilation of Dutch testimonies in the Auschwitz Trial, Nina Burkhardt includes the interview that Lucas granted the Dutch radio station KRO (Katholieke Radio Omroep) in his hotel room in Warsaw. It ran this way: KRO. You did not take part in selections? Lucas. I did not take part in selections, it took me no time at all to come into serious conflict with the chief doctor; I told him that the doctor is there to— KRO. You knew about it? Lucas. I knew about it immediately; I told the chief doctor that the doctor is here, uh, there to save lives, not to exterminate them. . . . KRO. Dr. Lucas, in the sense of the charge against you, you are not guilty? Lucas. In the sense of the charge, no, I don’t consider myself guilty.224

Lucas insisted on having done everything to alleviate suffering, sounding to the KRO reporter like someone who was tragically entangled in something beyond his control.225 A year earlier, the same KRO station had visited Elmshorn, where it discovered just how little Lucas’s wife and fellow citizens knew about his past. The “Brandpunt” program that aired on 11 January 1964 showed neighbors unflinching in their support of Lucas. Susanne Lucas admitted finding out from the newspaper about the charges against her untalkative husband, but even without further details she remained convinced of her husband’s innocence.226 Lucas later reported being treated with respect in Poland, but that the court’s visit had brought into sharp relief the nightmare of events from twenty years ago. The visit he called “useful but not enlightening.” Lucas let it be known in detached sentences that he was counting on acquittal.227 If not enlightening to Lucas, the trip opened the court’s eyes forensically and psychologically. It refuted denials of defendants while strengthening accusatory claims. For example, one could identify persons on both sides of the ramp from over a hundred meters away. In addition, documents in the Auschwitz Museum archive established the culpability of camp adjutant Robert Mulka.228 Due to the inertia of Cold War politics, a court so insistent on forensic accuracy had not examined the scene of the

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  183

crime any earlier. Just three days in mid-December sufficed to counter weeks of speculation and denial in the courtroom. Upon return, Henry Ormond declared that while all defendants were morally guilty, some were less so, and Lucas the least. Because he underwent a transformation after contributing to selections, Lucas did not belong in the same pot as the others. As was the case in other postwar trials, though, Ormond was certain that all defendants twisted the truth. “The adjunct attorney,” wrote the journalist Peter Wiese, “is convinced that an agreement exists among the twenty not to implicate each other.”229 As Ormond understood it, Baretzki had broken his silence by his telling about the young boy in Auschwitz who wore a sign around his neck identifying him as looking for his father, Schutzhaftlagerführer (camp director) Johann Schwarzhuber, so as not to be taken to the gas chamber by mistake. Besides Ormond, General Secretary Tadeusz Holuj of the International Auschwitz Committee also chided Lucas for his solidarity of silence.230 When Lucas did implicate defendants, they were almost always already deceased. As I mention in my chapter on Lucas’s 1970 retrial, Oswald Kaduk admitted, five years after being sentenced to life in prison, that he had been bribed to keep silent in court about what he knew about Lucas. On 7 January 1965, after Judge Hotz’s report touted the dividends of the site visit, defense lawyers Laternser, Stolting II, and Eggert immediately protested what they cited as formal mistakes. They urged another Auschwitz visit to prove that an exact identification of a person was impossible from sixty meters away. This request came off as especially pathetic. Rainer Eggert had seen everything for himself, and Laternser’s law partner Fritz Steinacker had served as a prop in the forensic measurements and visual/aural tests.231 Hofmeyer rejected their bid, ordering measurements simulated in the courtyard outside the courtroom instead.232 Another result of the visit was the mysterious submission of a confidential four-page letter to the Federal Chancellor’s Office, which was then forwarded to the Federal Ministry of Justice.233 Besides discussing hidden microphones and the deportment of Inge Deutschkron, this brief expressed relief that I. G. Farben’s role in Auschwitz had gone unmentioned and Lucas’s guarded behavior had been praiseworthy.234 One journalist who reacted to the site visit was Peter Jochen Winters. On the day after the group’s return, he published an article depicting Lucas as the “white raven” of the trial, poised against an army of “dark fellows” such as Kaduk, Boger, and Klehr. Lucas’s presence in the delegation had reflected his uniqueness in the courtroom. Instead of keeping silent, Lucas had described the horrific conditions encountered upon his arrival in late 1943. He alone treated prisoners as equals, consulted with outsiders about resistance, and heeded his conscience.235 Winters speculated that if Lucas’s superiors had seen through his evasion tactics and forced him to select on the ramp, he would have saved as many prisoners as possible from the gas chamber. This was the argument made popular by Hans Laternser on behalf of Dr. Schatz, Dr. Frank, and Dr. Capesius, and the same devil’s advocate consolation offered by Emmi Bonhoeffer to Goldman.236

184   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

For Winters, Lucas had become unschuldig schuldig (innocently guilty). Who could fault him for a conscience unresistant to Verstrickung (entanglement), which slid him into the clutches of totalitarianism? Winters used language that Aschenauer echoed in his closing argument for Lucas. SS officers had enlisted innocently to be soldiers of Hitler. Sadists like Klehr, Boger, Baretzki, and Kaduk were featured in press headlines that kept Auschwitz opaque rather than understandable to the public. Readers could appreciate a good tragedy, though, about “decent” men like Lucas with families and respectable careers. Because they identified more with Lucas than with Boger, they could forgive his supposed entanglement. As Rebecca Wittmann has noticed, Martin Walser’s essay “On Auschwitz” (1965) analyzed the reporting style where horrific detail only increased psychological distance to Auschwitz: “We have nothing to do with these events, with these atrocities; we know this for certain. The similarities aren’t shared here. This trial is not about us.”237 Walser meant this sardonically, of course. Winters offered an alternative to the tabloids that Walser described. By describing a defendant who was like the readers reading his article, he provided the style of reporting that Walser implied was missing. “Most likely everyone in the courtroom believed him [Lucas] then when he spoke about the turmoil of his conscience. Hardly anyone would have been able to contradict him when he said that even today, he is convinced that he could not have acted any differently in Auschwitz.”238 Winters was suggesting that readers reject Lucas’s culpability and empathize with him instead. He assumed that Lucas had been telling the truth about his punitive transfers, although he was less accepting of Lucas’s techniques for avoiding selection duty. If we are to believe Lucas’s fear, Winters wondered, would Lucas have been able to fool his superiors for so long? Because Winters took Lucas’s passive resistance as already proven, it supported his question about whether such resistance was always successful. The message of tragedy that Winters wanted to convey was that no matter how strong Lucas’s conscience was, the entrapment of totalitarian rule was stronger. Winters echoed the BGH’s reasoning for determining the presence of a situation of duress, but also the advice that Lucas claimed to have received from Bishop Berning: following immoral orders was acceptable if it kept one’s life out of danger. Thus, Winters had already made up his mind about Lucas’s quandary weeks before the evidentiary phase was completed and Lucas had offered something resembling a confession. Winters found it credible that Lucas’s actions were so constrained that he became a captive inside his SS uniform in Auschwitz. One of Lucas’s best days in court was 11 January 1965, when witnesses strengthened the positive atmosphere produced by Neideck and Schwesig before the Auschwitz visit. From both Ravensbrück and Birkenau, survivors supported Winters’s convictions about Lucas’s resistance. Since enough has been said already about the statements offered by Polish prisoner doctors, it suffices to echo the sentiments of the Polish prisoner doctors from the day they appeared in

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  185

court. Tadeusz Śnieszko remembered seeing Lucas in the Gypsy camp for the first time at the end of February 1944 and estimated Lucas’s time in the camp at four to six weeks. He conveyed the relief felt by patients and doctors when Lucas replaced Mengele.239 Tadeusz Szymański expressed his support eloquently through the interpreter Vera Kapkajew: “Doctor Lucas was a mensch in the camp. If I may express it thus, through him we regained our trust in Germans.”240 Had Lucas treated his patients any differently than Mengele? Hofmeyer wondered. Szymański responded that Lucas managed to smuggle medicine from the outside and treat all eleven nationalities equally. Prisoner doctors could begin saving patients, impossible under Mengele. Lucas resolved conflicts quickly without tolerating informants. Despite his stony and unsmiling face, “one always had the feeling one wasn’t in a camp, one saw the doctor in him.”241 Szymański’s closing statement suggested that the prisoner doctors were so mesmerized by Lucas because of his contrast to Dr. Mengele, who was so highly intelligent and cultured, and to Josef Klehr, the simple and brutal medic.242 Thus Szymański’s answers corresponded to Hofmeyer’s leading questions, which were geared to underscore Lucas’s exceptionalism. This superlative praise by Birkenau prisoner doctors was eclipsed by Ravensbrück survivor Sister Felixina, (i.e., Margarethe Armbruster), who had already provided a sworn statement regretting Lucas’s transfer.243 Timid and soft-spoken, Armbruster declared that Lucas was the only one to treat the inmates as persons, unlike his successor, Dr. Winkelmann. Lucas had even performed an appendectomy on Christmas Day 1944 and set a broken arm.244 Apart from any other information that they could offer about defendants, then, accusatory witnesses had to recognize and identify them correctly without giving an impression of revenge. Character witnesses, on the other hand, underwent less cross-examination. Some witnesses knew Lucas either not at all, or only by hearsay or appearance. But even passing knowledge was sufficient to offer new information, support existing information, or call into question the facts as previously understood. Eugeniusz Motz and Zygmunt Gawlowski, for example, had nothing against Lucas but remembered his facial scar.245 Lucas became the target of accusatory arms raised and fingers pointed, fittingly reminiscent of Lucas’s style for separating young from old and strong from frail on the Birkenau ramp. Inge Deutschkron made a point of including such body language in her reports. On 30 July 1964, for example, she noticed that Lucas’s face turned red when Kulka raised his arm to identify him as the “second camp doctor,” whose name he did not know but whom he recognized by sight. Kulka told Deutschkron later that he was repulsed by Lucas’s “trembling and stammering” reaction to being identified.246 It is precisely these visceral responses that the trial transcript failed to capture and perceptive observers had to commemorate. Five weeks after Kulka’s identification, Lucas was standing in the half circle of defendants when Helen Goldman raised her arm to point at him. After she uttered his name, Lucas stuttered and turned red.247 A month later, Dov Paisikovic pointed

186   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

to Lucas as one of the doctors he had seen at the Birkenau crematorium II.248 Like Kulka, Paisikovic had not heard Lucas’s name either, but recognition sufficed to turn Lucas’s face pale, which Deutschkron interpreted as “more than an admission of his guilt.”249 Powerless against his own unshielded shame, Lucas was also demurring to former Nazi victims. When spotting Deutschkron in a restaurant, he hastily removed his hat and bowed, although she ignored him. She wrote: “The longer the trial lasted, the more his eyes took on an expression that begged for pity. This is what he wanted from the two Israeli witnesses from Jerusalem, Dov Kulka und Yehuda Bacon, to whom he turned in order to ‘explain things.’”250 Such behavior was at odds, of course, with his customary denial of recognizing the witnesses who testified. All in all, testimonies of Lucas’s good behavior in Birkenau matched the reports from Ravensbrück and, though fewer in number, from Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen; Stutthof remained silent. Everywhere there was evidence of Lucas securing extra medicine, paying attention, and healing. His supererogatory acts involved a risk for which he was punished. These were actions befitting a physician in ordinary times, yet in Auschwitz his witnesses equated his actions with defiance of duty. Nevertheless, the fact that he was transferred is not sufficient proof of punishment. It may be that Lucas was simply presented with a different environment for carrying out his duties. These duties almost always carried the expectation of selections. If he had really been punished, it would have been for something serious and treasonous. Telling a select group of prisoners that he considered his unpleasant duties a Schweinerei was not grounds for punishment. It was entirely possible that he fulfilled most of his tasks dutifully, such as preventing the spread of disease and thus preserving a segment of the camp population for the work force, or sterilizing prisoners assessed as a danger to the German gene pool.

Notes 1. On media coverage of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, see Horn, “Thema”; Kleihues, “Der Auschwitz-Prozess”; Wamhof, “Gerichtskultur und NS-Vergangenheit”; Arendes, “Teilnehmende Beobachter”; Frei and Steinbacher, Beschweigen und Bekennen; and Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. 2.  Schwurgerichtsanklage, AP 1,891 (i.e., Bl. 14,648). 3. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 9. 4.  Kaplan, 4. 5.  Kaplan, 5. 6.  Roseman, “Holocaust Perpetrators in Victims’ Eyes,” 86. 7.  Monographs include Langer, Holocaust Testimonies; Douglas, Memory of Judgment; Wieviorka, Era of the Witness; Margalit, Ethics of Memory; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; Schmidt, Zeugenschaft; and Levi, Drowned and the Saved. Anthologies include Schmidt, Krämer, and Voges, Politik der Zeugenschaft; Baer, “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”; and Sabrow and Frei, Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen. Individual articles include Gross, “Der Holocaust in primärer Erinnerung”; Assmann, “Genre of Testimony”; and Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft.”

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  187 8.  Pendas, “Testimony,” 232. 9.  Pendas, 236. 10.  Renz, “Der erste Frankfurter Prozeß,” 11. 11.  Renz, 12–13. 12.  Out of the ninety-four names came fourteen of the eventual twenty-two defendants, most of whom were arrested between 1959 and 1961. Renz, 15–16. 13.  Renz, 16. 14.  Nachtrag LG/FaM zum Beschluß über die Eröffnung der gerichtlichen Voruntersuchung, betreffend Lucas, Höcker, AP 1,735–38. 15.  Renz, “Der erste Frankfurter Prozeß,” 29. 16. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 116–17. 17. Pendas, 114; Eröffnungsbeschluß des LG/FaM, Zwischenverfahren, 7 October 1963, AP 4,602–3. 18. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 197–98. Here Pendas cites Fritz Bauer, “Ideal oder Realkonkurrenz bei nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen?” Juristenzeitung 22 (1967): 627. 19.  Renz, “Der erste Frankfurter Prozeß,” 23. 20.  Renz, 25–26. 21.  Vorbemerkungen zur Strafsache gegen Mulka u.a., 4 Ks 2/63, AP 54–55. The main hearings began with twenty-two defendants, but by July 1964 the dismissal of Karl Bischoff and Gerhard Neubert for health reasons reduced the number to twenty. 22.  Presseinformation der Staatsanwaltschaft, 20 December 1964, AP 4,710–11. 23.  Presseinformation, 4,711–14. 24. Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 406–7. 25.  Stengel, 421–24. 26.  Stengel, 437–38. 27.  Stengel, 495. 28.  Stengel, 496. 29.  Vernehmung Charlotte Bartsch, 3 August 1964, AP 14,018. 30.  See Stengel’s discussion in Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 306–44. 31. Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 501. 32.  Knellessen, “Momentaufnahmen der Erinnerung,” 127. 33. Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 501–2. 34.  Stengel, 502. 35.  Stengel, 498. On the efforts of the German Red Cross, and on religious and community care of the witnesses in Frankfurt, see Funkenberg, Zeugenbetreuung, 163–302. 36.  Examples in Knellessen, “Momentaufnahmen der Erinnerung.” 37. Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 499. 38.  Stengel, 503. 39.  See Stengel’s example of the witness Gisela Böhm against Dr. Capesius. Stengel, 504. 40.  An excerpt of Kremer’s diary is reprinted in Höß, Broad, Kremer, KL Auschwitz. 41.  Stengel, 380–81. 42.  Vernehmung Hermann Langbein, 6 March 1964, AP 5,457–58; Vernehmung Hans Wilhelm Münch, 2 March 1964, AP 5,252. 43.  Vernehmung Ella Lingens, 2 March 1964, AP 5,247–48. 44. Stengel, Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 323, 329. 45.  Schwester Cilka to Henry Ormond, 28 January 1964, BArch N642-139. 46.  Elisabeth Ansel to Hans Hofmeyer, 29 January 1964, BArch N642-139. 47.  Elizabeth (Schlie) Wodnick to SL, 4 February 1964, BArch N642-140 and 9 March 1964, BArch N642-139. 48.  Sylvia Salvesen to FL, 18 February 1964, BArch N642-139.

188   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 49.  Zenon Baryla to Hans Peter Ivens, 21 January 1964, BArch N642-139. 50.  Karl Gerber to FaM Staatsanwaltschaft, 29 January 1964, N642-139. 51.  Gunther Lys to FL, 30 January 1964, BArch N642-137. 52.  Max Geissler to Fritz Bauer, 3 February 1964, BArch N642-140. 53.  Statement of Jakob Rotterschmidt, 6 February 1964, N642-139. 54.  “Nazi doctor tried to save prisoners,” Sydney Sun-Herald, 2 February 1964, BArch N642-139. 55.  Sara Rothschild to Hans Peter Ivens, 19 Feb 1964, BArch N642-139. 56.  Bohdan Skobowytah-Okolot to Hans Peter Ivens, 2 Feb 1964 and 14 March 1964, BArch N642-139. 57.  Bohdan Skobowytah-Okolot to German Consulate in Stockholm, 21 December 1963, FBI/LF. 58.  Statement of Tadeusz Szymański, 26 February 1964, 22 July 1964, FaM, BArch N642-140. 59.  Statement of Tadeusz Śnieszko, 1 March 1964, Krakow, 21 July 1964, FaM, BArch N642-140. 60.  Gerhard Mauz, “Stark: Ich schäme mich. Er gibt auch die Beteiligung an einer Vergasung zu,” Die Welt, 16 January 1964. 61.  Plädoyer of Henry Ormond, AP 34,050–51. 62. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 189. 63.  Aussage des Zeugen Barcz betreffend Lucas, 9 April 1964, AP 6,377–82. Likely any reports to Berlin would have gone through the office of Dr. Wirths. 64.  Vernehmung Wladyslaw Fejkiel, 29 May 1964, AP 9,272–73; 9,292–94. 65.  Fejkiel, 9,343. 66.  Przeglad Lekarski XVIII Jahrgang, 11 Serie Krakow 1962. In Mappe 37638/106 is a copy of the magazine, appended to the daily trial protocol. 67.  Vernehmung Ignacy Golik, 8 June 1964, AP 10,069. 68.  Golik, 10,084–85. 69. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 209. 70.  RA to Ivens, 21 June 1964, BArch N642-139. Aschenauer noted that the change in lawyers was partly due to Lucas’s financial position and because two appointed lawyers per defendant were not permitted. 71. Fortsetzung der Vernehmung Heinrich Dürmayer, 25 June 1964, AP 11,617. Aschenauer petitioned the court to change his status from elective to court-appointed defender, and by 19 November he and Eggert were both serving in that role, despite some initial irritation from Eggert. RA to LG/FaM, BArch N642-139. 72.  Aleksandr Lebedev, Staatsanwaltschaftliche Vernehmung, 19–20 May 1964, Anlage 2 zum Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung, 18 June 1964. 73.  Vernehmung Otto Dov Kulka, 30 July 1964, AP 13,568–71. 74.  Kulka, 13,560–61. 75.  Kulka, 13,649. Judge Hofmeyer verified that the man in question was Lucas (13,574). 76.  Kulka, 13,577–79. Kügler reminded the court that Kulka had described Lucas’s stature before identifying him in court. 77.  Kulka, 13,579–80. 78.  Kulka, 13,599–600. 79.  Kulka, 13,620, 13,650. 80.  Kulka, 13,622. 81.  Kulka to Langbein, 12 August 1964, qtd. in Stengel, Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 368. 82.  Hannah Arendt, “Note on the Trial,” xxx. 83. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 229–30. See also Sabrow, “Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer,” 18–19. 84.  On deep memory, see Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 1–38. See also Shenker’s discussion of unredemptive memory in Reframing Holocaust Testimony, 5–9. 85.  Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft,” 128. 86.  Weigel, 116.

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  189 87. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 79. 88.  For more on Helen Goldman, especially her attempt to receive compensation for the long-standing effects of camp labor on her health, see Wisely, “From Humiliation to Humanity.” Portions of that article have been rewritten for this chapter by permission from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute. 89.  Arolsen Archives, ITS Digital Archive, Individuelle Häftlings-Unterlagen Dachau, Ilona Kaufmann Copy of 1.1.6.2 / 10126859. 90.  Landesamt für Finanzen Saarburg, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Helen Goldman VA 130 611, Affidavit of 6 March 1956. 91.  Arolsen Archives, ITS Digital Archive, Individuelle Häftlings-Unterlagen Dachau, Ilona Kaufmann, Copy of 1.1.6.2 / 10126859. 92.  Landesamt für Finanzen Saarburg, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Helen Goldman VA 130 611, Affidavit of 6 March 1956. 93.  ITS, Korrespondenz T/D 352230, ITS to Konrad Höra, 15 August 1957, Copy of 6.3.3.2. / 98250076. 94.  Landesamt für Finanzen Saarburg, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Helen Goldman VA 130 611, Konrad Höra to Bezirksamt für Wiedergutmachung Trier, 9.10.1957. 95.  Harry L. Bassett to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 31 January and 20 February 1964, FBI/LF. 96.  Vernehmung Helen Goldman, 3 September 1964, AP 16,966–67. 97.  Goldman, 16,953–54. 98.  Goldman, 16,892–93. 99.  Goldman, 16,898. 100. Stengel, Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 409, 411. 101.  Vernehmung Helen Goldman, 3 September 1964, AP 16,929–32. 102.  Goldman, 16,994. 103.  Goldman, 16,903. The man was from Poland and spoke “Jewish” (i.e., Yiddish) with her (16,939). 104. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, 62–63. 105.  Vernehmung Helen Goldman, 3 September 1964, AP 16,908. 106.  Goldman, 16,941. A report from Auschwitz on 18 August 1944 of stool samples from sixty BIIc kitchen workers lists Ilona Kaufman (i.e., Helen Goldman), A 12010, as number 35 (ITS, Laboruntersuchungen des SS-Hygiene-Instituts Auschwitz, Copy of 1.1.2.1 / 555501-02). 107.  Goldman, 16,956–57. 108.  Goldman, 16,910–15. 109.  Goldman, 16,995–97. 110.  Goldman, 16,997. 111.  Mündliche Urteilsbegründung des Vorsitzenden Richters, 19 August 1965, AP 37,907. 112.  One misunderstanding was the false conveyance of “fairly tall” as “very tall” (16,889), for which Judge Seiboldt sought clarification (16,932). 113.  Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah,” 145. 114.  Rudolf Aschenauer, Plädoyer für Lucas, 21 June 1965, Fritz Bauer Institut Archiv, FAP 1, V-23, 9–10. As most prisoners knew about the danger of routine or sudden selections in the prisoner hospital, it makes sense that Goldman would have avoided reporting sick. 115. Christian Raabe, Plädoyer zu Lucas, Frank, Schatz, Breitwieser, Stark, Boger, Dylewski, Hofmann, Kaduk, Klehr, Baretzki, Scherpe, Hantl, Mulka u. Höcker, 21 May 1965, AP 33,868. 116.  Joachim Kügler, Plädoyer zu Lucas, Schatz, Frank, Capesius, 13 May 1965, AP 33,258. 117.  Langbein, “Ich habe keine Angst gehabt,” 291–93. See also Stengel, Hermann Langbein, 491–561. 118.  Arendt, “Note on the Trial,” xxx. 119. Fest, Begegnungen, 185. 120. Langbein, Auschwitz-Prozess, 607.

190   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 121.  Herbert Neumann, “Zeugin: Dr. Lucas selektierte. Ehemaliger KZ-Arzt erstmals schwer belastet. Es rauchte und rauchte den ganzen Tag,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 4 September 1964. 122. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 33. 123.  Young, “Between History and Memory,” 282. 124.  Vernehmung Helen Goldman, AP 16,891. 125.  Young, “Between History and Memory,” 279. 126. Langbein, Der Auschwitz-Prozeß, 607. 127. Naumann, Auschwitz, 235. 128.  See Funkenberg, Zeugenbetreuung, 111–13. 129.  Funkenberg, 28. A few witnesses dropped their guard only after assurances that German restaurant proprietors were not poisoning their food. See examples in Wagner, “Truth about Auschwitz,” and Knellessen, “Momentaufnahmen.” 130. Bonhoeffer, Zeugen, 38–40. Bonhoeffer’s husband, Klaus Bonhoeffer, was executed on 23 April 1945 for his role in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, two weeks after the execution of his younger brother, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. See Grabner and Roder, Emmi Bonhoeffer, 112. 131. Bonhoeffer, Zeugen, 38. Her account of the ramp encounter with Lucas (39) shows inconsistency either in Goldman’s account or in Bonhoeffer’s recollection of it. She mentions that the two-yearold was a boy and that Goldman’s other four siblings were there, aged four, seven, ten, and fourteen. 132.  After noticing the unintended adverse effects of their questions, volunteers decided as a rule to spend more time with the witnesses after instead of before their court appearances, while also helping them with financial logistics such as collecting their token honorarium. Funkenberg, Zeugenbetreuung, 113–15. 133. Bonhoeffer, Zeugen, 38. 134.  Bonhoeffer, 40. 135.  Bonhoeffer, 40. A harmless inconsistency here is that Bonhoeffer dated her letter 31 May 1964, yet Goldman did not testify in court until the following September. Still, there is no mistaking the identity of Bonhoeffer’s witness. 136.  See Dirks, “Selekteure und Lebensretter.” 137.  Lebedev was a reserve major in the Soviet Army. Vernehmung Aleksander Lebedev, 1 October 1964, 19,755. 138.  Fortsetzung der Vernehmung Aleksandr Lebedev, 10 October 1964, AP 19,972. 139.  Lebedev, 19,882. 140.  Lebedev, 19,957. 141.  Lebedev, 19,955–56. As discussed, a sighting of Lucas would have had to occur before 20 May or after 10 June 1944, when Lucas had returned from Osnabrück. 142.  Lebedev, 19,962. 143.  Lebedev, 19,968. 144.  Lebedev, 20,038. The prisoner doctors were Władysław Fejkiel on 9 April 1964 and Aron Bejlin on 28 August 1964. 145.  Lebedev, 20,055. 146.  Lebedev, 20,058–62. 147.  Lebedev, 20,050–51. 148.  Lebedev, 20,069–74. 149.  Lebedev, 20,076. 150.  Lebedev, 20,077–78. 151.  Lebedev, 20,079. 152.  It is also the case that Lucas told groups of prisoners and SS colleagues varying details about his training and background and how he came to be at Auschwitz. 153.  Lebedev, 20,079–80. Aschenauer also used the tactic of asking witnesses about their tattoo

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  191 number (20,084). He used his information about transports to challenge their memory of dates, as bearing such or such a number meant they had to have arrived on such and such a date. 154.  Lebedev, 20,119–20. 155.  Lebedev, 20,132–37. 156.  Lebedev, 20,158. 157.  Aussage Paisikovic betreffend den Angeklagten Dr. Lucas, 8 October 1964, AP 21,059–60. 158.  Paisikovic, 21,059–60. The defense also argued that Paisikovic compromised his testimony by attending an earlier hearing, a charge Aschenauer brought up again, this time as witness, in Lucas’s 1970 retrial. 159. Vernehmung Artur Radvanský, 9 October 1964, AP 21,217–18. He recalled Capesius, Frank, Schatz, Lucas, Kitt, Rohde, Entress, Klein, and Mengele (21,191). 160.  Radvanský, 21,197, 21,231. 161.  Radvanský, 21,237. 162.  Radvanský, 21,240–41. 163.  Radvanský, 21,240. This was in contrast to Ignacy Golik’s claim to have drawn baths for Lucas in the SS headquarters. 164.  Vernehmung Rudolf Gibian, 13 November 1964, AP 24,878–79, 24,898, 24,962. 165.  Gibian, 24,885–86. 166.  Gibian, 24,972. 167.  Gibian, 24,896–97. 168.  Vernehmung Louise le Porz, 27 November 1964, AP 25,959–77. Le Porz noted that in 1946 she had asked English officers in Hamburg in vain what had happened to Lucas. 169.  Le Porz, 25,982–83. 170.  SL to RA, 16 December 1964, BArch N642-139. 171.  Like Goldman, however, Zelmanovic also claimed to have arrived in Auschwitz in the second week of May, but from Beregszász. Vernehmung Lili (Jacob) Zelmanovic, 3 December 1964, AP 26,451–52. 172.  Brink, “Auschwitz-Album,” 148–49. 173.  Vernehmung Lili (Jacob) Zelmanovic, 3 December 1964, AP 26,433. 174.  Zelmanovic, 26,435–36. 175.  Zelmanovic, 26,432. 176.  Zelmanovic, 26,470. 177.  Zelmanovic, 26,460–63. I have pieced together the individual sentences, although in the courtroom they were each followed by translation into German. 178.  Zelmanovic, 26,470–71. 179.  Zelmanovic, 26,470. 180.  Zelmanovic, 26,437. 181.  Brink, “Auschwitz-Album,” 154. 182.  Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Fotographische Inszenierung, 164. 183.  Erich Kulka (father of Otto Kulka) and Alex Rosenstock were two trial witnesses who recognized their value for establishing the scene of the crime, as did the defendant Pery Broad. As Brink mentions (148), Kulka and Ota Kraus had already published eighteen of the photographs in their book Todesfabrik in 1958. See also Kulka, “Photographs as Evidence.” 184.  Brink, 150–51. 185.  For the photograph (Nr. 32) and its discussion, see Bruttmann, Hördler, and Kreutzmüller, Fotographische Inszenierung, 218. This book provides the most thoroughgoing discussion of the album’s significance. 186.  Brink, 153. 187.  Vernehmung Cäcilie Neideck, 10 December 1964, AP 26,723–24. 188.  Neideck, 26,726–27.

192   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 189.  Neideck, 26,728–29. 190.  Neideck, 26,730–31. 191.  Helene Schwesig to FL, 19 December 1961, FBI/LF. 192.  Helene Schwesig to Elmshorn Magistrate Wilhelm Ulbrich, 21 January 1962, FBI/LF. 193.  Vernehmung Helene Schwesig, 10 December 1964, AP 26,823. 194.  Renate Margulies to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 11 December 1964, FBI/LF. 195. Margulies. 196.  Vernehmung Cäcilie Neideck, 10 December 1965, AP 26,717–21. 197.  “‘Ich habe diese Reise in die Vergangenheit unternommen, um die ‘schwarze Wand’ zu besuchen, von der ich bis zum Prozeß nie etwas gewußt habe.’—Angeklagter Lucas,” Abendpost (Frankfurt am Main), 17 December 1964. 198.  Steinbacher, “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 78. 199. Antrag auf Augenscheinseinnahme von Nebenklageverteter Ormond, 8 June 1964, AP 10,137–48. See also Steinbacher, 61. 200.  Steinbacher, 68. 201.  Steinbacher, 69–70. For a summary of the political tensions, see 62–65. 202.  Steinbacher, 70. 203.  Steinbacher, 70–71. 204.  Judge Walter Hotz represented the court, accompanied by three public prosecutors (Hanns Großmann, Joachim Kügler, Gerhardt Wiese), three adjunct prosecutors (Henry Ormond, Christian Raabe, Friedrich Karl Kaul), one interpreter (Vera Kapkajew), the court photographer Paul Schmelefski, the protocol clerk Josef Hüllen, the two bailiffs Walter Arnold and Walter Lanz, and eleven of the twenty-two defense lawyers (Rainer Eggert, Hans J. Schallock, Karlheinz Staiger, Fritz Steinacker, Engelbert Joschko, Georg Bürger, Anton Reiners, Eugen Gerhardt, Wolfgang Zarnack, Hans Herbert Knögel, and Herbert W. Naumann). See Steinbacher, 86. 205. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 293. 206.  Gerhard Mauz, “Wo ist unser Angeklagter?” Der Spiegel, 23 December 1964, 88. 207.  Mauz, 88. 208. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 294. 209.  Steinbacher, “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 73. 210. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 295. 211.  Holder, “Lokaltermin in Auschwitz.” 212. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 296–97. 213.  Joachim Reifenrath, “Sie können nicht von nichts gewußt haben,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 December 1964. 214.  Joachim Reifenrath, “Im KZ-Block 22 arbeiten jetzt die Journalisten. Dr Lucas ging den Weg zum Anfang zurück,” Kölner Anzeiger, 15 December 1964. 215. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 298. 216.  Deutschkron, 299. 217.  Deutschkron, 303. 218.  Steinbacher, “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 74. 219. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 304–5. 220. Jürgen Serke, “Nach dem Grauen Trostlosigkeit. Der Angeklagte Lucas in Auschwitz— Gerichtliche Ortsbesichtigung beendet,” Westdeutsche Rundschau, 16 December 1964. 221. Serke. 222.  Herbert Straeten, “Häftlinge konnten Erschießungen sehen,” Neue Rhein-Zeitung, 16 December 1964. 223.  Joachim Reifenrath, “Das Grauen wird vermessen. Anwälte suchen Wände nach Beweisen ab,” Kölner Stadtanzeiger, 16 December 1964. As Steinbacher notes, Polish reporters wondered why it took twenty years to visit Auschwitz, and why the whole court did not attend. See “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 75.

“w h it e r av en ” o f t h e fr a n k f urt aus chw itz trial   •  193 224.  “Brandpunt,” KRO, 19 December 1964, quoted in Burkhardt, Rückblende, 120. Question marks added. 225.  Burkhardt, 120. 226.  Burkhardt, 119. 227. “‘Ich mußte immerzu an meine Kinder denken.’ Mitglieder der Auschwitz-Kommission nach ihrer Rückkehr tief bewegt—Dr. Lucas rechnet mit einem Freispruch,” Osnabrücker Tagesblatt, 19 December 1964. 228.  Steinbacher, “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 77. 229.  Peter M. Wiese, “Boger: Die kleinen Hasen . . . Ein Jahr Auschwitzprozeß—Eine Lanze für Lucas,” Cannstätter Zeitung, 22 December 1964. 230.  “Zeugenaussagen in Auschwitz bestätigt,” Schwabmünchner Allgemeine, 16 December 1964. 231.  Protokoll der Augenscheinseinnahme, 14–16 December 1964, Oswiecim, Polen (Anlage 6 zum Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung vom 7. Jan. 1965), AP 27,381; 27,405. 232.  Steinbacher, “Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 79. 233.  Pendas thinks that Rolf Vogel (acting on behalf of the government) or Harald Kirschner may have submitted the report. See Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 179. 234.  Steinbacher, “Protokol vor der Schwarzen Wand,” 79–80. 235.  Peter Jochen Winters, “Der weiße Rabe. Die Gewissensnot des Dr. Lucas,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, 19 December 1964. Except for the sections commenting on the Auschwitz visit, Winters’s article is unchanged from its earlier version, “Die Gewissensnot des Doktor Lucas. SS-Lagerarzt von Auschwitz in den Verstrickungen totalitärer Herrschaft,” Christ und Welt, 21 November 1964, 37–40. In a letter to Aschenauer that coincided with the site visit, Susanne Lucas expressed her largely favorable reaction to Winters’s Christ und Welt version but took offense at his description of her husband as weak, protesting that he did more for the prisoners by not becoming a martyr (SL to RA, 16 December 1964, BArch N642-139). 236.  Plädoyer des Verteidigers Laternser, AP 34,606–7, Duplik von Verteidiger Laternser auf die Repliken der Staatsanwaltschaft und Nebenklage vom 6.8.1965, reprinted in Laternser, Die andere Seite, 357–86, esp. 367. 237.  Quoted in Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 177. 238.  Peter Jochen Winters, “Der weiße Rabe. Die Gewissensnot des Doktor Lucas,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, 19 December 1964. 239.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Śnieszko, 11 January 1965, AP 27,746. 240.  Vernehmung Tadeusz Szymański, 11 January 1965, AP 27,654. 241. Szymański, 27,657–67. Concerning facial expressions of SS officers, Pendas records Auschwitz prisoner doctor Ella Lingens’s description of Dr. Klein and Dr. Capesius as looking quite different but sharing the same expression of half-intelligence and cold brutality behind a petit-bourgeois mask. Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 167. 242. Szymański, 27,685. 243.  Vernehmung Margaretha Armbruster, 30 July 1963, Kriminalkommissariat Heidelberg, Eppelheim, Abt. 352 Itzehoe Nr. 806, 47. 244.  Vernehmung Margarete Armbruster, 11 January 1965, AP 27,623–27. 245.  Vernehmung Eugeniusz Motz, 20 November 1964, AP 25,726–27; Vernehmungsprotokoll Zygmunt Gawlowski vom 15.1.1965, Anlage 3 zum Protokoll der Hauptverhandlung vom 28. Jan. 1965, AP 28,516. 246. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 243, 246. 247.  Deutschkron, 278. 248.  Vernehmung Dov Paisikovic, 8 October 1964, AP 20,942, 21,051–63. 249. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 282. 250.  Deutschkron, 318.

8

C onfession , C losing A rguments , J udgment (1965)

•••

In February 1965, the defendant Stefan Baretzki, a Volksdeutscher report leader and former noncommissioned officer, testified against his superior Dr. Franz Lucas. Whether it was his intention or not, Baretzki set in motion a process that led to Lucas’s confession. The confession was as shocking as Baretzki’s accusation against a codefendant. Thus, less than a month after hearing former prisoners support him on 11 January 1965, Lucas found himself scrambling to explain his ramp duty. He deflected his obvious lies about avoiding ramp duty as a strategy made necessary by his initial lack of witnesses and by Aschenauer’s request not to be in a hurry to confess. An audacious but fair strategy for defendants allowed to lie on their own behalf, the dare worked for over a year in court, propped up by character witnesses. In this chapter, I trace how Lucas pivoted from confessing ramp selections to justifying them out of his fear of Birkenau commandant Josef Kramer, a new adversary in his narrative.1 Ravensbrück survivor Johanna Dyer traveled from Great Britain to Frankfurt to appear in court on 11 March 1965—the very day that Lucas confessed to having performed ramp duty. Sounding nervous but trustworthy, she declared that she owed her life to Lucas, who had x-rayed her to determine whether she was free of tuberculosis. Dr. Treite had previously refused to release her from Block 10, which was reserved for patients with tuberculosis, typhus, and other infectious diseases. She reported Lucas’s argument with Dr. Treite and Dr. Trommer over a barracks selection that Lucas refused to carry out.2 Then came the statement from Dyer that Hannah Arendt quoted in her 1966 essay: “He didn’t belong there at all. He was too good. One could tell just by looking at him how much everything hurt him.”3 As usual, Lucas declared in response no memory of the witness but acknowledged that occasionally women were released with tuberculous if they

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  195

promised to seek further treatment, since confining them in the infirmary was akin to issuing them a death sentence.4 Dyer’s support for Lucas came at the time when the court was still processing the incriminating testimony against Lucas it had received from an already incriminated defendant. How much credence could the court grant Stefan Baretzki, already resigned to spending the remainder of his life behind bars? He had insisted that Ravensbrück testimony was the currency that paid for Lucas’s “return ticket to civilian life.” Was it not rather, Rudolf Aschenauer suggested, a matter of the “small fish” exacting revenge against the “big fish” who was a step removed from the killing? Baretzki had been initially reluctant to testify, expressing his frustrations instead to fellow prisoner Eugen Lazar, who was serving time for passing counterfeit dollars. Handwritten letters to Raabe and Ormond on 4 and 10 February 1965 documented Lazar’s conversations with Baretzki. On 17 February, Christian Raabe petitioned the court to summon Lazar on the basis that Baretzki had witnessed Lucas at the Birkenau ramp selecting “tens of thousands of persons” for gassing; that Lucas had the sole authority over life and death in these selections; and that Lucas had once done nothing to stop a large group of girls from being consigned to the gas chamber.5 When he took the stand on 18 February, Lazar summed up a conversation in which Baretzki had expressed irritation with Lucas’s denial of selections. Baretzki had reacted to a mention of Mulka in the newspaper: “Yes, those gentlemen officers are playing the benefactor roles today. None of them did or saw a thing. Only we little ones are guilty of everything today.”6 To Lazar’s question why he was unwilling to tell the court what he knew about the officers, Baretzki suddenly referred to Lucas: “Not one, but ten thousand he sent into the gas.” One day, after an entire transport of “pretty young girls” arrived, Baretzki and others suggested bringing them into the camp, but Lucas, insisting that it was impossible for him to direct the girls into the men’s camp, sent them all to the gas chamber. He could have easily brought them into the women’s camp, Baretzki insisted to Lazar: “He was the one responsible there.”7 Had Baretzki claimed to have witnessed Lucas selecting firsthand? Hofmeyer wanted to know. None of the defendants, Baretzki had scoffed, wanted to admit to the actions they accused Dr. Mengele of doing, who was interested in other matters. Baretzki had declared, “I’m not blind, I’m not stupid. Of course, I saw it.”8 As to Lucas’s claim of avoiding selecting, Lazar reported Baretzki’s view that if Lucas “had gone to the camp commandant with the idea that someone else should do the selecting, then the commandant would have kicked his ass and told him where to go. Excuse the expression, but it was like that.”9 In Baretzki’s view, Lucas was playing the benefactor role now to preserve his “good German” image. Baretzki corrected Lazar regarding the girls with beautiful long hair: they had not arrived just then on a transport but had already been a part of the Theresien-

196   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

stadt family compound in Birkenau.10 Despite this clarification, no one in court thought to pose further questions about this selection preceding the “liquidation” of this compound on 10–12 July 1944. Baretzki claimed that he and others had asked Johann Schwarzhuber to rescue as many children as possible, and Schwarzhuber rescued upwards of seventy-eight boys into the men’s camp (BIId), for which he was the camp leader.11 But when they asked Lucas to rescue women and children, he refused, although he was the camp doctor for the Theresienstadt compound at the time.12 Two dynamics were evident in the courtroom. On the one hand, Hofmeyer and Aschenauer raised doubts about Lazar’s credibility, noting his convictions on fraud and counterfeit dealings.13 The insinuation was that both Baretzki and Lazar were conspiring to avenge legal matters affecting them now. Working against Lazar, a Jewish survivor of Sachsenhausen who had lost both parents at Auschwitz, was his timidity and unfamiliarity with court protocol.14 On the other hand, Raabe saw an opportunity to grill Baretzki until he admitted seeing Lucas select.15 Bernd Naumann described it this way in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “It is not yet fathomable what effects the question will have that the Frankfurt adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe posed so offhandedly to the defendant Baretzki: ‘What can you tell us about the activity of Dr. Lucas on the ramp?’ And the answer ‘nothing’ is still no reason to sit up and take notice; it was heard too often. But Raabe shows himself undeterred, and Baretzki has the awakened tension in his face of someone who feels that another question is coming from someone who already knows a lot.”16 Naumann described Baretzki standing at the microphone, “agitated but controlled,” attracting stares of bewilderment while Lucas sat with his head bowed, writing something down in the suddenly quiet courtroom: “The surprise called forth in this trial by a talking defendant is always absolute.”17 Another surprise was Baretzki’s announcement that Lucas had also been camp doctor for “Mexiko,” an undeveloped holding area for thousands of Jewish women in the BIII sector, and as such could have ordered more water and blankets for them.18 Baretzki was not the only one to make this accusation. Two months later, the witness Józef Mikusz, with nothing good to say about Baretzki, at least corroborated his testimony by asserting that he had once seen Lucas in “Mexiko” selecting a group of naked women. This meant that a defendant and a victim converged in their memories about an area for which they assumed Lucas was responsible.19 Yet Lucas dismissed Baretzki’s allegations out of hand, claiming that he was hearing about “Mexiko” for the first time and that his prisoner doctor colleagues could vouch that he “was no longer in Birkenau when the Theresienstadt compound was dissolved.”20 Baretzki knew that he was facing a life sentence as perpetrator of murder and had little reason to falsely accuse Lucas. This was a rare case in which a criminal with little to lose challenged character testimony by pointing out that Lucas had ignored opportunities for saving lives. To the prosecution, at least, this

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  197

was new but not surprising news. In Raabe’s view, Baretzki’s challenge of Lucas’s fourteen-month denial was reason to arrest Lucas. Aschenauer argued that Baretzki’s testimony was inconsistent and reached premature conclusions, while the court downplayed Lucas’s flight risk.21 The declined motion set up Raabe’s complaint outside of court and Aschenauer’s response to it.22 On 2 March 1965, Raabe petitioned the court to reconsider its refusal to arrest Lucas. He reviewed the charge of selections and gas chamber duties along with Lucas’s claim of lingering about the ramp without selecting.23 He recalled Helen Goldman’s loss of mother and siblings and Baretzki’s very detailed statement concerning Lucas’s power of decision.24 Again the court maintained that neither Baretzki nor Lazar had strengthened the charge against Lucas. Undeterred, Raabe reasoned that posting a schedule for ramp duty, as Wirths’s office had done, made little sense if doctors were allowed to ignore it. If not a principal perpetrator, Lucas was at least guilty as accomplice to murder in several thousand cases. Given that prospect, what stopped him from practicing medicine in the Middle East or South America? Staying in Germany could mean a long custody, removal of citizen’s rights, and suspension of his medical license. If none of this convinced the district court to arrest Lucas, Raabe wanted his request forwarded to the regional appeal court. Aschenauer responded with a twelve-page statement warning the court against using evidence supplied by witnesses who confused times, places, and people.25 Had not Baretzki been in danger of losing all objectivity the longer he sputtered on vengefully?26 Aschenauer contested Baretzki’s claim that “Mexiko” had been under Lucas’s care and insisted that only camp leaders could have approved and carried out transfers of inmates (such as the girls with beautiful hair) between camp branches.27 Had Raabe forgotten how effusive the prisoner doctors were in their praise of Lucas as a man of honor?28 These rebukes smoothed the way for the crucial concession that Aschenauer now offered: Lucas would concede having been present three or four times on the ramp against his will, forced to select the prisoners from the arriving transports who could perform labor. Josef Kramer, the commandant of Birkenau, had been on hand to supervise, after the camp leader Fritz Hartjenstein had initiated a trial against Lucas for prisoner favoritism.29 Lucas’s codefendant and Aschenauer client Wilhelm Boger had revealed to Aschenauer in a hand-written letter that a trial had been pending against Lucas in the political division, where Boger worked.30 The concession that Aschenauer was offering shifted Lucas’s strategy from denial to alleged fear. Lucas had feared the consequences for disobeying orders, being woefully unequipped at Auschwitz to resist the system of SS, party, and state.31 The decisions of the BGH regarding obedience under duress demonstrated that the penalties for resisting superiors included condemnation to death by an SS or police tribunal, demotion with orders to report to a punitive unit serving on the front, or admission into a concentration camp. It was beside the point whether the accused officer was even strong enough to refuse orders. He had to have car-

198   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

ried out criminal orders in order to escape a threat to life and limb while demonstrating that his act had ensued only after he had considered every other way out of a dilemma that neither prescribed nor expected heroism.32 Kramer’s badgering presence was proof of danger to life and limb in a way that precluded the kind of resistance Lucas brought to bear against superior orders in Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. Arresting him now was outrageous in light of Lucas’s disdain for the SS and his lack of a safety net abroad.33 Aschenauer attached Wilhelm Boger’s letter, which recalled his seeing the files concerning the trial for Lucas’s favoritism.34 Boger had learned about the friction between Kramer and Lucas after reporting to Kramer’s office about an unrelated matter in June 1944 and overhearing a conversation between Kramer and Schwarzhuber, who confirmed for Boger that Kramer had compelled Lucas to select and had appeared on the ramp to enforce it.35 Sometime in early March, Lucas visited Raabe’s office after hours, probably on Aschenauer’s advice, with a plea to ease the pressure on him—to no avail.36 When hearings resumed on 11 March 1965, Judge Hofmeyer began by confronting Lucas with Aschenauer’s response to Raabe’s allegation.37 What did Lucas have to say about taking part three or four times in selections after his run-in with Josef Kramer? Lucas again began by calling Auschwitz a crime. He had dodged ramp duty by making excuses until the mass transports demanded all medical personnel. Even then he found substitutes until Wirths heard about it and ordered him to report to the ramp. Feigning abdominal pain and eye inflammation offered no help out of his dilemma, because Kramer used knowledge of Lucas’s pending trial and past paratrooper brigade assignment to threaten him. He gave me the order to participate on the ramp immediately, or he would lead me away. What that meant for me, given my past, I could well imagine. This occurred maybe three or four times. I was then on the ramp and Kramer stood next to me or behind me. I was supposed to pick out the persons who could work. I selected in such a way that a great many who could not provide bodily labor were placed with those persons who could. Kramer began fuming and placed these people back into the other line.38

If he had reported differently before, Lucas explained, it was due to his lack of witnesses and fear that telling the truth would land him in jail. The court then heard more details than Aschenauer’s letter on 8 March 1965 had revealed. At the beginning of the trial, Boger had given Aschenauer his confidential account of the friction between Lucas and Kramer, which had started by Lucas driving a capo from Birkenau to the main camp to treat a detached retina. In June or July 1944, Boger observed the tension firsthand when he was ordered to report to Kramer in Birkenau about a typhus matter. Schwarzhuber came with him. On their return to Auschwitz I, Schwarzhuber told Boger that Kramer had confronted Lucas on the ramp after Lucas refused to select. When Kramer be-

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  199

came aggressive, Lucas selected under pressure. Other SS personnel, such as Luise Danz, verified Schwarzhuber’s story for Boger. As part of the political division, Boger was asked not to intervene in what was a legal matter, and Lucas did not remain in Auschwitz much longer anyway. Schwarzhuber had remarked that “Lucas can’t jump over his own shadow.”39 After Aschenauer’s explanation, which Boger confirmed, Lucas claimed to have conducted no more than three or four selections with no recollection of the numbers involved.40 Raabe reminded Lucas that the two of them had stood together on the ramp during the official court visit three months earlier. At that time, he was surprised that Lucas could not answer his question about how much space a train took up at the ramp. Now Lucas was blaming his state of high agitation in 1944 for his inability to notice details about trains or how many people they contained.41 During Raabe’s questioning, Lucas admitted to four or five selections and mentioned the presence of a second doctor, without knowing whether that doctor had selected. He continued to insist on his avoidance of gas chamber duty. Whenever he had found a substitute for ramp duty, he had gone there himself for a few minutes to confirm that his substitute had followed through, “otherwise the bomb would have dropped.”42 These substitutes allegedly included fourteen physicians, among them Dr. Thilo and Dr. König. There were no set percentages of how many prisoners to select for labor.43 Baretzki’s reaction was to insist that Kramer had never forced anyone to select, and that Lucas had selected during the entirety of the Hungarian transports until his transfer in September or early October to Mauthausen.44 Raabe agreed that a small number of three or four times was unlikely and suggested treating Lucas the same as the defendants Dr. Capesius and Dr. Frank, already in custody. When Judge Hofmeyer argued that Lucas had not tried to escape in Poland during the court’s December visit, Raabe wondered how attractive communist Poland appeared as a destination.45 Then Aschenauer defused Raabe’s request by revealing that he had agreed to take on Lucas’s case only if Lucas confessed to his ramp activity, and Lucas had concurred. Aschenauer’s strategy was to present witnesses who could exonerate Lucas and prevent him from confessing too quickly. Hofmeyer agreed that Lucas posed no flight danger. On 14 March 1965, Aschenauer wrote the regional appeals court to downplay Lucas’s guarded confession on 11 March. He argued that fifteen months into the trial Lucas would have already disappeared if that had been his plan. He also included petitions for more witnesses.46 On 19 March, Raabe petitioned the same court to reverse Hofmeyer’s refusal to arrest Lucas, based on all of Lucas’s stuttered responses to Raabe’s precise questions.47 The appeals court finally agreed with Raabe and sent an official to arrest Lucas in Elmshorn at daybreak on 24 March 1965.48 Arrest put an end to Lucas’s trips back to Hamburg on nontrial days to continue his medical practice. He joined fifteen other defendants already in custody and remained in custody until 28 March 1968, serving all but three

200   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

months of the sentence of three years and three months that he received on 19 August 1965. His custody time before the sentence was reckoned in his favor. What can be said about Baretzki’s role in Lucas’s confession and arrest? For one thing, Baretzki’s return ticket remark was undeniably on the mark, because it states a reality that Lucas’s colleague Horst Fischer aired in his East Berlin interrogation: “We were aware that we would be held accountable for the crimes committed in Auschwitz, and we hoped to either fall at the front or, if taken captive, not be recognized as a concentration camp doctor.”49 This helps us rethink Lucas’s SS defection from Sachsenhausen on 16 April 1945 as a desperate attempt to avoid capture and accountability by the Russians. For another thing, Baretzki’s breach of defendant solidarity—a non-officer block leader confronting a camp doctor of higher rank—was unprecedented. It is unlikely that Lucas and Baretzki would have exchanged words or made eye contact for the remainder of the trial. More disturbing was Lucas’s confession. True, it failed to address his victims, but lack of remorse was expected. It meant rethinking the totality of his assertions. Confession promised no honesty, but merely became the pivot point between his silent first line of defense (denial) and his more loquacious second line of defense (fear). In this second line, defendants insisted they were unwilling to carry out the crimes of the real perpetrators. As Devin Pendas remarks, they contended that “they had personally found the events at Auschwitz to be abhorrent, that they had tried as best they could to get out, and that they had even helped inmates when possible.”50 This sort of insincere acknowledgment of crimes infuriated the prosecutors and adjunct prosecutors, as they made clear in their closing remarks in May 1965. Henry Ormond complained that partial confessions contained as much denial as the lies that preceded them. His East German colleague Friedrich Karl Kaul noted that confessing to just one crime was a way to distract from a defendant’s much longer list of crimes.51 In fact, as Frankfurt public prosecutor Hanns Grossmann argued, Lucas’s constant retreat from acknowledgment was the best proof of his guilt. After having disputed and downplayed his role on the ramp for months on end, Lucas settled on the problematic excuse of duress under orders. It was certainly the right of defendants to keep silent about the accusations raised against them. But Grossmann insisted that “when the defendants are convicted of lying . . . then it is the right and duty of the court and state attorney’s office to take note of this during its evaluation of personality.”52 The remarks of Ormond, Kaul, and Grossmann were the result of spending months in the courtroom waiting for the twenty defendants to take responsibility. While Lucas was more forthcoming and eloquent than most, neither cursory details about Gypsy camp conditions, nor confession, nor character witnesses could outweigh the gravity of the lies the prosecution was tired of hearing from him. Ultimately, then, Lucas’s confession was not the start of truthfulness but of a different lie that turned denial into a claim of duress that could make a scapegoat of a man

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  201

everyone loved to hate: Josef Kramer, commandant of Birkenau and “Beast of Belsen.”

From Confession to Verdict Unlike the prosecution, the court interpreted Lucas’s confession as the beginning of insight and even contrition. The oral verdict that came on 19–20 August 1965 steered a path between the closing arguments of Christian Raabe in May and those of Rudolf Aschenauer in June 1965. For the court, Lucas’s final statement in court in early August indicated the inkling of a conscience, perhaps enough to excuse the ramp narratives the court never accepted anyway. What is more, his Ravensbrück witnesses proved that Lucas had traveled from cowardice to courage by the end of the war. As the next chapter will show, Aschenauer’s successful appeal of this verdict reinstated the fear argument involving Kramer. Accordingly, Lucas was always the good German, and his anomaly of ramp duty was explained by something besides cowardice. It was not cowardice that turned into courage, because courage was there all along. Instead, so ran the narrative, it was fear for his life that explained Lucas’s selections at Auschwitz, but a fear that his disdain for Nazism’s goals helped him overcome as he became increasingly reckless after Auschwitz. Even after Lucas’s confession on 11 March and arrest on 24 March 1965, three Jewish survivors of Auschwitz living in Amsterdam appeared in Frankfurt to testify voluntarily against him. Abraham de la Penha appeared on 26 March and Rosje Corper-Blik and Celine van der Hoek on 12 April 1965.53 Irregularities in their testimony, mostly with respect to time, raised the court’s suspicions. De la Penha was thirty-four years old when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 19 May 1944 in a transport of Dutch Jews from Westerbork, the large SS-controlled transit camp in the Netherlands.54 Twenty years later, back in Amsterdam, he recognized Lucas’s name from a television special in December 1964 that showed the court’s Auschwitz inspection.55 After taking the stand in Frankfurt, he declared that Lucas had selected him for hard labor upon his arrival at Birkenau.56 Later he had survived another selection by Lucas in the hospital, where 150 prisoners were loaded onto trucks for the gas chamber.57 None of this mattered, because de la Penha failed to identify Lucas from among the defendants. He had not recognized Lucas from Dutch newspaper or television footage either, due to the civilian clothes Lucas wore and the span of twenty years that had passed since Auschwitz.58 He had recognized only the name, not the face.59 Until his friend’s suggestion to watch the news together, de la Penha had ignored trial coverage: “I’ve gone through so much misery, I don’t want to read about it.” Failing his visual test and being forced to defend his Dutch mispronunciation of Lucas (“Lücas”) made him regret coming forward at all.60

202   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

To believe Aschenauer, de la Penha’s motive for appearing in court must have been to seek revenge, the next natural step after receiving damages from the German government.61 As the audio recording demonstrates, interrogative pressure caught de la Penha by surprise and unraveled his sense of mission after about twenty minutes—not unlike the experience of Helen Goldman the previous September. Near the end of his forty-four minutes, he blamed nervousness and recent events for his blurred responses, and poor memory for his inability to orient himself on the court map. He complained of repeating himself and refused to retract any statements, having not traveled to Frankfurt to tell lies. “And what I know I’ve told, and I can tell you no more than that.”62 Furthermore, de la Penha found his court interpreter incompetent because she spoke softly and translated with difficulty, which led him to begin his testimony in halting German.63 The situation improved after Raabe encouraged him to speak Dutch and the interpreter to translate directly instead of indirectly.64 Despite the imprecision in de la Penha’s deposition and court remarks, Raabe later argued that minor errors conveyed more authenticity than a rehearsed testimony: “If he had really wanted to falsely incriminate the defendant, he could have done it much more simply.”65 The court disagreed: “Neither did he recognize Dr. Lucas in the main hearing, nor could he give a corresponding description of him. This statement was thus not fruitful for the court.”66 De la Penha’s compatriots fared no better on 12 April 1965. Before her own deportation, Rosje Corper-Blik had seen her parents disappear.67 Her transport arrived in Auschwitz from Westerbork on 17 or 27 January 1944, and she eventually became part of the Kanada-Kommando—collecting what deportees were forced to leave behind on the ramp.68 After the prisoners had disrobed at the sauna in Birkenau—she could not remember what time of year—she had seen how “Lucas ran around and looked at the people and just made a sign with his hand, to one side or the other, where they should go.” Her commando was too far away for her to see whether their names were recorded on some kind of a list.69 When called by Hofmeyer to identify Lucas, she was able to do so.70 Corper-Blik had recognized him five or six weeks earlier from television coverage of the Auschwitz inspection and would have recognized him even without hearing his name: “I saw that he had gotten older, but so has my own face. But the face seemed familiar to me, with all its features.”71 Corper-Blik’s testimony was discredited after she admitted volunteering to testify during the press conference of Abraham de la Penha in Amsterdam, which she herself had helped organize as a coworker of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.72 Celine van der Hoek followed Corper-Blik on the stand. They had traveled together to Frankfurt and shared a hotel room but had not overlapped at Auschwitz.73 Van der Hoek had been imprisoned for three months in what had served as the Gypsy camp but could not identify it on the wall map.74 One day she heard the woman who supervised her work detail greet Lucas by name while he was se-

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  203

lecting women. At the end of November 1944, she herself was among 250–300 women who marched past Lucas, unclothed with arms raised, in a selection that claimed a hundred lives.75 As Judge Hotz made clear, when Van der Hoek arrived in early September with the last Dutch transport, Lucas was already at Mauthausen. Van der Hoek insisted the guard had said, “‘Good day, Mr. Doctor Lucas.’ For surely there weren’t several men named Dr. Lucas.”76 Van der Hoek described Lucas’s features in the same terms as Corper-Blik but was not asked to identify him.77 Aschenauer was not interested in cross-examining either Dutch witness. One might well conclude that these two Dutch accusatory witnesses confused Lucas with another doctor. The court viewed them as revenge seekers discredited by their own inaccuracies. Unsurprisingly, though, when allowed to speak freely to Dutch newspapers, they revealed more than the court was interested in discovering.78 The Haagsche Courant reporter H. Kolb remarked that the welldressed “murderers” had been sitting on plush chairs for over a year, feeling more at ease than their accusers. Like posing for a photograph, identification had become a two-minute ritual arranging “the smallest in front and the taller ones in the back.” Even though the judge ordered those who had not worn glasses twenty years ago to remove their glasses now, “no one handed out SS caps to make the similarity more striking.” Corper-Blik took two steps forward, wrote Kolb, and pointed with outstretched arm while announcing, “That is Dr. Lucas.” After that, “the murderers were released back to their chairs.”79 As Corper-Blik described Lucas’s sauna selections, the defendant Robert Mulka, former Auschwitz adjutant, was blowing kisses to his wife and son Robert. Kolb noticed another defendant, Klaus Dylewski, who had support from his wife and young daughter and was known “for tossing Jewish kids in the air and shooting them. They are sitting in the same restaurant where Roosje Blik sits. She can no longer hold her tears over a plate of mixed salad. She is pale white and stammers: ‘I felt so ill when they all stood up, I had to take a step aside, unknowingly actually. I thought: Soon one of them might touch me. I didn’t notice all the other faces, just the one of Dr. Lucas. I had never seen him so up close.’”80 Corper-Blik revealed that other camp survivors who had known Lucas had been too afraid to travel to Frankfurt. “They called me and said: ‘You’re crazy, you’ll kill yourself by bringing back all those memories.’ But I had to come, didn’t I?” Perhaps the ultimate absurdity was that while waiting to testify, Corper-Blik and Van der Hoek “were sitting in the waiting room next to Dr. Werner Best, Hitler’s deputy in Denmark, and Dr. Otto Ambros, member of the board of directors of I. G. Farben, the company that delivered through a broker exactly 19,652.69 kilos of the pesticide Zyklon-B to Auschwitz in 1942 and 1943.”81 The final witnesses to incriminate Lucas were Bruno Stein on 22 April and Józef Mikusz on 26 April 1965. Stein was not among Lucas’s direct victims but described the SS doctor’s sterilizations of his fellow Sinti and Roma prisoners in the men’s camp of Ravensbrück. The audio portion records not only his “Mother

204   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

of God!” upon identifying Lucas, but also the sound of his weeping.82 Four days later and less dramatically, Mikusz remembered Lucas’s “characteristic face” from observing Lucas selecting female prisoners in “Mexiko,” the unfinished transitory compound mostly for Hungarian Jewish women.83 As touched on before, when testimonies from defendants and survivor witnesses converge, it is a reason to take them seriously. Neither Baretzki nor Mikusz had been prompted to address Lucas’s responsibilities in “Mexiko.” Baretzki maintained that Lucas was in a position to do more for the women there, whereas he himself lacked the authority to do so. And Mikusz, asked in passing about Lucas, sounded unvengeful. But it was late in the trial and the court already had a confession from Lucas. To reverse the feeling that the denouement had passed, further evidence against Lucas would have had to document murder, not his omissions of humanity. Attorneys and prosecutors were turning away from testimonial evidence and toward preparing their concluding remarks. How does one appraise the testimonial evidence that took up more than a year of the court’s time? Even more so than courts in previous trials, the Frankfurt court relied on witnesses to identify defendants and link them with their crimes. The absence of documentation due to the Nazi expungement of all possible evidence, especially in death camps, made the testimony of survivors the sole incriminatory voice and means for discovering or remembering the crimes.84 At the close of the trial, Judge Hofmeyer explained that as much as the court wanted to grant credence to all survivors’ voices, it was limited to accepting only the statements that withstood often impertinent interrogation. Even the ideal witness who wants to tell the pure truth . . . is subject to certain memory gaps after twenty years. He is in danger of projecting onto others the things that he himself experienced, and to count as his own experience certain drastic things that others in this milieu have recounted. More than anything he runs the danger of mixing up the times and places of his experiences. . . . Nevertheless, the court was aware of the enormous pressure on witnesses, given that most witnesses had no calendars or clocks or recording devices at their disposal, yet have been asked to provide the minutest details of their experiences.85

The danger of false sentencing was too high to relax vigilance about evidential claims that were impossible to cross-check against documentary sources long since destroyed by the Nazis.86 This was no show trial, Hofmeyer reminded his audience. Because the court had to render judgment of a defendant’s concrete guilt, it was constrained to determine if, when, and where the defendant had committed murder. It followed the criminological view that memories disintegrated after twenty years and became less reliable even for events “observed by the witness under unspeakable suffering.”87 Hofmeyer estimated that contradiction or improbability rendered around sixty percent of witness statements invalid. Even so, they remained unforgettable and showed the great personal price paid by wit-

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  205

nesses who supported the court’s investigation. But it had been impossible to make headway into the denials of the defendants. If the court accepted shaky testimonies, the defendants were in no position to complain, having contributed little to truth-finding during the hearings.88 Consistent with the standards he placed on testimony, Hofmeyer avoided believing that intense trauma always left a clear and lasting imprint on memory. This was the mistake the court in Jerusalem made in the first installment of the Demjanjuk trial (1986–88), against the cautionary findings of psychologists of memory such as Willem Wagenaar.89 By trusting survivor testimony, that court had confused Ivan Demjanjuk of Sobibor with Ivan Marchenko of Treblinka. Hofmeyer’s concern in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial about hanging the wrong person almost came to pass in Jerusalem.90 Although the Frankfurt court did not do so, it was not unheard of to ask psychiatrists to interpret a survivor’s traumatic memory.91 In January 1969, for example, Dr. Walter von Baeyer provided a psychiatric assessment of Jewish court witnesses in the trial against Erich Wollschläger and others in Darmstadt. At stake was the murder of Jews deported from the Kielce Ghetto to the death camp Treblinka.92 After questioning six witnesses and listening to recordings of twenty-seven others, Baeyer reaffirmed that some changes in personality were attributable to persecution: “We have repeatedly experienced court cases in which witnesses, forced to relive traumatic memories, became uncertain, hesitated, stuttered, broke into tears, got a rapid heartbeat, could go no further, and forced an interruption of the hearing.”93 Failure to recall details was no sign of a survivor’s diminished love for the truth. Reticent to describe their experiences, they did not intentionally misrepresent facts. Memory science helped explain their contradictions.94 Their images of suffering captured “the physiognomy and macabre character of the scene of terror rather than illuminating juridically decisive aspects.”95 Confusion about extreme events resulted less from a poor memory than from a prisoner’s overwork in bad weather on an empty stomach.96 Survivor symptoms were a reminder that cognitive compromise resulted from trauma and explained forensic miscues.97 A survivor’s contradictions and loss of particular details did not point to vindictiveness against defendants. And in compensation courts, survivors were not accusing defendants at all, but pinpointing the causes and effects of their own trauma. Despite the cynical claims to the contrary, survivors did not scheme to secure pensions from the German government in order to escape having to work.98 In this respect, psychiatrists outside of Germany, many of them Jewish émigrés, arrived at important conclusions ahead of their German non-Jewish counterparts. The pace of understanding the etiology of trauma was not helped by Nazi sympathizers who attributed trauma to preexisting mental instability or other endogenous causes.99 That is to say, psychiatrists outside of the German guild paid earlier attention to the psychological, not just organic, causes of a simple catch-all “vegetative dystrophy.” Admittedly, the pace and locus of research

206   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

was often driven by which trauma causes held the highest prospects for believability and thus a good pension. Holocaust survivors shared with returning German POWs many but certainly not all causes and effects of deprivation and loss, as Frank Biess has shown.100 The danger is conflating the role of survivor witnesses in compensation court (self-advocacy) with their role in criminal court (primarily accusation). Sympathy toward trauma invited the claim that trauma discredited Holocaust survivor testimony in court, as though its appeal to singular experience was higher than its empirical truth value. Raphael Gross has noticed that the aestheticization of the witness somehow explained the contradictions in survivor testimony while simultaneously disqualifying its value for historiography or the courtroom. Courts reliant on testimony were thus hard-pressed to prove anything against the accused.101 The danger of such dichotomous thinking was instrumentalized in the Auschwitz trial by Judge Hofmeyer and the defense lawyers Rudolf Aschenauer and Hans Laternser, who dismissed claims against their clients while commenting sympathetically on the horrors that witnesses must have undergone. As Rebecca Wittmann has noted, Dr. Hermann Stolting II announced in his summation, “Every witness who was himself a prisoner had to experience such humiliation, suffering, and torture there, and was daily in fear of death; he could no longer be objective, even if he wanted to be, and even if he is subjectively convinced that he is objective.”102 Intended to convey understanding, such condescension only deepened the humiliation of survivor victims. Nor was the defense above cynically remarking that testifying was a chance to take revenge and collect an honorarium from the government while vacationing in Frankfurt. Many witnesses had already collected token settlements for claims filed in compensation courts. Telling the truth regarding a defendant was sometimes at odds, then, with doing justice to a victim’s memory. Survivor testimony was rarely deceptive, though occasionally inaccurate. This applies equally to exculpatory “Stockholm syndrome” witnesses whose trauma was somewhat less debilitating, partly due to Lucas’s actions on their behalf. While his motives remain elusive, it is likely that Lucas cultivated a helpful persona as German losses mounted, either to retain something of his conscience or in the hope of preserving favorable witnesses, or both. It is no wonder that Aron Bejlin, who lost both his mother and his wife at Auschwitz, insisted that Lucas was an angel compared to Mengele. Asked about the trucks that took away his loved ones, Bejlin remarked: “I wasn’t able to take it all in so exactly. [Presiding judge (interrupts): So because you were upset you didn’t notice it, I see.] I was far too confused. I lost my mother.”103 Any good news about defendants was apt to blow fresh air into a courtroom, even if they were known for their volatile actions. But good news carried no burden of proof and revealed little about Lucas at other points in his career. Did he treat Sinti and Roma in the Gypsy family camp the same way as Jews in the Theresienstadt family camp in early 1944 or Scandinavian women in Ravensbrück

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  207

in early 1945? Did he distinguish between young or old, male or female, healthy or Muselmänner [prisoners on the verge of death from starvation, exhaustion, or disease]? We know less about Lucas’s volatility in those areas of his responsibility that were less likely to yield survivor witnesses, such as the ramp or sauna in Birkenau, Theresienstadt, and “Mexiko,” or at Stutthof, where standard killing methods hastened the deaths of Jewish prisoners too frail to work. Whether helping pin blame or clear it, confident-sounding testimony may still be flawed. Precise and dispassionate, Wladyslaw Fejkiel spoke half in German and half in Polish, which prompted someone on the court to call “Fejkiel’s statement for Lucas a perfect acquittal.”104 Similarly, the sedative Otto Dov Kulka took before testifying, his coaching by Langbein, his respectable profession as historian, his youth and health, and his gender all enhanced credibility. The housewife Goldman, described as looking twice her thirty-nine years, arrived unrehearsed. Her confidence disintegrating, she was dismissed on the basis of “frazzled nerves” and “hysteria”—a label reserved for female witnesses. The authority to accuse her persecutor in court hinged not on her aura of having endured persecution but on whether her answers to forensic questions supported her positive identification of the victimizer. The onus was on her to prove Lucas the cause of her suffering. A similar burden of proof had weighed on her in German reparation courts, where for over a decade she submitted damage done to her body as proof of her persecution. As soon as we look beyond their failure to confirm an indictment against this or that defendant, however, we identify the value of a public appearance for survivor witnesses. They broaden our view emblematically. What it was like for Dutch Jews from Amsterdam such as Corper-Blik and Van der Hoek to be deported via Westerbork to Auschwitz, to see loved ones disappear, and to return scarred to the Netherlands? Who can retrace the grief of Goldman and Zelmanovic, deported to Auschwitz from ghettos in German-controlled Ukrainian and Hungarian towns? The forensic content in the testimony of incriminatory witnesses such as Goldman, Zelmanovic, de la Penha, Corper-Blik, and Van der Hoek was compromised by their perceived inarticulateness. By merely hearing the answers to the questions it posed instead of trying to listen to the witnesses, Pendas argues, the Frankfurt court “excluded one of the central experiential truths of the Holocaust—that all Holocaust experience was traumatic.”105

Closing Arguments and Verdict The close of the evidentiary phase at the end of April 1965 allowed Lucas and his fellow defendants a break from answering questions. Cross-examination gave way to long speeches by the prosecution and defense beginning in May, and on 21 June 1965 Susanne Lucas was in the courtroom to hear Rudolf Aschenauer’s

208   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

plea on behalf of her husband. The weeks until the court’s verdict and oral justifications on 19–20 August 1965 were a time for Lucas to reflect on how to word his final statement before the court in early August. Not openly pious himself, Lucas received unsolicited and unwelcome advice on how to sound the right note of remorse from the theologian Hermann Schlingensiepen (1896–1980). Hearing little in response from Lucas, Schlingensiepen struck up a correspondence with Susanne Lucas instead that encouraged her during her husband’s three years in prison. Moreover, he fed her impression that Lucas’s sentence, the lowest possible for an accomplice to murder, was an unjust punishment for the entire family. In this respect, the Protestant Schlingensiepen resembled the Catholic Rudolf Aschenauer, as both men wanted Lucas out of prison as soon as possible, and Schlingensiepen was a signatory on a clemency petition designed by Aschenauer and Susanne Lucas in 1967. In addition, both men knew some of the same high-ranking clerics. Here the similarity ends. Aschenauer wanted no part of Schlingensiepen’s concern with the souls of German prisoners. The theologian had gone so far as to request voluntary jail time alongside Auschwitz trial defendants out of solidarity with their guilt, from his conviction that his own leg injury had prevented him from serving in the war and thus had shielded him from the temptations and criminal orders faced by the Auschwitz personnel.106 But Aschenauer could not acknowledge that his clients had done wrong. He built his career defending Nazis as decent Germans unfairly tried by the Americans, for example in the Einsatzgruppen and (Dachau) Malmedy trials, and formed a strong symbiosis with both Catholic and Protestant clerical bodies to furnish former Nazis with legal and financial assistance.107 With both Lucas and his lawyer skeptical of soul talk, Schlingensiepen settled on finding an understanding interlocutor in Susanne, but the two never discussed her husband’s guilt or his victims, and one wonders whether it was ever really on their minds. She at least shared Schlingensiepen’s spiritual vocabulary and considered church affiliation a part of her identity. Schlingensiepen’s views recalled those of the more famous theologian Martin Niemöller, who immediately after the war called for Germans to examine their conscience but then became more interested in pardoning war criminals.108 Especially after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the role of the Catholic and Protestant leaderships in prioritizing amnesty was considerable.109 The most consistent warning against premature clemency came from the Mannheim judge Barbara Just-Dahlmann. Her convictions about justice were shaped by translating the diaries of Polish Holocaust victims into German for the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, just as the fifteen-year statute of limitations was expiring for manslaughter in May 1960. She was also a thoughtful Christian committed to Jewish-Christian dialogue. In a letter to Schlingensiepen, she warned that Germany’s churches committed a grave mistake by calling for mercy for war

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  209

criminals before completing the work of justice, which had to consist of acknowledging crimes and exhibiting remorse.110 The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, fashioned by German Protestants in October 1945, focused on German guilt and sorrow for failing to do more, but it was not an example of what Just-Dahlmann had in mind for feeling remorse over victims.111 In essence, it was a bystander’s creed that insulated normal Germans from the real criminals. This was precisely what repulsed Just-Dahlmann, particularly after putting herself in the position of the victims whose diaries she translated. During their exchange of letters in 1962 and 1963, Schlingensiepen and Just-Dahlmann examined the historic task of the EKD (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Protestant Church in Germany), ahead of a “great wave of trials,” to offer a formal call to repentance (Bußruf) concerning the apocalyptic dimension of the horrors committed under Hitler.112 Their disagreement over the primacy of mercy reflected Just-Dahlmann’s interest in the victim and Schlingensiepen’s interest in the perpetrator. Schlingensiepen’s views were enmeshed with those of the CDU, whose representatives on the Elmshorn city council had, as discussed, expressed no interest in digging up Lucas’s past. This was also a vote against justice for his Holocaust victims, and in political form it was a vote against extending the statute of limitations for murder, especially genocide. In a 1965 Bundestag session, a certain Dr. Schwarzhaupt reminded her colleagues that the same twenty years that made recalling details, tracing evidence, and gathering witnesses so difficult had also fashioned one-time criminals into good citizens. “Human justice,” she proclaimed, “must remain behind that which one concedes to a justice that is vigilant over this earthly world [applause from CDU/CSU].”113 In this model endorsed by the Lucases, their lawyer Aschenauer, and their unexpected spiritual advocate Schlingensiepen, justice consisted of returning a husband and father to his family and closing the lid again on the past in order to recoup financial and professional losses. Schlingensiepen’s formidable correspondence included not only theologians, church leaders, and jurists, but also war criminals and their families. His first letter to Lucas in March 1964 regretted the silence of German churches toward the atrocities of Hitler’s regime but also suggested that Nazi guilt eluded adequate punishment by an earthly judge.114 In fact, he suggested the SS officer Wilhelm Greiffenberger as an example of one whose religious confession had already ushered in divine pardon (albeit without first acknowledging wrongdoing). As Katharina von Kellenbach has shown, however, any innocence that Greiffenberger purported having was contradicted by his court records.115 Those details were less important to Schlingensiepen, who promised Lucas that German clergy were united ecumenically in seeking mercy for war criminals. Lucas himself never replied to Schlingensiepen, but his wife happened upon his letter and wrote the theologian fourteen months later—shortly before her

210   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

husband’s sentencing—about her state of turmoil. With children too young to understand the problem but too old for her to hide it from them, her confidence was faltering under a mask of cheerfulness.116 No one deserved less than her husband the public accusations distorting his image: “You shouldn’t get to rob someone of freedom and honor just because he didn’t become a martyr in the ‘dark times,’ yet because of being gifted with charity helped those poor suffering persons as much as was in his power. A kind man who helped the sick, gave them his own rations and medicine, who rescued wherever he could, was in such needy moments certainly more valuable than a dead hero???”117 A month later, she wrote that she had heard Aschenauer’s summation for her husband in Frankfurt on 21 June and shared nearly three hours with her husband. She was “praying and yearning” for her husband’s acquittal, for the sake of her family’s happiness and his resumption of medical practice.118 Susanne Lucas is one of the women Von Kellenbach includes in her discussion of women married to Nazi perpetrators who “remained protective and defended their husbands vigorously despite their claims that they had been kept in the dark about the precise nature of their men’s wartime assignments.”119 Only the wife of Hans Stark, the youngest defendant in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, imposed conditions on her husband by threatening to divorce him if he showed no moral transformation through authentic contrition. Like Susanne Lucas in 1950, Margaret Stark married her husband years after the war (1953) and thus did not officially belong to the SS Sippengemeinschaft (tribal community). As Gudrun Schwarz has argued, it was chiefly by maintaining the home and raising the children that women represented a haven from the hard duties their husbands performed in the camps.120 Shielding their husbands preserved the schism between private morality and public duty, as SS wives appealed to judges and prosecutors with letters and amnesty campaigns, stressing “their husband’s private morality and personal decency as husbands and fathers.”121 Private family virtues outweighed the public atrocities that put them on trial. As Von Kellenbach maintains, the letters the women wrote to their spiritual guides “showed little shock or moral repugnance after they were confronted with the evidence in the courts. Their muted reactions made their claims of ignorance unbelievable. Instead, their letters showed an eagerness to justify, minimize, and condone their husbands’ deeds after the war, which strongly suggests that they had prior knowledge.”122 These wives should have responded morally and critically, Von Kellenbach argues. “This includes the threat of separation as a moral response to a partner’s sustained refusal to change and failure to make amends.” Not challenging their husbands made wives complicit.123 This assumes, of course, that civil courts would recognize a conviction for war crimes and a lack of contrition as dishonorable behavior that presented adequate grounds for divorce.124 Religious authorities considered conjugal infidelity to disrupt marital harmony, but not a husband’s murder of civilians during wartime.

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  211

Schlingensiepen had contacted Hans Stark about his final statement in the trial. He did not respond, but his wife Margaret wrote that her husband’s arrest in April 1959 in their Cologne apartment forced him to break his silence as she stood with the children, unable to fathom his secret. “He had concealed it from me until this terrible day. He had never found the courage to inform me about his former life. I feel terrible about this and I have not been able to deal with this.”125 This is Von Kellenbach’s example of a woman who was too young or married too late to undergo the RuSHA vetting of SS spouses for admission into the SS Sippengemeinschaft. Was the silence of the husbands an indication of trauma, shame, or simply their overwrought honoring of a pledge to keep secret what they had seen and done? Rather than promising them support if they renounced their husbands for their complicity, Schlingensiepen encouraged a pastoral (i.e., patriarchal) approach by admonishing wives to visit prison regularly and show patience, fidelity, and unquestioning love, as though this practice would restore the spiritual insight their husbands required. Nowhere was concern for victims in sight. Von Kellenbach shows convincingly how Margaret Stark removed herself from guilt by association by insisting that her husband “show measurable regret” as “a precondition for the return to normal family life.”126 Moral regeneration was necessary not simply as an ultimatum but for the sake of their children. But as Von Kellenbach notes, Hans Stark never responded to Schlingensiepen’s letters, even when Schlingensiepen begged him in 1971 to help his chances for pardon by displaying some kind of remorse.127

Final Arguments of Christian Raabe and Rudolf Aschenauer A month before the defense attorneys gave their summations, state and civil prosecutors rehearsed the facts of the case. Head prosecutor Hanns Grossman recapitulated the inefficacy of the duress argument, while Henry Ormond attacked the lack of truthfulness in the defendants’ responses. Joachim Kügler elucidated how the “undoctorly” work of SS doctors, dentists, and pharmacists, all in positions of authority, inspired the men below them to carry out heinous deeds.128 Despite their unanimous denial of having participated in ramp duty, all were collaborators, Kügler argued, and nothing justified softening their participation from perpetrator to accomplice. Lucas’s record of lies and shifting explanations was a reason not to believe him—certainly not his latest version of events, after what had been termed a “confession.”129 All of the prosecutors recalled Lucas’s insistence during the Auschwitz visit that his absence from ramp selections explained his inability to answer questions about them. Kügler and Ormond were offended that he had destroyed their trust. Lucas was more interested in saving his own skin than in telling the truth, and he saw no reason for honesty so long as witnesses continued to defend him. But none of them was as personally invested in

212   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

overturning Lucas’s lies than Christian Raabe, who two months before had taken the lead in getting Lucas to confess and in arresting him. Raabe’s summation on 21 May 1965 took issue with Lucas’s defense claims. First, Lucas had described his paratrooper training as punishment, yet it was the period that his promotion to Obersturmführer took effect, and his SS officer card showed no trace of imposed disciplines.130 Second, Raabe pointed to Lucas’s inclusion on the list of selecting doctors that Fritz Klein had submitted shortly before his execution in the Bergen-Belsen trial, and on the list of major war criminals that Dr. Löbner, a prisoner doctor, had submitted to the Russians after the liberation of Auschwitz. Why would either man have included Lucas’s name if he had selected only three or four times?131 Third, broken witnesses such as Helen Goldman and Abraham de la Penha were fundamentally convincing. If Lucas was the man of character everyone claimed, Goldman’s appearance would have been the perfect time for him to admit his complicity instead of accusing a woman of lying who had lost everything.132 Baretzki, Barcz, and Mikusz gave believable accounts of Lucas selecting on the ramp during the entirety of the Hungarian transports, but also in the Gypsy and Theresienstadt family camps and in “Mexiko.”133 Raabe was convinced that Lucas also participated in prescribed duties at the gas chamber. Given his unconvincing story of cowering before Kramer on the ramp, how would he have resisted duty at the gas chamber as well? Having first claimed that Kramer was happy to select on his behalf, Lucas labeled Kramer his nemesis as soon as he could no longer deny autonomous ramp duty. The argument from alleged adverse circumstances involved turning one set of protective claims into its opposite.134 Beyond confirming the main charge against Lucas, Raabe kept drawing attention to his “indescribable spirit of conformity, subservience, and untruth.”135 In the religious realm, Lucas had filled out gottgläubig on the SS questionnaire yet remained Catholic throughout the war, even seeking advice from his bishop. Now he was Protestant. No one had forced Lucas to betray his religion. Nor had Lucas said one word against the SS defendants from whom he claimed to have kept aloof. Why not accuse them of wrongdoing unless he feared the same from them?136 Lucas recalled only what worked in his favor, but he forgot spending Christmas 1943 at Auschwitz. The pretense reached its height during the court’s visit to Auschwitz.137 After reading ten pages of examples, Raabe confirmed that SS personnel who refused to kill unarmed persons suffered no executions or indictments.138 Refusing orders to select would not have endangered Lucas—assuming the friction with Kramer had even occurred. A situation of duress obtained only if one had demonstrated the will to resist and had been prevented from carrying it out due to a well-founded fear for one’s life. Raabe doubted that a compliant officer like Lucas had demonstrated the will to resist criminal orders, but this did “not exclude the possibility, whenever it was possible to do so without danger, to help other persons against the intentions of the elite of the Third Reich.”139 Lucas could have

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  213

simulated illness or insisted more strongly on a transfer to the front. Harassment would have been preferable to knuckling under to unspeakable crimes. Avoiding a request to transfer to the front was incompatible with a plausible defense for his actions.140 Raabe noticed that survivor testimony stemmed largely from doctors and women. The women might have “exaggerated somewhat,” and the comradery among the doctors was only natural. As the end of the war neared, Lucas might have sensed the importance of covering his back (Rückversicherung).141 Unwilling to depart from the path of SS medicine that initially inspired him, Lucas showed a lack of courage to change the status quo that, Raabe maintained, had caused his guilt. Still, there was no question that mitigating testimony brought Lucas back down to the level of accomplice, not perpetrator. Raabe suggested that given Lucas’s aiding and abetting of murder in at least thirty thousand cases, the court should sentence Lucas to twelve years in penitentiary and suspend his civil rights for ten years.142 Aschenauer’s plea on 21 June 1965 for his client Lucas was determined to obscure the details that Raabe had uncovered.143 According to Aschenauer, fear pervaded Lucas’s sixteen months of camp service, but “Lucas behaved in Auschwitz, that is, at the beginning of his imposed activity as camp doctor, exactly as he did in Ravensbrück.”144 Lucas’s fair treatment of Jews, coupled with his criticism of the events at Auschwitz, made him a vulnerable outsider there, Aschenauer insisted, and Lucas had remained exposed to a totalitarian system that ravaged the private sphere of idealistic medical doctors. In the SS, the death sentence applied to breaches of loyalty or obedience, especially in wartime.145 In Aschenauer’s view, the prosecution had forgotten Lucas’s true character and ignored how fate tossed him into the proximity of crime, where he was still struggling with consequences of entanglement.146 Featuring his client as the true victim, Aschenauer reviewed the BGH’s decisions on what constituted legitimate duress. A defendant had to have carried out an action that, though clearly against his will, helped him avoid a danger to life and limb. Short of heroic courage, the defendant had to have tried his utmost to find a way to avoid the commanded action—through power of persuasion, suggesting alternatives, deception, escaping, delaying, doing it minimal justice, or showing demonstrable lack of zeal.147 Even then, a defendant’s superior officer might have been intimidating enough to deter resistance. A defendant could not be rebuked if unaware of a path of resistance he could have taken.148 Lucas was thus a victim of the totalitarian climate under Nazism, specific pressure from superior officers, and the prosecution’s ignorance of legal precedents—but Raabe, Aschenauer could not help remarking, was too young to have experienced Nazism after 1933 and could never presume to understand Lucas’s entanglement.149 Hence, Aschenauer argued for what Devin Pendas has termed the “minoritarian myth” of Nazism, which supposed that “the Third Reich was a criminal regime imposed on the vast majority of indifferent or hostile Germans by a small mi-

214   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

nority of very brutal fanatics.”150 Aschenauer’s summation is an accurate depiction of the myth, and one of the standard arguments he made on behalf of his many clients. In fact, Aschenauer was equally adept in turning the minoritarian myth against the American victors. They replaced the “brutal fanatic” Nazis but resumed the intimidation of Germans far too decent to be subjected to the whims of either Hitler or a victor’s justice. Following the final arguments of the defense lawyers, the defendants had a chance in early August 1965 to demonstrate public regret sincere enough to sway judge and jury.151 Hermann Schlingensiepen’s unsolicited advice encouraged Lucas to express grief for succumbing to “terroristic compulsion” and to declare that he mourned the victims and survivors even more bitterly than his own fate and that of his family.152 There is no evidence that Lucas responded, but his final statement on 6 August 1965 did reflect the spirit of the advice. The point in time where I was forced against my will to perform service in Nazi concentration camps ushered in a chapter of life that I will never overcome. The most terrible part was being ordered to ramp service. Naturally in my hopeless situation I tried to save as many Jewish prisoners as possible. But the memory haunts and haunts me: what about the others? I have struggled to tell you the truth. Now I can only hope that you will come to a verdict that helps to loosen entanglements and open the path of life again.153

Any contrition that Lucas dared admit was undercut by vintage Aschenauer language: “forced against my will,” “being ordered,” “hopeless situation,” and “entanglements.” To Schlingensiepen, the language sounded sincere enough to be effective, and he congratulated Lucas for it.154 That Lucas’s final statement had a mitigating effect is apparent from the oral verdicts on 19 and 20 August that Judge Hofmeyer took eleven hours to explain.155 Devin Pendas has made two remarks about Hofmeyer’s stance that deserve emphasis here. First, the court “seemed far more persuaded by the defense’s specific and detailed attacks on the reliability of eyewitness testimony than it did by the prosecution’s generic defense of the witnesses.”156 Second—and here it should be remembered that Hofmeyer declined to accompany the court delegation to Auschwitz in December 1964—Hofmeyer echoed the belief of Schlingensiepen and other conservatives that “Auschwitz’s unprecedented and unimaginable crimes eluded the grasp of human courts.”157 Since even a life sentence fell far short of a fair response to the enormity of the crimes, sentences became token statements that corresponded to the scale of brutality that differed greatly among defendants. The court’s written verdict, accessible fourteen months later, spent four times as long on Lucas as the oral verdict did.158 It suffices here to note that the court viewed Lucas’s complaint of Kramer’s intimidation as an unverifiable but likely untrue defensive claim and rejected Lucas’s insistence on having avoided supervisory gas chamber duties. All the same, Lucas must have disagreed with exter-

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  215

mination and carried out duties reluctantly, even as he aided prisoners, especially at Ravensbrück. The insight noticeable in Lucas’s final statement justified the court’s imposing the lowest sentence permitted by law: three years and three months, effective from his arrest in March 1965.159 Three of the twenty defendants (Johann Schoberth, Arthur Breitwieser, and Willi Schatz) were exonerated up front. Stefan Baretzki, Wilhelm Boger, and Josef Klehr, among the six who received life sentences for willful murders, received additional sentences for complicity in mass murder. Klehr, for example, had not only killed Jewish inmates with phenol injections but had also assumed gas chamber duty. The remaining eleven defendants received term sentences as accomplices to murder, ranging from Lucas, who was lowest, to the adjutant Mulka (fourteen years). That is, they had not willed the murders as their own, the court believed. Arguing a position of duress had been the common defense among the defendants, although none of them, as Grossmann remarked, had ever become as specific as Lucas about naming their object of fear. The SS dentist Willy Frank had selected prisoners under duress but lacked Lucas’s eagerness to ease the plight of prisoners and had displayed few qualms about supervising the melting of gold teeth. In his favor was the illness that had kept him from the front. Better health might have helped him avoid entanglement in mass crimes. Frank received seven years for selecting six transports.160 Among the three exonerated defendants was the dentist Willi Schatz, who reported to Willy Frank. Like Lucas, he denied ramp involvement in selections and changed his story freely during the pretrial investigation. When Höcker’s album was discovered, Schatz was identifiable in several photographs.161 On this basis, Schatz was then identified as the previously unknown officer who selected on the ramp in photographs compiled in the Auschwitz album belonging to Lili (Jacob) Zelmanovic.162 Lucas claimed in his 1970 retrial that Schatz had been his closest colleague and kept him current on Auschwitz atrocities. Lucas may have referred to Schatz because he knew he was exonerated. No matter: we now know that Lucas was appealing to a man who himself was a liar, as the photographic evidence shows, and this is even more of a reason to question Lucas’s denial of actions in which colleagues like Schatz were involved.

Notes 1.  This chapter is derived in part from my 2020 article “Confession that Isn’t.” 2.  Vernehmung Johanna Dyer, 11 March 1965, AP 30,459. 3.  Dyer, 30,460. 4.  Dyer, 30,464. 5.  Christian Raabe to LG/FaM, 17 February 1965, Beantragung zur Ladung und Vernehmung des Untersuchungshäftlings Eugen Lazar, 5. Anlage zum Protokoll vom 18. Feb 1965, FBI/LF. 6.  Vernehmung Eugen Lazar, 18 February 1965, AP 29,342.

216   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 7.  Lazar, 29,342–43. 8.  Lazar, 29,344–45. 9.  Lazar, 29,346–47. 10.  Lazar, 29,359. 11.  Lazar, 29,342–47. Although Baretzki failed to be more specific, these boys, between fourteen and sixteen years old, were selected from the Theresienstadt compound (BIIb) on 9 July to enter BIId. Two days later, BIIb was blockaded, and the remaining four thousand inmates were brought to the gas chambers. See Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse, 817, 820. 12.  It is doubtful that the situation was as straightforward as Baretzki claimed. 13.  Lazar, 29,353. 14.  Lazar, 29,348. 15.  Lazar, 29,355–56; Aussage Baretzki, 18 February 1965, AP 29,221. 16.  Bernd Naumann, “‘Ich bin doch nicht blöd, ich bin doch nicht blind gewesen.’ Baretzki belastet den Mitangeklagten Dr. Lucas: Er hat auf der Rampe selektiert,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 February 1965. 17. Naumann. 18.  Aussage Baretzki, 18 February 1965, AP 29,221–24, 29,230. Some women were selected for transfer to labor sites, but the rest were eventually gassed. If it is true that Lucas oversaw the Mexiko depot compound, it was likely in the same trade-off capacity (e.g., with Josef Mengele and Heinz Thilo) of sharing duties for the other Birkenau compounds. 19.  Mikusz knew from hearsay that Lucas was selecting—whether for transports or for the gas chamber he could not say (Vernehmung Mikusz, 26 April 1965, AP 32,272–79). But because Lucas’s “characteristic face” had stuck in his memory, he could match the name to the face. He had observed Lucas at the time from a distance of about thirty yards (32,280–83). 20.  Aussage Baretzki, AP 29,221, 29,235–39. 21.  Airport police in Frankfurt had detained Lucas in early August 1964 on the suspicion that he was planning to fly abroad, not knowing that he was simply flying home to Frankfurt: “Acht Angeklagte wollen nicht nach Auschwitz. Ehemaliger SS-Arzt auf Frankfurter Flughafen festgehalten,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 August 1964. Although the article does not mention it, it was Otto Dov Kulka, waiting to return to Jerusalem after testifying against Lucas on 30 July, who alerted the police to Lucas, who had approached him to plead his innocence. 22.  Christian Raabe to LG/FaM, 2 March 1965, FBI/LF. 23. Raabe. 24. Raabe. 25.  Rudolf Aschenhauer to LG/FaM, 8 March 1965, BArch N642-1388. 26.  Aschenhauer. It was the same criticism the defense leveled against many of the traumatized prosecution witnesses. 27. Aschenhauer. 28. Aschenhauer. 29. Aschenhauer. 30. Aschenhauer. 31.  Aschenhauer. This was the passage that used almost word for word the phrase from Peter Jochen Winters’s Christ und Welt article. 32. Aschenhauer. 33. Aschenhauer. 34.  Handwritten declaration of Wilhelm Boger, 8 March 1965, BArch N642-138. 35. Boger. 36.  Raabe knew that if he continued the pressure on Lucas, he would be able to resist Lucas’s “explanatory skills.” Christian Raabe, in discussion with the author, Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main, 12 May 2011.

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  217 37.  Christian Raabe to LG/FaM, 2 March 1965, FBI/LF. 38. Vernehmung Johanna Dyer, 11 March 1965, AP 30,465–66. Langbein’s transcript of the decisive passage reads: “I took part three or four times in selections on the ramp” (Langbein, Auschwitz-Prozeß, 628). The court protocol paraphrases this as follows: “Mitschrift des beisitzenden Richters vom 143. Verhandlungstag (11.3.1965).” 39.  Dyer, 30,484. 40.  Dyer, 30,474. 41.  Dyer, 30,492–93. 42.  Dyer, 30,475. 43.  Dyer, 30,476. 44.  Dyer, 30,474–75. 45. Langbein, Auschwitz-Prozeß, 634. 46.  RA to OLG/FaM, 14 March 1965, FBI/LF. 47.  Christian Raabe to OLG/FaM, 19 March 1965, FBI/LF. 48.  “Schon wieder Sensation im Frankfurter Auschwitzprozeß: Dr. Lucas gestern verhaftet. Polizeiaktion im Morgengrauen,” Elmshorner Nachrichten, 25 March 1965. 49. Dirks, Verbrechen, 181. Thanks to Marco Pukrop for drawing my attention to Fischer’s disclosure. 50. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 138–39. 51.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Henry Ormond, 25 May 1965, AP 34,023–63; Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Kaul zu Mulka, Höcker, Klehr, 20 May 1965, AP 33,717. 52.  Plädoyer des Oberstaatsanwalts Grossmann, 7 May 1965, AP 32,854. 53.  My remarks here on de la Penha are condensed from Wisely, “Renewed Trauma.” 54.  Vernehmung Abraham de la Penha, 26 March 1965, AP 31,026. 55.  De la Penha, 30,998. See also Burkhardt, Rückblende, 170–71. 56.  De la Penha, 30,987–91. 57.  De la Penha, 30,995–98. 58.  De la Penha, 31,012–13. 59.  De la Penha, 31,005–6, 30,098. 60.  De la Penha, 31,001–2, 31,009–10. 61.  De la Penha, 31,029. 62.  De la Penha, 31,019–27, 31,033. 63.  “A. de la Penha, die in Auschwitzproces ex-kamparts dr. Lucas moest aanwijzen: ‘Getuigen was ellendig,’” Het Parool, 29 March 1965. 64.  Vernehmung Abraham de la Penha, 26 March 1965, AP 31,022. 65.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe zu Lucas, Frank, Schatz, Breitwieser, Stark, Boger, Baretzki, Scherpe, Hantl, Mulka u. Höcker, 21 May 1965, AP 33,874. 66.  Fortsetzung der mündlichen Urteilsbegründung des Vorsitzenden Richters, 20 August 1965, AP 36,966. 67.  “Twee Nederlanders getuigen vandaag in Auschwitzproces,” De Nieuwe Dag, 12 April 1965. 68.  Vernehmung Rosje Corper-Blik, 12 April 1965, AP 31,585–88. 69.  Corper-Blik, 31,608–9. 70.  Corper-Blik, 31,635. 71.  Corper-Blik, 31,636. 72.  Corper-Blik, 31,628–29. 73.  Van der Hoek was on the same transport as Corper-Blik’s sister, however. See “Amsterdamse dames getuigen in process tegen dr. Lucas,” Haagsche Courant, 7 April 1965. 74.  Vernehmung Celine van der Hoek, 12 April 1965, AP 31,663. 75.  Van der Hoek, 31,655–57. 76.  Van der Hoek, 31,659.

218   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 77.  Before flying to Frankfurt, Van der Hoek had told the press: “From my barracks almost fifty were gassed that time. A bump or pimple on your back could already be enough. That’s how I was selected by Lucas. I don’t know if I would still recognize him. I saw him on TV and in newspaper photos. I would not have picked him. But I know that Doctor Lucas selected, Mengele and he always did that work.” See “Amsterdamse dames getuigen in process tegen dr. Lucas,” Haagsche Courant, 7 April 1965. 78.  For example, one learns that from Corper-Blik’s Westerbork transport of 2,500 people, only sixty young men and sixty young women were spared the line for the gas chamber. See “Amsterdamse dames.” 79.  “Amsterdamse dames.” 80.  “Amsterdamse dames.” 81.  “Amsterdamse dames.” 82.  Vernehmung Bruno Stein, 22 April 1965, AP 31,921–62. 83.  Vernehmung Józef Mikusz, 26 April 1965, AP 32,272–83. 84. Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 205–6. 85.  Mündliche Urteilsbegründung des Vorsitzenden Richters, 19 August 1965, AP 36,679–81. 86.  Mündliche Urteilsbegründung, 36,683. 87.  Mündliche Urteilsbegründung, 36,678. 88.  Mündliche Urteilsbegründung, 36,684. 89. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 204. 90.  The sentence of death was overturned rightly on appeal, with the corrected details ensuring that Demjanjuk could be tried again. He was sentenced to four years prison on 12 May 2011 and died less than a year later. 91.  Many trauma studies overlap with studies of bearing witness, including Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Krell and Sherman, Medical and Psychological Effects; Leys, Trauma; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Goschler, Schuld und Schulden; Goltermann, “Kausalitätsfragen”; Brunner, “Medikalisierte Zeugenschaft”; and Herzog, “Obscenity of Objectivity.” 92.  Baeyer, “Psychiatrisches Gutachten,” 85. 93.  Baeyer, 83. 94.  Baeyer, 87. 95.  Baeyer, 84–87. For Baeyer, transcriptions of witness statements helped pinpoint metareflective passages in which witnesses explained their own awareness of contradictions and gaps in memory. 96.  Baeyer, 87–88. 97.  Echoing Raabe, Baeyer considered minor imprecisions a vote in favor of the witnesses. 98.  See esp. Pross, Paying for the Past. 99.  For example, Niederland, Folgen der Verfolgung. 100. Biess, Homecomings, esp. 70–94. 101.  Gross, “Holocaust in primärer Erinnerung,” 130–32. 102. Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 205. 103.  Vernehmung Aron Bejlin, 28 August 1964, AP 16,280. 104. Deutschkron, Auschwitz war nur ein Wort, 191. 105.  Deutschkron, 236. 106.  For example: “Pfarrer will freiwillig ins Zuchthaus, aber das Justizministerium lehnt ab,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 August 1965. 107. Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, esp. 265–75. 108.  Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 48–56. 109.  In addition to Von Kellenbach’s book and articles, several monographs have analyzed the confluence of collective guilt, justice, and the role of churches, listed here by publication year: Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage; Just-Dahlmann and Just, Die Gehilfen; Vollnhals, Evangelische Kirche; Klee, Persilscheine und falsche Pässe; Weisbrodt, Rechtsradikalismus; Ericksen and Heschel, Betrayal; Phayer,

c o n fe s s io n , c lo s in g a rgum e nts , judgm e nt  •  219 Catholic Church and the Holocaust; Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 129–220; Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 265–295; Höppner and Perels, Das verdrängte Erbe; Messenger and Paehler, A Nazi Past. 110.  Barbara Just-Dahlmann to HS, 14 December 1962, 7NL 016-51, Bl. 13. 111.  On the Stuttgart Confession, see Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 52–57. 112. Barbara Just-Dahlmann to HS, 12 January 1963, 7NL 016-51, Bl. 21. See also JustDahlmann and Just, Die Gehilfen, 60–66. 113.  Deutscher Bundestag, Zur Verjährung, 16. 114.  HS to FL, 21 March 1964, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 8. 115.  Von Kellenbach, “Schuld und Vergebung,” 262–64. 116.  Susanne Lucas to HS, 4 June 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 10. 117.  Susanne Lucas. 118.  Susanne Lucas to HS, 4 July 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 12. 119.  Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 162. 120.  As Gudrun Schwarz’s book Eine Frau an seiner Seite (A wife at his side) makes clear, SS wives became complicit by their presence at the camps, by profiting from the loot dispossessed from the Jews, and by assuming jobs that were part of the administration of the genocide. “These wives saw themselves as an integral part of the battle to cleanse and renew the fatherland and vowed unconditional and eternal loyalty to their husbands in SS marriage ceremonies” (quoted in Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 165–66). 121.  Von Kellenbach, 167. 122.  Von Kellenbach, 171. 123.  Von Kellenbach, 177. 124.  For example, one Bielefeld court in 1948 found that the punishment of a defendant by an American court was “an act of fate” that both spouses had to bear jointly. Von Kellenbach, 178. 125.  Von Kellenbach, 180. 126.  Von Kellenbach, 184. 127.  Von Kellenbach, 186. 128.  Plädoyer des Staatsanwalts Kügler zu Lucas, Schatz, Frank, Capesius, 13 May 1965, AP 33,256. 129.  Plädoyer des Staatsanwalts Kügler. 130.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe zu Lucas, Frank, Schatz, Breitwieser, Stark, Boger, Dylewski, Hofmann, Kaduk, Klehr, Baretzki, Scherpe, Hantl, Mulka u. Höcker, 21 May 1965, AP 33,857–58. 131.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,862–63. 132.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,866–70. 133.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,875. 134.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,887–92. 135.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,894. 136.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe. 137.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,897–99. 138.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,912. 139.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,914. 140.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,916. 141.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,921–22. Raabe does not credit Baretzki with this insight. 142.  Plädoyer des Nebenklagevertreters Raabe, 33,922–23. 143.  For analyses of the summations, see Wittmann, Beyond Justice, 191–245, and Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 192–226. 144.  RA, Plädoyer für Lucas, 21 June 1965, BArch N642-384, 21-22 (Aschenauer’s numbering). 145.  Plädoyer für Lucas, 32–35.

220   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 146.  Plädoyer für Lucas, 38–39. 147.  Plädoyer für Lucas, 43. 148.  Plädoyer für Lucas, 47. 149.  Plädoyer für Lucas, 33. 150.  Pendas, “Historiography of Horror,” 222–23. 151.  Von Kellenbach, “Schuld und Vergebung,” 253–54. 152.  HS to FL, 23 July 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 13. 153.  Letztes Wort des Angeklagten Lucas, 6 August 1965, AP 36,643. 154.  HS to FL, 10 August 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 14. 155.  Fortsetzung der mündlichen Urteilsbegründung des Vorsitzenden Richters, 20 August 1965, AP 36,954–69, esp. 36,968. 156. Pendas, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 231. 157.  Pendas, 232. 158.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren: Straftaten Dr. Lucas, AP 37,874–934. The written verdict is reprinted in Gross and Renz, Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, 893–916. 159.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren: Straftaten Dr. Lucas, AP, 36,967–69. 160.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,974–75. 161.  Busch, Hördler, and van Pelt, Höcker-Album, esp. 271, 298, 304. 162.  Hördler, “Gesichter der Gewalt,” 111.

9

T he P ath toward A cqu ittal (1965–1970)

•••

The sentencing of Dr. Franz Lucas was never a matter of suspense. The momentum of friendly testimonies had a greater effect on the court than his long-delayed confession and the accusations against him. This chapter discusses the period between his lenient sentence and acquittal. Arrested on 24 March and sentenced on 19 August 1965, Lucas left prison three months early to return to Elmshorn at the close of March 1968, almost a year before the sentence was confirmed and the appeal upheld by the BGH in February 1969. How did his family, Schlingensiepen, and his Elmshorn acquaintances react to his imprisonment? How did Lucas and Aschenauer respond to the written verdict, released in November 1966, while also pleading for clemency? What were the dynamics in the Frankfurt courtroom under a different court in 1970? Lucas’s retrial began on 20 August 1970, exactly five years after his original sentencing. Since he had already served his sentence, the retrial was meant to clear his honor and hasten his unencumbered return to medical practice. Lucas and his defense lawyers, long familiar with his case, assumed they had the upper hand and that his acquittal, which came on 8 October 1970, was a foregone conclusion that reflected the attitudes of West German society at large. In these five years, Lucas left a more visible trace of his thoughts than he did during the trial, and almost always in correspondence with his wife and Aschenauer. Given Aschenauer’s commitment to defending former Nazis in different jurisdictions, it is unsurprising that he was absent from court as the oral verdict concerning Lucas was read on 20 August 1965. The defense lawyer Hans Herbert Knögel took notes for him. Two items caught his attention: first, Hofmeyer assumed that Lucas had done gas chamber duty, although no convincing testimony had contradicted Lucas’s denial thereof; second, Hofmeyer left unexplained why Lucas was the only sentenced defendant not stripped of civil rights, although ev-

222   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

eryone knew why.1 Knögel’s notes were among the matters Lucas and Aschenauer hoped to address once the written verdict appeared. In general, Aschenauer met with Lucas every few weeks in Frankfurt and with his wife Susanne whenever he was in Hamburg.2 Among his lawyerly functions for Lucas was tracking down the address of Dr. Fritz Baader in Nuremberg, Lucas’s first boss in the Waffen-SS, whom Lucas considered a major exculpatory witness going forward.3 Due to Lucas’s loss of appetite and weight, he also had Aschenauer request exercise allotments matching those of fellow defendant Klaus Dylewski.4 The court refused, based on the prison doctor’s assertion that Lucas’s large cell window reduced his need for more time in the courtyard.5 Unlike Aschenauer, Susanne Lucas had been present for the concluding remarks and sentencing on 19–20 August 1965. Before leaving on her “fate-heavy journey” to Frankfurt, she had received roses and chocolates from Hermann Schlingensiepen by way of her parish pastor Friedrich Sander.6 Just as she had enjoyed seeing her husband during Aschenauer’s summation, she was again grateful for extended time with him: “I cannot express in words how deep and strong the experience of these days was!”7 Two weeks after the verdict, she met with the medical board in Bad Segeberg (about an hour from Elmshorn) to discuss the effect of her husband’s sentencing on his ability to practice medicine.8 Life for Susanne Lucas involved driving to Frankfurt to visit her husband, looking after her daughters, and managing household and finances. Beyond these concerns, letters and meetings with Aschenauer always featured the hope of her husband’s early release.9 The drive to Frankfurt was long, the standard visiting hour was short, and time away from their father was hard on the children.10 By the time they saw their father in April 1966, they had not seen him since his arrest at home on 24 March 1965.11 Prison had changed his appearance, his wife thought, despite his assurances that conditions were adequate.12 The children came along when their mother visited Lucas in late July 1966 as well, after his transfer to Kassel for treatment of gallstones.13 On the home front, the sale of the family’s Steinway grand piano helped pay the dues owed the medical board in 1965. Susanne Lucas removed the medical practice sign and began renting out the rooms of her house.14 By June 1966, Aschenauer negotiated with Dr. Iversen of the board’s pension office a provisional amount that was less than a quarter of the asking rate.15 As of September 1966, the board had no plans to suspend her husband’s medical license unless or until the verdict on the trial defendants became legally binding.16 While they awaited the written court verdict, the Lucases followed the court’s periodic review of continuance of custody. The court was obliged every six months to determine whether the prison sentence was still worth upholding, given its effects on a prisoner’s freedom and health. The first clemency petition for Lucas was due 14 February 1966, just shy of six months following the trial’s conclusion.17 For Lucas’s fellow defendants Pery Broad and Hans Stark, the six-month review re-

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  223

sulted in release, as Susanne Lucas discovered by reading Die Welt on 24 February 1966. She apologized to Aschenauer for impatiently hoping the same for her husband: “Sometimes it’s not easy not knowing.”18 But the court refused a sentence reduction for Lucas, echoing Christian Raabe’s insistence that Lucas belonged behind bars due to the severity of the charge against him.19 Despite the setback of the February review, Susanne Lucas was confident her husband would be home for their older daughter’s confirmation in the fall of 1966. She encouraged Schlingensiepen not to take her husband’s silence personally, as he was loathe to discuss spiritual matters or acknowledge pain. In the penitentiary, Lucas sought no contact with his trial codefendants, not even with Willy Frank. In addition, Aschenauer had advised the Lucases against accepting help from political circles, but they were long since immune to extremism anyway.20 This does not appear to be a typical piece of advice from Aschenauer, given his reputation in aid organizations for former Nazis such as Komitee für kirchliche Gefangenenhilfe (Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners), as Hilary Earl has pointed out.21 With high hopes, Aschenauer tried again for a pardon of his client a year after the verdict. Susanne Lucas had heard in late June through Aschenauer’s wife that he planned a pardon request. Aschenauer had to remind Lucas that a plea for pardon could come only after the written verdict appeared, already long past its promised arrival by March 1966. Now it was not expected until after Aschenauer returned from vacation in August 1966.22 Aschenauer had a chance to speak with Hofmeyer and met with Lucas’s wife the next day to gather materials necessary for the pardon plea.23 Still, the written verdict did not come until November 1966. Aschenauer had reminded Hofmeyer that by Easter 1967 Lucas would have served two years, and Hofmeyer had promised to advocate for Lucas with the Hesse Minister of Justice, maintaining that it was only because the court had to levy a minimum punishment for accessory to murder that Lucas had received the arbitrary minimum sentence of three years and three months. Aschenauer asked Susanne Lucas not to mention to anyone his meeting with Hofmeyer.24 It is unclear whether this was because Hofmeyer was acting on his own and displaying a kind of “defendant favoritism,” or because Aschenauer thought it better not to get her hopes up. To use Henry Ormond’s phrase, Hofmeyer had never thrown Lucas, his educated social peer, into the same pot as the other defendants. It was while doing dissertation research in 2019 at the Main State Archive in Hesse that Matias Ristic discovered incriminating documents against Hofmeyer. Like Lucas and so many others, Hofmeyer had remade himself after the war while keeping his Nazi past under wraps. During the Nazi years, he had served as the judge on a hereditary health court in Gießen from 1936 to at least August 1939, where he authorized sterilizations of “feebleminded” persons referred to his panel for assessment.25 After his Gießen engagements, Hofmeyer was an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht. Beginning in 1942, he then held a position with the

224   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

War Justice Division, working for Judge Otto Grünwald’s Fliegende Standgerichte (“drumhead” or “kangaroo” courts), which levied death sentences on German citizens opting out of the Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) in the final months of the war. One example was the townspeople who hung white sheets of surrender from their apartment windows as a sign they were ready for the war to end. Thus, Hofmeyer’s formative experiences as judge consisted in part of pronouncing compulsory sterilizations and death sentences. Ristic’s findings will doubtless affect even more how scholars view Hofmeyer’s legal arguments, his reactions to witnesses who reported being sterilized by Lucas, his natural affinities with the similarly educated Lucas, and his willingness in 1967 to help Aschenauer reduce Lucas’s three-and-a-quarter year sentence, already the lowest for accomplices of murder. Ristic’s discovery is also a reminder not to focus exclusively on court proceedings for biographical information about a defendant, because the judge cannot count as a standard of objectivity. In a Fritz Bauer Forum blog responding to a 2010 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Kurt Nelhiebel, born in 1927 and attendee at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, reflected on Hofmeyer’s “successful deception maneuver” to become its presiding judge. Unlike the originally suggested judge Hans Forester, who turned out to have Jewish relatives, Hofmeyer was considered unbiased. In a private meeting with Henry Ormond, he did not mention working under Otto Grünwald, but under Karl Sack, head of the War Justice Division of the Wehrmacht Supreme Command, who was privy to the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 and was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.26 This cover-up is all the more disturbing to those who, like Ristic, admired Hofmeyer’s handling of the trial and his emotional recap on its final day, as his voice quivered: “There are likely many among us who for a long time will not be able to look into the eyes of a happy and trusting child without recalling the hollow, imploring, uncomprehending, fear-filled eyes of children who traveled their final path in Auschwitz.”27

The Written Justification of the Verdict and the Response of the Defense For his offense, “collective accessory to collective murder in at least four instances of at least one thousand persons per instance,” Dr. Franz Lucas was sentenced to three and a quarter years penitentiary.28 The long-awaited written verdict began with a short biography of Lucas, followed by “factual ascertainments” (tatsächliche Feststellungen) about Lucas’s participation in the mass killings of Jewish persons in Auschwitz. From at least four RSHA transports, and never more than 25 percent from each, he had selected Jewish men and women over sixteen years old according to their ability to work. This meant the immediate deaths of at least a thou-

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  225

sand persons per transport. After selecting, Lucas supervised the orderlies at the gas chamber, observed the deaths of the prisoners through a peephole, and gave the signal to open the doors when he no longer detected movement inside. Lucas knew that the Jewish persons were being killed solely on the basis of alleged inferior race and that he had contributed to the ordered extermination actions.29 The third section summed up Lucas’s defense statement from his first statement in court in January 1964 followed by cross-examination. The court presented and evaluated the evidence. Clearly disgruntled by Lucas’s shifting responses to the charges, the court recalled his claim to have found substitutes and yet driven to the ramp because the substitutes would not have shown up otherwise. Lucas claimed being compelled by Wirths to appear on the ramp alone, feigning sickness four times, and convincing Kramer to take his place. Alone or with others, Lucas estimated appearing perhaps twenty times at the ramp without ever selecting or making a trip to the gas chamber. On 11 March 1965, that story changed. Now Kramer was refusing to help, bringing up Lucas’s prisoner favoritism and threatening to march him off if he refused to fall in line. All the while he redirected for the gas chamber the deportees Lucas had designated for work. Lucas had justified his long denial that he selected on the basis of lacking witnesses, fearing that honesty would land him in prison.30 The court dismissed Lucas’s reasons for traveling to the ramp even after finding a substitute. Lucas’s story of duress was invented out of fear the court would reject his tale that Kramer willingly assumed his duties for him.31 There were five reasons to reject Lucas’s avoidance arguments. First, the high volume of Hungarian transports prevented an SS doctor from either avoiding ramp selection (Lucas) or taking it on as an extra duty (Kramer or other doctors). Second, Lucas’s name was listed among the names of selecting doctors that Dr. Fritz Klein had provided during the Bergen-Belsen trial. The court doubted whether four autonomous selections would have been enough to cause Klein to include Lucas on such a list. Third, it argued the same regarding the list of major war criminals compiled by Dr. Fritz Löbner, a prisoner doctor, for the Russians in 1945. In light of Lucas’s good deeds, Lucas’s inclusion must have stemmed from involvement in selections of RSHA transports. Fourth, Baretzki’s spontaneous response to Lucas’s claim of finding substitutes was that Lucas had performed duty during the entirety of the Hungarian transports, and Baretzki himself had never noticed Kramer force a doctor into selecting.32 Fifth, Otto Dov Kulka, a trustworthy witness, had seen Lucas select repeatedly at the ramp. Confident that Kulka had identified Lucas correctly, the court considered Kulka’s testimony further proof that Lucas had not selected merely four or five times, and then only under compulsion.33 The court seriously questioned Lucas’s love of the truth. He claimed a switch from Birkenau to Auschwitz at least two months before Kramer arrived in Birkenau on 9 May 1944. Would Kramer really have known about the trial Lucas claimed was pending for prisoner favoritism weeks earlier? As the court under-

226   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

stood it, Lucas had driven the capo with a detached retina to the main camp without permission from Birkenau commandant Fritz Hartjenstein. Annoyed as he was, Wirths had settled matters without creating a scene. By transferring Lucas to the main camp as troop doctor, he deflated any trial plans. Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer’s adjutant, Karl Höcker, had not heard about a pending trial. Only Boger had declared that Lucas had been denounced for favoritism, but he had no news about a pending trial either.34 Regarding the matter of rank, it was improbable that Hauptsturmführer Kramer would threaten Obersturmführer Lucas, only slightly lower in rank. Kramer had to know not to interfere in Dr. Wirths’s area of medical affairs. Lucas’s court behavior also signaled untruthfulness. He had been extraordinarily unsure of himself both during the initial cross-examination in January 1964, when he claimed that Kramer had substituted for him, and during his confession in March 1965. He had sought convenient answers to hard questions without sounding convinced of them himself. Follow-up questions yielded evasive responses. The court repeated its belief from the oral verdict that the clash with Kramer was an invention, and it was disinclined to believe Boger’s account of Kramer’s aggressiveness heard from Schwarzhuber.35 For the court, the strongest reason to castigate Lucas involved his gas chamber duty, which, he had indirectly admitted, followed ramp duty. During his first court appearance, when asked why he did not select in order to save as many lives as possible, he responded that he had not wanted to go along to the gas chamber. In the follow-up cross-examination, he indicated that Wirths had given only general instructions about selecting the “work-worthy” and supervising the “disinfectors” when they threw in the gas crystals.36 That Lucas was loath to supervise the gas chamber was understandable and likely true, but even a true statement was unacceptable when used to support the lie that he had never selected prisoners on the ramp. For the court, the untruth on this point of gas chamber duty weighed more heavily than the condition of forced will and reluctance, key for German courts in determining criminal motivation, that Lucas was trying to convey. Appealing to SS sources such as Rudolf Höss, Johann Paul Kremer, and Franz Hofmann, as well as to Sonderkommando survivors Dov Paisikovic and Filip Müller, the court chose to doubt Lucas’s consistent denial of avoiding the gas chambers. It believed the first version of his story wherein he was the only doctor assigned to the ramp. This made the story that followed his confession—of being one of two doctors present on the ramp—a protective claim to help explain why he would not have traveled to the gas chamber after selecting.37 Lucas could only have shirked the second part of his duty if a second doctor had relieved him of it. This was unlikely, because during his first testimony in court Lucas had declared that one doctor had been assigned to ramp duty once the massive transports began to arrive in the spring of 1944, and that he had been assigned alone at least

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  227

four times, without however selecting, since Kramer had done so for him.38 The witness Hilse reported that from May through July 1944 some 120 freight trains arrived in Auschwitz carrying Hungarian Jews. Every day at least one RSHA transport arrived, and on thirty days at least two arrived, not counting the trains that arrived from other parts of Europe day and night. Such inundation made it impossible to place two doctors on the ramp. Adding a second doctor to Lucas’s claim was meant to support his assertion that he had avoided duty at the gas chambers. The court again cited Paisikovic’s claim to have seen Lucas there (whose face but not name Paisikovic knew then) during his crematorium duty, having found his spontaneous identification of Lucas credible.39 Resolved that Lucas had been at the gas chamber, the court then listed the witnesses who failed to support the indictment. Gibian and Van der Hoek had both put Lucas at Auschwitz later than early August 1944. Zelmanovic’s claim that Lucas had stabbed her in the arm with his dagger showed a case of mistaken identity.40 Goldman must have projected her terrible experience onto Lucas. Differences in her accounts made the court doubt that Lucas had been the one selecting her family members upon the family’s arrival in Birkenau.41 In its legal assessment, the court concluded that Lucas had advanced the cause of the main perpetrators on at least four occasions. Selection itself was not causal participation in murder, since the persons selected received a temporary stay of execution. The issue was that the doctor decided on the life and death of Jewish men and women over sixteen years old who were brought to him after the preliminary sorting by the lower SS ranks. All Jews were condemned to death by Hitler. The doctor had a small amount of discretionary power to suspend that sentence by pronouncing prisoners capable of working. It was the doctor’s hand gesture, relegating persons to the line for the gas chamber, that set the condition for their death and made participation on the ramp a concurrent cause for the killing of the victims. No doubt the court had in mind Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka’s description of how Lucas’s pointing gestures differed from those of the whitegloved Mengele. Curiously, the court maintained that the doctors promoted the killing by reinforcing the will of the lower ranks to participate in them. Some men required no extra encouragement, motivated as they were by extra rations, such as schnaps and cigarettes, that they received.42 Other SS men who had not yet fully suppressed their consciences helped reluctantly.43 The doctor’s act of consigning persons to the gas chamber had to have a negative effect on the reluctant lower ranks, the court asserted. “For everyone knows that it is the doctor’s duty to preserve human life and to guard it from death. For this reason, the doctor enjoys respect and prestige in wide circles of the population. One expects ethical and moral behavior from him.”44 If doctors showed no compunction about killing, it was no wonder that the lower ranks overcame their own misgivings about killing Jewish persons in mass numbers. Lucas had to have been aware of this.45

228   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

There was no proof that Lucas had inwardly affirmed the killings and willed them as his own. On the contrary, the verdict maintained, his behavior in Auschwitz and subsequent camps showed rejection of the killings and only reluctant attention to Wirths’s orders for selecting and overseeing the gassing process. Countless witnesses testified to what they called Lucas’s “decency” in Birkenau and Ravensbrück. The prisoner doctors Fejkiel and Bejlin noted his equal treatment of prisoners in the Gypsy camp and his halting of camp selections. Dr. Epstein thought highly of him, maintaining that Lucas came to BIIf (i.e., men’s hospital camp) to substitute for Dr. Thilo and stopped the selections there. He operated on sick prisoners in tandem with Jewish prisoner doctors, whom he gave extra rations. Dr. Śnieszko noted the easing of tension and workloads in the Gypsy camp after Lucas substituted for Mengele as camp doctor. Dr. Szymański noted that Lucas supplied extra medicine from outside the camp, which made the prisoners marvel at the risks he took. They could finally start saving the sick of every nationality, because Lucas made no discrimination based on race or country of origin.46 Ravensbrück witnesses Le Porz, Neideck, Schwesig, Armbruster, Gerber, and Kowalczyk augmented the favorable reports. By refusing to select weak prisoners for the gas chamber, Lucas refused to heap more Schweinerei onto all the Schweinerei he was forced to observe, or to employ “Auschwitz methods” at Ravensbrück.47 Since no reliable witness had dispelled the impression of Lucas’s consistent good behavior, the court concluded that he had shown humanity toward all prisoners, including Jewish ones. Suspending the usual selections of prisoners too weak or sick to work was proof of his great reluctance toward killing the RSHA Jews (that is, the Hungarian deportees).48 And so, the court cycled between pointing out the holes in Lucas’s selfdefense and insisting on his benevolence. This was not so uncommon a practice in courts that levied short accomplice sentences for killings that on their face invited verdicts of life in prison. Usually, courts got around evidence of horrific acts by coming up with mitigating factors to drastically reduce sentences. For example, a defendant might have been too young to see through state propaganda, or have merely claimed inward opposition to the regime. In Lucas’s case, there was less need to grasp at straws, because the testimonies delivered the reasons for mitigation as understood at the time. As Falko Kruse has shown, the phase between 1961 and 1965 saw the most verdicts but the lowest sentences. For the very same heavy crimes, Nazis who were academics might receive the maximum of fifteen years for an accomplice, but non-academics regarded as SA thugs more frequently received life in prison because they were considered perpetrators in wartime and in civilian life.49 Former chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s division between dutyperforming soldiers and “asocial” Nazi criminals clearly favored the academics as Mitläufer (mere followers) who claimed victimhood and played along with the fledgling democracy enough to expect immunity from prosecution, as Norbert Frei reminds us.50 Still, some ecclesial and juridical voices sounded opposition. In

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  229

March 1963, the EKD published a memorandum criticizing the trend of levying the same penalty for mass murder as for grand larceny, and many of the jurists from the Frankfurt trial were present at the forty-sixth Juristentag (Meeting of German Jurists) in 1966, where the gap between severe crime and mild punishment was sharply criticized.51 The court proposed that Lucas could have done more to avoid criminal orders. Lucas admitted not having been threatened crassly by Wirths. Hans Münch, considered trustworthy by the court, recalled that after Dr. (Hans) Delmotte’s refusal to do ramp service, Wirths had first given him time for reflection, then had reminded him that the result of allowing all Jewish persons into the camp would have been overcrowding and death. Delmotte finally gave in to the argument that death by gas would be easier on the prisoners than their slow death in the camp. Münch insisted that had Delmotte continued to resist, Lolling would probably only have transferred him to a different unit. Wirths would not have initiated an official trial either, given his distaste for such matters. Münch himself was proof that refusal of orders incurred no reprisals. After refusing Wirths’s order to select, he instead drove without permission to Berlin to request that Dr. Lolling (Wirths’s superior) release him from the obligation, and experienced no negative repercussions.52 Like Münch, the camp pharmacist Kurt Jurasek had also visited Lolling’s office about an order given by Wirths, which simply resulted in his relocation to Landsberg. Karl Lill, the clerk in the SS hospital, said that Wirths had expressed admiration for a doctor that refused to select: “Finally, a man with character!”53 No harm, then, would have come to Lucas from refusing ramp and gas chamber duty, and Lucas was aware of this. Beyond becoming cooler toward him, Wirths had also not punished him for refusing to verify, for the camp leader, the “uselessness” of prisoners in the subcamp Blechhammer. The court repeated that the Hartjenstein threat had not materialized into a trial precisely because Wirths’s transfer of Lucas to the main camp relieved Lucas of the burdens of a Birkenau camp doctor.54 All of this was the court’s painstaking way of proving that Lucas was a victim of neither Josef Kramer nor Eduard Wirths. The court then noted that Lucas played an instrumental and conscious role in furthering the murderous actions of the main perpetrators (i.e., Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich). Despite his inner resistance and reluctant participation, he was aware that his actions depended on his will and that they were particularly base (niedrig) because the Jewish persons were killed solely for belonging to a so-called inferior race. His supervision of the gas chamber showed him how cruel (grausam) the killing style was, and his proximity to the victims showed him how malicious (heimtückisch) Nazi deception was. No reasons existed for justification or alleviation of guilt (Rechtfertigungs- or Schuldausschließungsgründe).55 Then came the court’s most explicit and memorable assessment of Lucas, which resurfaced in Aschenauer’s appeal in November 1966 and influenced the

230   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

BGH in February 1969 to suspend the sentence given Lucas by the Frankfurt district court: “The court is convinced that the defendant Dr. Lucas was too weak to resist participation in the murderous action. Prone to following orders, he traveled the path of least resistance to avoid unpleasant results, but not because a real or imagined threat existed on his life. It was in Ravensbrück that he finally had the courage to refuse selection duty. There too, no dangers accrued to life and limb, for he was simply transferred to another camp.”56 For these reasons, Lucas was sentenced for collective accessory to collective murder in at least four cases (Pars. 47, 49, 74, 211 of the criminal code), which were committed each time in similar unity of action (Tateinheit) against at least a thousand persons (Par. 73).57 The sixth and final area addressed by the court was Strafzumessung (assessment of punishment). Again, the court emphasized the gap between doctors’ healing functions and their participation in genocide. Their proximity to the gassing process should have generated a revulsion that made them swear off all further participation. But they overcame their scruples and moral hesitation enough to silence their conscience, which produced a similar effect on the lower ranks looking up to them. This was reason to punish the medical personnel no less stringently than the men whose accomplice actions they influenced. The court was sending a confusing message. Were SS men like Boger receiving life sentences because their killings derived from baser motives than were identifiable in doctors like Lucas? On the one hand, the court chastened Lucas for being a poor example for the men he outranked, as though he were the conscience of Boger. On the other hand, the court held that Lucas had not internalized the criminal motives of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich that it identified in Boger: racial antisemitism, treachery and malice, and lust for blood and revenge visible in actions “done on the basis of an unnatural joy at the destruction of human life.”58 The less Lucas looked like Boger or a common murderer as envisioned in the criminal code, the less punishment he received. As Pendas points out, the medical orderlies Herbert Scherpe and Emil Hantl could kill with phenol injections just as proficiently as Josef Klehr, but because they lacked his initiative they too were sentenced much more mildly.59 For Lucas, the court saw fit to apply the legal minimal sentence of five years of prison for each of the (at minimum) four collective accomplice actions, which killed at least one thousand persons apiece. This was infelicitous wording.60 Be that as it may, the court determined that its minimum sentence took into account Lucas’s personality, one which parted ways with most of the other SS members who worked at Auschwitz.61 The court justified but did not excuse Lucas’s actions due to his weakness, which it explained had stemmed from his arrival in Auschwitz immediately following a stint in a probationary unit. It speculated that Lucas may simply have lacked the courage to pursue a path that would have spared him from cooperating and becoming complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent Jewish persons.

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  231

In his favor, the court noted, was that Lucas found the courage later in Ravensbrück to refuse his cooperation and accept the consequences of a transfer. He saved many prisoners’ lives and fled from Sachsenhausen to avoid entanglement in new crimes. Lucas’s behavior became an object of wonder for the prisoner doctors in Auschwitz and the prisoners in Ravensbrück. This showed that his actions against the so-called RSHA Jews were done with a heavy heart and that he tried to somehow restore a balance through his good deeds. His final statement, about how the deaths of the persons he did not select for work had weighed on his soul, showed remorse. For these reasons the minimum punishment allowed by law, three years prison, seemed sufficient for each accomplice action. Out of these individual punishments, in keeping with Par. 74 of the criminal code, a single punishment was created that took into account Lucas’s personality and his behavior in Auschwitz and the other camps. Three years and three months seemed a sufficient punishment, beginning with his arrest on 24 March 1965.62 So ended the court’s written justification in November 1966. After reading his copy of the document, Lucas wrote to Aschenauer on 11 November 1966 with several points of disagreement.63 First, he denied ever being present at the crematorium, a point he remembered stressing during his “so-called confession.” He remembered the witness Paisikovic admitting to Kügler’s intense questioning that he had not seen Lucas inside the crematorium courtyard, and Lucas proposed that Paisikovic had lied just as much about seeing the other defendants there. Second, he criticized how the court understood Dr. Wirths and Dr. Münch. He agreed with the assertion of witness Artur Radvanský (10 September 1964) that Wirths had been two-faced—both engaging and ruthless— whereas the court insisted on seeing only his good side. Dr. Münch had belonged to the Hygiene Institute and was not beholden to Wirths for release from selecting. And did anyone wonder why Münch sported a full beard? What was the reason for his nervous behavior before the court?64 Third, the court was silent about his self-endangerment, for example how Charlotte Bartsch’s friend Gisela Bruns had maintained hearing Lucas say he could lose his neck if he continued criticizing the regime. Lucas added that he had heard Dr. Willy Frank express to Lucas’s lawyer Hans Peter Ivens during a pause in the hearings that he too had warned Lucas to monitor his views more carefully. What is more, the verdict hardly mentioned that the probationary unit he came to Auschwitz from was later wiped out, or that Fritz Baader had advised him to lie low; Lucas emphasized that Baader should become a witness. He also regretted that Dr. Baumkötter had not been summoned, because he had been present in Oranienburg when Lolling threatened Lucas. Fourth, the court failed to understand the regular rotation of twelve to fifteen doctors at Auschwitz. Fritz Klein’s list had only included the doctors who lived in his SS barracks and had omitted the dentists and pharmacists. Why had the court not asked him more about the deployment of troop doctors to the ramp? He saw no point in the court’s long discussion of his supposed

232   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

loss of credibility. Concerning the court’s assertion that Kramer would not have threatened him because he did not outrank him, Lucas remarked that in wartime it was always the service position, not the service rank, that was decisive. Finally, regarding the court’s respect for Otto Dov Kulka, Lucas granted that a ten-yearold could testify credibly in court, but not a thirty-year-old about events that happened when he was ten years old. He criticized Kulka’s description of how his selection style differed from that of Mengele. It is unknown how carefully Aschenauer considered Lucas’s responses to the written verdict. In the appeal he submitted on 17 November 1966, Aschenauer reprimanded the court for ignoring Lucas’s putative situation of duress. The court had accepted the probationary character of Lucas’s paratrooper battalion, declared that Lucas had inwardly opposed and reluctantly performed selections and gas-chamber duty, and affirmed how prisoner doctors had marveled at Lucas’s flirtation with danger. How could the court then claim that Lucas was too weak to resist the extermination campaign, and that “out of a spirit of following orders” he had taken the path of least resistance? How could it presume that no real danger existed for Lucas to life and limb? If the court put aside superior orders or putative duress, it could not then assert that Lucas had taken the path of least resistance. The court needed not only to show Lucas the path he should have taken, but also to identify his recognition of the suggested path. Thus, Aschenauer motioned that the judgment be suspended and sent back to the court for a new trial and verdict.65 Two years and three months later, the BGH agreed with Aschenauer’s appeal in its ruling on 19 February 1969. It was the only appeal the BGH granted from the August 1965 verdict, from either defenders or prosecutors.

Grounds for Release? Poor Health and Admirable Character While waiting for the BGH to act on his appeal of the verdict, Aschenauer kept writing the Frankfurt court to suspend Lucas’s sentence. In February 1967, a year after the first unsuccessful six-month custody appeal, Aschenauer wrote again, citing the court’s own mitigating remarks from the sentencing: Lucas’s civil rights had not been suspended; he would have received an even lower sentence had such a lower threshold existed; and he had inwardly resisted the exterminations.66 Another reason for suspension was Lucas’s poor health: namely, the gallstone problems that had forced his transfer on 5 May 1966 to Kassel-Wehlheiden Prison for several weeks.67 Lucas had pressed for surgery in Elmshorn rather than in Kassel. But on the strength of assurances from Kassel, Frankfurt prosecutor Gerhard Wiese rejected Aschenauer’s petition for Lucas’s early release, doubtful whether medical expertise in Elmshorn exceeded that available in Kassel. The severity of Lucas’s crimes justified his confinement, and Lucas might find the prospect of a new existence enticing enough to risk a disappearance. Lucas’s personal

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  233

freedom did not outweigh the interest of the “state community” in continuing his punishment.68 Aschenauer appealed on behalf of Lucas’s wife and daughters and closed his letter by drawing attention to two letters of character reference he had enclosed from persons on familiar terms with Lucas.69 Aschenauer had seen the appeal to character work wonders for another client, Erich Ehrlinger, former leader of Sonderkommando 1b of Einsatzgruppe A, whom he defended a decade after his defense of Einsatzgruppe D leader Otto Ohlendorf.70 When Ehrlinger’s sentence of twelve years for accomplice to murder was announced in December 1961, the BGH sent the case back for retrial. At that point, Aschenauer encouraged Ehrlinger’s wife to urge political leaders to consider clemency for her husband. The conservative weekly Christ und Welt, especially its journalist Peter Jochen Winters, stylized Ehrlinger as a martyr. In 1969 the trial was suspended due to Ehrlinger’s alleged incapacity to stand trial—a decision he out-lived by thirty-five years.71 Winters advocated for Elisabeth Ehrlinger the way Schlingensiepen advocated for Susanne Lucas. As Michael Wildt reports, Winters was adept in “turning the legal prosecution of his crimes into the moving story of an unjustly treated victim and his brave wife.”72 No doubt it was Ehrlinger, whom the court called “a willing party member and adherent of the National Socialist regime” with no qualms about killing Jews,73 that Winters had in mind when he wrote about Lucas, whose opposite characteristic was that he did have qualms. Winters wrote: “In a constitutional state, the courts must serve the law and justice. Elisabeth E.’s battle is a contemporary part of German reality. Elisabeth E. has doubts about justice, the attainment of which is the noblest aim of a constitutional state. Can we blame her?”74 As Wildt remarks, however, Winters’s article did not mention the Jewish victims ravaged by Ehrlinger’s trail of terror in the Ukraine.75 Just as Aschenauer had advised Ehrlinger’s wife to compile letters of support from respected citizens, he now requested Susanne Lucas to contact Lucas’s friends and professional acquaintances. Schlingensiepen, for example, received a typed letter on 15 April 1967 asking him to write “that you consider my husband’s character beyond reproach, although he was brought by fear and compulsion to a situation that he was unable to master alone, forcing him to carry out inhumane orders. Also, that you would welcome the soonest opportunity for my husband to be integrated again into the community of life and work of the German people (Lebens- und Arbeitsgemeinschaft des deutschen Volkes).”76 Schlingensiepen complied, but kept silent about “the living and working community of the German people.”77 Instead, he wrote that it had been tragic to see Lucas on trial. He had long supported avenging Nazi crimes, but he maintained that it was time to show mercy “to a man who, after his tragic entanglement in guilt and deserved punishment, is now well poised to pursue his medical profession for the benefit of others, to which, from what I know of him, he remains seriously dedicated.”78

234   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Susanne Lucas thanked Schlingensiepen for his contribution and promised to convey his kind words to her husband once he was safely back in Elmshorn.79 A striking number of medical colleagues, legal professionals, and clergy provided references. A doctor and a dentist knew Lucas from preparatory school in Meppen and had been his fraternity brothers in Saxonia, their Münster Catholic student fraternity. Their blameless friend had never been a Nazi.80 A Hamburg attorney wrote that he and his wife had known Susanne Lucas since 1943, and the three of them had inwardly opposed the government’s slogans. Surely the purpose of Lucas’s punishment had been fulfilled and required no more of his time away from his family?81 A pastor alerted to Lucas’s fate prayed that he be restored to his family: “If we ask ourselves what Christ would do in our position, then we’ll do the right thing.”82 A Catholic chaplain from Elmshorn City Hospital, baffled by the charges, insisted that Lucas’s helpfulness during those “questionable years” corresponded to his character now.83 Aschenauer supplied the court with ten such letters on 7 May 1967 to demonstrate that Lucas was not the sort to flee justice.84 The character references failed to impress the court, which asserted that how Lucas behaved preceding his arrest was of little importance.85 Judge Uhse wrote that none of the exculpatory notes mentioned the real reason Lucas had stood trial. A crime was not corrected by shortening its punishment, and “the public interest in seeing Nazi crimes of violence punished has risen significantly.”86 Also rejected was an argument of Rainer Eggert, who represented Lucas in his retrial three years later. Eggert insisted that Par. 26 of the penal code granted the possibility of a first-time offender taking the last third of the sentence on probation.87 A month before Uhse denied Aschenauer’s request for Lucas’s clemency, Lucas wrote Schlingensiepen that a certain Pastor Voigt had visited the penitentiary and left him a volume of Rembrandt drawings. Schlingensiepen must have included a note that provoked Lucas, who wrote: “My wife was fourteen years old when the war broke out, my daughter was born in 1951. Is the reference to them supposed to mean that so-called justice can contain the greatest injustice of all?”88 Yet because his wife felt supported by Schlingensiepen, Lucas decided to accept the theologian’s gift. Three years later, before acquittal but long after his release from prison, Lucas sent a second letter to Schlingensiepen to state that due to his “eight-year persecution” he could only count on a small retirement pension and was still bearing the economic effects of the “so-called trial.”89 Lucas’s rare communication thus showed his bitterness about the effect of the justice system on him and his family, but nothing of the supposed spiritual insight that Schlingensiepen admired yet overestimated in defendants such as Wilhelm Greiffenberger. In July 1967, Aschenauer reported being assured by the medical board that even after the trial verdict became legally binding, Lucas would be allowed to continue his medical practice. He also mentioned precedents for shortened jail

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  235

time and reintegration into society. The Munich regional appeals court had allowed two conditional releases in 1966 after completion of two-thirds of the two sentences. Finally, he reminded the Frankfurt court that Lucas had risked much for Ravensbrück prisoners.90 The court rejected the plea ten days later.91 These examples show the work of Lucas’s lawyers to return him to his family at all costs.

Appeals Court, Retrial, Acquittal The flurry of letters from Aschenauer to a resolute Frankfurt regional appeals court signal his dogged determinism on behalf of the Lucases. Whether it was due to Aschenauer’s persistence or not, the court shaved off three months from Lucas’s sentence, releasing him on 26 March 1968, almost exactly three years after his arrest.92 Then the unexpected happened. On 31 October 1968, Lucas petitioned for Rainer Eggert to represent him at the BGH appeal hearing in Karlsruhe, which was approved.93 Eggert wrote Lucas and Aschenauer on 14 November that Lucas needed to choose between Eggert and Aschenauer as his court-appointed defender, since the BGH allowed only one attorney in Karlsruhe, but that there was no question that Aschenauer was already functioning as such.94 After a telephone call with Lucas two days later, Aschenauer assured the BGH that there had been a misunderstanding and that he was the one representing Lucas for the appeal hearing.95 On 9 December 1968, Aschenauer received two letters. The first was from Lucas regarding a breach of trust. At their last meeting in Hamburg, Aschenauer’s comments on the course of the trial had affected Lucas deeply, although he had no wish to go into detail.96 The second was from the BGH, informing him that Lucas had sought out the firm of Laternser, Eggert, and Steinacker to be his elective lawyers.97 The next day, Aschenauer wrote Lucas: “Under the given circumstances I will no longer be active for you in any matter. I regret that you misunderstood my comments about the difficulties of a retrial.” At the same time, he informed the BGH that he was no longer in a position to represent Lucas and was thus withdrawing his petition of 16 November.98 This break between client and lawyer was startling. Aschenauer had been an advocate for Franz and even more for Susanne Lucas, easing her concerns to bring the father of her children home as soon as legally possible. Long before parting ways, Aschenauer had submitted his appeal on 17 November 1966, holding that the court had failed to prove that Lucas was aware of any path out of danger except for capitulating to Josef Kramer.99 The BGH upheld the appeal on 20 February 1969 in Karlsruhe, and it too questioned the assertion that Lucas’s good deeds at Ravensbrück reflected increased courage. If Lucas had already been undermining Nazi policies in Auschwitz-Birkenau, his selections only made sense as a breach of personality resulting from compulsion. Lucas’s switch

236   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

from denial to confession was a way to avoid contradiction, since he could not deny selections while asserting simultaneously that he had selected under compulsion.100 This “proof emergency” (Beweisnotstand) was no reason to doubt his truthfulness. The court added, finally, that the affidavit of fellow SS doctor Fritz Klein, used for proving Lucas’s presence at the ramp, brought no insight into his internal conflict while he selected prisoners.101 And so it was more decisive that he was uncomfortable doing the selecting than that he did the selecting. While the state prosecutors in 1969 decided which witnesses to summon to the extended trial against Lucas, the civil prosecutors no longer had plaintiffs to represent.102 In fact, Henry Ormond’s colleague Christian Raabe, so instrumental in getting Lucas to confess in 1965, took no notice of Lucas’s retrial and was unaware of the acquittal. “It is remarkable, but it can be explained by the fact that I had nothing more to do with this material.”103 Raabe missed the retrial because he and East German adjunct prosecutor Friedrich Karl Kaul were facing Aschenauer again, this time in the Frankfurt euthanasia trial of Dietrich Allers and Reinhold Vorberg that ended in December 1968. Lucas’s new elective lawyers, Eggert, Steinacker, and Horst Loebe, were too busy to defend any further clients until early 1970.104 On 30 July 1970, the firm asked to be hired as Lucas’s public defenders instead of as his elective counsels. Lucas’s new legal team was in high demand for trials and retrials of Nazi perpetrators. As Aschenauer had done, his lawyers coached Lucas to convey the impression of a reluctant, fearful participant in all Nazi matters, whose exuberance turned into feelings of entrapment. The prosecutor and the court reinforced this image. Jürgen Hess, with nothing to counter the argument of fear, had actually proposed the acquittal, and when presiding judge Werner Baumann uttered Lucas’s acquittal, it was after offering a summary of Lucas as a victim of the SS.105 As one Frankfurt newspaper reported it, “Lucas saw no way of getting out his entanglement. The court is convinced that Lucas would not have taken part in these things without this fear for his life.”106 As reflected by the trial transcript, no one appeared alarmed by either Lucas’s denials or admissions. Lucas denied that Baretzki had any role in prompting his confession and attributed his own increasing truthfulness to the appearance of exculpatory witnesses.107 Oddly, by 1970 Baretzki was no longer interested in discussing his superior officer Lucas either. He refused to leave the penitentiary in Butzbach to testify in Lucas’s new trial, explaining to prosecutor Jürgen Hess that he could no longer distinguish his own experiences from what he had read and heard about Auschwitz. He was not at all certain what Lucas was doing on the ramp and wanted nothing to do with the matter.108 Baretzki’s codefendant Oswald Kaduk, on the other hand, had become less guarded in the intervening five years. During the trial, Kaduk had declined to answer Kügler’s question whether Lucas had decided over life and death.109 Now a visit by State Attorney Gerhard Wiese to Ziegenhain Penitentiary yielded Kaduk’s admission that Lucas had sent

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  237

thousands to the gas chamber, a fact that the defense attorneys had bribed him to keep to himself in 1965.110 The German justice system in 1970 continued the trend of district courts to extend mercy before justice. To recall, Lucas was the only defendant of seventeen—twenty-five altogether, if one counts the two other Auschwitz trials—to win his appeal and have his case sent back to Frankfurt to be tried by a different district court. If the judges ratified his argument of duress, it meant rehabilitating him and clearing his name while restoring his right to practice medicine. He could not be levied a higher penalty and would not have to return to prison. If the original verdict was confirmed, however, he would not be rehabilitated. All indications were, as the Frankfurter Neue Presse predicted, that the trial would bring about his acquittal.111 After the hearings leading to Lucas’s acquittal began on 20 August 1970, it soon became obvious that acquittal, if not celebration of Lucas’s character, was a foregone conclusion. In fact, the seventeen trial days could easily have been cut in half. Instead of offering a chronicle of the trial days, the following pages summarize the most important themes that emerged. Presumably, the court, prosecution, and defense had studied carefully the Frankfurt district court verdict from August 1965 and the BGH suspension of that verdict in February 1969. It is also apparent that they were open to hearing what Lucas had to say for himself. Lucas took the first three days to give an account of himself, speaking more boldly and defiantly, but not necessarily more succinctly than five years before. The transcript does not replicate the questions or comments from the courtroom but only what Lucas responded auf Vorbehalt—that is, to any reservations the court had. Lucas’s answers fail to convince, no matter how clarifying they might have sounded when spoken in 1970. As a result, both the court and the defense sounded more credible in their summaries of what they thought they heard, as though filling in the gaps to fashion a more satisfying justification for why Lucas did what he did. What were the areas he felt moved to address in the beginning days? Whether asked to do so or by choice, Lucas began by downplaying his SA and SS involvement. He had withdrawn from the Münster Stahlhelm when the SA took it over because students were taking actions against Jewish professors: “I was never a member of the SA. In 1933 I was in the Stahlhelm and participated in militia training. When the Stahlhelm was transferred to the SA, I left the SA.”112 He then attributed his SS membership to his love for riding horses and pronounced as “exaggerated juvenile pompousness” the passage in his SS application that mentioned his prep school mentor, the Nazi Egert in Meppen. A few days later, Lucas insisted that his uncle was the one who had spent time with Egert.113 Moreover, Lucas had not joined the Waffen-SS voluntarily, but was drafted as a member of the Reiter-SS after his exam and promotion in Danzig, following six to eight weeks of service in the Security and Assistance Service (Sicherheits- und

238   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Hilfsdienst, SHD). His deployment in a special unit in Prague, where he had begun to study, was from 15 October to 20 December 1939. His SS unit had guarded an oil refinery. In Danzig, where he passed his state exam in July 1942, he was given credit for the interrupted Prague semester.114 As before, Lucas mentioned seeking the counsel of Bishop Berning, Fritz Baader, and Judge Krämer. Following their advice to keep a low profile did not disperse any threats of trials against him.115 Lucas knew Bishop Berning because Berning and his father had been confirmed together. Lucas himself had left the Catholic Church in 1937 without separating from it internally. He blamed the departure on pressure exerted by the SS and doubted whether Berning knew about it.116 Lucas reported arriving in Birkenau in January 1944 and being reassigned “at some point in April” to Auschwitz as troop doctor. As we have already seen, this date put him in Birkenau at the time of the first “liquidation” of the Theresienstadt family camp, a fact he neither mentioned nor was asked about any further, as the court seemed satisfied to hear him depict it as less catastrophic and much cleaner than in the Gypsy camp, with fewer casualties and no selections.117 Withholding any reference to Mengele, Lucas insisted that it was Dr. Werner Rohde, not Mengele, who had introduced him to his responsibilities. Lucas also mentioned SS doctors or dentists he had named only briefly before, if at all—Heinz Thilo, Willi Schatz, Werner Rohde, Bruno Kitt, and Horst Fischer—but only to maintain that he had little social contact with any of them in the officer barracks outside the main camp. SS dentist Dr. Schatz and prisoner doctors were his conduit for learning about crimes in the camp. Lucas also made certain the court understood how two-faced, both friendly and brutal, his Auschwitz boss Eduard Wirths had been.118 Wirths reprimanded him for not reporting sick cases in the hospitals and barracks, as the camps he supervised were overflowing with “unnecessary eaters” whose extermination would help stem infectious diseases. Josef Kramer reprimanded him similarly for refusing to select on the ramp.119 Lucas claimed that at his first ramp selection in the middle of May 1944 he shared duty with the pharmacist Gerhard Gerber. He succumbed to pressure from Kramer and feared being sent back to his paratrooper unit to “be burned as fuel.” He had stayed away from the crematorium and could not remember having ever mentioned that Dr. Mengele had taken him there. The second selection came “one, two, or three weeks” after his first. He stressed that altogether he had appeared four times at the most on the ramp, each time with Kramer behind him while he selected along with Dr. Bruno Kitt or Dr. Horst Fischer. He himself had never collected the tokens for selecting that could be redeemed for schnaps and food.120 Regarding his service in the four subsequent camps, Lucas’s narrative strategy was to distance himself from the killings, recall only humane colleagues or tormenters, and sound humble about contributing to the welfare of prisoners. At Mauthausen, he was unaware of killings but “had been told” that prisoners

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  239

were rounded up occasionally and loaded onto buses. Besides the prisoner doctor Pottlacher (Podlaha), with whom he worked, he remembered only Ziereis, the commandant he had angered enough to be transferred. At Stutthof, Lucas had instructed capos to cover the door of the morgue with bricks as a way to defy the commandant’s order to administer lethal injections. Such actions were his only way to help the prisoners there. Lucas’s abbreviated descriptions gave the impression that his camp duties were one big blur in his memory, except for how he “learned how to deal with the commandants and was no longer so easily intimidated.” He became less concerned about the consequences of recklessness: “In Auschwitz I had not yet seen any possibility of defending myself.”121 Ravensbrück allowed for modest resistance. Releasing tuberculosis patients from the hospital ward spared a great number from death. He witnessed very few direct killings and distributed food packets (some ethnic prisoners were allowed care packages from the outside, but the SS often plundered or hid them). One day Trommer ordered him to transfer the weak prisoners into the neighboring camp, where he knew they would die without medical assistance. After the argument with Trommer that prisoners witnessed, he received marching orders to Sachsenhausen.122 He repeated his claim of increased courage: “In Auschwitz I had followed orders only insofar as I felt directly threatened. Over the months I developed a thicker skin, as my own life didn’t mean as much to me after what I had experienced. But with Kramer I couldn’t have taken liberties to resist orders.”123 In January or February (it was in fact the last day of February), he arrived in Sachsenhausen and was taken to Dr. Enno Lolling, chief physician of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate WVHA-DIII, who “roped him in” by telling him that “one more insubordination and he was done for.” Witnesses could corroborate the threat. He had not been a prisoner in Sachsenhausen strictly speaking, but when the commandant ordered him to select prisoners with tuberculosis, Lucas deserted the SS.124 Thus, in the three days that Lucas was cross-examined, he emphasized ideological nonconformity, social isolation, unawareness of and distance from killings, increasing courage, and reckless benevolence on behalf of prisoners. Nearly every witness who then appeared supported Lucas’s narrative. Although a few star or expert witnesses—former SS judge Konrad Morgen, former SS doctor Hans Münch, and former prisoner doctor Ella Lingens—testified early on, none appeared to have overlapped with Lucas at Auschwitz. Morgen had investigated corruption cases in the camps.125 His view was that selecting prisoners in Birkenau for work would have been considered illegal, because prisoners there were “corpses on vacation.”126 The order was to gas all persons designated for Birkenau. Individual initiative was forbidden in the time of mass extermination. Morgen conjectured that refusal to carry out an order would not have brought a trial so much as a discreet solution to the problem.127 The SS officer would be assigned a position more in keeping with his lack of “toughness.” Despite align-

240   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

ing with research that explained away the popular duress defense, Morgen maintained that a climate of terror thwarted “good” SS officers. He distinguished between a doctor’s medical responsibility to the garrison doctor (Wirths) and his soldierly responsibility to the commandant (i.e., Hartjenstein and Kramer). To Morgen, doctors had not been intrinsically necessary for selecting but served as “legitimizing decorations” (Staffage).128 Dr. Hans Münch described the selection process as a matter of secrecy and “internal suppression.” Following the onset of the Hungarian transports, most Auschwitz doctors merely carried out Wirths’s orders, but Wirths believed “that this Jewish extermination was the worst action one could take, and even if the Germans were to win the war, the American Jews would never be satisfied.”129 Münch listed Thilo, Mengele, and Rohde among the ideological doctors who avowed that annihilation was necessary to germanize the East, and Wirths, Fischer, Delmotte, and Weber among those who opposed it. Münch downplayed the rule that a doctor had to be present at the gas chamber, thus supporting Lucas’s notion that doctors could pass off their duty onto medical orderlies.130 In 1981, however, during a Swedish television interview, Münch was adamant about the opposite, maintaining that exterminations by gas, like individual executions, required the presence of “at least one doctor” for the purpose of medical supervision.131 As noted, Münch had been exonerated in 1947 by a Polish tribunal on the basis of favorable testimony, but like Lucas he was still getting away with deception in 1970. With time, he was less careful about hiding how similar his views were to his friend Mengele’s. Not acquainted with Lucas personally, Münch associated him with a group concerned with sterilization experiments.132 More than likely Münch did not consider sterilization a charge warranting secrecy, since it was not criminalized anyway. Possibly Münch lied about being ignorant of Lucas’s ramp selections, but he most certainly lied when assuring the court of his own noninvolvement. An ideal court witness by virtue of chatty helpfulness, Münch laced affable fact giving with self-preserving lies. Like Lucas, Münch avoided mentioning Mengele’s name, listing Thilo as Delmotte’s mentor.133 It bears mentioning that Lucas’s lawyer Steinacker represented Mengele during his divorce from Irene Schoenbein, whom he had married in 1939. Avoiding Mengele’s name helped a defendant avoid guilt by association, and it helped Mengele and those who represented him by taking the focus off him. Like Münch, Ella Lingens, former prisoner doctor in Birkenau women’s camp, was a star witness from early 1964 and said nothing new in 1970. She had known most doctors but had heard nothing positive or negative about Lucas. SS doctors were volatile, she reminded the court: “One prisoner experienced him one way, another prisoner experienced him another way. That’s worse than if he were consistently evil.”134 Like Münch, she observed no special crematorium duties for SS doctors. She recalled a doctor from the Hygiene Institute refusing to select (prob-

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  241

ably Delmotte) and Josef Kramer, wildest of all commandants, throwing stones at prisoners. Whether he would have acted the same way toward fellow SS officers she could not say, but she knew that officers had presented a united front to the prisoners.135 Wilhelm Boger, summoned from Ziegenhain penitentiary, confirmed that Kramer allowed no one to “fall out of line.” Boger’s account differed from his version five years earlier. Instead of recalling a conversation with Schwarzhuber, he mentioned Bernhard Walter, the SS Spieß (sergeant-in-arms) and photographer of the records department of the political division. Boger had been summoned to Kramer’s office in Birkenau, and when Kramer arrived from the ramp, it was with several officers who were making a terrible din about Lucas. Boger himself claimed to be ignorant about Lucas, but he had seen pictures of him taken by Walter on the ramp. Kramer had ordered the pictures without telling Boger why. Aschenauer had advised him against mentioning this fact in 1965 because Walter was a witness for the prosecution. Boger ended by declaring that “if Hauptscharführer (Willi) Schatz was acquitted, then Dr. Lucas deserves to be acquitted even more.”136 On the stand later, Walter professed knowing nothing about Lucas or having received an order to photograph doctors selecting on the ramp. Any photographs of the ramp were for the political division, and he was also called on to document cases where inmates had thrown themselves onto the electric fence.137 Former Auschwitz adjutant Karl Höcker insisted that what doctors did was of no concern to commandants. All he knew about ramp selections was from the trial. Lucas must have left Auschwitz shortly after his own arrival, as he recalled that Lucas reported to the commandant’s (i.e., Richard Baer’s) office upon transfer. Only after hearing Lucas’s name did Höcker recall that something had happened to make a punitive transfer necessary.138 Hence Höcker supported Lucas’s claim that differences with his superiors led to his transfer to Mauthausen. Kurt Jurasek, assistant pharmacist to the former defendant and chief Auschwitz pharmacist Capesius, supported Lucas’s argument about Wirths’s volatility. After Jurasek refused to assist with pulling gold teeth from corpses, Wirths threatened him with a tribunal. Jurasek asked the secretaries in Enno Lolling’s Oranienburg office to consider him for assignments elsewhere. “Dr. Wirths was obliging on the outside, but once in the pharmacy I witnessed him yelling and threatening with a firing squad. Gerber told me that the argument involved a selection that Dr. Capesius refused to carry out.”139 Jurasek remembered Lucas’s politeness toward the prisoner pharmacists as an exception.140 Former prisoners also testified again. Ravensbrück witness Helene Schwesig echoed her earlier praise of Lucas’s courage to refuse selections and risk his life for inmates.141 Cäcilie Neideck repeated that Lucas had soothed and sometimes wept for women in Ravensbrück. Lucas’s refusal to select profoundly ill patients for Uckermark brought Dr. Treite’s response that “such a thing ought to be lined

242   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

up against the wall.” In response, Lucas confirmed that Treite was unfeeling but could not recall Treite calling for his execution.142 Margareta Armbruster, the Catholic nurse, contrasted Lucas with the Ravensbrück doctors Treite and Winkelmann: “Dr. Lucas was always good to us, and we could tell that he worked under pressure. . . . Then suddenly he was gone.”143 Gypsy camp prisoner doctor Władysław Fejkiel testified that Lucas had assisted the prisoner doctors in Birkenau and Mauthausen. Interestingly, Fejkiel also reported favorably on Münch and Wirths, who advocated for him after he was caught aiding an escape. Had Wirths known he had protective witnesses, Fejkiel conjectured, he might not have chosen suicide while awaiting trial.144 Otto Wolken, another prisoner doctor, assumed that the SS doctors carried out no functions at the gas chamber. He maintained that doctors could have requested a transfer to the front.145 Witnesses against Lucas were far less prominent in 1970. Dov Paisikovic, one of the few Sonderkommando workers who escaped execution after his crematorium stint, contradicted Münch and Lingens by insisting that a doctor was always present at the gas chamber. He did not know the names of the doctors but had seen Lucas repeatedly at the gas chamber—and only there—and had recognized him while testifying in October 1964.146 Fellow Sonderkommando prisoner Filip Müller confirmed that doctors were present in the crematoria, although he himself had not seen Lucas. In 1945, though, Erich Kulka (father of Otto Dov Kulka), had told him that he had seen Lucas on the ramp. The elder Kulka had also mentioned Lucas in conjunction with the Theresienstadt family compound, particularly regarding the gassing of its prisoners. Lucas’s lawyer Fritz Steinacker objected that Erich and Otto Dov Kulka had collaborated in 1964 with Müller regarding their testimonies in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.147 Taking issue with Paisikovic’s account were two men rarely in the role of witness: Justice Josef Perseke, clerk of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and Rudolf Aschenauer. Referring to his notes from the time, Perseke reported that during his appearance in October 1964 Dov Paisikovic had pointed at Kaduk, Capesius, Schatz, and Lucas as defendants he had noticed at the crematorium. Paisikovic had not recalled seeing Lucas in the undressing room of the gas chamber, but frequently at the crematorium, and once with Zyklon-B canisters. The conflict was that Paisikovic had attended a court hearing (he sat on the balcony) in 1964 before officially appearing as a witness. Whether the defendants had switched seats between Paisikovic’s appearance as spectator and witness, Perseke could no longer say.148 Rudolf Aschenauer remembered that Paisikovic had identified two defendants based on the seating order depicted in the magazine Revue, whose reporter had accompanied Paisikovic to Auschwitz to dig up a diary.149 But defendants had since changed seats due to arrests. Paisikovic was thus unsure of himself, Aschenauer recalled: “One could not speak of a clear identification.”150 Otto Dov Kulka, who had impressed the court in 1964, declined to testify in 1970, explaining that confronting his Auschwitz past would affect his ability to

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  243

concentrate on his research.151 His psychiatrist wrote that Kulka had been in her care for eight years as a result of late-appearance trauma symptoms such as inability to concentrate, nightmares, and periods of fear. As Kulka’s testimony against Lucas in 1964 had only heightened those symptoms, she advised against a trip to Frankfurt in 1970. Interestingly, Kulka had been respected in 1964 precisely for not displaying the symptoms that compromised testimony from so many other witnesses. One can only speculate whether this late onset of symptoms would have ended up discrediting his appearance as witness in 1970.152 Although not a prosecution witness like Kulka, Dr. Louise le Porz had also changed enough to decline testifying, and she referred the court instead to a letter supporting Lucas that she had written to the Frankfurt prosecutors in 1964.153 According to Sarah Helm, “Loulou” had changed her mind about Lucas a year later: [A]s the trial exposed details of Lucas’s previous crimes, including his selection of Jews for gassing at Auschwitz, his humanity at Ravensbrück looked more like an attempt to save his skin. Nevertheless, Loulou said she didn’t regret speaking up for Lucas; the help he gave to patients in Block 10 was not in dispute. After Lucas was freed, just four years later he pushed his luck by asking Loulou for a character reference so he could recoup his confiscated possessions. She refused: “I said no. That’s enough. This matter of his possessions had nothing to do with me.”154

Ultimately, not a single voice that the court considered valid stood up in court to accuse Lucas. Wolken, Lingens, and Münch functioned as quasi historians without shedding light on Lucas—with the exception of Münch’s offhand comment about Lucas’s interest in sterilization experiments. Paisikovic was discredited by the defense. Predictably, Ravensbrück supporters raved again about Lucas. The only disappointment for Lucas was that the paratrooper veterans who were supposed to remember him and support his fear argument did not, but instead praised his replacement, Dr. Erwin von Helmersen.155 Rather than validate Lucas’s fear for his life, they suggested that he had either misinterpreted or misrepresented his reason for being part of the unit. On the penultimate trial day, Fritz Baader made up for the lack of fear talk by verifying Lucas’s claims about helplessness and fear. As we saw earlier, though, there is reason to expect that Baader’s remarks were not aboveboard since they aligned with Lucas’s claims less spontaneously than Baader indicated. After the testimonies, Frankfurt state attorney Jürgen Hess argued on 1 October 1970 for Lucas’s exoneration on the basis of putative duress.156 The court adjourned in less than an hour, and met for less than two hours the following day.157 After Baader’s brief appearance on 5 October, both Hess and Eggert repeated motions for acquittal, and Lucas expressed hope for a fair verdict.158 On 8 October, after reading the substantial grounds for the verdict, the presiding judge announced the official verdict: “Der Angeklagte wird freigesprochen” (The

244   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

defendant is acquitted).159 Thus, the final week of short hearings had the momentum of acquittal. Hess believed Lucas’s claim of a punitive transfer to the SS paratrooper unit and maintained that Lucas’s transfer to Mauthausen could no longer be determined; it could be determined, however, and Hess was off by a month with regard to Lucas’s flight from Sachsenhausen. Second, Hess cited the support by the prisoner doctors Fejkiel, Bejlin, and Szymański that Lucas treated all patients the same and could not improve conditions because he expected an imminent punitive transfer.160 Third, Hess echoed the Beweisnotstand notion that Lucas could not simultaneously deny and justify the pressure of selecting. Lucas’s fear of punishment by the court in 1965 matched his fear of punishment by Kramer in 1944. Like the 1965 court, Hess doubted Lucas’s claim that other doctors stepped in for his selections but affirmed that without witnesses one had to take the defendant at his word. Hess accepted Lucas’s chameleon-like defensive claims as “unrefuted” (unwiderlegt), the most glaring of which was explaining his transfer from Auschwitz as the result of accusations that he was homosexual, as well as claiming that he was insubordinate toward Wirths and Kramer. Kramer had not, however, surfaced in the version of events furnished for Kügler and Düx. Ultimately Hess grasped Lucas’s narrative better than the defendant himself did, arguing that Lucas’s “will was bent” by Kramer’s threat: “It cannot be excluded that the defendant subjectively did everything in his perspective at the time to remove himself from ramp duty.”161 With such remarks Hess sounded more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor. The court’s verdict on 8 October 1970 features continuities and differences in thought between the two Frankfurt district courts of 1965 and 1970. The 1970 court noted that Lucas’s victimization was unprovable but “on the other hand could not only not be disproved but had a strong degree of probability.”162 Even Lucas’s claim of joining the SS cavalry because he enjoyed riding horses appeared plausible.163 Like Hess, the court generously improved upon Lucas’s image of a pitiable sheep among wolves, tacitly incorporating Aschenauer’s discussion of BGH decisions on duress under orders. Smoothing out Lucas’s own inconsistent answers, the court imagined that Lucas had first objected to and avoided selections until mass transports made Wirths insist on his participation. Objection became avoidance when Lucas found substitutes for selecting seven or eight transports. He then traded avoidance for circumvention, defying the spirit of the order by saving as many Jewish prisoners as possible. In short, he followed BGH procedures for avoiding criminal orders—reasoned objection, avoidance, circumvention—only to be stymied by a pistol-wielding superior. Objectively Lucas aided mass murder, but subjectively he avoided committing a punishable crime. What more could he have done? If the 1965 court had understood Lucas as choosing the route of least resistance, the 1970 court described him as becoming riskier to avoid committing crimes. He could not be expected to endanger his own life by refusing to take

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  245

the lives of others. The 1970 court shielded its protégé twice over. On the one hand, Lucas secured impunity by following the rules for resisting criminal orders. On the other hand, mistaking phantom dangers for real ones secured his defense, because no court could punish him for timidity. Aberration in Lucas’s character came from the pressure he had been forced to endure, and from nothing else. The court’s hermeneutic ignored other possible external influences except legally identifiable ones, excusing this good man’s murderous actions as but a handful of character anomalies. His thousands of Jewish victims remained unnamed and without dimensionality, unlike the Jewish boy whose apple Boger stole before dashing his brains against the wall: this is what it took to really engage the court.164 Accordingly, Lucas really had nothing he had to confess in March 1965, but he did so anyway in a courtroom where the pressure on him reminded him of the compulsion to perform selections twenty years earlier. Despite upholding the appeal granted by the BGH, Frankfurt District Court IV added words of censure. Judges Möller, Baumann, and Ohm refused to compensate Lucas for his time in captivity, citing the “crude immorality” of his actions. Had Lucas been bothered by the SA’s rowdy actions against Jewish professors in 1933, he should not have joined the SS in 1937. Membership meant the possibility of assignment to the camp system and performing selections. Regardless of “legally blameless entanglement” (strafrechtlich schuldlose Verstrickung), his behavior remained morally reprehensible, and to reimburse him with public funds for his prison time offended the spirit of the law.165 The press covered Lucas’s retrial from start to finish. One newspaper noted the court’s understanding that most participants in Nazi crimes were “necessary cogs in the gearbox of the plan for the so-called final solution to the Jewish question.”166 The language of “cogs in the machine” corresponds to the way perpetrators were classified at the time, not just to the legal image of the perpetrator.167 When they read about conscientious people like Lucas who did their duty, newspaper readers could only shake their heads, but atrocities committed by willing thugs deserved their indignation. An article in Der Spiegel by Gerhard Mauz, who had written about the Auschwitz site visit the previous December, bought into Lucas’s fear argument but encouraged civil courage over resignation. “At some point, however, we will have to start talking about fear for one’s own life as a posture that can be overcome whenever inhumanity is demanded.”168 Mauz’s article featured a photograph of Franz and Susanne Lucas leaving the Frankfurt courtroom with smiles of relief. The final letter of Hermann Schlingensiepen to Susanne Lucas more than a year later congratulated her for wearing “the liberated smile of a brave heart that, not to no avail, had suffered alongside the man so close to her.”169 He could not resist reporting that prominent clergy had made progress in persuading the German chancellor to ask the minister-presidents of the federal states to grant the appeals for pardons awaiting their action.

246   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Figure 9.1.  Franz Lucas and his wife Susanne Lucas leaving the courtroom in Frankfurt after his acquittal on 8 October 1970. AP Photo/Mark Goecks. Used by permission.

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  247

A less exuberant response to the verdict came from camp survivor Olga Hartung, who wondered what kind of judges could acquit a man who admitted to killing four hundred (in reality it was four thousand) Hungarian Jews. Why hold such trials if everyone knew the outcome would be acquittal? Hartung and her fellow victims of fascism wanted the chance to forget, instead of having old wounds reopened by a comedy that was like a slap in the face.170 Erika Buchmann was even more ruthless in her castigation of the acquittal. Now that she was aware of his “active participation in the gassing of four thousand men, women, and children,” she was distancing herself from her earlier defense of Lucas. I would have said that as a witness in the trial, had I been summoned to appear. Murder is murder, and someone so heavily implicated as Dr. Lucas does not become an innocent party simply by not having selected in other concentration camps. The fact that Dr. Lucas appealed the extremely mild prison sentence of three years and three months proves that the dead of Auschwitz have not weighed on his conscience, and that he is not prepared to accept even a nominal punishment for the crimes committed. Instead, he is still clinging today to the “duress” in which he claims to have found himself in Auschwitz—even though he admitted in court that he knew that he could not be held to carrying out criminal orders such as mass murder of innocent persons. Courage in the face of death was no prerequisite for refusing selections.171

As Buchmann saw it, Lucas’s appeal had aligned him with the ranks of the mass murderers of Auschwitz, a position the Frankfurt judges affirmed by pronouncing his full rehabilitation. Lucas practiced private medicine until 1983.172 Those years brought occasional charges against Lucas’s activity at Ravensbrück or Sachsenhausen. Whenever asked to comment, he either denied the allegations or claimed not to remember the reference point. Most noteworthy was his claim not to have been acquainted with Mengele. Lucas relied on the history of his own case as his default narrative—on what was already said and recorded, not on what might be a new insight, connection, memory, or desire for honesty. The emerging subtext was that he had suffered enough and was not obliged to reveal anything more about his life in the SA, SS, Waffen-SS, NSDAP, or about anyone else’s life. Charges brought against him from postacquittal statements were dropped by state attorneys before they got very far. This is understandable in cases where he was accused of atrocities at a time when he had not yet arrived at Ravensbrück or had already left the camp, or was accused of such direct treachery against prisoners that it completely canceled out the character image he enjoyed.

248   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Notes 1.  Hans Herbert Knögel to RA, 31 August 1965, BArch N642-161. 2.  RA to SL, 27 September 1965, BArch N642-161. 3.  RA to FL, 5 October 1965, BArch N642-161. 4.  FL to RA, 29 October 1965, BArch N642-161; FL to RA, 15 December 1965, BArch N642-161. 5.  LG/FaM to RA, 14 December 1965, BArch N642-161. 6.  SL to HS, 23 August 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 15. 7.  SL to HS, 12 September 1965, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 16. 8.  SL to HS, 12 September 1965. Along the way, Susanne Lucas had visited a family suggested by Schlingensiepen, noticing among the five children no visible bitterness about the amount of time their father had spent in prison. 9.  SL to RA, 8 April 1965, BArch N642-138; SL to RA, 28 August 1965, BArch N642-161; SL to RA, 16 March and 21 March 1966, BArch N642-161. 10.  SL to RA, 29 September 1965, BArch N642-161; SL to RA, 3 February 1966, BArch N642161; RA to FL, 15 March 1966, BArch N642-161. 11.  SL to RA, 26 April 1966, BArch N642-161. 12.  SL to HS, 8 April 1966, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 9. 13.  SL to RA, 24 June 1966, BArch N642-161; SL to RA, 28 July 1966, BArch N642-161. 14.  SL to RA, 2 December 1965, 16 March, 21 March, 30 March 1966, BArch N642-161. 15.  Evert to FL, 7 February 1966; FL to RA, 14 February 1966; RA to Ärztekammer Bad Segeberg, 11 March 1966; Ärztekammer Bad Segeberg to RA, 16 March 1966; RA to FL, 22 March 1966, BArch N642-161. 16.  RA to OLG/FaM, 2 June 1967, HHStAW 461-37638.168, Bl. 47-48; RA to OLG/FaM, 27 May 1967, HHStAW 461-37638.168, Bl. 44. 17.  LG/FaM to Wilms, 4 February 1966, BArch N642-161. 18.  SL to RA, 25 February 1966, N642-161. 19.  3. Strafkammer LG/FaM to Staatsanwaltschaft LG/FaM, 21 February 1966, FBI/LF. 20.  SL to HS, 25 April 1966, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 18. 21. Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 271–72. 22.  SL to RA, 24 June 1966; RA to FL, 26 December 1965; RA to Hanns Grossmann, 18 June 1966; Gerhard Wiese to RA, 22 June 1966; RA to FL, 25 July 1966, BArch N642-161. 23.  RA to FL, 3 August 1966; RA to SL, 25 July 1966, BArch N642-161. 24.  RA to SL, 7 November 1966, BArch N642-161. 25.  Alexander Hanecke, “Der Richter und sein Geheimnis,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 31 March 2019. See also Ristic, “Hans Hofmeyer.” 26.  Kurt Nelhiebel, “Was nun? Ein Ex-Nazirichter als Vorsitzender im Auschwitz-Prozess,” 4 May 2019, Fritz Bauer Blog, Buxus Stiftung, retrieved 9 January 2023 from https://www.fritz-bauer-forum .de/was-nun-ein-ex-nazirichter-als-vorsitzender-im-auschwitz-prozess/. Interestingly, just as it was communist-affiliated newspapers that carried the news of Lucas’s involvement as SS doctor, so too it was the East German SED (Socialist Unity Party) newspaper Neues Deutschland that accused Hofmeyer of his kangaroo court involvement, which was rejected as communist propaganda. 27.  Nelhiebel. Hofmeyer’s comments came on 20 August: Fortsetzung der mündlichen Urteilsbegründung des Vorsitzenden Richters, 20 August 1965, AP 37,068–69. 28.  Gross and Renz, Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, 1,373. For a list of the original defendants and their charges, along with actual time served, see 1,365–70. 29.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, AP 37,878–79. 30.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,880–83. 31.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,883–84.

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  249 32.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,886–89. 33.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,895. 34.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,890–94. 35.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,896–97. 36.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,899. 37.  Filip Müller and Dov Paisikovic of the Sonderkommando had testified that a doctor had been present during the gassing process and had watched through a peephole. Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,900–901. 38.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,901. 39.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,902–3. 40.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,903–5. 41.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,907–9. 42.  Johann Paul Kremer’s report that many SS men were keen on receiving rations for ramp duty dismayed the court: “The extra portions were more important to these SS men than the lives of thousands of people.” Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,911. 43.  The court cited Rudolf Höss’s assertion that his presence on the ramp was necessary to compel the SS members under his charge to endure the psychological horror. Like most of Höss’s claims, however, this too needs to be taken lightly. 44.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,912. 45.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,913–14. 46.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,914–17. 47.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,917–18. 48.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,918–20. 49.  Kruse, “NS-Prozesse und Restauration,” 134. 50. Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, 403–4. See also Pukrop, “SS-Mediziner,” 23–24. 51.  Kruse, “NS-Prozesse und Restauration,” 109. 52.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, AP 37,921–23. 53.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,923–24. 54.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,924–26. 55.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,927. 56.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,926. 57.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,928. 58. Pendas, Auschwitz Trial, 56–57, 76–79. 59.  Pendas, 120–21. 60.  To be clear, the court should have written five years of prison for all four of the actions reckoned together. Otherwise, the impression is that Lucas could expect twenty years of prison, which exceeded the fifteen-year limit for accomplice to murder. 61.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, AP 37,931. 62.  Urteil im Hauptverfahren, 37,932–34. 63.  FL to RA, 11 November 1966, BArch N642-161. 64.  It is possible that Lucas is referring to facial scars Münch might have sustained from Mensur duels as a student. More simply, a beard might have complicated recognition after the war. Photographs of Münch show no facial scars. 65.  Revisionsbegründung von Verteidiger Aschenauer zu dem Angeklagten Lucas, 17 November 1966, AP 38,872–75. Aschenauer noted that “Raabe proposes to sentence . . . Lucas to life in prison, although in the main hearings [he] had proposed a sentence of twelve years.” RA to LG/FaM, 3 December 1966, BArch N642-161. 66.  RA to LG/FaM, 25 February 1967, HHStAW 461-37638/168. 67.  See SL to RA, 23 May 1966 and 24 June 1966, BArch N642-161.

250   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 68.  Beschluß Oberstaatsanwalt Wiese LG/FaM, 13 March 1967, HHStAW 461-37638/168. 69.  RA to OLG/FaM, 24 April 1967, HHStAW461-37638/168. 70. Seliger, Politische Anwälte, 460–63. See also Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 48–50. 71. Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt, 30. 72. Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 409. 73.  Wildt, 409. 74.  Peter Jochen Winters, “Die Geschichte der Elisabeth E.,” Christ und Welt, 11 June 1965, quoted in Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 409. 75.  Wildt, 536. 76.  SL to HS, 15 April 1967, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 19. 77.  Was the language of ethnic community so ingrained that a theologian failed to notice it? Von Kellenbach discusses lingering language of Volksgemeinschaft in Mark of Cain, 170. 78.  HS, Befürwortung des geplanten Gesuchs um Strafabkürzung für Herrn Dr. med. Franz Bernhard Lucas, 17 April 1967, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 20. 79.  SL to HS, 23 April 1967, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 21. 80.  “A.B.” to RA, 2 May 1967, HHStAW, 461-37368/168. 81.  “H.F.” to RA, 18 April 1967, HHStAW, 461-37368/168. 82.  Pastor H. to RA, 17 April 1967, HHStAW, 461-37368/168. 83.  Priest E. to RA, 18 April 1967, HHStAW, 461-37368/168. 84. SL to RA, 29 April 1967, BArch N642-161; RA to OLG/FaM, 8 May 1967, HHStAW 461-37638/168. 85.  State Attorney Uhse to OLG/FaM, 27 June 1967, HHStA 461-37638/168, 50–52. 86.  State Attorney Uhse. 87.  Rainer Eggert to OLG/FaM, 12 June 1967, HHStA 461-37638/168. 88.  FL to HS, 19 May 1967, 7NL 016-62, Bl. 22. 89.  FL to HS, 3 April 1970, 7NL 016-62, n.p. 90.  RA to OLG/FaM, 4 July 1967, HHStAW 461-37638/168. 91.  Beschluß, OLG/FaM, 14 July 1967, HHStAW 461-37638/168. 92.  Beschluß, LG/FaM, 16 March 1968, HHStAW 461-37638/267-02. 93.  BGH to LG/FaM, 6 November 1968, BArch N642-161. 94.  Rainer Eggert to FL, 14 November 1968, BArch N642-161. 95.  RA to BGH, 16 November 1968, BArch N642-161. 96.  FL to RA, 9 December 1968, BArch 642-161. Aschenauer was possibly skeptical of Lucas’s chances to have his full rights restored. 97.  BGH to RA, 9 December 1968, BArch N642-161. 98.  RA to FL, 10 December 1968; RA to BGH, 10 December 1968, BArch N642-161. 99.  RA, “Revisionsbegründung,” 17 November 1966, AP 38,875. 100.  In legal terms, denial allowed the defendant to avoid testifying against himself while awaiting the results of the court’s efforts to incriminate him or clear his name. See Sickor, Geständnis, 197–98. 101.  Revisionsverfahren Dr. Lucas, AP 39,788; 39,795–97. 102.  Henry Ormond to Jürgen Baumann and Gerhard Wiese, 3 March 1970, FBI/LF. 103.  Christian Raabe in conversation with the author, 12 May 2011, Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main. 104.  Rainer Eggert to LG/FaM, 25 November 1969, FBI/LF. 105.  Presiding Judge Baumann, Urteil des 8.10.1970, AP 39,999–40,010. 106. “Freispruch für KZ-Arzt Lucas. Revisionshandlung endete mit vollem Erfolg für Angeklagten,” Frankfurter Neue Presse, 9 October 1970. 107.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 28 August 1970, 41.

t h e pat h toward acquittal   •  251 108.  Jürgen Hess, “Vermerk,” 3 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, Bl. 57. 109.  Vernehmung Karel Klein, 28 January 1965, AP 28,457–58; “Einlassung der Angeklagten,” 3 May 1965, AP 32,727–28. 110. Gerhard Wiese, “Vermerk,” 2 February 1970, Haftsonderheft betr. Dr. Lucas, HHStAW 461/37638/168. 111.  “Freispruch nach drei Jahren Haft? KZ-Arzt wider Willen kämpft um seine Ehre,” Frankfurter Neue Presse, 21 August 1970. 112.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 11. It is not exactly in Lucas’s favor to have identified so strongly with a paramilitary organization with antidemocratic and antisemitic designs, however. 113.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 41. 114.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 11–12. Lucas had not included this information before, although his SSO records do include the stint in Prague. 115.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 11–12. 116.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 13–14. 117.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 8. 118.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 4. 119.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 12. 120.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 15–24. 121.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 22. 122.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 23. 123.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 23. 124.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 23–24. 125. On Morgen’s role in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, see Wittmann, Beyond Justice, esp. 160–74. 126.  Strafsache Lucas 1970, 28. Morgen thus highlighted the RSHA racial mandate while ignoring the later WVHA mandate from January 1943 onward to use gassing of “unnecessary eaters” as a way to enhance the slightly healthier prisoners for Reich labor. 127.  One newspaper reported Morgen’s claim that Lucas could have refused ramp selections if he portrayed himself as “150 percent Nazi,” at the expense of “saving” prisoners from the gas chamber. “‘Lucas konnte sich drücken’: SS-Zeugen sagten im Auschwitz-Revisionsverfahren aus,” Kieler Nachrichten, 26 August 1970. 128.  Testimony of Konrad Morgen, 25 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 28–29. 129.  Testimony of Hans Wilhelm Münch, 25 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 30–31. 130.  Hans Wilhelm Münch, 31–32. 131.  Jewish Virtual Library, TV Interview with Hans Münch, retrieved on 7 January 2023 from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/tv-interview-with-hans-m-uuml-nch. 132.  Testimony of Hans Wilhelm Münch, 25 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 33. 133.  Hans Wilhelm Münch, 32. 134.  Testimony of Ellen Lingens, 27 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 35. 135.  Ellen Lingens, 36–37. 136.  Testimony of Wilhelm Boger, 1 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 49–51. 137.  Testimony of Bernhard Walter, 17 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 82–83. 138.  Testimony of Karl Höcker, 1 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 53. 139.  Testimony of Kurt Jurasek, 5 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 55. 140.  Kurt Jurasek, 56. 141.  Testimony of Helene Schwesig, 28 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 40. 142.  Testimony of Cäcilie Neideck, 10 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 60–62. 143.  Testimony of Margareta Armbruster, 11 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 70. 144.  Testimony of Aron Fejkiel, 10 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 66–68.

252   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 145.  Testimony of Otto Wolken, 12 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 71–73. 146.  Testimony of Dov Paisikovic, 28 August 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 43–44. 147.  Testimony of Filip Müller, 10 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 62–65. 148.  Testimony of Josef Perseke, 25 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 86–87. 149.  Paul Trunk, “Wiedersehen mit der Hölle,” Revue, Nr. 37, 13 September 1964. 150.  Testimony of Rudolf Aschenauer, 25 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 87–89. 151.  Otto Dov Kulka to LG/FaM, 19 September 1970. Anlage zum Protokoll vom 17.9. 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 92f. 152.  Statement of Dr. med. Bella Wirz-Thannhauser, 11 September 1970, Anlage zum Protokoll vom 17. 9. 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 92g. 153.  Letter of Louise le Porz, 7 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 68, referring to her letter to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 12 September 1964, in BArch N642-140. 154. Helm, Ravensbrück, 645. 155.  Testimonies of Wilhelm Schubert, Gerd Kempner, Hermann Harms, and Josef Seidel, 17 September 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 75–81. 156.  Summation of State Attorney Jürgen Hess, 1 October 1970, Strafsache Lucas 1970, 93. 157.  Jürgen Hess, 95. 158.  Jürgen Hess, 98. 159.  Jürgen Hess, 99. The protocol mistakenly recorded the sixteenth and final hearing day as the seventeenth hearing day. 160.  Summation of Jürgen Hess, 7–9, FBI/LF. 161.  Summation of Jürgen Hess, 22. 162.  Urteil vom 8.10.1970, Strafsache gegen Lucas 1970, LG/FaM, AP 40,000. 163.  Urteil, AP 40,003. 164. Stengel, Die Überlebenden vor Gericht, 328. 165.  Beschluß in der Strafsache gegen Dr. med. Franz Bernhard Lucas, LG/FaM, 8 October 1970, FBI/LF, Bl. 20,887–88. 166.  “Vermeintliche Notstandssituation—aber: ‘objektiv Beihilfe zum Mord,’” Offenbach Post, 9 October 1970. 167.  Paul, “Von Psychopathen,” 24–26. 168.  Gerhard Mauz, “Was hätte er mehr tun können oder müssen?” Der Spiegel 42, 5 October 1970, 139. 169.  HS to SL, 31 January 1972, 7NL016-62, Bl. 23. 170.  Olga Hartung to Staatsanwaltschaft FaM, 18 October 1970, FBI/LF. 171. Nachlaß Erika Buchmann, BArch NY4178-54, Bandzählwerk 0027, Filmzählwerk 0968. Buchmann was actually among the witnesses that Rainer Eggert had petitioned the court on 2 October 1970 to summon. Strafsache Lucas 1970, 94. 172. Eckart, Medizin in der NS-Diktatur, 474.

C onclusion

••• In the introduction to their anthology of recast Nazi identities, David Messenger and Katrin Paehler note: “In the early 1930s, many Germans negotiated their way into Nazism. . . . In the late 1940s, they were negotiating themselves out of it.”1 As the two parts of my book have shown, Franz Lucas belongs squarely within this cohort of Reich-era opportunism and postwar blamelessness. He erased his initial Nazi radicalism with postwar claims that it was insincere, a sham he needed to maintain to get by. News of his Nazi past had no place on the professional vita of a respected gynecologist. Therefore, the second part of this book has dealt explicitly with the explanations he provided when forced to talk, especially in the public trial context. I have weighed those statements against what I discovered in the first half of the book about Lucas’s ideological formation and Nazi service. To protest his denials, I have enlisted accusatory witnesses, journalists, and adjunct prosecutors, especially Christian Raabe. Shielding Lucas from justice were grateful camp survivors; fraternity comrades and gynecology patients; his faithful wife, Susanne; Nazi defenders Rudolf Aschenauer and Rainer Eggert; theologian Hermann Schlingensiepen; physician and former camp doctor Fritz Baader; and journalist Peter Jochen Winters. Their comments are both understandable in the context of defense and reprehensible outside of it—seen from the point of view of those waiting for a sign of acknowledgment. Lucas’s university education coincided with the nazification of the universities, with SA membership, with the privileging of eugenics, and with the implementation of population policy. His interest in ectopic pregnancies took into account the research of peers who were decidedly not neutral. Instead, they linked aberrations to “inferior races,” whose sterilization they declared essential. One must wonder how Lucas reacted to the disappearance of Jewish professors and fellow students. He cannot pretend not to have noticed. Then again, his Catholic fraternity, Saxonia, also had little patience for alleged outsiders to the Volksgemeinschaft. Gynecological practice was the goal of Lucas’s postwar existence. A secure civilian life was so alluring that he deserted the SS and denied his membership

254   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

in order to secure a position in Elmshorn as an assistant gynecologist, escaping denazification (such as it was, especially in Schleswig-Holstein) and any need to prove his past at a time when broken municipalities were willing to overlook proof of qualifications.2 For a long time, he projected his innocence onto bold explanations of medical service during the war. He fabricated accounts for the town of Elmshorn in order to become its director of gynecology in 1954, and for Schmalacker’s investigation of former Sachsenhausen doctors Heinz Baumkötter, Alois Gaberle, and Otto Adam. Lucas took advantage of silence and denial as long as possible. This luxury was attributable in part to Ravensbrück trial testimony that contrasted him to the evil doctors that surrounded him in early 1945. Hidden in Elmshorn from British authorities and grateful survivors, although not under a pseudonym, Lucas could follow newspaper reports of all Allied trials while avoiding a verdict of hanging or life in prison. He served as the absent standard of comparison in the Hamburg trial. But what if he had been found in 1946 and placed in the docket beside fellow doctors Treite and Winkelmann? Would the British court have spared him on the basis of well-intentioned witnesses? How would he have answered the questions posed of the doctors Treite, Winkelmann, Orendi, Rosenthal, and Schiedlausky? Would he have defended eugenic policies of abortion or sterilization against forced laborers and Sinti and Roma, or shrugged his shoulders while attributing them to “orders from Berlin?” When probed by the city of Elmshorn, Lucas’s deception created a breach of trust great enough to sever his position with the city hospital. Had he been innocent, Lucas’s threats of lawsuits for libel, the engagement of his lawyers, and the fierce loyalty of his patients would have safeguarded his professional reputation. As the Frankfurt prosecutors built their case for the Auschwitz trial, Lucas not only denied the charge of selecting deportees on the Birkenau ramp but also denied selections in camp hospitals and barracks or during roll calls to control disease or overcrowding. Because his assignment in Auschwitz-Birkenau put him in charge of the Gypsy and Theresienstadt family camps, it is scarcely surprising that he denied any proximity to their “liquidations.” Lucas knew he could claim a poor memory of events without suffering the humiliation that such an accusation produced for incriminatory witnesses. But he admitted to a poor memory only when confronted with his contradictions, especially in documented form. Otherwise, he flipped back and forth on dates to avoid complicity. Lucas denied knowing almost every name he was asked about during interrogations. He was skilled at describing catastrophic conditions and his helplessness to change them. Increasingly in his defense narrative, he claimed that prisoner doctors, his real colleagues, informed him of atrocities committed by other SS doctors. He himself was out of touch with what went on around him, except for construing a prisoner status for himself. Over time, he also stopped mentioning Mengele and denied any affiliation with him. Most likely, his greatest crimes re-

concl us ion  •  255

mained hidden not only by verbal silence but also by the literal silence of crimes of omission. Passivity, after all, can be interpreted in different ways. It may denote a lack of initiative in committing crimes, which German courts found mitigating. But it may also denote the failure to prevent crimes, and this failure is what Allied courts deemed inexcusable. One way that Nazis spread the blame for their crimes was making sure that all SS doctors at Auschwitz had a chance to become complicit on the Birkenau ramp, for example. The Allies rightly identified the notion of associative guilt in SS membership, although their list of similar culpable organizations was hardly comprehensive. Nevertheless, membership in the SS was a good place to start, and the “Nuremberg defense” of only acting under orders was a lame excuse that was properly rejected out of hand.3 One should recall the smiling and singing depicted in Karl Höcker’s Solahütte excursion photographs, which followed the “hard” blood-bonding work of Birkenau executioners in the 1944 Hungarian campaign. This esprit de corps is manifested in the similarity of their postwar justifications. Helplessness in the face of superior commands was joined by other tropes such as citing the limited resources in the final stage of the war. Predictably, no matter how much they wanted to improve conditions, their own hands were tied.4 Another explanation for lacking agency was having received advice to lie low. Bishop Berning in Osnabrück and Fritz Baader in Nuremberg became the authorities Lucas cited the most. Accordingly, advice to keep his head down and avoid standing out gave Lucas the permission to obey criminal orders to preserve his own life. Presenting himself as a helpless, retreating victim of totalitarianism aligned perfectly with Aschenauer’s advice. The real Nazis were the few demons at the top who terrorized normal, decent German young men. Despite overwhelming evidence against the myth of duress, Lucas insisted that every authority figure he consulted from church, military, and law was a fellow victim of the Nazi state. It is no wonder that Lucas’s confession lacked authenticity. Admittedly, most Nazi confessions lacked it as well; any identifiable remorse rarely included the affected victims and insisted that the inadequacy of earthly justice left divine judgment the only option for addressing severe crimes. Despite Aschenauer’s assurances that his client resolved to come clean, there was no sense that truthful statements and the end of denial would follow on the heels of confession. Upon conceding his involvement in a handful of ramp selections, Lucas no longer felt the pressure to explain what he did on the ramp when he was not selecting. No one took his stories seriously anyway, not even his advocates in the press, such as Peter Jochen Winters, or the retrial prosecutor Jürgen Hess. Confession—more accurately, concession—introduced Josef Kramer, the familiar and sadistic “beast of Belsen,” as Lucas’s greatest detractor, along with Wirths, Sansoni, Ziereis, Heidl, Trommer, Lolling, and all the other chief doctors or camp commandants. Still, it is a mistake to expect truthfulness, let alone acknowledgment of wrong-

256   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

doing, in the wake of a concession. For an “accomplice,” the more pressing need was securing a milder sentence by alleging helplessness or ignorance. It fit Lucas’s narrative to claim that increased recklessness over time signaled ethical progress. At Auschwitz he could not yet overcome his fear of being put on trial for resisting criminal orders. A punitive relocation to Mauthausen resulted from his reluctance to select prisoners, never mind that his first accounts had him transferred because Wirths accused him of homosexuality. The transfers from Mauthausen, Stutthof, and Ravensbrück punished his consistent refusal to select groups of sick prisoners or falsify death certificates. Refusals always led him squarely into skirmishes with camp leadership. The court appeared to agree with the premise that Lucas gradually embraced the path of greater resistance. In 1969, the BGH agreed with Aschenauer’s argument that no path of viable action had been visible in the first place, because Lucas’s examination of the options revealed only the loss of others’ lives if he carried out orders, or the loss of his own life if he refused. Lucas claimed that he became more reckless as his own life mattered less to him. In no other camps did he intend to repeat the Schweinerei of Auschwitz. It may well be the case that some form of character development took place, and not just as a retrospective claim to enhance Lucas’s justifications. There is reason to suppose that Lucas became disillusioned with evolving SS practices that collided with personal hopes. Perhaps passivity and fear did in fact give way to boldness and risk, or perhaps what looked like courage to others became easier and strategic for him with the approach of war’s end, a way to purchase his return ticket to civilian life, as Stefan Baretzki insisted. In my understanding of perpetrators, however, to map such trajectories as redemptive instead of accidental or strategic is almost always a mistake. Instead of accepting the premise of fear turning into boldness, we should imagine the possibility of volatile, inconsistent behavior deriving from internal and external factors the historian may know nothing about. I would argue that Lucas simultaneously rescued and consigned to death; he acted out, on the level of reflex, ingrained hierarchical values that favored one group of prisoners over another, depending on ethnicity, educational and occupational background, camp function, and state of health. Depending on a prisoner’s standing, she experienced Lucas as her menace or her rescuer. On the one hand, Lucas smuggled castor oil and white bread to prisoners, operated on Christmas day, and addressed prisoner doctors with the respectful Sie form. On the other hand, Lucas dutifully carried out sterilizations of Sinti and Roma and consigned thousands of Jews to their deaths. By so doing, he likely avoided opportunities he could have seized to save prisoners without risking the charge of prisoner favoritism. I mention this not simply to echo, on the one hand, Pierre Bourdieu’s suspicion of a personal teleology in which characters make noticeable progress toward ethical behavior, or, on the other hand, Dick de Mildt’s warning not to succumb to the “inner logic” of Nazi biographies, “as if they followed an

concl us ion  •  257

intentional evolutionary pattern through which their embryonic criminal intentions ripened into full blown maturity.”5 Instead, I insist on Lucas’s simultaneous saving and killing in order to maintain a robust boundary between Lucas and unequivocal rescuers. For while Lucas’s regular medical duties might look like saving acts within the SS context of doctoring, they fail to attain the level of supererogatory efforts by rescuer figures in constant danger, such as Polish families hiding Jews from Nazis and antisemitic neighbors in the countryside beyond the electric camp fences.6 Those who benefitted from Lucas’s actions often made him an object of pity, as though he had dropped his guard and required their protection. In addition to mourning his absence at Ravensbrück and fearing the worst when they no longer saw him, they also mobilized to protect him from the justice of the Allies after the war. They portrayed Lucas and the “brown” nurse Gerda Schröder as enemies of the SS and as coconspirators for Operation Bernadotte, for example. The impression Lucas tried to convey was of a lonely benefactor of prisoners, trapped in an SS uniform, lacking friends and comradeship, taking his meals alone, perpetually at odds with more committed Nazis. Arriving at Auschwitz under duress, he protested the death camp’s mission as soon as he understood it. Testimonial enthusiasm was not a constant, however. While they were overwhelmed by Lucas’s altruism in early 1945, the German communist Erika Buchmann and the French doctor Louise le Porz were sickened in 1965 by Lucas’s admission of Birkenau selections in 1944. At the point that their own survival was no longer foremost in their minds, they could condemn his role in determining the fate of other prisoners in other places. For her part, in declining to travel to Frankfurt to testify in 1964, Sylvia Salvesen noted not only that she had been ill, but more fundamentally that she failed to see what Ravensbrück had to do with a trial about Auschwitz: “I have not been to Auschwitz and I don’t even know the name of ‘Mulka’—I have only been to Ravensbrück concentration camp.”7 A similar reaction came from Tadeusz Kowalczyk, who declined a summons to travel to Frankfurt in early 1965 because he had already discharged his duty toward the man who helped him survive. “Even after twenty years, the emotional impact of my experiences in concentration camps is so severe that I try to avoid circumstances that refresh these memories—particularly to see the accused. . . . At Sachsenhausen his help indirectly saved my life. I felt obligated to him for this and despite my tight business schedule and my emotional reaction, I gave testimony in the Hamburg court on his behalf.”8 These reactions reflect the realization that a defendant’s efforts to save lives in one place were not a guarantee of his efforts in every place. My own thinking on Lucas began by affirming Hannah Arendt’s contrast of Lucas to his fellow defendants in the Auschwitz trial. He dressed the part of a fine gentlemen who seemed out of place in the courtroom and especially among

258   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

the other defendants. The inference was that how the defendants behaved in Frankfurt indicated their behavior at Auschwitz. Indeed, contrast as a rhetorical mode is powerful for describing the exception to the norm, especially in the legal arena of pronounceable guilt and innocence. No one remembered Lucas as a raging antisemite. He seemed out of place in the camps. He wanted to learn operating skills and pediatrics from prisoner doctors like Josef Podlaha and Berthold Epstein. Although it is hardly mitigating to say so, his experiments appear to have been limited to sterilization. If he considered prisoners as a convenient means to practice his medical skills, he hid it well. In the Ravensbrück trial, Major Stewart invoked Lucas constantly as the standard of doctoring rejected by Dr. Schiedlausky, Dr. Winkelmann, Dr. Rosenthal, and even Dr. Treite. The immediate postwar focus on extremity of crime may help explain not only why there was no concerted effort to find Lucas either during or after the Ravensbrück trial, but also why he and Karl Höcker were added late to the defendant list of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial indictment. Court arguments, journalists, and historical scholarship have sustained a dualism of sadistic versus humane Nazis. As has been discussed, the journalist Peter Jochen Winters grappled the most with Lucas’s conflict of conscience. Notwithstanding his headlong slide into totalitarianism and inability to admit responsibility, Lucas was still a “white raven” compared with the “army of evil bogeymen” of Kaduk, Klehr, Baretzki, and Boger. Who among the millions of Germans would have acted any differently? Winters simultaneously made Lucas into a figure who stood out from the rest but was just as normal as any newspaper reader. Accordingly, Lucas could be excused for following the hollow advice of the authority figures he consulted.9 Still, Winters must have realized that the resistance that he ascribed to Lucas was at odds with a strategy of self-preservation. This is not to say that they were mutually exclusive in practice, as Lucas may have been a quiet saboteur. Both resisting orders and being compelled to follow orders were convenient selfjustifications, however. The most damage done by Winters was to reinforce Aschenauer’s insistence that Lucas’s weakness and fear stemmed from becoming every bit a victim of SS ruthlessness as the prisoners in the compounds he oversaw. Without realizing it, the argument ran, Lucas became entangled in circumstances as the result of decisions that he had made precisely to help him not stand out, and that included joining the SS because he liked to ride horses. This assertion sounded as convincing as his declaration that he traveled to the ramp to make sure that the doctors who agreed to substitute for him actually showed up. When one considers them long enough, the complaints about entanglement and duress begin to sound the same. Lucas asserted that he had to play along if he was to survive. He was accused of not being involved enough. Advancing this attitude of timidity in court increased the likelihood that his self-serving declarations would sound credible.

concl us ion  •  259

Contrast defines the way Lucas is remembered. The “although” caveat of the court’s judgement expresses that although he sent thousands to their death, he was not as terrible as others—or “if I didn’t do it, someone else would have inflicted far worse damage.” It is a matter of degree, not a difference of kind. That someone as charitable as Emmi Bonhoeffer tried out this argument on the scarred survivor Helen Goldman speaks volumes about the condescending discourse of the vanquished toward the genuinely ravaged. The more examples of perpetrators one includes in a comparison, the more one feels justified to make “although” caveats. Historian Joachim Perels writes: “Except for few exceptions such as the concentration camp physician Dr. Franz Bernhard Lucas, who to a degree preserved humane qualities in dealing with the victims, the members of the SS were completely defined by racist ideology.”10 This comment suggests that freedom from racism was necessary to ever act kindly. Ravensbrück scholar Bernhard Strebel writes: “Only the SS physician Dr. Franz-Bernhard Lucas refused to conduct selections for the gas and was transferred as a result to Sachsenhausen.”11 The need to categorize is understandable, but it reflects secondhand observations and the legal language of the court. Because he was not sadistic, the argument runs, Lucas deserves to be measured differently than the others he served alongside. There is little evidence that he manifested “blood lust” or obvious antisemitism, initiated crimes, made Hitler’s will his own, or zealously carried out the ramp selections to which he was assigned and eventually confessed. In some respects, the conservative estimate of the four thousand victims from Hungarian transports he consigned to the gas chamber seems trapped in a legal caveat about his good intentions, character testimony, and the overwhelming sense that he wanted to be left alone about his past and flee the spotlight in favor of his gynecology practice. A more careful assessment comes from Peter Reichel, who rejects Lucas’s claims and determines that Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses told “half the truth.”12 Comments by the journalist Thorsten Stegemann in 2005 are also on target, in particular that Lucas’s “way of dealing with his own past is symptomatic of the behavior of many other perpetrators who attempted—unfortunately, often with success—to avoid accountability through silence and concealment of facts.”13 But the remorse that the court thought it saw, and the principle of telling the truth, are not automatically the opposite of denial. Lucas’s final statement that he “fought his way to telling the truth to the court” was effective for receiving a shortened sentence, but it furnishes little cause to take his self-serving declarations at face value, most prominently that his transfers had all been punitive. And that shortened sentence of three years and three months was only a third of what Raabe recommended and a tiny fraction of Kügler’s plea for a life sentence. In announcing its verdicts, the Frankfurt district court also used its own rhetoric of compulsion, as though it were helpless in the face of the German criminal code for determining perpetrator and accomplice and had to accept a defendant’s self-serving declarations unless shown persuasive evidence to the contrary. All of

260   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

these are good reasons not to rely on the court as the last and best source for a biography, even though a trial may be the catalyst for beginning one.14 Relatively speaking, the short accomplice sentence is no exception to German legal practice at the time. Absolutely speaking, however, it should never fail to shock us. The temptation to have sympathy with families separated for three or four years in the 1960s is understandable. More important is the need, following Marion Kaplan’s lead, to list the humiliations that Jewish families suffered for far more years in the 1930s, and Elmshorn is no exception. Genocide need not be invoked to make this contrast of community fortunes poignant. Talk of tragic entanglement suggests that Lucas lacked choices. Despite any sympathy that we could muster for Lucas by considering the circumstances of war, we ought to pay more attention to the circumstances he genuinely could control, most notably the causes for entanglement that preceded his service at Auschwitz. The best reason to downplay his victimhood, of course, is that the real victims whose death certificates he signed were faced with far different quandaries. Obviously, the choice to join a group like the SS was something altogether different than a prisoner’s nonchoice to perish alongside loved ones selected for the gas chamber upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lucas had to know, already in the 1930s, the price that was exacted by joining an organization antisemitic to the core. He was intelligent enough to draw his own conclusions by the time he arrived at Auschwitz in late 1943. By the time he stood trial in the 1960s, it was too late to argue that he had followed up his initial fear with increased recklessness. Resorting to the claim of following superior orders out of fear became an almost impenetrable line of defense from which Lucas ultimately benefitted, as shown by his eventual full acquittal. One’s assent, in the view of historian Hans Buchheim, often preceded the events by several years, if we take into account the voluntary membership most of the defendants exercised by joining the SS in the first place. Buchheim explains why individuals without criminal leanings (such as Lucas) did not try harder to avoid carrying out criminal orders. The lack of courage weighed all the heavier, since “1) membership in the SS was voluntary, 2) the applicant had to have at least a general sense of the questionable special nature of the organization, and 3) it was possible at least until the start of the war to opt out of the SS.”15 Culpability arose because of this voluntary element, by which members lent consent to the practices and beliefs of the body.16 Membership meant suspending civil law and rights, moral objections, and strategic considerations in favor of the Führer principle, which claimed to reflect historical necessity. Buchheim maintained that anyone attaining the rank of an SS-Obersturmführer (i.e., Lucas’s rank as “first lieutenant”) had automatically set the stage for individual culpability for crimes. One could not claim that the anti-Jewish policies came as a surprise in the early 1940s; the roots of “Rassenkrieg auf Leben und Tod” (racial war to the death) were there all along.17

concl us ion  •  261

One can sum this up more simply, as Franz Kompisch did in 2015 as presiding judge in the Lüneburg Auschwitz trial against Oskar Gröning. Kompisch took Hans Hofmeyer’s thorough argumentation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in a different direction. Instead of adhering to the strictures of the German penal code with respect to genocide (“our hands are tied”), Kompisch discussed the choices that had been available to Oskar Gröning, addressing him directly and frankly with words that could have been directed at Lucas fifty years earlier. As an educated person, you carried within yourself the experiences of centuries of German culture and history. You weren’t just shaped by twelve years of Nazi rule. Of course, the time was ideologically tinted. Of course, it was indoctrinated. Of course, the Jews were depicted as posing a danger for Germany. But the power of thinking was not turned off in persons. You decided. The war was running successfully for Germany. You wanted to be a part of it. That is a decision. You wanted to be a part of this snappy and dashing troop of the SS. You wanted to wear this uniform.18

This argumentation citing some of the mundane enticements of Nazism is a simple and effective way of moving past claims of duress. True, Obersturmführer Lucas was guilty by membership in an organization known for carrying out horrific crimes against humanity, with even more culpability arising from the choices he made along the way. Stefan Baretzki accused Lucas of not having done more, but the court and press were less interested in crimes of omission. Lucas’s sphere of responsibility extended well beyond ramp selections. He could have done more to spare lives before the Theresienstadt camp liquidation in July 1944, and he could have improved conditions for the thousands of Hungarian women languishing in the Mexiko compound. Another matter is whether Lucas could have done more to escape the place he considered a prison. He claimed, unconvincingly, that he tried. Was this also a matter of choice? Ultimately the argument of being more useful in the camps than at the front does not hold. In this investigation are figures I consider the real heroes because of their disciplined attempts to make criminals take responsibility. In many ways they were troubled by the denials and silence of defendants and SS witnesses with no interest in exposing crimes. In the preinvestigation phase of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Elmshorn chief council member Horst Rosenbusch identified the various ways in which Lucas had damaged the city’s trust. There were the public prosecutors from other jurisdictions—Völker in Itzehoe, Schmalacker in Münster, Schwedersky in Düsseldorf—who pursued leads and made connections. In the trial itself, the survivor witnesses who had the courage to travel to Frankfurt deserve highest praise. Emmi Bonhoeffer and her colleagues in the German Red Cross made the experience of testifying in Frankfurt a bit less horrific. Hermann Langbein and Bernd Naumann left behind an uncanny chronicle. The young adjunct prosecutor Christian Raabe, working in Henry Ormond’s office, challenged

262   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

Lucas’s account of punitive transfer to the SS paratrooping unit and later pressed Lucas to confess. Journalists such as Inge Deutschkron revealed Lucas’s gamble of accompanying the court delegation to Auschwitz as a farce. Adept at reading body language, she wondered how Lucas’s reactions of shame at being identified by witnesses belied his predictable denials of knowing them or his habit of showing up in places that compromised his supposed innocence. It is worth closing this examination of Lucas’s medical career with a statement from his former boss at Sachsenhausen, chief doctor Heinz Baumkötter. Sachsenhausen was Lucas’s final stop before closing out sixteen months of SS medical service in five camps, all of which selected and executed sick and fragile prisoners. In a 1995 video interview with Bodo Michael Baumunk in Münster, Baumkötter recalled how his similarities with Lucas helped him understand him only too well. Baumkötter’s need to be “careful” (what this means is unclear) and Lucas’s extreme introversion gave rise to very few conversations. Lucas not only kept quiet but was also a cunctator: guarded, nervous, reserved, indecisive, and dilatory. “I didn’t want to impinge on his solitude. I thought I knew what was going on inside him—but seen solely from the outside he made a morbid impression. Call it pathological, even. While he went along with things, on the other hand I had the impression that he knew what he was doing and perhaps had the opinion that he could consciously do it in my presence, perhaps even pretend.”19 Baumkötter called him the “super-cautious sick one” but was at a loss to say whether Lucas’s reserved nature stemmed from pronounced psychological or physical factors. At best, and only with Lucas’s assent, a troop doctor might have been able to examine him at the time, but Baumkötter himself did not. He recalled only that Lucas had disappeared prematurely and stayed hidden. Unable to recollect his own reaction, Baumkötter suspected that he had delayed putting out an alert about Lucas’s desertion as a way to give Lucas extra time. He saw Lucas again at his own trial in Münster.20 If we follow Baumkötter’s assessment of Lucas as a cunctator, Lucas may have planned to desert the SS much sooner but kept putting it off. It is at least clear that Baumkötter considered him a Mitläufer, a follower who was conscious of what he was doing. It is also very much in keeping with Christian Raabe’s memory of Lucas. Did he play this game of opportunism in earnest, or only play at it, revealing the right moves and spouting the right phrases? Was his sickliness a psychosomatic manifestation of some internal split? If there is anything at all to the talk of character, I believe that Baumkötter comes closer to describing it with his estimation of Lucas’s ambivalence and sickliness than Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses do with descriptions of Lucas flatly refusing “Auschwitz methods.” My own thinking has returned to the image of the Januskopf (Janus face) in the myth derived from the Roman god of beginnings and endings, doors and thresholds, temporal and spatial transitions. For Friedrich Nietzsche, in the fourth aphorism section of the Gay Science, “Sanctus Januarius” denotes eternal return, the

concl us ion  •  263

cycle of death and rebirth, winter into spring, sickness into health, ice into fire.21 In this reading, Lucas looks forward to the end of the war while looking backward to Auschwitz, which he continually invokes as the disgusting Schweinerei he seeks to avoid. For some he is a savior and for others a messenger of death. He smuggles extra medicine and food for the prisoners who end up speaking on his behalf, acting the way a doctor is supposed to act. He also determines death, pointing toward the impenetrable threshold of the sealed gas chamber, acting the way an SS camp doctor was ordered to act, but tripping over his own shadow, as Wilhelm Boger recalled Johann Schwarzhuber commenting about Lucas. In other words, he is fully human, capable of doing good but following orders he may have disagreed with and knew were wrong. The habit of deception over truthfulness derives from the Januskopf image. Deception had its legal moorings. As the BGH pointed out in 1969, it was Lucas’s right to hold contradictory lines of defense; as the second Frankfurt district court pointed out in 1970, it could not be proven that Lucas knew that refusing ramp selections would not endanger his life. But just as Baretzki was the flawed SS fellow defendant who exposed a superior officer hiding behind a denial of ramp selections, so too Baumkötter, also a committed SS doctor who at the time of his interview considered the Reich years the best years of his life, becomes a welcome balance to the glowing descriptions of Lucas’s exculpatory witnesses.22 After deception has been uncovered enough times, it becomes the interpretive lens through which one judges all statements or protective claims, including seemingly neutral ones. I would thus discourage defining one SS officer’s character solely in contrast to more identifiably sadistic SS officers, or elevating Lucas above the victims on the ramp that he assigned to the gas chamber, regardless of whether he was personally hostile towards them. In the end, we know only that Lucas was afraid. Perhaps he was afraid of Wirths, Kramer, Hartjenstein, Höss, and Mengele at Auschwitz. Perhaps fear of the advancing Russians lay behind his decision to flee Sachsenhausen via GrossKreutz for Elmshorn in April 1945. If he was afraid of SS veterans’ opinions of him as an officer who went absent without leave near the war’s end, then he likely kept to himself after the war. He was afraid of defendants such as Percy Treite testifying against him. Because he was afraid of having his Nazi past discovered, Lucas arranged for the Elmshorn magistrate’s office to threaten with libel anyone who accused him of working in the concentration camp system. He was afraid of losing his medical practice, pension, and other benefits of the medical insurance system. He was afraid of having his reputation tarnished and landing in prison. He was afraid of being operated on in prison for gall stones, even by experienced doctors. Most of all, Lucas was afraid of telling the truth in court and in depositions, and of owning up to his deeds, regardless of how pressured he was to carry them out. The result was his final statement, which contained only a passing regard for the dead. Lucas reserved the adjective “monstrous” not for the crimes of

264   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r

genocide but to describe the order he was given to select Jewish deportees. His final statement rested not with the victims, but with his abetting of murder. He hoped for an end to his misery of entanglement. Our final impression is of a man whose alleged fear of a trial without due process during the war was outdone by a fear of prison twenty years later. Within the grasp of such fear, denial and self-pity were more viable than genuine remorse and assumption of responsibility. Inside the courtroom, justice is a matter of proving guilt and responsibility. According to Micha Brumlik, former director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, it does not involve reconciliation or revenge. Its task is to prevent arbitrariness and guarantee fairness. A fair trial means deciding in favor of the defendant if there is adequate doubt about, or mitigating circumstances surrounding, the alleged crime.23 Outside the courtroom, justice links to working through the past. In Arendt’s words: “To the extent that there is a mastery of the past, it consists in the retelling of that which came to pass; but even this retelling, which forms history, solves no problems and quells no suffering, it extends ultimately no mastery over anything. Yet it does spur on continued retelling, so long as the sense of the happening stays alive.”24 This is an eloquent call for the urgency of historical scholarship. Time does not heal all wounds, of course. When Thomas Walther, representing fifteen joint plaintiffs, was asked whether it was really necessary to bring the Nazi Oskar Gröning to justice seven decades after the crime, he responded that “Mord verjährt nicht” (murder has no statute of limitations). Those who were murdered and those who survived had a right, he thought, to see justice created in a German court.25 As far as the plaintiffs were concerned, justice was not about the extent of punishment. Depending on health, though, even a man in his nineties, suggested the Auschwitz survivor Max Eisen, “could be sentenced to two hundred hours of community service and, for example, talk in schools about his time in Auschwitz.”26 To the extent that it suggests the alternative of community service as a path to reform (as Lucas’s final statement worded it, a path to life), Eisen’s suggestion has currency. Twenty years after the Wehrmacht Exhibition, and with Stolpersteine (stumbling stone memorials to deportees) ubiquitous on cobblestone streets, Germany clings to fragile victories of working through its past. This climate is by no means uniform, but it is noticeably better since the millennial turn, as the Jewish director of the Einstein Forum, Susan Neiman, argues repeatedly in Learning from the Germans. In this climate, Katharina von Kellenbach has reinvigorated the prophetic voices of Barbara Just-Dahlmann and others from the early 1960s who watched major, impenitent Nazi criminals slide through German courts unscathed, due to attitudes and laws that turned out to be revocable after all. Von Kellenbach reminds us that a penitentiary is a not just a place for serving time, but that it also plays directly on penance, which imagines a perpetrator’s ability “to recognize the suffering of victims and to bear the truthful memory of his or her violation.”27 She suggests that while penance cannot replace pun-

concl us ion  •  265

ishment, it nevertheless “breaks the isolation of denial and delusion and draws perpetrators out of their self-centered denials into moral agency,” offering “more than passive acceptance of either punishment or forgiveness” and proposing that “individuals and communities become active bearers of culpability.”28 Thus penance allows the perpetrator an opportunity to show courage in bearing up under its weight, to the extent that he failed to summon that courage to resist crime earlier.29 Readiness to bear the burden also rejects the silence of solidarity unwilling to judge the crimes of another, invoked supposedly to avoid self-righteousness. Furthermore, penance contradicts the stance of church representatives who long appealed to empathy (read: suppression of memory) for the long-touted “struggle of conscience” of the “sinner” unfortunate enough to have been caught.30 Such rhetoric of tragedy and entanglement, maintained so long by the journalist Winters and the lawyer Aschenauer, is to be rejected. The thesis behind my book is that historical truth is in the telling. The least one can do is avoid resignation, correct wrong impressions and misinformation, insist on culpability where it is obvious, and take advantage of sources unavailable or of little interest to German courts decades ago. Lifting Franz Bernhard Lucas from the dimension of celebrated exceptionalism into a more complicated zone of self-absorbed opportunism makes him neither devil nor angel but fully, if two-facedly, human. The most challenging aspect—trying to read the lips of a tight-lipped introvert to determine his motives—has also resulted, I hope, in findings that help deepen the ongoing work of justice. With so many deaths and damages for which to atone, even the “white raven” Lucas stands as a warning against the uncourageous malaise of forgetting just to get on with things.

Notes 1.  Messenger and Paehler, Nazi Past, 6. 2.  See Pukrop, “Heinrich Rindfleisch.” 3. Knittel, Historical Uncanny, 153. 4.  The jurist Lorenz Schulz echoes the regret of Alfred Streim, former head of the Central Office, over not charging Nazi criminals with crimes of omission: “Then we could have brought many more perpetrators to court.” See Schulz, “Kollektive Erinnerung,” 23. 5.  De Mildt, Name of the People, 44. 6.  See the examples provided by Jones in Moral Responsibility, Gross in Neighbors, and Tec in When Light Pierced. An excellent article on the complexity of rescue is Frydel, “Judenjagd.” 7.  Sylvia Salvesen to Staatsanwalt Wiese, LG/FaM, 28 October 1964, BArch N642-139. 8.  Tadeusz Kowalczyk to Gerhard Wiese, 1 February 1965, BArch N642-148. 9.  Peter Jochen Winters, “Die Gewissensnot des Doktor Lucas,” Christ und Welt, 20 November 1964. 10.  Perels, “Strafsache gegen Mulka und andere,” 131. 11.  Strebel, “Gaskammer im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” 285. 12. Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 168–69.

266   •   t h e t r i al o f a n a z i d o c t o r 13.  Thorsten Stegemann, “Ein stiller Mann aus Osnabrück,” Tageszeitung, 4 January 2005. 14.  De Mildt, Name of the People, 40–48. 15. Naumann, Auschwitz: Bericht, 159. 16.  Buchheim, “Befehl und Gehorsam,” 275. 17.  Buchheim, 276. 18. Huth, Die letzten Zeugen, 242–43. Kompisch’s remarks to Gröning came on 15 July 2015. 19. Video Interview of 19 February 1995 of Bodo Michael Baumunk with Heinz (Heinrich) Baumkötter, Sachsenhausen Gedenkstätte, R 63/38/1, P 4 Baumkötter, Heinrich/2. 20.  Interview with Baumkötter. 21.  On the function of the Sanctus Januarius book of aphorisms in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science, see Lampert, What a Philosopher Is, esp. 205–18. 22.  Taube, “Der Großvater in Auschwitz,” 187. 23.  Brumlik, “Zum Geleit,” 50. 24.  Quoted in Wojak, “Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß,” 52. 25.  Per Hinrichs, “Der Richter, der zum Nazijäger wurde,” Die Welt, 27 March 2015. 26. Hinrichs. 27.  Von Kellenbach, Mark of Cain, 187. 28.  Von Kellenbach, 188. 29.  Von Kellenbach, 189–90. 30.  Von Kellenbach, 190–91.

B ibliography

••• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Arendes, Cord. “Teilnehmende Beobachter: Prozessberichterstatter als Vermittler von NS-Täterbildern.” In Wamhof, Das Gericht als Tribunal, oder: Wie der NS-Vergangenheit der Prozess gemacht wurde, 78–97. Arendt, Hannah. “A Note on the Trial.” Introduction to Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt, translated by Jean Steinberg, vii–xxx. New York: Frederick. A. Praeger, 1966. ———. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964). In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 17–48. New York: Schocken, 2003. Assmann, Aleida. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 261–73. Baer, Ulrich, ed. “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”: Erinnerungskultur nach der Shoah. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Baeyer, Walter von. “Psychiatrisches Gutachten über Fragen der Glaubwürdigkeit und Erinnerungszuverlässigkeit bei der Beurteilung von Zeugenaussagen rassisch Verfolgter, die weit zurückliegenden Extrembelastungen ausgesetzt waren.” Nervenarzt 41 (1970): 83–89. Bartov, Omer. Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Bauer, Fritz. “Ideal oder Realkonkurrenz bei nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen?” Juristenzeitung 22, no. 20 (1967): 625–28. Bästlein, Klaus. “Eine andere Heimatgeschichte—Schleswig-Holstein im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Heesch, Heilkunst in unheilvoller Zeit, 139–66. Bedford, Sybille. “The Worst that Ever Happened: The Trial of Twenty-Two Former Staff of Auschwitz Concentration Camp” (1966). In As it Was: Pleasures, Landscapes, and Justice, by Sybille Bedford, 218–60. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990. Beischl, Konrad. Dr. med. Eduard Wirths und seine Tätigkeit als SS-Standortarzt im KL-Auschwitz. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Berghahn, Volker, and Simone Lässig, eds. Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Biess, Frank. Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Binding, Karl, and Alfred Hoche. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens: Ihr Maß und ihre Form. Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920.

268  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Bláha, František. “Mediziner auf schiefer Ebene.” Undated Manuscript. Archive of Gedenkstätte Dachau. Blanke, Thomas, and Stefan Beier, eds. Die juristische Aufarbeitung des Unrechts-Staats. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998. Bloxham, Donald. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “Milestones and Mythologies. The Impact of Nuremberg.” In Heberer and Matthäus, Atrocities on Trial, 263–82. Bock, Gisela. Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik. Berlin: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985. Bonhoeffer, Emmi. Zeugen im Auschwitz-Prozeß: Begegnungen und Gedanken. Wuppertal-Barmen: Johannes Kiefel, 1965. Boozer, Jack S. “Children of Hippocrates: Doctors in Nazi Germany.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450 (July 1980): 83–97. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Biographical Illusion.” In Identity: A Reader, edited by Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman, 297–303. London: Sage Publications, 2000. Brink, Cornelia. “Das Auschwitz-Album vor Gericht.” In Wojak, Auschwitz-Prozess 4 Ks 2/63, 148–59. Bromberger, Barbara, and Hans Mausbach. “Die Tätigkeit von Ärzten in der SS und in Konzentrationslagern.” In Medizin, Faschismus und Widerstand. Drei Beiträge, edited by Barbara Bromberger, Hans Mausbach, and Klaus-Dieter Thomann, 186–262. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse, 1990. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Brumlik, Micha. “Zum Geleit: Ein Appell an die Politik.” In Wojak, Auschwitz-Prozess 4 Ks 2/63, 48–51. Brunner, José. “Medikalisierte Zeugenschaft: Trauma, Institutionen, Nachträglichkeit.” In Sabrow and Frei, Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, 93–110. Bruttmann, Tal, Stefan Hördler, and Christoph Kreutzmüller. Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens. Ein Album aus Auschwitz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2019. Buchheim, Hans. “Befehl und Gehorsam.” In Anatomie des SS-Staates, by Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, Hans Adolf Jacobsen, and Helmut Krausnick, 215–322. Munich: DTV, 2005. Buchmann, Erika. Die Frauen von Ravensbrück. East Berlin: Kongress, 1959. Burkhardt, Nina. Rückblende: NS-Prozesse und mediale Repräsentation der Vergangenheit in Belgien und den Niederlanden. Münster: Waxmann, 2009. Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001. Busch, Christophe, Stefan Hördler, and Robert Jan van Pelt, eds. Das Höcker-Album: Auschwitz durch die Linse der SS. Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern, 2016. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Christmann, Bernd. Hanns Eisele: Biographische Nachforschungen zu einem SS-Arzt. Marburg: Tectum, 2011. Czarnowski, Gabriele. “Vom ‘reichen Material  .  .  . einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsstätte’: Zum Problem missbräuchlicher medizinischer Praktiken an der Grazer Universitäts-Frauenklinik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus.” In NS-Wissenschaft als Vernichtungsinstrument. Rassenhygiene, Zwangssterilisation, Menschenversuche und NS-Euthanasie in der Steiermark, edited by Wolfgang Freidl and Werner Sauer, 225–73. Vienna: Facultas, 2004. Czech, Danuta. Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1939–1945. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989. ———. “Kalendarium der wichtigsten Ereignisse aus der Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz-Birkeau.” In Fritz Bauer Institut, Auschwitz-Prozess, 597–838.

bibl iograp hy   •  269 Czech, Herwig. “Nazi Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the Racial State Paradigm.” In Pendas, Roseman, and Wetzell, Beyond the Racial State, 213–38. Danckwortt, Barbara. “Sinti und Roma als Häftlinge im KZ Ravensbrück.” In Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland, edited by KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, 81–98. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2012. Danker, Uwe, and Astrid Schwabe. Schleswig-Holstein und der Nationalsozialismus. Neumünster: Wachholz, 2006. De Mildt, Dick. In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. Berlin: Springer, 1996. Deutscher Bundestag Presse- und Informationszentrum. Zur Verjährung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen: Dokumentation der parlamentarischen Bewältigung des Problems, 1960–1979. Teil 1. Bonn: Deutscher Bundestag Presse- und Informationszentrum, 1980. Deutschkron, Inge. Mein Leben nach dem Überleben. Munich: DTV, 2000. ———. Auschwitz war nur ein Wort: Berichte über den Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess 1963–1965. Berlin: Metropol, 2018. Dirks, Christian. “Selekteure als Lebensretter: Die Verteidigungsstrategie des Rechtsanwalts Dr. Hans Laternser.” In Wojak, “Gerichtstag halten,” 163–92. ———. Die Verbrechen der anderen: Auschwitz und der Auschwitz-Prozess der DDR. Das Verfahren gegen den KZ-Arzt Dr. Horst Fischer. Göttingen: Schöningh, 2005. Dixon, Jeremy. Commanders of Auschwitz: The SS Officers Who Ran the Largest Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940–1945. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2005. Douglas, Lawrence. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Dross, Fritz, Wolfgang Frobenius, Andreas Thum, and Alexander Bastian, eds. “‘Ausführer und Vollstrecker des Gesetzeswillens’—die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie im Nationalsozialismus.” In Geburtshilfe und Frauenheilkunde 76, no. S 01 (December 2016): S1–S158. Earl, Hilary. “Scales of Justice: History, Testimony, and the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg.” In Weiss and Diefenforf, Lessons and Legacies, 325–51. ———. “Criminal Biographies and Biographies of Criminals: Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and Perpetrator ‘Routes to Crime’ Using Biographical Method.” In Berghahn and Lässig, Biography Between Structure and Agency, 162–81. ———. The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “‘Bad Nazis and other Germans’: The Fate of SS Einsatzgruppen Commander Martin Sandberger in Postwar Germany.” In Messenger and Paehler, A Nazi Past, 57–82. Ebbinghaus, Angelika, and Klaus Dörner, eds. Vernichten und Heilen: Der Nürnberger Ärzteprozeß und seine Folgen. Berlin: Aufbau, 2001. Eckart, Wolfgang Uwe. Medizin in der NS-Dikatur: Ideologie, Praxis, Folgen. Cologne: Böhlau, 2012. Elling, Hanna, and Ursula Krause-Schmitt. “Die Ravensbrück-Prozesse vor dem britischen Militärgericht.” Informationen: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift des Studienkreises Deutscher Widerstand, 1933–1945 vol. 35, no. 19 (October 1976): 13–37. Ericksen, Robert P., and Susannah Heschel. Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. Erpel, Simone. Zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung: Das Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück in der letzten Kriegsphase. Berlin: Metropol, 2005. Eschebach, Insa. “‘Ermittlungskomplex Ravensbrück’: Das Konzentrationslager in den Akten des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit.” In Forschungspunkt Ravensbrück: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Frauen-Konzentrationslagers, edited by Sigrid Jacobeit und Grit Philipp, 94–114. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997.

270  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Eschebach, Insa, and Astrid Ley, eds. Geschlecht und “Rasse” in der NS-Medizin. Berlin: Metropol, 2012. Finkelmeier, Conrad. Die braune Apokalypse. Weimar: Aufbau, 1947. Ferdinand, Ursula. “Die Medizinische Fakultät der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster von der Gründung bis 1939.” In Thamer, Droste, and Happ, Universität Münster, 413–530. Fest, Joachim. Begegnungen: Über nahe und ferne Freunde. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004. Feyen, Martin. “‘Wie die Juden?’ Verfolgte ‘Zigeuner’ zwischen Bürokratie und Symbolpolitik.” In Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung. Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel, edited by Norbert Frei, José Brunner, and Constantin Goschler, 323–55. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. Fings, Karola. “Die ‘gutachtlichen Äußerungen’ der rassenhygienischen Forschungsstelle und ihr Einfluß auf die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerpolitik.” In Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Michael Zimmermann, 425–59. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007. ———. “A ‘Wannsee Conference’ on the Extermination of the Gypsies? New Research Findings Regarding 15 January 1943 and the Auschwitz Decree.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27, no. 3 (2013): 174–94. ———. Sinti und Roma: Geschichte einer Minderheit. Munich: Beck, 2016. Fitzel, Tomas, “Eine Zeugin im Nürnberger Prozeß.” Ueberschär, Nationalismus vor Gericht, 60–67. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1999. Fogelman, Eva. “The Rescuer Self.” In The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, 663–77. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Frei, Norbert. Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit. Munich: Beck, 1996; repr., Munich: DTV, 2003. Frei, Norbert, and Sybille Steinbacher, eds. Beschweigen und Bekennen: Die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. Frei, Norbert, José Brunner, and Constantin Goschler, eds. Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung: Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. Freund, John, ed. After Those Fifty Years: Memoirs of the Birkenau Boys. Toronto: J. Freund, 1992. Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Friedlander, Saul. Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Friedrich, Jörg. Die kalte Amnestie: NS-Täter in der Bundesrepublik. Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2007. Fritz Bauer Institut Frankfurt am Main and State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, eds. Der AuschwitzProzess: Tonbandmitschnitte, Protokolle, Dokumente. DVD-ROM. Berlin: Directmedia/Zeno.org 007, 2007. Frydel, Tomasz. “Judenjagd: Reassessing the Roles of Ordinary Poles as Perpetrators in the Holocaust.” In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence: Actions, Motivations and Dynamics, edited by Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 187–203. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Füllberg-Stolberg, Claus, Martina Jung, Renate Riebe, and Martina Scheitenberger, eds. Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994. Fulbrook, Mary. “Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi, or Crucial Clue?” In Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, edited by Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, 15–35. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Funkenberg, Merle. Zeugenbetreuung von Holocaust-Überlebenden und Widerstandskämpfern bei NSProzessen (1964–1985): Zeitgeschichtlicher Hintergrund und emotionales Erleben. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2016. “Gerda Schröder: Eine Melbergerin als Krankenschwester im Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, 1944–1945.” (Auszüge aus dem Buch ‘Tilgi-men glem ikke’ der Norwegerin Sylvia Sal-

bibl iograp hy   •  271 vesen, Oslo 1947, mit einem Vorwort von Lieselotte Niemann und Heinz Schröder). In “Erinnern heißt Hoffen: Lebensschicksale Löhner und Bad Oeynhausener Bürgerinnen und Bürger.” Beiträge zur Heimatkunde der Städte Löhne und Bad Oeynhausen 18 (2002): 63–119. Gerlach, Christian. The Extermination of the European Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Godau-Schüttke, Klaus-Detlev. Die Heyde/Sawade-Affäre: Wie Juristen und Mediziner den NS-Euthansieprofessor Heyde nach 1945 deckten und straflos blieben. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010. Goltermann, Svenja. “Kausalitätsfragen: Psychisches Leid und psychiatrisches Wissen in der Entschädigung.” In Frei, Brunner, and Goschler, Praxis der Wiedergutmachung, 427–51. Goschler, Constantin. Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Grabher, Michael. Irmfried Eberl: “Euthanasie”-Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2006. Grabner, Sigrid, and Hendrik Roder, eds. Emmi Bonhoeffer: Essay, Gespräch, Erinnerung. Berlin: Lukas Verlag für Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte, 2004. Grabowska, Janina. “K.L. Stutthof: Ein historischer Abriß.” In Stutthof: Ein Konzentrationslager vor den Toren Danzigs, edited by Hermann Kuhn and translated by Leon Lendzion, 8–94. Bremen: Ed. Temmen, 1995. Granzow, Joachim, and Siegfried Suckut, eds. Die Löwengrube: Als Arzt in DDR-Haftanstalten Mitte der fünfziger Jahre. Ein Erlebnisbericht. Berlin: Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, 2006. Retrieved 20 December 2022 from https://www .stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de/assets/bstu/de/Publikationen/E_Granzow_Loewengrube_Suckut.pdf. Greenberg, Irving. “Theology after the Shoah: The Transformation of the Core Paradigm.” Modern Judaism 26, no. 3 (October 2006): 213–39. Greve, Michael. “Täter oder Gehilfen? Zum strafrechtlichen Umgang mit NS-Gewaltverbrechern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” In “Bestien” und “Befehlsempfänger”: Frauen und Männer in NS-Prozessen nach 1945, edited by Ulrike Weckel und Edgar Wolfrum, 194–221. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. Grosch, Helmut. “Der Kieler Gynäkologe Carl Clauberg und die Bevölkerungspolitik des Nationalsozialismus.” In Heesch, Heilkunst in unheilvoller Zeit, 85–118. Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Gross, Raphael. “Der Holocaust in primärer Erinnerung und historischer Forschung: Zur aktuellen Diskussion um die ‘Zeugenschaft.’” In Beschweigen und Bekennen: Die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust, edited by Norbert Frei and Sybille Steinbacher, 127–36. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. ———. Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2012. Gross, Raphael, and Werner Renz, eds. Der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965): Eine Quellenedition. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013. Grot, Elzbieta. “Indirekte Extermination.” In Stutthof: Das Konzentrationslager, edited by Donald Steyer and translated by Rita Malcher, 197–98. Gdansk: Wydawn “Marpress,” 1996. Gründel, Ernst Günther. Die Sendung der jungen Generation: Versuch einer umfassenden revolutionären Sinndeutung der Krise. Munich: Beck, 1932. Guth, Karin. Z 3105: Der Sinto Walter Winter überlebt den Holocaust. Hamburg: VSA, 2009. Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Härtel, Christina. “Karl Bonhoeffer als Gutachter in Zwangssterilisationsverfahren.” In Karl Bonhoeffer—ein Nervenarzt: Vorträge zum 60. Todestag, edited by Dag Moskopp and Dorothea Jäkel, 67–85. Berlin: Wichern, 2009. Hahn, Judith. Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt: Drei Karrieren im Sanitätsdienst der SS. Münster: Klemm and Oelschläger, 2015.

272  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Harms, Ingo. “Medizinische Verbrechen und die Entnazifizierung der Ärzte im land Oldenburg.” In Forschungen zur Medizin im Nationalsozialismus: Vorgeschichte—Verbrechen—Nachwirkungen, edited by Alfred Fleßner, Uta George, Ingo Harms, and Rolf Keller, 78–111. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Harten, Hans-Christian. Himmlers Lehrer: Weltanschauliche Schulung in der SS, 1933–1945. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014. Hax, Iris. “Sterilisierung und Kastration von Häftlingen des KZ Sachsenhausen.” In Medizin im Nationalsozialismus und das System der Konzentrationslager, edited by Judith Hahn, Silvija Kavcic, and Christoph Kopke, 66–90. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse, 2005. Hayes, Peter. Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hayse, Michael R. Recasting West German Elites: Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse Between Nazism and Democracy, 1945–1955. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Heberer, Patricia, and Jürgen Matthäus, eds. Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Heer, Hannes. Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 2005. Heesch, Eckhard, ed. Heilkunst in unheilvoller Zeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse, 1993. Heger, Wanda. Jeden Freitag vor dem Tor: Der Bericht der Frau, die im Deutschland der Jahre 1942–1945 vielen skandinavischen Häftlingen in Konzentrationslagern das Leben gerettet und die Rettungsaktion des Grafen Bernadotte ermöglicht hat. Translated by Claudia Meyenburg. Munich: Schneekluth, 1989. Heiber, Helmut. Universität unterm Hakenkreuz. Teil 2, Bd. 1, Die Kapitulation der Hohen Schulen: Das Jahr 1933 und seine Themen. Munich: Saur, 1994. Heitkötter, Birthe. Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie im Nationalsozialismus: Peter Esch und die Frauenklinik der Universität Münster von 1925 bis 1950. Münster: Aschendorff, 2013. Helm, Sara. Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Herbert, Ulrich “Extermination Policy: New Answers and Questions about the History of the ‘Holocaust’ in German Historiography.” In National Socialist Extermination Policies. Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, edited by Ulrich Herbert, 1–52. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. ———. Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989. Bonn: Dietz, 2001. Herzog, Dagmar. “The Obscenity of Objectivity: Post-Holocaust Anti-Semitism and the InventionDiscovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” In Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept, edited by Nitzan Lebovic and Andreas Killen, 128–155. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Heuß, Herbert. “Der Fall Pery Broad 1959–1993.” In “Schonung für die Mörder”: Die justizielle Behandlung der NS-Völkermordverbrechen und ihre Bedeutung für die Gesellschaft und die Rechtsstruktur in Deutschland—Das Beispiel der Sinti und Roma, edited by Herbert Heuß and Arnold Roßberg, 143–81. Heidelberg: Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2015. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Hoedeman, Paul. Hitler or Hippocrates: Medical Experiments and Euthanasia in the Third Reich. Translated by Ralph de Rijke. Sussex: The Book Guild Ltd., 1991. Höppner, Reinhard, and Joachim Perels, eds. Das verdrängte Erbe der Bekennenden Kirche. Stuttgart: Radius, 2012. Hördler, Stefan. Ordnung und Inferno: Das KZ-System im letzten Kriegsjahr. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015.

bibl iograp hy   •  273 ———. “Gesichter der Gewalt—SS-Netzwerke, Personalpolitik und Massenmord in Auschwitz.” In Busch, Hördler, and Van Pelt, Höcker-Album, 110–51. Hörster-Philipps, Ulrike, and Bernward Vieten. “Die Westfälische-Wilhelmsuniversität beim Übergang zum Faschismus: Zum Verhältnis von Politik und Wissenschaft, 1929–1935.” In 200 Jahre zwischen Dom und Schloß: Ein Lesebuch zur Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Westfälischen WilhelmsUniversität Münster, edited by Lothar Kurz, 77–103. Münster: L. Kurz, 1980. Höss, Rudolf. Death Dealer: Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Edited by Steven Paskuly. Translated by Andrew Pollinger. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996. Höss, Rudolf, Pery Broad, and Johann Paul Kremer. KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS. Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1994. Hohmann, Joachim. “‘Persilscheine’ für den Schreibtischtäter: Das Beispiel des NS-Kriminalbiologen Dr. Dr. Robert Ritter.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 19, no. 4 (72) (1994): 42–59. Hopfer, Ines. “Die Spur führt nach Graz: Auf der Suche nach den sterblichen Überresten eines NS-Opfers.” Mauthausen Jahresbericht 2008: 48–57. Horn, Sabine. “‘. . . jetzt aber zu einem Thema, das uns in dieser Woche alle beschäftigt.’ Die westdeutsche Fernsehberichterstattung über den Auschwitz-Prozeß (1963-1965) und den Düsseldorfer Majdanek-Prozeß (1975-1981)—ein Vergleich.” 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 17, no. 2 (2002): 13–43. Huber, Barbara. Der Regensburger SS-Zahnarzt Dr. Willy Frank. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. Huth, Peter, ed., in cooperation with Philipp Heinemann, Kai Feldhaus, Laura Gehrmann, Torsten Hasse, Anne Losensky, Axel Sturm, and Anja Wieberneit. Die letzten Zeugen: Der AuschwitzProzess von Lüneburg 2015. Eine Dokumentation. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015. Jäger, Herbert. Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Gewaltkriminalität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1982. Jardim, Tomaz. The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Jasch, Hans-Christian, and Wolf Kaiser. Der Holocaust vor deutschen Gerichten: Amnestieren, Verdrängen, Bestrafen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2017. Jaspers, Karl. Die Schuldfrage [1946] / Für Völkermord gibt es keine Verjährung. Munich: Piper, 1979. Jones, David H. Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Junk, Peter, and Martina Sellmeyer. Stationen auf dem Weg nach Auschwitz: Entrechtung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung. Juden in Osnabrück, 1900–1945. Ein Gedenkbuch. Osnabrück: Rasch, 1989. Just-Dahlmann, Barbara, and Helmut Just. Die Gehilfen: NS-Verbrechen und die Justiz nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988. Kaienburg, Hermann. Der Militär- und Wirtschaftskomplex der SS im KZ-Standort SachsenhausenOranienburg: Schnittpunkt von KZ-System, Waffen-SS und Judenmord. Berlin: Metropol, 2015. ———. Das Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen, 1936–1945: Zentrallager des KZ-Systems. Berlin: Metropol, 2021. Kampling, Rainer. “Religiöse Motivation der Täter? Annäherungen an eine Fiktion des Entschuldigungsmythos.” In Kramer, NS-Täter, 243–51. Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kárný, Miroslav. “Das Theresienstädter Familienlager (BIIb) in Birkenau (September 1943–Juli 1944).” Hefte von Auschwitz 20 (1997): 133–237. Kaul, Friedrich Karl. Ärzte in Auschwitz. East Berlin: Volk und Gesundheit, 1968. Keren, Nili. “The Family Camp.” In Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp, 428–40.

274  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Kernbauer, Alois. “Das Ende der freien Wissenschaft: Die Auswirkungen der NS-Herrschaft auf die Struktur der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität Graz.” In Medizin und Nationalsozialismus in der Steiermark, edited by Wolfgang Freidl, 27–57. Innsbruck: Studien, 2001. Krell, Robert and Marc I. Sherman, eds. Medical and Psychological Effects of Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors. London: Routledge, 1997. Kretzer, Anette. NS-Täterschaft und Geschlecht: Der erste britische Ravensbrück-Prozess 1946/47 in Hamburg. Berlin: Metropol, 2009. Klee, Ernst. Persilscheine und falsche Pässe: Wie die Kirchen den Nazis halfen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1991. ———. Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001. ———. Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich: Karrieren vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001. ———. Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2003. ———. Auschwitz: Täter, Gehilfen, Opfer und was aus ihnen wurde. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2013. Kleene, Heinz. Der Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus in einer Kleinstadt: Das Beispiel des ehemaligen Bürgermeisters und späteren Stadtdirektors Dr. Hans Kraneburg aus Meppen. Münster: Universitätsund Landesbibliothek Münster, 2018. Kleihues, Alexandra. “Der Auschwitz-Prozess im DDR-Fernsehen: Aus Anlass einer Rezension von Uwe Johnson.” Johnson-Jahrbuch 14 (2007): 101–44. Klemp, Stefan. KZ-Arzt Aribert Heim: Die Geschichte einer Fahndung. Münster and Berlin: Prospero, 2010. Knellessen, Dagi. “Momentaufnahmen der Erinnerung: Juristische Zeugenschaft im ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess—Ein Interviewprojekt.” In Zeugenschaft des Holocaust: Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung, edited by Michael Elm and Gottfried Kößler, 116–38. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007. Knittel, Susanne C. The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kogon, Eugen. Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1961. Komitee der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, ed. Damals in Sachsenhausen: Solidarität und Widerstand im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. Berlin: VEB, 1970. Kramer, Helgard. “SS-Mediziner in Auschwitz und ihre Repräsentation im ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess: Dr. Hans Münch und Standortarzt Dr. Eduard Wirths.” In Gesetzliches Unrecht: Rassistisches Recht im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Micha Brumlik et al., 209–40. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005. ———. “Tätertypologien.” In Kramer, NS-Täter, 253–309. ———, ed. NS-Täter aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006. Kranebitter, Andreas. “Aribert Heim, Lagerarzt in KZ Mauthausen, im Spiegel der Dokumente.” KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen Memorial-Jahrbuch 2008: 86–99. Kröner, Hans-Peter. “‘Die Fakultät hat in politischen schwierigen Situationen Charakter bewiesen’: Der ‘Lehrstuhl für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene’ und die Berufung Otmar Freiherr von Verschuers in Münster.” In Thamer, Droste, and Happ, Universität Münster, 993–1027. Kruse, Falko. “NS-Prozesse und Restauration: Zur justiziellen Verfolgung von NS-Gewaltverbrechen in der Bundesrepublik.” Kritische Justiz 11, no. 2 (1978): 109–34. ———. “Zweierlei Maß für NS-Täter? Über die Tendenz schichtenspezifischer Privilegierungen in Urteilen gegen nationalsozialistische Gewaltverbrecher.” Kritische Justiz 11, no. 3 (1978): 236–53.

bibl iograp hy   •  275 Krokowski, Heike. Die Last der Vergangenheit: Auswirkungen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung auf deutsche Sinti. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001. Kubica, Helena. “The Crimes of Josef Mengele.” In Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp, 317–37. ———. “Children and Youths at KL Auschwitz.” In Auschwitz: Nazi Death Camp, edited by Franciszek Piper and Teresa Swiebocka, translated by Douglas Selvage, 123–39. Oswiecim: AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum, 1996. Kubica, Helena, and Setkiewicz, Piotr. “The Last Stage of the Functioning of the Zigeunerlager in the Birkenau Camp (May–August 144).” Memoria 10 (July 2018). Retrieved on 20 December 2022 from https://view.joomag.com/memoria-en-no-10-july-2018/0531301001532506629. Kühl, Stefan. Ordinary Organizations: Why Normal Men Carried Out the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Books, 2016. Kühne, Thomas. “Der nationalsozialistische Vernichtungskrieg und die ‘ganz normalen’ Deutschen. Teil 1: Forschungsprobleme und Forschungstendenzen der Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 580–662. ———. Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Kulka, Otto Dov. Landschaft der Metropole des Todes: Auschwitz und die Grenzen der Erinnerung und der Vorstellungskraft. Munich: DVA, 2013. Kulka, Erich, and Ota Kraus. Die Todesfabrik. East Berlin: Kongress, 1958. Kulka, Erich. “Photographs as Evidence in the Frankfurt Court.” Yad Vashem Bulletin 17 (1965): 56–58. Kunzmann, Adolf, and Siegfried Milius. Fallschirmjäger der Waffen-SS im Bild. Osnabrück: Munin, 1986. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001. Lampert, Laurence. What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Lang, Hans-Joachim. Die Frauen von Block 10: Medizinische Versuche in Auschwitz. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2011. Langbein, Hermann. Im Namen des deutschen Volkes: Zwischenbilanz der Prozesse wegen nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen. Vienna: Europa, 1963. ———. Der Auschwitz-Prozeß: Eine Dokumentation. 2 vols. Vienna: Europa, 1965; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1995. ———. Menschen in Auschwitz. Frankfurt/Berlin/Vienna: Ullstein, 1980. ———. “Ich habe keine Angst gehabt.” In Wojak, Im Labyrinth der Schuld, 285–96. ———. Die Stärkeren: Bericht aus Auschwitz und anderen Konzentrationslagern. Vienna: Ephelant, 2008. Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Lasik, Aleksander. “Die Personalbesetzung des Gesundheitsdienstes der SS im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau in den Jahren 1940–1945.” Hefte von Auschwitz 20 (1997): 290–368. Lässig, Simone. “Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography. Introduction.” In Berghahn and Lässig, Biography between Structure and Agency, 1–26. Laternser, Hans. Die andere Seite im Auschwitz-Prozeß 1963/65: Reden eines Verteidigers. Stuttgart: Seewald, 1966. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Lewy, Guenter. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ley, Astrid. “Kollaboration mit der SS zum Wohle von Patienten? Das Dilemma der Häftlingsärzte in den Konzentrationslagern.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 61 no. 2 (2013): 123–39.

276  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

———. Zwangssterilisation und Ärzteschaft: Hintergründe und Ziele ärztlichen Handelns 1934–1945. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lichtenegger, Gerald. “Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Nachgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus an der Universität Graz.” In Grenzfeste deutscher Wissenschaft: Über Faschismus und Vergangenheitsbewältigung an der Universität Graz, edited by Steirische Gesellschaft für Kulturkritik, 48–71. Graz: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1985. Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Lippman, Matthew. “War Crimes Prosecutions of Nazi Health Professionals and the Contemporary Protection of Human Rights.” Thurgood Marshall Law Review 21 no. 11 (1995–1996): 11–76. Longerich, Peter. Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung. Munich: Piper, 1998. ———. Heinrich Himmler: Biographie. Munich: Pantheon, 2010. Lower, Wendy. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Lucas, Franz Bernhard. “Symptomatologie, Diagnose und Therapie der Extrauteringravidität.” Medical dissertation. Danzig Medical Academy, 1942. Lüdtke, Alf. “Der Bann der Wörter: ‘Todesfabriken.’ Vom Reden über den NS-Völkermord—das auch ein Verschweigen ist.” WerkstattGeschichte 13 (1996): 5–18. MacLean, French. The Camp Men: The SS Officers Who Ran the Nazi Concentration Camp System. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1998. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Margalit, Gilad. “The Justice System of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.” In The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt, 181–204. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Marsálek, Hans. Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen. Vienna: Steidl, 1995. Martin, Dunja. “Die Funktion des Krankenreviers in NS-Konzentrationslagern am Beispiel des Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück.” Master’s thesis. University of Hannover, 1994. ———. “Menschenversuche im Krankenrevier des KZ Ravensbrück.” In Füllberg-Stolberg, Jung, Riebe, and Scheitenberger, Frauen in Konzentrationslagern, 99–112. Messenger, David, and Katrin Paehler, eds. A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Miquel, Marc von. Ahnden oder amnestieren? Westdeutsche Justiz und Vergangenheitspolitik in den sechziger Jahren. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Mohamed, Saira. “Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity.” Columbia Law Review 115 (2015): 1157–1216. Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Morsch, Günter. “Oranienburg—Sachsenhausen, Sachsenhausen—Oranienburg.” In Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, edited by Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann, 111–34. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2002. ———. Sachsenhausen: “The Concentration Camp by the ‘Reich’ Capital”: Formation and Development. Berlin: Metropol, 2016. ———, and Astrid Ley, eds. Medizin und Verbrechen: Das Krankenrevier des KZ Sachsenhausen 1936– 1945. Berlin: Metropol, 2007. ———, and Astrid Ley, eds. Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936–1945: Events and Developments. Berlin: Metropol, 2011. ———, Bertrand Perz, and Astrid Ley, eds. Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas: Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung. Berlin: Metropol, 2011.

bibl iograp hy   •  277 Müller, Hilde Dorothee. “Die Erkennung und Behandlung der ektopischen Schwangerschaft an der Danziger Frauenklinik 1930 bis 1934.” Medical dissertation, Berlin/Charlottenburg, 1936. Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1979. Müller-Hill, Benno. “Selektion: Die Wissenschaft von der biologischen Auslese des Menschen durch Menschen.” In Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik in der NS-Zeit, edited by Norbert Frei, 137–55. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991. Naujoks, Harry. Mein Leben im KZ Sachsenhausen 1936–1942: Erinnerungen des ehemaligen Lagerältesten. Berlin: Dietz, 1987. Naumann, Bernd. Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt. Translated by Jean Steinberg. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966. ———. Auschwitz: Bericht über die Strafsache Mulka u. a. vor dem Schwurgericht Frankfurt. Berlin: Philo, 2004. Nehmer, Bettina. “Täter als Gehilfen? Ahndung der Einsatzgruppenverbrechen.” In Blanke and Beier, Juristische Aufarbeitung, 635–68. Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Neitzel, Sönke, and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012. Niederland, William. Folgen der Verfolgung. Das Überlebenden-Syndrom—Seelenmord. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. Orth, Karin. Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Eine politische Organisationsanalyse. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999. ———. Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien. Munich: DTV, 2004. Paldiel, Mordecai. Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Panayi, Panikos. “The Persecution of German Romanies: The Case of Osnabrück, 1933–46.” Patterns of Prejudice 37 no. 4 (2003): 377–99. ———. Life and Death in a German Town: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War II and Beyond. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. Paul, Gerhard. Landunter: Schleswig-Holstein und das Hakenkreuz. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2001. ———. “Von Psychopathen, Technokraten des Terrors und ‘ganz gewöhnlichen’ Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung.” In Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, edited by Gerhard Paul, 13-90. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Paul, Gerhard, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, eds. Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004. Pendas, Devin. “The Historiography of Horror: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and the German Historical Imagination.” In Weiss and Diefendorf, Lessons and Legacies, 209–30. ———. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “Testimony.” In Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History, edited by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann, 226–42. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2009. Pendas, Devin, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzell, eds. Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Perels, Joachim. “Die Strafsache gegen Mulka und andere: 4 Ks 2/63—Juristische Grundlagen.” In Wojak, Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63, 124–47. Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: 1930–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

278  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Philipp, Grit. Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück, 1939–1945. Berlin: Metropol, 1999. ———. Erika Buchmann (1902–1971): Kommunistin, Politikerin, KZ-Überlebende. Berlin: Metropol, 2013. Piper, Franciszek. Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz: Aufgrund der Quellen und der Erträge der Forschung 1945 bis 1990. Oswiecim: Staatliches Museum, 1993. Plato, Alice von. “Vom Zeugen zum Zeitzeugen: Die Zeugen der Anklage im ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965).” In Wojak, “Gerichtstag halten,” 193–215. Podlaha, Josef. “Surgery and Medical Care of the Prisoners in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.” In Medical Science Abused: German Medical Science as Practised in Concentration Camps and in the So-Called Protectorate. Reported by Czechoslowak Doctors, 58–75. Prague: Orbis, 1946. Pöppinghege, Rainer. “‘Ein herrliches Sommersemester 1933!’ Die Gleichschaltung der Studentenschaft in Münster.” Westfälische Zeitschrift 145 (1995): 195–217. ———. “Studentische Repräsentationsorgane 1920 bis 1960.” In Thamer, Droste, and Happ, Universität Münster, 193–224. Pohl, Dieter. “Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen.” Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte 45 no. 1 (January 1997): 1–48. Pohl, Rolf. “Gewalt und Grausamkeit: Sozialpsychologische Anmerkungen zur NS-Täterforschung.” In NS-Täter in der deutschen Gesellschaft, edited by Joachim Perels and Rolf Pohl, 69–117. Hannover: Offizin, 2002. Pross, Christian. Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pukrop, Marco. “Dr. med. Heinrich Rindfleisch: Eine Lagerarztkarierre im KZ Majdanek.” In KZVerbrechen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager und ihrer Erinnerung, edited by Wojciech Lenarczyk, Andreas Mix, Johannes Schwarz, Veronika Springmann, 33–51. Berlin: Metropol, 2007. ———. “SS-Mediziner zwischen Lagerdienst und Fronteinsatz: Die personelle Besetzung der Medizinischen Abteilung im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen 1936–1945.” Ph.D. dissertation. University of Hannover, 2015. Rademacher, Michael. Die Kreisleiter der NSDAP im Gau Weser-Ems. Marburg: Tectum, 2005. Recker, Klemens-August. “Wem wollt ihr glauben?” Bischof Berning im Dritten Reich. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998. Reichel, Peter. Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur in Politik und Justiz. Munich: Beck, 2001. Renz, Werner. “Der erste Frankfurter Prozeß: Völkermord als Strafsache.” 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 15 no. 2 (2000): 11–48. ———. “Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß: Zwei Vorgeschichten.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 50 no. 7 (July 2002): 622–41. ———. “Auschwitz vor Gericht: Zum 40. Jahrestag des ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses,” Hefte von Auschwitz 24 (2009): 191–299. ———. “Anmerkungen zum Tonbandmittschnitt im 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess” (September 2013). Tonbandmittschnitte des Auschwitz-Prozesses (1963–1965). Fritz Bauer Institut. Retrieved 30 December 2022 from https://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/materialien/T_03_Der_Ton bandmitschnitt_des_Auschwitz-Prozesses/. Renz, Werner, and Friedrich-Martin Balzer, eds. Das Urteil im Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963– 1965). Bonn: Paul-Rugenstein, 2004. Rettl, Lisa, and Peter Pirker. “Ich war mit Freuden dabei”: Der KZ-Arzt Sigbert Ramsauer. Eine österreichische Geschichte. Vienna: Milena Verlag, 2014. Richter, Timm. “Das Verhältnis der Universität Münster zum Militär.” In Thamer, Droste, and Happ, Universität Münster, 61–81.

bibl iograp hy   •  279 Riechert, Hansjörg. Im Schatten von Auschwitz: Die nationalsozialistische Sterilisationspolitik gegenüber Sinti und Roma. Münster/New York: Waxmann, 1995. Ristic, Matias. “Hans Hofmeyer—Widersprüche eines Richters ‘von Format’ oder: ein Blick auf den Auschwitz-Prozess-Vorsitzenden im Lichte bislang unberücksichtigter Rechtsprechung.” Kritische Justiz 53, no. 1 (2020): 98–113. Roseman, Mark. “Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas, and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective.” In Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History, edited by Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, Hanna Schissler, 83–103. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. ———. “Holocaust Perpetrators in Victims’ Eyes.” In Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies, edited by Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, 81–100. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. “The Lives of Others—Amid the Deaths of Others—Biographical Approaches to Nazi Perpetrators.” Journal of Genocidal Research 15, no. 4 (2013): 443–61. Rückerl, Adalbert. Die Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, 1945–1978: Eine Dokumentation. Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1979. Rüter, Christian Frederic, and D. W. de Mildt. Die westdeutschen Strafverfahren wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945–1977. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998. ———, eds. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945–1999. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Sabrow, Martin. “Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten.” In Sabrow and Frei, Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, 13–32. Sabrow, Martin, and Norbert Frei, eds. Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Salvesen, Sylvia. Forgive—But Do Not Forget. Translated by Evelyn Ramsden. London: Hutchinson, 1958. Saupe, Achim. “Zur Kritik des Zeugen in der Konstitutionsphase der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft.” In Sabrow and Frei, Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945, 71–92. Schäfer, Silke. “Zum Selbstverständnis von Frauen im Konzentrationslager: Das Lager Ravensbrück.” Ph.D. dissertation. Technische Universität Berlin, 2002. Scharsach, Hans-Henning. Die Ärzte der Nazis. Vienna: Orac, 2000. Schikorra, Christa. Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung: “Asoziale” Häftlinge im Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin: Metropol, 2001. Schmidt, Sibylle. Zeugenschaft: Ethische und politische Dimensionen. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2009. Schmidt, Sibylle, Sybille Krämer, Ramon Voges, eds. Politik der Zeugenschaft: Zur Kritik einer Wissenspraxis. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Schmidt, Ulf. “‘The Scars of Ravensbrück’: Medical Experiments and British War Crimes Policy, 1945–1950.” In Heberer and Matthäus, Atrocities on Trial, 123–57. ———. Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor. Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Schmuhl, Hans-Walter. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries. Berlin: Springer, 2008. ———. “Nürnberger Ärzteprozesse und ‘Euthanasie’-Prozesse.” In Medizin und Nationalsozialismus: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung, edited by Robert Jütte, Wolfgang U. Eckart, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, and Winfried Süß, 267–82. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011. Schulz, Lorenz. “Kollektive Erinnerung und strafrechtliche Verantwortung.” In Bialystok in Bielefeld: Nationalsozialistische Verbrechen vor dem Landgericht Bielefeld, 1958 bis 1967, edited by Freia Anders, Hauke-Hendrik Kutscher, and Katrin Stoll, 18–53. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2003. Schwarz, Gudrun. Eine Frau an seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der SS-Sippengemeinschaft. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997.

280  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Seliger, Hubert. Politische Anwälte? Die Verteidiger der Nürnberger Prozesse. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016. Setkiewicz, Piotr, ed. The Private Lives of the Auschwitz SS. Translated by William Brand. Oswiecim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2017. Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. ———. “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide.” History and Memory 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 141–75. Sickor, Jens. Das Geständnis. Heidelberg: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Siegert, Toni. “Das Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg: Ein Lager für sogenannte Asoziale und Kriminelle.” In Bayern in der NS-Zeit, edited by Martin Broszat, 429–94. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979. Sigel, Robert. Im Interesse der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, 1945–1948. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992. Sofsky, Wolfgang. Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzentrationslager. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993. Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Steinbach, Peter. “Der Nürnberger Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher.” In Ueberschär, Nationalismus vor Gericht, 32–44. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000. Steinbacher, Sybille. “‘Protokoll vor der Schwarzen Wand’: Die Ortsbesichtigung des Frankfurter Schwurgerichts in Auschwitz.” In Wojak, “Gerichtstag halten,” 61–89. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001. ———. “Die Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1940– 1945.” In Gross and Renz, Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, 17–54. Stengel, Katharina. Hermann Langbein: Ein Auschwitz-Überlebender in den erinnerungspolitischen Konflikten der Nachkriegszeit. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012. ———. Die Überlebenden vor Gericht: Auschwitz-Häftlinge als Zeugen in NS-Prozessen (1950–1976). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2022. Strebel, Bernhard. Das KZ Ravensbrück: Geschichte eines Lagerkomplexes. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003. ———. “Die Gaskammer im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück Anfang 1945.” In Morsch, Perz, and Ley, Neue Studien, 277–87. Berlin: Metropol, 2010. Szymański, Tadeusz, Danuta Szymańska, and Tadeusz Śnieszko. “Das ‘Spital’ im Zigeuner-Familienlager in Auschwitz-Birkenau.” Auschwitz-Hefte. Bd. 1, Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift Przeglad Lekarski über historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz, edited by Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, translated by Jochen August et al., 199–207. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1987. Taube, Tilman. “Der Großvater in Auschwitz—Zur Geschichte einer Fotoserie im Höcker-Album.” In Busch, Hördler, and Van Pelt, Höcker-Album, 172–87. Tec, Nechama. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Thamer, Hans-Ulrich, Daniel Droste, und Sabine Happ, eds. Die Universität Münster im Nationalsozialismus: Kontinuitäten und Brüche zwischen 1920 und 1960. Veröffentlichungen der Universitätsarchiven, vol. 5. Münster: Aschendorff, 2012. Tillion, Germaine. Ravensbrück. Geneva: Editions Famot, 1976. Tobin, Patrick, “Crossroads at Ulm: Postwar West Germany and the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando Trial.” Ph.D. dissertation. University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2013. Ueberschär, Gerd R., ed. Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht: Die allierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten, 1943–1952. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000. ———. “Sowjetische Prozesse gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene 1943–1952.” In Ueberschär, Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht, 240–61.

bibl iograp hy   •  281 Venema, Derk, and Alex Jettinghoff, “A Biographical Approach in Holocaust Research.” Review of The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference, edited by Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller, translated by Charlotte Kreutzmüller-Hughes and Jane Paulick (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). In Journal of Perpetrator Research 2.1 (2018): 151–54. Vieten, Bernward. Medizinstudenten in Münster: Universität, Studentenschaft und Medizin 1905 bis 1945. Cologne: Pahl Rugenstein, 1982. Völklein, Ulrich. Josef Mengele: Der Arzt von Auschwitz. Göttingen: Steidl, 2000. ———. Dr. med. Eduard Wirths: Ein Arzt in Auschwitz. Eine Quellenedition. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2005. ———. Der “Märchenprinz” Eduard Wirths: Vom Mitläufer zum Widerstand. Als SS-Arzt im Vernichtungslager Auschwitz. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2006. Vollnhals, Clemens. Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung 1945-1949: Die Last der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 1989. Von Kellenbach, Katharina. “Schuld und Vergebung: Zur deutschen Praxis christlicher Versöhnung.” In Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945, edited by Björn Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck, 227–312. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006. ———. The Mark of Cain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Wagner, Jens-Christian. “Sinti und Roma als Häftlinge im KZ Mittelbau-Dora.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland. Vol. 14, Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma im Nationalsozialismus (2012): 99–107. Wagner, Julia. “The Truth about Auschwitz: Prosecuting Auschwitz Crimes with the Help of Survivor Testimony.” German History 28 no. 3 (2010): 343–57. Wamhof, Georg. “Gerichtskultur und NS-Vergangenheit: Performativität—Narrativität—Medialität.” In Wamhof, 9–37. ———, ed. Das Gericht als Tribunal, oder: Wie der NS-Vergangenheit der Prozess gemacht wurde. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009. Wegener, Bernd. Hitlers politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS, 1933–1945. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982. Weigel, Sigrid. “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage: Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von identity politics, juristischem und historiographischen Diskurs.” In Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft (Jahrbuch des Einstein Forums, 1999), 111–36. Berlin: Akademie, 2000. Wein, Dorothee. “Das Krankenrevier im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen in seiner Funktion als Vorführobjekt.” In Medizin im Nationalsozialismus und das System der Konzentrationslager, edited by Judith Hahn, Silvija Kavcic, and Christoph Kopke, 46–65. Frankfurt am Main: Mabuse, 2005. Weindling, Paul. “Die Opfer von Humanexperimenten im Nationalsozialismus: Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes.” In Geschlecht und “Rasse” in der NS Medizin, edited by Insa Eschebach and Astrid Ley, 81–99. Berlin: Metropol, 2012. Weinke, Annette. Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt gegen sich selbst: Die Geschichte der Zentralen Stelle Ludwigsburg, 1958-2008. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. Weinzierl, Erika. “Hermann Langbein—Zeitzeuge in Wort und Schrift.” In Engagierte Demokraten: Vergangenheitspolitik in kritischer Absicht, edited by Claudia Fröhlich and Michael Kohlstruck, 224– 36. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfschiff, 1999. Weisbrodt, Bernd, ed. Rechtsradikalismus in der politischen Kultur der Nachkriegszeit: Die verzögerte Normalisierung in Niedersachsen. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1995. Weiss, Theodore Zev, and Jeffry Diefendorf, eds. Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004.

282  

B IB LIO G R A PHY

Weiss-Rüthel, Arnold. Nacht und Nebel: Ein Sachsenhausenbuch. Potsdam-Berlin: VVN-Verlag, 1949. Welzer, Harald. Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007. Werle, Gerhard, and Thomas Wandres. Auschwitz vor Gericht. Völkermord und bundesdeutsche Strafjustiz: Mit einer Dokumentation des Auschwitz-Urteils. Munich: Beck, 1995. Wette, Wolfram, ed. Retter in Uniform: Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2002. Wetzell, Richard. “Eugenics, Racial Science, and Nazi Biopolitics: Was there a Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit of Science?” In Pendas, Roseman, and Wetzell, Beyond the Racial State, 147–75. Wickert, Christl. “Insel der ‘Politischen.’ Fallstudie: Häftlingseinsatz im Krankenrevier des Männerlagers Ravensbrück.” In “. . . unmöglich, diesen Schrecken aufzuhalten.” Die medizinische Versorgung durch Häftlinge in Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück, edited by Ramona Saavedra Santis and Christl Wickert, 107–15. Berlin: Metropol, 2017. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Translated by Tom Lampert. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2009. Wilke, Karsten. Die “Hilfgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit” (HIAG) 1950-1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011. Williams, Timothy. “Agency, Responsibility, and Culpability: The Complexity of Roles and SelfRepresentations of Perpetrators.” Journal of Perpetrator Research 2, no. 1 (2018): 39–64. ———. The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Wisely, Andrew. “War against ‘Internal Enemies’: Dr. Franz Lucas’s Sterilization of Sinti and Roma in Ravensbrück Men’s Camp in January 1945.” Central European History 52 (2019): 650–71. ———. “Renewed Trauma: Abraham de la Penha’s Testimony against Dr. Franz Lucas in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial.” In Recognizing the Past in the Present: New Studies on Medicine before, during, and after the Holocaust, edited by Sabine Hildebrandt, Miriam Offer, and Michael Grodin, 241–56. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. ———. “Confession that Isn’t: The Fear Claims of Dr. Franz Lucas Between Accusation and Acquittal in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1964–65).” Holocaust Studies 26 no. 4 (2020): 484–509. ———. “From Humiliation to Humanity: Reconciling Helen Goldman’s Testimony with the Forensic Strictures of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial.” S:I.M.O.N. (Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation) 9, no. 1 (2021): 4–35. Witt, Manfred. “Karl Wilhelm Jötten und das Hygiene-Institut 1926 bis 1945: Biopolitik im Kontext von Universität, Stadt und Land.” In Thamer, Droste, and Happ, Universität Münster, 953–92. Wittke, Stefan. “Teilexkulpation von KZ-Tätern?” In Blanke and Beier, Juristische Aufarbeitung, 547–94. Wittmann, Rebecca. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Wojak, Irmtrud. “Herrschaft der Sachverständigen? Zum ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß.” Kritische Justiz 32, no. 4 (1999): 605–16. ———. “Der erste Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß und die ‘Bewältigung’ der NS-Vergangenheit.” In Wojak, Auschwitz-Prozess 4 Ks 2/63, 52–70. ———, ed. “Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst  .  .  .”: Geschichte und Wirkung des ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001. ———, ed. Im Labyrinth der Schuld: Täter—Opfer—Ankläger. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003. ———, ed. Auschwitz-Prozeß 4 Ks 2/63 Frankfurt am Main. Ausstellungskatalog. Cologne: Snoeck, 2004.

bibl iograp hy   •  283 Young, James E. “Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness.” In Witness & Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, edited by Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, 275–83. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Zimmermann, Michael. Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage.” Hamburg: Christians, 1996. Zinner, Hedda. Ravensbrücker Ballade: Schauspiel in fünf Akten. Berlin: Henschel, 1961.

I ndex

abortion, 46, 56–58, 64, 76, 108, 115, 122–23, 254 Adam, Otto, 17, 25, 135–37, 254 Adenauer, Konrad, 17, 228 Allers, Dietrich, 236 Ambros, Otto, 203 antisemitism, 12, 22, 24, 31–33, 46, 48, 59, 75, 230, 257–60 Arendt, Hannah, 1–2, 6, 11, 13, 24, 28, 165, 170, 194, 257, 264 Lucas as exceptional figure, 28 “banality of evil”, 1 Armbruster, Margareta, 108–9, 111–12, 185, 228, 242 “Aryan”, 24, 47, 51–52, 57, 86, 122, 128n11 Aschenauer, Gertrud, 25, 40n109 Aschenauer, Rudolf, 8, 12, 17–20, 24–25, 36, 47, 64, 72, 74, 88, 97, 114, 163, 167–68, 172–73, 184, 188n70–71, 190–91n153, 194–99, 201–3, 206–11, 213–14, 221–24, 229, 231–36, 241–42, 244, 249n96, 253, 255–56, 258, 265 audio recordings, 7, 29, 40n134, 168, 202–3 Auschwitz I, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13–17, 19–20, 24–25, 27–32, 34–36, 45, 51, 60–62, 69–74, 76–78, 80–90, 95, 98–99, 101, 104–8, 111, 118, 135–37, 147, 149, 154–59, 161–63, 165–66, 170–75, 177–84, 186, 197–203, 206–8, 211–15, 224–28, 230– 31, 236, 238–39, 240–45, 247, 255–58, 260, 262–64 court visit to, 29, 36, 179–83, 192n204, 192n223, 214, 262 Auschwitz–Birkenau (Auschwitz II), 1–2, 4, 6–7, 11, 15–16, 24, 26–30, 35, 60–61, 69–70, 73–78, 80, 82–83, 85–86, 90, 97–98, 105–7, 110–12, 118, 135, 137, 139, 150, 158, 160–62, 164, 166, 168, 171–76, 178–82, 184–86, 194–98, 201–

2, 207, 225–29, 236, 238–42, 254–55, 257, 260 Baader, Fritz, 59–60, 62–64, 68n111–12, 72– 73, 136, 222, 231, 238, 243, 253, 255 Babiuch, Alfreda, 85 Backhouse, Colonel, 15 Bacon, Yehuda, 186 Bad Segeberg, 146, 149, 151, 222 Baer, Richard, 72, 81, 226, 241 Barcz, Wojciech, 162, 212 Baretzki, Stefan, 7, 36, 78–80, 82, 87, 93n70, 104, 156, 162, 164, 176, 183–84, 194– 97, 199–200, 204, 212, 215, 225, 236, 256, 258, 261, 263 Bartsch, Charlotte, 158, 231 Bassett, Harry, 166, 168 Bästlein, Klaus, 140 Bauer, Fritz, 25, 28–30, 138, 147, 156–58, 161, 224, 264 Baumann, Werner, 236, 245 Baumkötter, Heinz, 9, 16–17, 20, 25, 31, 35, 38n54, 98, 135–39, 231, 254, 262–63 Baumunk, Bodo Michael, 262 Bedford, Sybille, 7 Bednarek, Emil, 79 Bejlin, Aron, 73–74, 206, 228, 244 Benecke, Eric–Emil, 50 Benecke, Wilhelm, 50 Bergen–Belsen trial, 15, 212, 225 Bernadotte, Count Folke, 123 Berning, Wilhelm (Bishop of Osnabrück), 11–12, 46–47, 72, 184, 238, 255 Best, Werner, 158, 203 Biess, Frank, 206 Binding, Karl, 55 Birkenau. See Auschwitz–Birkenau Bischoff, Karl, 187n21 Blechhammer, 7, 229

inde x  •  285 Bloxham, Donald, 113 Blutkitt (blood bond), 33 Bock, Gisela, 55–56 Boger, Wilhelm, 19, 29, 78–79, 156, 162, 184, 197–99, 215, 226, 230, 241, 245, 258, 263 Böhmichen, Karl, 34, 96–98 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 190n130 Bonhoeffer, Emmi Delbrück, 171, 183, 190n131, 190n135, 259, 261 Bonhoeffer, Karl, 66n66 Bonhoeffer, Klaus, 190n130 Boozer, Jack, 28 Borejko, Piotr, 70 Breitwieser, Arthur, 215 Brink, Cornelia, 176 British military court, 15, 104 Broad, Pery, 191n183, 222 Browning, Christopher, 30–33 Brumlik, Micha, 264 Bruns, Gisela, 231 Bruttman, Tal, 176 Buchberg, 166 Buchheim, Hans, 158, 260 Buchmann, Erika, 26, 103, 111, 117–19, 121, 125–27, 146–47, 247, 252n171, 257 Frauen von Ravensbrück, 111, 125 Buki, Milton, 158 Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), 2, 156, 163, 184, 197, 213, 221, 230, 232–33, 235, 237, 244–45, 256, 263 Buntrock, Martin, 79 Burkhardt, Nina, 182 Capesius, Viktor, 7, 76, 173, 183, 193n241, 199, 241–42 Catholicism, 12–13, 19, 46–47, 49, 64, 108, 134, 208, 212, 234, 238, 242 Berning, Wilhelm (Bishop of Osnabrück), 11–12, 46–47, 72, 184, 238, 255 Catholic Center Party, 3, 46–47, 49 Concordat, 46–47, 66n42 Saxonia fraternity, 45, 48–49, 234, 253 von Galen, Clemens August (Count, Bishop of Münster), 47 CDU (Christian Democratic Union), 148, 151, 209 Central Office (Zentrale Stelle, Ludwigsburg), 21, 110, 156, 208, 265n4 Chlum, 59–62, 67n100 Christoph, Hubert, 87 Churchill, Winston, 17 Clauberg, Carl, 20, 76, 107–8, 111–13, 149, 151, 171, 182 Clay, Lucius, 19

communism, 20, 22, 26, 46, 48–49, 109–10, 125–27, 158, 173, 199, 257 concentration camps, 1, 9, 16–17, 30, 35, 59, 62–63, 84, 106, 111, 121, 135, 139, 148, 151, 170, 197, 200, 214, 224, 247, 257, 263 Corper–Blik, Rosje, 201–3, 207 Czech, Herwig, 54 Dachau, 18–19, 58, 166, 208 Danz, Luise, 199 Danzig, 3, 24, 34, 45, 50, 52, 56–57, 64, 98, 147, 149, 151, 163, 237–38 Darmstadt trial, 170, 205 de la Penha, Abraham, 29, 201–2, 207, 212 de Mildt, Dick, 23, 256 death certificates, 13, 70, 75–77, 97, 123, 134, 163, 256, 260 deception, 4–5, 13, 23, 35, 106, 115, 119, 147, 151, 155, 206, 213, 224, 229, 240, 254, 263 Delmotte, Hans, 32, 229, 240–41 Demjanjuk trial, 205 Demjanjuk, Ivan (John), 205, 218n90 Deutschkron, Inge, 8, 155, 163, 168, 179–81, 183, 185–86, 262 Dilewski, Klaus, 203 Dinur, Yehiel (alias K. Zetnik), 165 Dirks, Christian, 31 Dixon, Jeremy, 27, 40n114 Domanski, Jan, 70 Douglas, Lawrence, 21 Dutch Auschwitz Committee, 202 Düx, Heinz, 5, 69, 83, 86, 88–89, 97, 145, 147–49, 156, 178, 244 Dyer, Johanna, 117, 131n103, 194–95 Dylewski, Klaus, 175, 222 Earl, Hilary, 13, 23, 223 ectopic pregnancy, 3, 54, 56–57, 64, 253 sterilization, 1, 6, 14, 20, 27, 29, 32, 35, 46–47, 51, 54–58, 64, 76, 89, 103–15, 122–23, 127, 134–35, 161, 163, 186, 203, 223– 24, 240, 243, 253–54, 256, 258 venereal disease, 54, 56–57 Egert, Josef, 5, 46–47, 237 Eggert, Rainer, 36, 163–64, 168, 173, 180, 183, 188n71, 234, 252n171 Ehrlinger, Erich, 233 Ehrlinger, Elisabeth, 233 Eichmann, Adolf, 1–2, 11, 21, 154, 165 Einsatzgruppen trial, 18–19, 22, 208 Eisen, Max, 264 Elmshorn, 1, 4–5, 8, 17, 25, 35, 61, 69, 105, 127, 135, 139–41, 145–51, 156, 177,

286   •   i n de x 182, 199, 208, 221–22, 232, 234, 254, 260–62, 263 Entress, Friedrich, 75, 87 Epker, Neeltje, 118 Epstein, Berthold, 64, 73–75, 258 “euthanasia”, 13, 18, 32–33, 46–47, 51, 98, 105, 236 Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD), 209, 229 repentance (Bußruf), 209 Fabisch, Hans, 136–39, 141n21 FDP (Free Democratic Party), 148 Fegelein, Hermann, 63 Fejkiel, Władysław, 74–75, 162–63, 207, 228, 242, 244 Final Solution, 12, 245 Finkelmeier, Conrad, 109–10, 112–13 Die braune Apokalypse, 109 First World War, 31 Fischer–Schweder, Bernhard, 20 Fischer, Horst, 15, 31–32, 85, 87, 173–74, 200, 238, 240 Flaucher, Quirin, 98 Flossenbürg, 62–63, 224 Fogelman, Eva, 34 Foth, Werner, 148 Frank, Willy, 81, 85, 215, 223, 231 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 2–3, 5, 9, 14, 16–17, 21, 25, 27–28, 30, 34–36, 69, 78, 97, 103, 108, 110, 114, 127, 138, 145, 147, 154–86, 200–2, 204–6, 210, 221–22, 224, 229–30, 232, 235–38, 243–47, 254, 257–58, 261 Frei, Norbert, 20, 228 Friedlander, Henry, 33 Friedrich, Jörg, 15 Friedrich, Max, 130n63 Frowein, Ernst, 31 Fuchs, Hans, 56 Gaberle, Alois, 17, 25, 135–38, 140, 254 gas chambers, 1, 13, 15–16, 29, 34–35, 72, 76–77, 83, 85, 87–88, 99, 107, 111, 115–16, 118–19, 134, 139, 147, 150, 154, 157, 162, 172, 175, 177, 183, 195, 197, 199, 201, 212, 214–15, 221, 225– 29, 232, 237, 240, 242, 259–60, 263 Gawlowski, Zygmunt, 97, 161, 185 Gebhardt, Karl, 115 Geissler, Max, 138–40, 161–62 genocide, 10, 13, 18–19, 23, 31–32, 36, 155, 157, 209, 230, 260–61, 264 Allied Control Council Law No. 10, 17–19, 21

Holocaust, 21, 24, 32–33, 81, 86, 100, 104, 155, 165, 206–8 war crimes, 13, 15, 18–22, 113–14, 156, 161, 209–10, 261 Gerber, Gerhard, 238 Gerber, Karl, 109–10, 112–13, 127, 161–62, 228, 241 Gerlach, Christian, 89–90 Gibian, Rudolf, 174, 227 Gleichschaltung, 48 Gnielka, Thomas, 156 Goldman, Helen (born Ilona Kaufman), 27–29, 35, 159, 163, 165–71, 175–76, 178, 183, 185, 189n88, 189n114, 190n131, 190n135, 197, 202, 207, 212, 227, 259 Golik, Ignacy, 163 Göllner, Gerhard, 178 Gönczi, Imre, 11 Gorecki, Alexander, 172–73. See also prisoner doctors Göring, Hermann, 50 gottgläubig (theistic), 48, 64, 212 Gottliebová, Dina (Babbit), 1, 85–86, 93n68, 93n100 Granzow, Joachim, 54–56 Greenberg, Irving, 28 Greiffenberger, Wilhelm, 209, 234 Greve, Michael, 21 Gröning, Oskar, 261, 264 Gross, Raphael, 67n90, 206 Gross, Walter, 50 Gross-Rosen, 38n52, 98 Grossmann, Hanns, 200, 212, 215 Grünwald, Otto, 224 Grynszpan, Zindel, 165 Gütt, Arthur, 54 gynecology, 4, 10, 16, 35, 45, 54–56, 58, 96, 98, 104, 115, 123, 140, 145–48, 151, 171–73, 177, 253–54, 259 Lucas’s study of ectopic pregnancy, 54, 56, 253 “Gypsy”, 37n1, 128n19, 129n31 Gypsy (family) camp (BIIe), 1, 4, 6, 34, 58, 60– 61, 70, 73–78, 83–85, 91n27, 95, 97, 106–7, 109, 112, 152n27, 161–62, 185, 200, 202, 206, 212, 228, 238, 242, 254 Haake, Martha, 117, 131n108 Hamburg, 1, 4, 14, 25, 84, 104–5, 108, 137, 145, 147–48, 165, 191n168, 199, 222, 234–35, 254, 257 Hamburg-Fühlsbüttel (concentration camp), 152n18 Hantl, Emil, 76, 230 Harms, Hermann, 61

inde x  •  287 Hartjenstein, Fritz, 78, 83, 197, 226, 229, 240, 263 Hartung, Olga, 247 Hax, Iris, 111, 135 Hayes, Peter, 40n120 Heer, Hannes, 31 Heger, Bjorn, 123 Heidl, Otto, 16, 99–100, 255 Heißmeyer, August, 132n127 Hellinger, Martin, 105 Helm, Sarah, 142n45, 243 Hersmann, Werner, 20 Hess, Jürgen, 36, 236, 243–44, 255 Heyde, Werner (alias Fritz Sawade), 150 Heydrich, Reinhard, 22, 150, 155, 229–30 HIAG (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit, Mutual Aid Society), 19, 151 Hilberg, Raul, 33 Himmler, Heinrich, 3, 22, 70, 80, 95, 105–6, 111, 115, 123, 140, 155, 229–30 Hirsch, Fredy, 85 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 8, 18–19, 22, 48, 52, 56, 105, 112, 148, 155, 171, 184, 203, 209, 214, 224, 227, 229–30, 259 Hjort, Johan, 123–24, 136, 139–40 Hjort, Wanda, 123 Hoche, Alfred, 55 Höcker, Karl, 81–82, 156, 215, 226, 241, 255, 258 Hoedeman, Paul, 28 Hofmann, Franz, 87, 226 Hofmeyer, Hans, 2, 78, 101n18, 157, 159–61, 163, 167–68, 172, 174, 176, 183, 185, 188n75, 195–96, 198–99, 202, 204–6, 214, 221, 223–24, 248n26, 261 Höhn, August, 136 Holder, Hans, 29, 179 Holocaust. See genocide Holuj, Tadeusz, 183 homosexuality, 34, 95, 244, 256 Hoppe, Paul Werner, 98 Hördler, Stefan, 13, 99, 176 Horstmann, Rudolf, 98, 136 Höss, Rudolf, 7, 81–82, 88, 106, 109, 118, 120, 226, 249n43, 263 Hössler, Franz, 81 Hummerich, Werner, 80, 157, 164, 168, 170, 172 I. G. Farben, 183, 203 Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, 156 intentionalism and functionalism, 12, 22, 257 Ivens, Hans Peter, 137, 148, 163, 231 Iversen, Gerd, 222

Jäger, Herbert, 60, 62 Januskopf. See Lucas, Franz Bernard Jászi, Recha, 171 Jettinghoff, Alex, 33 Jews, 11–14, 16, 20–22, 24, 26, 30–33, 46–47, 51, 59, 65n13, 70, 72–73, 78–79, 81, 85–86, 89–90, 96, 98, 106–7, 109, 113– 14, 118–19, 137, 155, 166, 171, 175, 179, 201, 205–7, 213, 227–28, 231, 233, 240, 243, 247, 256–57, 261 antisemitism, 12, 22, 24, 31–33, 46–47, 49, 59, 67n90, 75, 230, 257, 260 as witnesses, 14–16, 20–21, 26, 36, 75, 154– 59, 162–63, 173, 196, 201, 203–7 from the Baltic region, 98 from Germany, 14, 32, 159 from Hungary, 13, 21, 24, 70, 73, 81, 85– 86, 90, 106–7, 118–19, 175, 227–28, 231, 247 from Lithuania, 11, 20 from the Netherlands, 96, 201, 207 from Poland, 137, 207 Joachimowski, Tadeusz, 128n16 Jötten, Karl Wilhelm, 51 Junk, Peter, 47 Jurasek, Kurt, 229, 241 Just–Dahlmann, Barbara, 208–9, 264 Justin, Eva, 130n82 Kaduk, Josef, 162, 175 Kaduk, Oswald, 7, 181, 183–84, 236, 242, 258 Kaindl, Anton, 147 Kampling, Rainer, 49 Kapkajew, Vera, 172, 185 Kaplan, Marion, 155, 260 Katan, Alexander, 58 Kather, Erich, 98–99 Kaul, Friedrich Karl, 157, 172, 174, 200, 236 Kehrer, Ferdinand, 51 Kemper, Gerd, 61 Kitt, Bruno, 15–16, 33, 38n50, 71, 84–85, 173–74, 238 Klee, Ernst, 30 Klehr, Josef, 7, 76, 162, 183–85, 215, 230, 258 Klein, Fritz, 11, 15–16, 73, 81, 87, 168, 193n241, 212, 225, 231, 236 Klimke, Wilhelm, 51 Knellessen, Dagi, 159 Knigge, Volkhard, 47 Knögel, Hans Herbert, 221–22 Knott, Otto Karl, 99 Kogon, Eugen, 9 Kolb, August, 147, 203 Kompisch, Franz, 261

288   •   i n de x König, Hans Wilhelm, 11, 15, 17, 80, 136, 141n10, 149, 151, 164, 171, 199 Kosterlitz, Hans–Krafft, 115 Kowalczyk, Tadeusz, 137, 139, 228, 257 KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), 152n18 Kramer, Helgard, 30–31, 113 Kramer, Josef, 15–16, 81–83, 87–89, 96, 135, 194, 197–99, 201, 212, 214, 225–27, 229, 232, 235, 238–41, 244, 255, 263 “Beast of Belsen”, 15, 201, 255 Krause, Paul, 50 Krebsbach, Eduard, 58, 101n8 Kreibich, Eduard, 138, 141n12 Kremer, Johann Paul, 28, 51, 159, 226, 249n42 Kretzer, Anette, 104 Kreutzmüller, Christoph, 176 Kruse, Falko, 22, 228 Kubica, Helena, 106 Kügler, Joachim, 5, 8, 69, 72, 83, 95, 145, 147, 156–58, 163, 166, 172, 188n76, 211, 231, 236, 244, 259 Kühl, Stefan, 13, 32, 71 Kühne, Thomas, 82–83 Kulka, Erich, 78–79, 191n183, 242 Kulka, Otto Dov, 28, 78–80, 92n58, 92n60, 159, 168, 188n76, 185–86, 207, 216n21, 225, 227, 232, 242–43 Kurz, Eugen, 51, 136 Kurzke, Alfred, 58 Lacroux, Renee, 118 Langbein, Hermann, 7, 11, 16, 21, 27–28, 38n50, 71, 84, 156, 158–60, 164, 170, 173, 207, 261 Langer, Lawrence, 165–66 “deep memory”, 165 “humiliated memory”, 166 Lässig, Simone, 12 Laternser, Hans, 171, 173, 178, 183, 206, 235 Lazar, Eugen, 195–96 Le Coq, Violette, 116 Le Porz, Louise, 15, 29, 117–18, 121, 174–76, 228, 243, 257 Lebedev, Alexander, 163, 171–74, 178 Lenz, Fritz, 51, 61 Lewy, Guenter, 114 Ley, Astrid, 134–35, 141n3 Lies, 4–5, 8, 84, 100, 137, 145–46, 151, 170, 194, 200, 202, 211–12, 231, 240 Lifton, Robert Jay, 27–28, 32–33 Lill, Karl, 158, 229 Limperg, Bettina, 114 Lingens, Ella, 16, 160, 239–40, 242–43, 245. See also prisoner doctors

Lippman, Matthew, 28 Löbner, Fritz, 212, 225. See also prisoner doctors Loebe, Horst, 36, 236 Lolling, Enno, 9, 16, 35, 83, 98, 135, 173, 229, 231, 239, 241, 255 Longerich, Peter, 3 Lower, Wendy, 32, 67n90 Lucas, Franz Bernhard arrest, 2, 10, 27, 36, 121, 135, 148, 197–201, 212, 215, 221–22, 231, 234–35 as Januskopf, 24, 36, 139, 262–63 as witness, 2, 6–7, 13–17, 24–30, 35–36, 61–64, 74–75, 78–80, 90, 100–1, 103–18, 127, 151, 154–86, 194–214, 222–28, 231, 236, 239–44, 247, 253, 259, 262–63 as “white raven”, 24, 30, 35, 154–55, 178, 183, 258, 265 at Auschwitz, 1, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 13, 15–17, 19–20, 24–25, 27–36, 45, 60–62, 69–90, 95, 98–99, 104–8, 111, 118, 135–38, 147, 154–67, 170, 173–86, 197–203, 206–8, 212–15, 224–31, 235–47, 254–64 at Auschwitz–Birkenau, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 11, 15–16, 24, 26–30, 35, 60–61, 69–86, 90, 97–98, 105–7, 110–12, 118, 135, 137, 139, 150, 158, 160–68, 171–86, 194–98, 201–2, 207, 225–29, 235, 238–41, 254–55, 257, 260 at Mauthausen, 1, 4, 27, 34, 58, 74, 78, 95– 101, 107, 135, 162–63, 186, 198–99, 238, 241–44, 256 at Ravensbrück, 1, 4, 6, 10, 14, 16, 20, 26–31, 35–36, 55, 58, 63–64, 74, 77, 82, 85, 87, 98, 100–1, 103–27, 134–37, 140, 146–47, 151, 154–55, 160–63, 174, 176–77, 184–86, 194–95, 198, 201, 203, 206, 213, 215, 228, 230–31, 235, 239–43, 247, 254–59, 265 at Sachsenhausen, 1, 4–5, 9, 13, 16–17, 20, 27, 31, 35, 77, 79, 98, 101, 107, 111– 12, 123–24, 127, 134–41, 147, 161–62, 177, 186, 196, 198, 200, 231, 239, 244, 247, 254, 257, 259, 262–63 at Stutthof, 1, 4, 16, 35, 95–101, 103, 127, 163, 186, 207, 239, 256 character references for, 2, 34, 49, 58–59, 105, 108, 146, 148, 160, 177, 185, 194, 196, 200, 233–34, 243, 259, deputy for Mengele, 32, 34, 70, 79–86, 161– 62, 164–65, 228, 238, 240, 247, 254 desertion from SS, 35, 134–38, 145, 262 facial scars, 49–50, 65n27, 180

inde x  •  289 gynecologist, 4, 10, 16, 35, 45, 54–58, 96, 98, 104, 115, 122, 140, 145–48, 151, 172–73, 177, 254, 259 illness, 8–9, 52, 90, 213, 215 lies, 5, 13, 100, 137, 145, 170 Nazism, 1–20, 23–30, 33–36, 45–59, 64, 95, 109, 127, 140, 145, 150, 154–55, 158, 201, 204, 208, 213–14, 221, 223, 228, 253, 255, 257–58, 261 postwar career in Elmshorn, 1, 4–5, 8, 17, 25, 35, 61, 69, 105, 127, 135, 139–41, 145–51, 156, 177, 182, 199, 209, 221– 22, 232, 234, 254, 260–63 promotions of (SS), 3, 58–60, 63, 212, 237 ramp selection, 6–7, 13, 15, 26–35, 64, 72, 75–77, 79–90, 95, 116, 137, 139, 150, 157, 159–60, 163–85, 194–202, 207, 211–15, 225–31, 236–44, 254–55, 258–59, 261, 263 religion, 8, 25, 27, 46, 52, 72–75, 125, 209, 212 sterilization, 1, 14, 20, 27, 29, 32, 35, 46–47, 51, 54–58, 64, 76, 103–15, 122–23, 127, 134–35, 161, 163, 186, 203, 223– 24, 240, 243, 253–58 treason charge, 4, 70, 134, 147, 186 Lucas, Susanne, 8, 19, 25, 36, 108, 145–48, 182, 193n235, 207–10, 222–23, 233– 35, 245–46, 248n8, 253 Luhmann, Niklas, 32 Lys, Gunther, 137, 142n26, 161 MacLean, French, 27, 84 Mallman, Klaus–Michael, 30 Malmedy (Dachau) trial, 18, 208 Marchenko, Ivan, 205 Margulies, Renate, 177–78 Marsálek, Hans, 97, 101n13 Marschall, Elisabeth, 105, 117, 133n145 Martin, Dunja, 103, 129n36 Martin, Ernst, 97–98, 101n18. See also prisoner secretaries Mauthausen, 1, 4, 27, 34, 58, 74, 78, 95–101, 107, 135, 162–63, 186, 198–99, 238, 241–44, 256 Mauz, Gerhard, 10, 179, 245 Die Welt, 10 McCloy, John, 19 Mengele, Josef, 1, 11, 15, 17, 28, 31–32, 34, 51, 60–61, 69–70, 73–76, 79–88, 92n46, 106, 113, 161–65, 168, 185, 195, 206, 227–28, 232, 238, 240, 247, 254, 263 at Auschwitz–Birkenau, 1, 11, 15, 28, 60– 61, 69–70, 73–76, 80, 106, 164, 185, 228, 238

and Lucas, Franz Bernhard, 32, 34, 70, 79–86, 161–62, 164–65, 228, 238, 240, 247, 254 experiments on Sinti and Roma inmates, 1, 76 Meppen, 3, 5, 45–49, 54, 64, 234, 237 Merz, Richard, 98 Messenger, David, 10 “Mexiko” (BIII compound), 98, 196, 204, 207, 212, 216n18, 261 Meyer, Winfried, 30–31 Mikusz, Józef, 116n19, 159, 196, 203–4, 212 Moll, Otto, 81, 118, 120, 132n139 Monowitz (Auschwitz III), 75, 87, 179 Morgen, Konrad, 239–40, 251n127 Morgenstern, Paul, 112, 163–64 Morsch, Günter, 134 Mory, Carmen, 116–17, 121–22, 131n101–102 Moscow Accord, 17 Motz, Eugeniusz, 185 Mulka, Robert, 1, 7, 154, 181–82, 195, 203, 215, 257 Müller–Hill, Benno, 89 Müller, Filip, 158, 167, 176, 226, 242, 249n37 Müller, Hilde Dorothee, 54 Münch, Hans, 11, 28, 31, 149, 160, 229, 231, 239–40, 242–43, 249n64 Muselmänner, 207 Naendrup, Hubert, 48 Naumann, Bernd, 2, 27–28, 165, 170, 196, 261 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2, 27, 165, 196 Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers Party), 3, 12, 17–18, 46, 49–50, 58, 126 denazification, 4, 19, 145–46, 254 “Final Solution”, 12, 245 Hitler Youth, 6 medical practices, 28, 51, 55, 58, 89, 105 National Socialism, 21, 34, 46, 49, 51, 57– 59, 233 resistance to, 47, 114, 213, 256 Nebe, Arthur, 105–6 Reich Criminal Police Office, 105 Reich Office for Combating the Gypsy Menace, 105 Nedvedova, Zdenka, 119 Nehmer, Bettina, 22 Neideck, Cäcilie, 176–77, 184, 228, 241 Neiman, Susan, 264 Neitzel, Sönke, 31 Nelhiebel, Kurt, 224 Neubert, Gerhard, 187n21 Neubert, Kurt, 52

290   •   i n de x Neuhäusler, Johannes, 19 Nevermann, Heinrich, 137–38 Niemöller, Martin, 208 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 262 noma, 57, 59, 73, 75, 85–86, 201, 245 nulla poena sine lege. See genocide Oberheuser, Herta, 31, 115 Ochs, Leni, 72–73, 158 Oftedal, Sven, 138. See also prisoner doctors Ohlendorf, Otto, 18, 233 Ontl, Friedrich, 87 Operation Bernadotte, 123–24, 127, 257 Oranienburg, 16–17, 35, 60, 98, 111, 135, 231, 241 Orendi, Benno, 85, 105, 116, 131n108, 132n125, 254 Ormond, Henry, 76, 156–58, 162, 170–71, 178–79, 183, 195, 200, 211, 223–24, 236, 261 Orth, Karin, 30–31 Osnabrück, 1, 3, 12, 45–47, 50, 54, 64, 65n13, 71–74, 91n16, 91n18, 91n20, 93n100, 138, 140, 176, 190n141, 255 Paehler, Katrin, 10, 253 Paisikovic, Dov, 158, 173–74, 185–86, 191n158, 226–27, 231, 242–43, 249n37 paratrooper, 3, 41n146, 45, 59–64, 67n100, 198, 212, 232, 238, 243–44 Paul, Gerhard, 31, 33, 142n48 Pendas, Devin, 12, 18, 29, 155, 157, 200, 207, 213–14, 230 “minoritarian myth”, 12, 213–14 Perels, Joachim, 259 perpetrators, 2, 10–14, 21–26, 30–33, 36, 41n160, 75, 100, 103–4, 114, 127, 135, 139, 155–57, 171, 196–97, 200, 209– 13, 227–29, 245, 256, 259, 264–65 and cognitive dissonance, 33 and victims, 2, 10, 12, 14, 21–23, 26, 32–33, 75, 100, 114, 127, 155, 157, 171, 196, 200, 209, 227–29, 259, 264 Perseke, Josef, 157, 160, 168, 242 Peter, Cuno, 51 Peters, Max, 9 Philipp, Grit, 127 Podlaha, Josef, 34, 58, 96–97, 239, 258 population policy (Bevölkerungspolitik), 45–46, 56, 253 postwar trials, 2, 13–14, 17, 114, 155, 183, 258. See also Frankfurt Auschwitz trial British trials, 15, 17, 103–5, 122, 126, 254

Nuremberg, 3, 8–9, 14–15, 18–20, 31, 45, 57–59, 62–64, 95, 136, 145, 147, 222, 225 media coverage, 146, 154, 161 Soviet trials, 17, 135 prisoner doctors, 8, 11, 16, 34, 64, 69–70, 74–77, 83, 86, 96–97, 101, 110, 112, 138, 160, 162, 172, 174, 178, 184–85, 196–97, 212, 225, 228, 232, 238–44, 254, 256, 258 prisoner favoritism, 26, 123, 197, 225–26, 256 prisoner secretaries, 97, 160 Protestantism, 8, 19, 49, 208–9, 212. See also Susanne Lucas Pukrop, Marco, 9, 13, 31, 134 punitive transfer, 9, 78, 121, 163, 184, 241, 244, 256, 259, 262 Raabe, Christian, 2, 24, 36, 40n117, 60, 88, 97, 108, 110, 112, 114, 157–58, 163–64, 168, 171–72, 176, 195–202, 211–13, 216n36, 223, 236, 253, 259, 261–62 Radvanský, Artur, 173–74 ramp selections, 6–7, 13, 15, 26–35, 64, 72, 75–77, 79–90, 95, 116, 137, 139, 150, 157, 159–60, 163–85, 194–202, 207, 211–15, 225–31, 236–44, 254–55, 258–59, 261, 263 Ravensbrück, 1, 4, 6, 10, 14, 16, 20, 26–31, 35–36, 55, 58, 63–64, 74, 77, 82, 85, 87, 98, 100–1, 103–27, 134–37, 140, 146–47, 151, 155, 160–63, 174, 176– 77, 184–86, 194–95, 198, 201, 203, 206, 213, 215, 228, 230–31, 235, 239, 241–43, 247, 254, 256–59, 265 Ravensbrück trial, 1, 4, 6, 10, 14, 16, 20, 26– 30, 35–36, 58, 64, 74, 82, 98, 100–1, 103–8, 110–16, 118–20, 124–27, 135–37, 140, 146–47, 154–55, 160–63, 174, 176–77, 184–86, 198, 201, 206, 215, 228, 230, 235, 239, 241–43, 247, 254, 256–58 Red Cross, 11, 105, 123–24, 170, 261 in Germany, 170, 187n, 35261 in Sweden, 11, 123–24 Reichel, Peter, 259 Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), 46, 48 Reifenrath, Joachim, 180, 182 religion, 27, 46, 52, 75, 125, 212 gottgläubig, 48, 64, 212 Volksgemeinschaft, 25 Renz, Werner, 28 Revier, Dora, 119

inde x  •  291 Richter, Hermann, 34, 96–98 Ristic, Matias, 223–24 Ritter, Robert, 105, 114, 130n82 Race Hygienic Research Branch, 105 Rögner, Adolf, 156 Rohde, Werner, 11, 15–16, 71, 76, 174, 238, 240 Roosevelt, Franklin, 17 Roseman, Mark, 24, 155 Rosenberg, Hans, 141n21 Rosenbusch, Horst, 148–51, 261 Rosenthal, Rolf, 31, 105, 115, 118, 254, 258 Rothschild, Sara, 161 Rotterschmidt, Jakob, 137–39 RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), 21, 72, 76, 86, 157, 224–25, 227–28, 231, 251n126, Rudaitis, Ona, 20 Rüdin, Ernst, 54 SA (Sturmabteilung), 3, 31, 45–46, 48, 56, 228, 237, 247, 253 Sachsenhausen, 1, 4–5, 9, 13, 16–17, 20, 27, 31, 35, 77, 79, 98, 101, 107, 111–12, 123–24, 127, 134–41, 147, 161–62, 177, 186, 196, 198, 200, 231, 239, 244, 247, 254, 257, 259, 262–63 Sack, Karl, 224 Salvequart, Vera, 119 Salvesen, Sylvia, 35, 103, 118, 123–25, 133n156–57, 139, 146, 161, 174–75 Sansoni, Richard, 60, 62–63 Sauer, Albert, 118, 120, 132n127 Schallock, Hans, 178 Schaner, Jenny, 70 Schatz, Willi, 82, 173, 183, 215, 238, 241–42 Schenk, Heinrich, 1, 108, 110–14, 163 Schenk, Rudolf, 50 Scherpe, Herbert, 29, 76, 175, 230 Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate), 82–83, 224 Schiedlausky, Gerhard, 1044–5, 118, 122, 254, 258 Schikorra, Christa, 129n36 Schleswig-Holstein, 16, 140, 142n48, 145, 150, 254 Schlingensiepen, Hermann, 8, 25, 36, 208–9, 211, 214, 222–23, 233–34, 245, 248n8, 253 Schmalacker (Münster district judge), 133n156–57, 136, 138, 147, 151, 261 Schmid, Anton, 11–12, 165 Schmidt–Ott, Regina, 168 Schmuhl, Hans–Walter, 135 Schoberth, Johann, 157

Schröder, Gerda, 35, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 123– 24, 129n30–31, 132n149, 132n156, 139, 257 Schubert, Wilhelm, 61–62 Schüle, Erwin, 20 Schumann, Horst, 76, 81, 107, 182 Schwarz, Gudrun, 210 Schwarzhaupt, Elisabeth, 209 Schwarzhuber, Johann, 79, 105, 109, 118, 120–21, 164, 183, 196, 198–99, 226, 241, 263 Schwesig, Helene, 146, 177–78, 184, 228, 241 Sehn, Jan, 156, 179 Seiboldt, Günter, 157 Seidel, Josef, 61–62 Seip, Didrik Arup, 123–24 Sellmeyer, Martina, 47 Semprich, Kurt, 146–47 Setkiewicz, Piotr, 106 Shenker, Noah, 29, 168 Siegert, Toni, 63 Siggelkow, Herbert, 138 Šíl, Frantizek, 110, 112 Sinti and Roma, 1, 4, 6, 13–14, 26–27, 29, 37n1, 39, 47, 56, 74–76, 103–15, 122, 127, 128n19, 128n26, 130n74, 130n85, 142n30, 161, 163, 203, 206, 254, 256 Śnieszko, Tadeusz, 70, 73–74, 161–62, 185, 228. See also prisoner doctors Sonderkommando, 52, 158, 167, 226, 233, 242, 249n37 Sonntag, Walter, 63 Sorge, Hans–Hermann, 32 Spiegel, Der, 179, 245 Spoerry, Ann, 116 SS camp doctors, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9–10, 13–17, 27–32, 34–36, 58–64, 69, 73–90, 95–101, 103–15, 118–27, 134–41, 147, 150–51, 156, 158–67, 171–73, 177–82, 185, 196, 200, 203, 213, 226, 228–32, 238–42, 253–58, 262–63 SS Medical Academy (Graz), 3, 45, 54, 56–58, 149, 151 SS-Sippengemeinschaft, 210–11 SS–TV (Totenkopf–Verband, Death’s Head Unit), 63 Stahlhelm, 48, 237, 251n112 Stark, Hans, 7, 162, 173, 181, 210–11, 222 Stark, Margaret, 210–11 Stegemann, Thorsten, 259 Stein, Bruno, 29, 106, 110 Steinacker, Fritz, 181, 183, 235–36, 240, 242 Steinbacher, Sybille, 178 Steinberg, Jean, 27

292   •   i n de x Stelling, Kurt, 31 Stengel, Katharina, 74–75, 78, 158–60, 167 sterilization, 1, 6, 14, 20, 27, 29, 32, 35, 46–47, 51, 54–58, 64, 76, 89, 103–15, 122–23, 127, 130n63, 130n69, 134–35, 161, 163, 186, 203, 223–24, 240, 243, 253–54, 256, 258. See also Sterilization Law of 1933 abortion, 46–47, 51, 54, 56–58, 64, 76, 108, 115, 122–23, 254 at Ravensbrück, 14, 35, 55, 58, 64, 103, 105, 107–13, 115, 127, 134, 161, 163, 203, 243 effect on Sinti and Roma, 56, 103, 105–9, 112–15, 127, 163, 203, 256 hereditary health courts, 47, 51, 55, 89, 111–12, 114, 122, 223 Sterilization Law of 1933, 51, 54, 66n42 Stewart, S. M., 104, 116, 120–22, 126, 258 Stille Hilfe (Quiet Aid), 19, 151 Stockholm syndrome, 122, 206 Stoeckel, Walter, 55 Stolting, Hermann (II), 173, 183, 206 Strebel, Bernhard, 31, 103–4, 132n139, 259 Streim, Alfred, 265n4 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, 209 Stutthof, 1, 4, 16, 35, 96, 98–101, 103, 127, 163, 186, 207, 239, 256 Suckut, Siegfried, 54 Suhren, Fritz, 109–10, 118, 120 syphilis, 67n75 Szymański, Tadeusz, 73–74, 97, 149, 161–62, 185, 228, 244. See also prisoner doctors testimony, 13–14, 21, 26–29, 36, 61, 64, 70, 75, 78–80, 83, 103, 107–10, 113, 121–22, 124–25, 137, 155, 157, 159–60, 164– 65, 167, 171, 173, 176–78, 195–97, 201–2, 204–7, 213–14, 221, 225–26, 240, 243, 254, 257, 259 and emotion, 14, 29, 155, 165, 257 and the law, 36, 155, 206 error, 26, 202 experience, 26, 155, 205–7 reliability of memory, 26, 29, 155, 160, 165, 167, 202, 204–6, 254 secondhand information, 27, 159–60, 173, 259 truth, 14, 26, 155, 204–7, 214, 225–26, 259 witness, 13–14, 21, 26, 28–29, 36, 61, 70, 75, 78, 80, 110, 155, 157, 159–60, 165, 178, 204–7, 214, 259 Theresienstadt family camp, 1, 4, 6, 34, 69, 73–80, 85, 106, 159, 164–66, 174, 196, 207, 212, 242, 254, 261

Thilo, Heinz, 15–16, 31, 38n52, 73–76, 83–84, 88, 168, 171, 176, 199, 228, 238, 240 Tiachiv ghetto, 166 Tillion, Germaine, 108, 118 Timm, Max, 150 Tito, Josip Broz, 60–61, 64 Tobin, Patrick, 20 trauma, 14, 26, 100, 159, 165, 167, 205–7, 211, 218n91, 243. See also testimony and reliability, 26, 159, 165, 206 and perpetrator, 102n38 and sympathy, 100, 205–6 Treblinka, 89, 205 Treite, Percy, 16, 31, 34, 55, 104–5, 107–8, 112, 115–27, 131n98, 131n107, 132n139, 133n160, 142n40, 147, 174, 177, 194, 241–42, 254, 258, 263 Trommer, Richard, 16, 127, 147, 174, 177, 194, 239, 255 Truman, Harry, 19 tuberculosis, 35, 73, 76, 97, 116–17, 119, 127, 194, 239 typhus, 9, 70, 73, 77, 84, 86, 97, 99, 117, 135, 194, 198 Uckermark, 107, 115, 117–21, 127, 177, 241 Uhlenbroock, Kurt, 172 Uhse, Dirk, 234 Ulbrich, Wilhelm, 177 Vaillant–Couturier, Marie–Claude, 14–15 Van der Hoek, Celine, 201–3, 207, 218n77, 227 Venema, Derk, 33 Verstrickung (entanglement), 100, 184, 245 Winters, Peter Jochen, 184 Vetter, Helmut, 34 victims, 2, 8–10, 12–16, 20–24, 26, 32–33, 46, 75, 85, 95–96, 100, 106–7, 110–14, 127, 145, 154–58, 179, 181, 186, 196, 200, 203, 206–14, 227–29, 233, 236, 244–45, 247, 255, 258–60, 263–64. See also testimony and perpetrators, 2, 10, 12, 14, 21–23, 26, 32–33, 75, 100, 114, 127, 155, 157, 171, 196, 200, 209, 227–29, 259, 264 trauma, 14, 26, 100, 206–7, 211 Vitek, Rudolf, 75 Vogel, Georg Friedrich, 156 Vogel, Rolf, 193n233 von Baeyer, Walter, 205 von Galen, Clemens August (Count, Bishop of Münster), 47 von Helmersen, Erwin, 59–60, 64, 243 von Kellenbach, Katharina, 8, 209–10, 264

inde x  •  293 von Ubisch, Leopold, 50 von Verschuer, Otmar Freiherr, 50–51 Vorberg, Reinhold, 236 VVN (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes), 146–47 Wachholder, Kurt, 52 Waffen–SS, 3, 9, 19, 45, 52–53, 58–60, 84, 98, 116, 145, 222, 237, 247 Wagenaar, Willem, 205 memory psychology, 205 Wagner, Gerhard, 55 Walser, Martin, 184 Walter, Bernhard, 175–76, 241 Walther, Thomas, 264 Wegener, Bernd, 59 Weigel, Sigrid, 165 Wein, Dorothee, 135 Weindling, Paul, 107 Weinke, Annette, 20 Welzer, Harald, 31, 33 Wessel, Heinrich, 147, 152n11 Wette, Wolfram, 11 Wetzell, Richard, 54 “white raven”. See Lucas, Franz Bernard Wiese, Gerhard, 61, 232, 236 Wildt, Michael, 233 Wilke, Artur, 8 Williams, Timothy, 10, 32 Winkelmann, Adolf, 14, 58, 82, 105, 115–16, 118, 121–23, 127, 131n98, 133n160, 185, 254, 258 Winkowska, Tusia, 115 Winter, Erich, 113 Winter, Walter, 113 Winters, Peter Jochen, 155, 183–84, 233, 253, 255, 258 Wirths, Eduard, 7, 11, 15–16, 27, 31–32, 41n143, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81–84, 87–88,

95, 160, 171, 173, 188n63, 197–98, 225–29, 231, 238, 240–44, 255–56, 263 Witek, Prakseda, 71 Wittke, Stefan, 22 Wittman, Rebecca, 29, 40n134, 184, 206 Wohlrab, Christian, 98 Wojak, Irmtrud, 28 Wolken, Otto, 242–43. See also prisoner doctors Wollheim, Norbert, 159 Wollschläger, Erich, 205 Wolter, Waldemar, 31, 96–97, 101n5, 101n8 women, 6, 8, 20, 32, 35, 54–58, 63, 73, 76, 78–81, 86, 99, 103, 105, 107–23, 126– 27, 134, 141, 147, 149, 151, 157–61, 164, 167, 171–72, 177, 182, 194–96, 203–206, 210, 213, 219n120, 224, 227, 240–41, 247, 261 as Lucas’s patients, 56–57, 111, 116–21, 123, 175, 194, 213, 241 medical aides, 105, 119 Ravensbrück witnesses, 35, 105, 109, 111– 12, 115–18, 126–27, 161, 241 wives of Nazi perpetrators, 8, 71, 77, 210–11 World Jewish Congress, 156 Wulkan, Emil, 156 WVHA (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt), 60, 70, 135, 239, 251n126, Young, James, 26, 169 Zarnack, Wolfgang, 178 Zelmanovic, Lili (Jacob), 159, 175–76, 178, 191n171, 207, 215, 227 Ziereis, Franz, 34, 95–97, 135, 239, 255 Zimmerman, Michael, 103, 105, 113 Zinner, Hedda, 126 and Ravensbrücker Ballade, 126 Zyklon–B, 87, 99, 102n33, 150, 157, 203, 242