The use of a limited personal morality to rationalize horrendous evil: Interviews with an Auschwitz doctor and his son

Abstract

Perpetrators and witnesses of the extermination process during the Third Reich use normalization strategies to relate to their atrocious experiences: complete silencing, emotionless descriptions of details, selective descriptions of emotional reactions, etc. The need for normalization is transmitted to offspring by means of a “double-wall,” an emotional phenomenon brought on by both parents and children (Bar-On and Charny, 1988). In the present study, an interview with a German physician from Auschwitz who deliberately did not take part in the massive selection process, and an interview with his son are analyzed. The father-physician creates an effect of normalization by a carefulselective description of his moral and emotional reactions to what he experienced in Auschwitz and since then. It is proposed that the selecting is motivated by the father's covert quest for mastery together with an overt perception of himself as, paradoxically, ‘moral.’ An analysis of the son's report suggests that the father's strategy has been transmitted unwittingly to the son. The son's interview is interpreted as a limited vehicle for going beyond what the parent transmitted and for partially confronting and working through the parent's role during the Nazi era.