Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  It was the appearance of Micheels’s fiancée forty years later in a documentary film about Dr. Wirths that was the seed of the showdown between Micheels and Claude Lanzmann. He and Nora had been separated shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, Micheels told me one autumn afternoon on the deck of his Westport home. When they found each other finally, it was not a storybook ending: “Our feeling of love could not be salvaged,” Micheels wrote in a deeply saddening passage in his memoir.

  He went to America, where he became a psychoanalyst, a professor of psychiatry on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine and president of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Nora remained in their native Holland, and, although Dr. Micheels married, they stayed in touch, and in the late eighties she wrote to tell him that she had appeared as a “witness” in a documentary two Dutch Jewish filmmakers had made about Dr. Wirths.

  Micheels sent for a tape of the film (which was shown on Dutch television but never released commercially) and found it flawed but thought-provoking. In addition to Nora, among the witnesses was Dr. Munch, the one who’d refused to take part in the “selections” and who was the only Nazi doctor acquitted in a war-crimes trial, in part because of the testimony of Auschwitz survivors who believed they owed their lives to him.

  “I thought Munch was important,” Micheels told me, “because he demonstrated that it was possible to refuse to participate in some aspects of the killing process without being punished for it”—a fact that contradicts the exculpatory claims of many Nazis who said if they hadn’t participated in the killing they would have been killed.

  On the other hand, Micheels recognizes clearly that Munch did not resign from or resist the whole killing system. His behavior raises the question of whether there can be degrees of evil in hell. By staying where he was and saving some Jewish lives, was Munch doing “good” in the midst of evil? By refusing to participate in selections but following other SS orders, can it be said Munch was “better” than Wirths, or are such distinctions meaningless in Auschwitz? These are questions Robert Lifton addresses in his study The Nazi Doctors with his theory of “doubling”—the doubling of the Nazi doctors’ personalities into killer and healer components, with little communication between the two.

  The questions are valid, Micheels believed. So he wrote, politely, to Claude Lanzmann, inviting him to discuss these questions, never expecting the traumatic consequences of his request. Lanzmann was scheduled to be at Yale for a series of seminars with the French and history departments in April 1990. Micheels invited him to participate in a panel discussion with him at a meeting of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Association scheduled for the same week at Yale. Micheels proposed they discuss Shoah, Micheels’s memoir, and the film about Wirths, which Micheels described in summary to Lanzmann.

  Lanzmann accepted the invitation without commenting on the Wirths film, and Micheels heard nothing further from him until he arrived in New Haven two days before the panel discussion. Micheels first met Lanzmann that evening over dinner at the home of Dr. Dori Laub, a survivor and cofounder of the Yale Holocaust witness project.

  “He behaved very strangely,” Micheels said of Lanzmann, “both that night and throughout.”

  “At the dinner I attended,” Dr. Micheels’s wife told me, “he made so much trouble over food. First, it had to be a vegetarian meal, then he refused to eat the vegetarian food, then the wine was no good. I watched him take a swallow and spit it back into his glass. I think he was going to say something about how bad it was until he caught me looking at him with horror.”

  What Lanzmann did at the first dinner was essentially spit out the film Dr. Micheels wanted to show and discuss. Micheels ran a tape of it for him. “He saw the movie, but when I asked him for comments, he walked out of the room. I followed him and pressed him, but all he would say was, ‘If you show that movie, I won’t come.’”

  Micheels was under some pressure. The panel discussion was heavily oversubscribed because of Lanzmann, whose renown far exceeded Micheels’s. If Lanzmann withdrew, many would be disappointed.

  So Micheels told Lanzmann, “‘I won’t show the movie. Let’s talk about Shoah. I’ll talk about some of my experiences.’ He apologized for his behavior about the film, and I expected him not to talk about it. But when his turn came he began to talk about it, he began to attack it.”

  “Did you experience it as a personal attack?” I asked Micheels.

  “Yes,” he told me. Dr. Micheels is not one to overdramatize. Life has shown him far too much real drama for that. He is as mild-mannered a man as he is polite, so when he says that Lanzmann’s attack on the film (and him) reminded him of the totalitarian methods of the camp guards, it is not something he says casually.

  I’ve read the transcript of the public clash that evening over the film, and Lanzmann’s attack on the film in front of an audience of Micheels’s colleagues and friends cannot be seen as anything but a personal attack. Lanzmann conceded that he was “violent, very violent” in his denunciation of the film. And his public attack on the film that night was so full of fury and venom, it was difficult to interpret as anything but an attack on its sponsor—on anyone who believed the film should be shown and discussed and not simply burned and destroyed.

  The panel discussion that evening, before an audience of psychoanalysts, Yale academics, and guests, began with Dr. Micheels speaking about his experience in Auschwitz. Speaking in particular about the Auschwitz phenomenon in which prisoners became Geheimnisträgers, bearers of secrets, secrets about what was really happening, secrets about what had become of the people who disappeared from within their midst, about the work many of them did keeping the machinery of death running. The silence was necessary in part because the secrets were literally unspeakable, in part because the penalty for talking about them was death, and finally because survival was possible only by a willed refusal to accept the truth.

  Geheimnisträgers: At his home fifty years and half a world away from Auschwitz, I asked Dr. Micheels if the real secret too unbearable to utter was the truth about human nature.

  “Yes,” he said. “About how bad it could be. No one had known how bad.”

  But now, today, Dr. Micheels told the audience at Yale that evening, it is important for those who are the secret bearers to tell their secrets, to “make a breach in the wall of silence around the Holocaust.”

  He was followed by Claude Lanzmann, who felt it was more important to silence Dr. Micheels. After an effusive introduction (“[Shoah] is more than the film event of the century . . . but a truly revolutionary artistic and cultural event” in its own right), Lanzmann took the stage and, to Dr. Micheels’s surprise, announced he would explain why he “forbade” the expected showing of the Wirths film and the discussion about it Dr. Micheels wanted to have.

  In terms of contempt, using the jargon of Lacanian film theorists, Lanzmann told the audience, “It’s a very bad film, in my opinion; one doesn’t even know who did it (I think two people from Holland), but it’s a film without any kind of signature . . . . There is no desire behind this film” (emphasis added).

  Having dismissed it first of all for the sin of not fulfilling Lacanian film-buff criteria, Lanzmann goes on to make an even uglier charge: “I had to tell myself that the purpose of the film was the rehabilitation of this Nazi doctor. . . . [It is a] bad film that complacently sets out to explore a Nazi soul” (emphasis added).

  At this point, Dr. Micheels, an Auschwitz survivor, stood accused in effect of being so morally obtuse that he would complacently sponsor a film that rehabilitated Nazis. One step away from the ultimate Lanzmann accusation: Revisionist. Although Lanzmann claimed to “respect very much” Dr. Micheels, he told his colleagues that the film Micheels wanted to show “represented for me all of the things I have always fought against, with all my strength. . . . What I have called the obscenity of the very project of understanding.”

  All this after Lanzmann had refused to tell Miche
els to his face why he objected to the film when Micheels pressed him at their introductory dinner; all this after Lanzmann had indicated that he would not launch an attack on the film at the panel discussion.

  “Did you feel betrayed?” I asked Micheels.

  “Yes, I did,” he told me. “He led me to believe he would not.”

  Not only was Dr. Micheels caught off guard, he was outmatched physically: At seventy-three, fragile and slender, Dr. Micheels said the six-foot-plus Lanzmann, an imposing figure in his black leather jacket, reminded him of “a German general” both in his physical stature and his aggressive, pounding assault on Micheels’s position and judgment.

  Indeed, Lanzmann was only getting started in an epic savaging of the film he wouldn’t let the audience see. As he expanded on his accusation of the obscenity of (and thus the need to censor) the film he forbade, he focused first on its transgression of his commandment against studying Nazi baby pictures.

  “I wish to give you the reasons for my revolt” against the forbidden film, Lanzmann says, adopting the pose of the heroic resistance fighter, rather than his actual role: a man who used his celebrity power to force the panel into dropping it under threat of refusing to appear. “The film . . . that I forbade, started with a picture of this Nazi doctor as a child, as a baby. He’s a smiling child.” Here, he invokes his dictum that you cannot engender the Holocaust by explaining how smiling babies become mass murderers. Not only can you not engender it, you cannot discuss the question of how it happens.

  But they do, somehow. The babies in the baby pictures who do not seem to manifest a desire to murder do grow up to be baby killers. Some babies do, some babies do not. The ones who do must acquire the ability, the desire to do so, somehow. It doesn’t happen by spontaneous generation. The fact that they do seems to be of some legitimate interest to those who live among babies and baby killers. But such interest is forbidden by Lanzmann; any such inquiry must, he insists, entail sympathy for the devil, for mass murderers. All explanation is excuse.

  But, Lanzmann thundered on, the mind-set of such a film with its baby pictures “is not only obscenity, it is real cowardice. . . . It is a way of escaping, it is a way not to face the horror.” It seemed more than a bit odd for Lanzmann, who has faced the horror of Auschwitz only on film, to lecture Dr. Micheels, who has faced it in person, about cowardice.

  But still Lanzmann is not finished. To Dr. Micheels’s horror, he’s devoting his entire speech that night to denouncing the film Micheels wanted to discuss. And now, on top of obscenity and cowardice, he tosses out his favored trump-card insult: Revisionism.

  He cites a discussion between Elie Wiesel and the archbishop of Paris (who was born a Jew but raised a Catholic by the French family that sheltered him during the war). In the context of a discussion with Wiesel on a French television show, the archbishop said, according to Lanzmann, “The true problem, the true question [of the Holocaust] is the problem of evil.” An assertion Lanzmann insists is such a cowardly evasion of the horror that happened at Auschwitz that it amounts to Revisionism. Lanzmann accuses the archbishop not just of being a Revisionist but of being a Revisionist in “a much more perverse form” than that of a Holocaust denier.

  Always Lanzmann insists on assuming bad faith (as the existentialists like to call it) on the part of of those who discuss the subject in any fashion that violates his commandments. The Jewish archbishop, he says—making a point of playing up his Jewishness—cannot be attempting, sincerely if misguidedly, to discuss the question; he must be a cowardly Revisionist.

  Having announced the discovery of “a much more perverse form of revisionism,” he finds evidence of it in the film Dr. Micheels wanted to simply discuss. The chief evidence, aside from the baby pictures: The film presents a discussion of the meaning of Dr. Wirths’s suicide shortly after he was captured. Wirths’s family members speculate about whether he killed himself in part out of consciousness of guilt. The presence of this footage in the film, the implication Wirths might be suffering pangs of conscience (when, in fact, the filmmakers might be taking just as jaundiced a view of the relatives’ rationalization as Lanzmann does), makes it too dangerous to be shown, Lanzmann insists.

  Lanzmann makes explicit his paternalist-censor role toward the close of his assault. He realizes, he says, that the intensity of his attack might give the audience “a strong desire to see this film.” But, he jokes condescendingly, he’s now “prepared that you see the film, because I have given ‘directions for use.’ And this was necessary because there are some virgin brains among you!”

  The response of the audience to this tirade, when it finally concluded, was mixed. I felt worst for Dr. Micheels, most conscious of the sense of isolation and betrayal he must have felt, when I read in the transcript the way Micheels’s colleague and fellow panelist Dori Laub suddenly and unexpectedly attacked the film.

  Laub was, after all, the cosponsor of the evening. He’d seen the film but never raised any objections to it—certainly not to Dr. Micheels—until that very moment. But Lanzmann had been “violent, very violent” in his attack on the film to Laub before the panel convened, as well as in his attack on the film at the panel. And rather than defend Dr. Micheels or the plan to show the film, Laub felt compelled in his closing remarks to publicly take Lanzmann’s side.

  His rationale was curious. He announced that he’d been fooled, hoaxed. He said that when Dr. Micheels first showed him the film, he’d understood the German-speaking witnesses but not the Dutch. When he saw it again with Lanzmann, with subtitles for the Dutch, he had a revelation, a radical change of mind: “I realized that the film was . . . a hoax.”

  He doesn’t explain very clearly why what the Dutch speakers had to say caused his hoax conviction. Here is how he tried to explain it: “There was no balance whatsoever between this feeble and fumbling attempt of German self-explanation and that of the [Dutch] survivors. The Germans’ attempts were hardly substantive. They were not enough. There was a disproportion. And I thought it was right not to be exposed to this kind of information.” As if it would be a better, less dangerous film to watch if the German self-justifications were more convincing.

  And what of Dr. Micheels? After indirectly, implicitly being charged with the intention to promulgate a cowardly Revisionist work, he now seemed to stand accused of having perpetrated a hoax on his colleague Dori Laub, concealing from him the supposedly revelatory words of the Dutch witnesses.

  I can understand the dismay Dr. Micheels must have felt at this moment, but fortunately Micheels did find at least one passionate defender that night. Late in the evening, one member of the audience rose and spoke out eloquently to Lanzmann:

  What I have to say is very painful. . . . It has to do with the difficulty of learning from history and history repeating itself in different guises. . . . The Nazis started with a kind of book burning. By saying that there are things that people should not see because they are bad for people. Because they are too upsetting to the ideas that they have. Because they misrepresent. Because people cannot be allowed to make their own minds up about it. . . . The Wirths film . . . may be a terrible film. But I’m very disappointed and very angry that I was not given the opportunity to make my own mind up about it and that you used as justification for that an ideological stance which is a repetition of exactly what it is that you’re attempting to help us to understand. And I find that very upsetting [emphasis added].

  This was followed by “loud assent” from the audience. Then a second person in the audience was emboldened to challenge Lanzmann and, referring to the last speaker, told Lanzmann, “He feels that people should have been able to make up their own mind.” A true revolt seemed to be brewing.

  You can watch the film if you want, Lanzmann replies, he’ll just “go into the corridor and . . . smoke a cigarette.” It’s “absolutely boring,” he says dismissively. “I don’t know what this film wants to convey.”

  Another audience member challenges him now, “Why should
you have to know what it’s going to convey before we can see it?”

  Here Lanzmann adopts an ironic, paternalistic tone: “I really wanted to protect you [from it].”

  Finally, an audience member says, “I would be very interested if Dr. Micheels—he’s a soft-spoken man, but it’s a film that personally, Dr. Micheels, you’re involved in. . . . Could you make some comments on it?”

  Four years later, Dr. Micheels and I are seated in his dining room overlooking Long Island Sound. He’s just shown me the forbidden Wirths film, and he’s telling me what he really wanted to say that night to Lanzmann and why he didn’t.

  He was, he says, taken aback by Lanzmann’s assault. But there was something more: Lanzmann looked and acted so apoplectic, Dr. Micheels felt “he might have been about to break down or fall apart.” And so, at the time, Micheels told me, he was reluctant to provoke further outbursts: “He looked out of control.”

  He confined himself that night to a dignified response: “One objection you [Claude] had to the movie [was] that it was an attempt to rehabilitate Wirths. I didn’t see that in the movie. . . . Almost all of the participants were indicting Wirths.”

  I didn’t see rehabilitation in the film when I watched either. I was alert for the kind of exculpatory psychologizing Lanzmann had indicted it for. Yes, there are the dangerous baby pictures whose insidious subtext Lanzmann warned against. And, yes, Wirths’s surviving family members ramble on confusedly about whether Wirths’s suicide after capture indicated a consciousness of guilt rather than mere knowledge, or certainty of imminent trial and execution. But if the family members want to rehabilitate Wirths, the film does not endorse their project; the film provides copious, sickening examples of Wirths’s criminality from those survivors who witnessed it, including Dr. Micheels’s dignified but impassioned former fianceé, Nora.