Letter+to+Helga

=//**Letter to Helga**//=

Dearest Helga,

I fear that I have lost my soul - and now you. For too long, fear has shamed me into silence. Now I must tell you what I have seen and what I have done, what I know others have done. Why I thought I was doing so much good and instead did so much harm.

I don't know where it all began. Was it in Munich while I was still studying medicine, when I first heard with my own ears the hissing hatred that has brought this ruin down upon us? Was it in the first World War? Was it still before that? Oh, my beloved, even if it all began long before we met, I must find the place and the time when I chose, when we Germans chose our terrible future.

I remember shadows. And in those shadows, spiders hatched. Venomous terrors were born. I know. I was one.

We drew our zeal for perfection on earth from a common source. Science. Our arrogant belief that we would find absolute truth in science was at the heart of our ruin. We championed eugenics. And fueling all our beliefs was our pride. Pride in being Scientists. German scientists.

Philipp Stein held a vision of this perfection, too. But he did not have the hatred that came over us. It drove us all the more to believe in ourselves, to pride ourselves on our objectivity. When I began to notice this hatred coursing through me, when it first rose up in my throat, Philipp and I were still young, still friends, still full of hope for Germany, for all of us. We believed in ourselves as doctors, as men of science and truth.

Until I met you, time was a burden to me. The past was horrible. The present was cruel. And the future loomed like a monster, I felt trapped between nightmares. No matter how much I tried to help my parents or my patients, I felt useless. Powerless. Hopeless. To watch them suffer was my first glimpse of my own weakness. At the policlinic, my patients, especially the parents of those frail children, expected me to work some sort of miracle. I expected that of myself. Our professors, Philipp, the other medical students, none of us could imagine a world in which we could fail.

When Philipp left Munich, I didn't envy him in the least, even though he had a prestigious residency, and I hadn't. I was confident that I would reach great professional heights too. I had you and was to be a father. I knew I might have to work harder, but I was willing to do whatever I could, with you by my side. After all, we Were still young. Our lives were full of hope.

It is not as though I didn't have eyes to see what was happening. I looked right into the throat of the monster. But I refused to imagine what we all would become if we let it devour us. I don't mean the man, Hitler. I mean the anger, the hatred, the contempt for others that dwelled in him, in me, in most of us. That was our doom. As my mother told me, I had set a trap for myself and did not know it. And in that trap I was snared. Snared by my own ambitions. By my grand dreams and delusions. By my foolishness. Like most of us, I was a fool. A fool for Hitler.

You warned me about the Nazis, Helga. About how they blamed others for every problem we had. How they were willing to make others weak in order to make themselves strong. For a while, I heeded your warning. It was easier to see through their lives when times were good. It was harder when I struggled to believe in myself.

Philipp saw through them, too. But in his case, I thought he was only trying to discredit the Nazis because they blamed the Jews for all that was wrong in the world. I even thought that I was stronger than Philipp. That he was a dreamer, but I was a practical man. Despite his talents, I thought he was somehow ordinary, weak. At the time, to be honest, I thought his kind had always been weak, that weakness was a cause of corruption. I have learned to my shame how very wrong I was.

I knew that Philipp's strength came, at least in part, from Christine. Just as I drew strength from you. But he had other strengths that I lacked, despite your hope that I would find them in myself. The strength to examine my preconceptions, my prejudices, for example. The strength to admit that I might be wrong. Most important of all would be my lack of compassion. It hurts me to admit this, Helga, but I have come to see that my lack of compassion was my greatest weakness. How strange! I once thought that having compassion was a weakness. To my shame, I turned against those who had it. And I did not challenge those who lacked it.

I have learned something over the past few days that I should have known long ago: how pathetic it is when people blame others for their own poor decisions. We humans have a habit-a sickness, actually-of doing that. I have not been immune to it

Everyone now tells how Hitler tricked us into doing his will. At the trial earlier this week, one of the defendants tried to argue that he was only doing what he was told: he was just following Hitler's orders. As though Hitler had him in chains, unable to escape. Hitler may have been a great demon! But we Germans should have had will enough of out own to resist him. To tell the truth, we did not want to. I was willing, so many of us were willing, to do what we thought we had to do to gain the future we believed we deserved.

Although I managed to escape the Nazi trap for a while-thanks to you, Helga, more than to any great wisdom on my part-eventually I was blinded by my selfishness. I let my own angers and fears ensnare me and become my master. The demon was not Hitler. It was me.

Hitler by himself was not powerful enough to cause our ruin. We Germans did it ourselves. This truth makes me ashamed. And afraid. Oh, Helga! We have lost so much. So much. And for what?

I began my own descent into this abyss at the end of 1929. That's when I began to slide down an icy slope. So many of my hopes had collapsed. Soon after Greta took ill, I remember telling you how I saw the growing economic chaos as an echo of my despair and powerlessness. Given the state of the world around us, perhaps it is no wonder that I was losing confidence in myself, in my profession, in Germany's future. I felt like a spider whose web had been torn apart, with no other recourse but to spin another.

I tried so hard, Helga, to do the right thing. For our children. For us. Greta's condition was a test, now I see. And you were better than I in dealing with it. Better than I, the doctor. I wanted to help. In some cases, I believe I did. But I could not accept my weakness and needed more than ever to believe in my strengths. Things were changing so fast. And not for the better.

Then came 1933. That fateful year. I cam admit it now Helga, I was frightened by the chaos all around us. At the same time, I still was hopeful. If the Nazis showed their vicious edge, I tried to look beyond that. Didn't we all?

Everyone agreed, the Vaterland needed to get its health back. Even if the medicine was bitter. At first, I was among the masses willing to stand back and let Hitler and his party do their work. If I awoke every morning and went to sleep every night consumed by my powerlessness in the face of Greta's illness, I at least needed to believe someone could hear the Volk of our dissension, our loss of self respect, our vulnerability to foreign forces and to degrading behavior. Hitler's victory gave me, gave all true Germans, hope. "True" Germans I find myself writing. I must correct myself. I was so convinced I knew who was a "true" German, a "true" Jew, a "true" communist. I saw things so sharply, so clearly. It was easier that way.

Some will say that Greta's death did this to me, that it made me do terrible things. I even tried to say that to myself, for a while. Yes, I felt our daughter's suffering and I suffered, too, but my suffering was much different, much less than hers-and yours. Most of all, I felt sorry for myself, so powerless to do anything for her, so unable to accept this about myself. Instead, I sought to find power where I could, in order to believe in myself again. That may account for my joining the Party when I did and for my work with the Nazi Physicians' League in the Rhineland. But it does not excuse it. I was headed in this direction before Greta took ill, before we married, perhaps. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted this power.

After the trial today, I walked past the train yard. An arriving freight train was switched by mistake from one track directly onto a siding, thereby dooming it to a head-on collision with a parked locomotive. I saw what was happening and I shouted as loud as I could. No one cold hear me. Later I heard that the engineer on the moving train and a workman on the parked locomotive were both killed. Two other men were injured. As I stood there, unable to do anything, I thought of how someone from another planet might feel, watching us, watching us, watching me, over the last twenty years or more. Watching us approach our calamity. Our doom. And we not knowing what we had done, what we where doing to ourselves. To others.

There was a moment when we all took the wrong track, when we could not stop ourselves from chaos. When, I wonder. The World War? Versailles? The Great Depression? January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor? The Declaration on martial law after the burning of the Reichstag? When Hindenburg died in 1934 and Hitler declared himself Fuhrer for life and most of us cheered? Or was it Kristallnacht, with broken glass from Jewish shops and homes and synagogues in the streets all across Germany? Then came the decision to invade Poland. To build more slave labor camps. To build Auschwitz.

Was it one of these decisions, these deliberate, logical choices that made sense at the time- or was it something beyond time, something in us, in all human beings, from the very beginning of time? I don't know why we let ourselves be switched onto the track that led to this chaos. All I know is that we cannot go back now.

As a wounded veteran of the first war, I was exempt from serving in 1939. You were happy with that, but I felt the need to serve. My big chance came when I wrote SS Generalleutnant Brandt and he invited me to Berlin. That led to my brief service at Grafeneck. I was so happy then to be doing something important, Helga. If my friendship with Philipp was over, if he and I had to part ways, as you warned me we would, it was because we disagreed about Germany's correct path. Victory in Poland and Brandt's assurances were all the proof I needed: I was tight and Philipp was wrong. But it was more than that, of course.

Brandt inspired me then with his idealism. Now, watching him in the trial, I see him differently. His imposing bearing, his self-confidence and authority, his dispassionate Korrektheit-everything that I thought represented the purest form of Vaterlandsliebe-I now see as hollow arrogance. Idealism corrupted by indifference. The cause of our ruin. Germany's. His. Mine.

My work in Berlin led to my assignment in early 1940 at Grafeneck under Doktor Schumann. Thinking back on it now, I know that I lost my soul there, if not five years before, when I worked in Koblenz. I admit, Helga, the first months of the war energized me. I was convinced that we could do no wrong. In April, I volunteered for the SS as a field doctor. You knew I was in Denmark. I soon saw that the real war in the east was passing me by. I wanted more action. After sixteen months, I applied for a transfer.

As you may have suspected, I was posted to Auschwitz. Yes, Auschwitz! To be honest, I was grateful to be going. It was an answer to my prayers. You know how much I wanted to do something important.

Auschwitz was at the end of Hell. No, it was Hell itself. Working there, I became a devil among devils, all of us prodding our victims towards disgrace and death. I once had thought myself so important and my work so beneficial for humanity. What I did not realize until then was the depths to which human beings can sink to gain power over others. I soon learned that I was no different. At Auschwitz, I steeled myself to ignore the suffering I saw-and caused. It was my way of enduring. Eventually, I could endure no more. For now, know only that I may not have been the greatest devil at Auschwitz. But even a small devil can do great harm.

When I received your letter about Paul-Adolf's death three years ago this month, I was surprised at how little I felt. I am sorry I could not have been with you to help you overcome your grief.

We both know that Paul-Adolf chose his fate, a soldier who wanted to give his life for Adolf Hitler and Germany. Still, how many choices did he really have? He was born at the wrong time to have choices. Perhaps I was, too. In his case, how can we blame him? I had a life before the Nazis came to power. I knew another world. I was a man. He was but a boy. He learned about the Nazis about the same time he learned to read. Everywhere he went, the Nazis were on display. His schools were a nursery for Nazis. He and his friends all played at being Nazis. When Greta fell ill, the Hitler Youth became as much, maybe more of a family to him than we were. From 1933 to 1934, the last ten years of Paul-Adolf's life, more than half of his whole life, he lived for Hitler. Now he died for him. You warned him, Helga. You warned me. Neither of us listened.

From October 1943 through the summer of 1994, I continued my service in the Medical Division of the SS at Auschwitz in the Ostmark. Auschwitz was like a vast city, having grown like fungus out of rotten wood. One of my colleagues called it "anus mundi." And yes, Helga, it was the anus of the world. Horrible things happened there. I admit, I saw -- and I did -- horrible things every day.

For the most part, it was like working in a factory. We physicians had our routines, our shifts, our goals, our daily quotas, and our bosses. We even produced something -- slaves and corpses, one or the other, depending on our whim. Day after day, night after night, Auschwitz seeped into me, became a part of me. I, a doctor, worked in a factory whose product, sooner or later, was death.

I was an unfeeling tool. A scalpel wielding a scalpel. As I had cloaked myself in what I thought to be scientific objectivity, as I became myself an object without feeling, it is no wonder that I saw all others as objects, as tools for our ends. I wanted to become that way. I wanted to be used.

Even when I began to realize what I had become, I did not have the inner strength to stop. For too long I gave myself to the service of Hitler's state. That so many others did the same gives me little comfort.

When Philipp arrived in Auschwitz, he begged for mercy, not for himself, but for another. I did what I could. But I was so weary, so weak.

My will was drained. I fooled myself into thinking that I had already seen the worst. But each day was worse than there one before. Sleeping only brought nightmares. I did not know how to stop working. My routine gave me comfort. Without it, I would have lost my mind. Perhaps I did anyway.

When Philipp arrived in Auschwitz, he begged for mercy, not for himself, but for another. I did what I could. But I was so weary, so weak.

My will was drained. I fooled myself into thinking that I had already seen the worst. But each day was worse than the one before. Sleeping only brought nightmares. I did not know how to stop working. My routine gave me comfort. Without it, I would have lost my mind. Perhaps I did anyway.

I made excuses and pretended as long as I could. I even thought myself heroic for helping Phillip, if you can believe that. I cannot explain it, Helga. Only that I could not imagine how it could be any other way.

As luck would have it, a bomb fell on Auschwitz and I was wounded. When I was evacuated to a hospital in Berlin, I felt enormous relief. And shame.

I knew all along, Helga, that you would despise me. "Where is your conscience?" you would have asked. To do the work that I believed that I needed to do, I could not afford to have a conscience.

I know now that I was betraying everything I had hoped to become. I should have seen the harm that I was doing. But I did not. And not just at Auschwitz.

Remember my trip before the war to the Rhineland? I joined in the effort to sterilize boys and girls who where born to German mothers and Negro fathers, thinking that they were a threat to the purity of our Volk. I look back now on how we feared those children and I am ashamed.

When the war began, I was encouraged and inspired by Hitler's personal physician, Professor of Medicine Karl Brandt. Later he became Generalkommissar fir das Sanitats-und Gesundheitswesen for the entire Reich. Do you remember, I wanted to impress him with a new shirt? I admired his determination, his will, what I thought was his idealism. After meeting him, I went to Berlin to help prepare for a still more shameful act: Aktion T-4, the Sterbehilfe program. Yes, we ‘helped’ people die. We said we were providing a Gnadentod -- a merciful death. There was nothing ‘merciful’ about it. We murdered innocents. My first victim was a harmless, green-eyed boy. His eyes have haunted me ever since. What more proof do I need of the evil I served? Oh, Helga! I now see that I was caught up in the unbridled patriotism that drove us into the wars. When the first one ended, I was angry and anguished over Germany’s loss and the unjust peace. Frustration and disappointment festered in me and propelled me toward the Nazis. We sought revenge. A New Order. A Thousand Year Reich. How absurd it all seems now. Some handled those terrible times better than I did. It gives me some comfort to know that there were heroes amongst us. Against Hitler and for Germany. Some even for the Jews. For all those we thought did not deserve to live. For the causes that I should have championed. Other demons were at work in me, too, hatched out of the arrogance that I learned during medical training. I was so certain that doctors were superior beings. And that patients were but a collection of symptoms. Of body parts to be dissected and manipulated in our hospitals and on our laboratory tables. We worshipped German science. We were so convinced that our profession would improve our race and the world. I had choices, but they were limited by my narrow understanding, by my unwillingness to explore any other way of thinking. So, I chose to join the Party. I chose to go to Koblenz, where I sterilized helpless children. I chose to go to Grafeneck, where we killed those we thought were ‘living lives not worth living.’ Then I went to Auschwitz. I took part in its abominations. Selections. Castrations. I closed my eyes to what was happening all around me. I had been warned. By my mother. By Philipp. And especially by you, Helga. I did not listen. Instead, I betrayed you all. I don’t believe I’m evil, Helga, even though I have done evil things. These were evil times. In a different time, a different place, I might have been a better man. I have let myself be used. But that is no excuse. I should have been stronger. Or at least more aware of my weaknesses. And guarded better against them. I have been too human. Please help me, Helga. Let us begin a new life together. I need you and love you. As always,

Your husband, Johann