The Thanatos Syndrome

asked her.
    â€œYes,” she said. “It was usually Dr. Jäger.”
    That’s all, Tom. End of footnote. As a matter of psychological interest, I still don’t know whether the smell I remember—part of the hallucination or whatever—is the smell of the geranium or a trace of the Zyklon B. I should add that there seemed nothing particularly horrifying about her showing me the “special department”—that is, she was not horrified nor was I, at the time. It was a matter of some interest. Soldiers are interested, not horrified. Only later was I horrified. We’ve got it wrong about horror. It doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.
    But I’ve kept you long enough. Thank you for coming. I’m all right.

16. I LOOK DOWN at him curiously.
    â€œWhat happened to Dr. Jäger?”
    The priest, unsurprised, answers in the same flat, dry voice. “He disappeared. He was thought to have gotten across the Bodensee to Switzerland and eventually to Portugal and to Paraguay.”
    â€œWhat happened to the others you met?”
    â€œOh, that’s a matter of record. You can look it up.” He recites rapidly, as if he were a clerk reading the record. “Dr. Max de Crinis, the ‘charming Austrian,’ who was responsible for sending retarded children to Goerden, one of the murder institutions, could not get out of the Russian encirclement of Berlin in 1945. He committed suicide with a government-supplied capsule of cyanide. Dr. Villinger, the eugenicist, was indicted in the euthanasia trial in Limburg. After questioning by the prosecution he went to the mountains near Innsbruck before the trial and committed suicide. Dr. Carl Schneider, respected successor to Kraepelin at Heidelberg, worked with the SS commission at Bethel and selected candidates for extermination. When he was put on trial after the war, he committed suicide. Dr. Paul Nitsche, author of the authoritative Handbook of Psychiatry during the Weimar Republic, was tried in Dresden for the murder of mental patients, sentenced to death, and executed in 1947. Dr. Werner Heyde, director of the clinic at Würzburg, where patients had been treated humanely since the sixteenth century, was also put on trial at Limburg for euthanasia. He committed suicide in his cell five days before the trial. He approved carbon monoxide as the drug of choice in euthanasia. At the time he was head of the Reich Society for Mental Illness Institution. Dr. C. G. Jung, co-editor with Dr. M. H. Goering of the Nazi-coordinated Journal for Psychotherapy, after the war became, I understand, a well-known psychiatrist.”
    After he finishes, we sit for a while in silence. The moon is overhead. The sea of pines, without shadows, looks calm and silvery as water. There is a sliver of light in the south where the moonlight reflects from Lake Pontchartrain.
    â€œNo fires tonight,” says the priest.
    â€œNo,” I say absently.
    â€œWould you do me a favor, Tom?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œGet me that soup and Jell-O. I’m hungry.”
    He spoons up chicken soup from the can and drinks the melted Jell-O from the bowl.
    â€œYou seem to feel better, Father.”
    â€œI’m fine.”
    â€œDo you have these episodes often?”
    â€œMostly in winter. I think it’s an allergy to the dampness.”
    â€œHow long have you had them?”
    â€œSince last year when we had all that rain.”
    â€œI see.” I reach for the ring of the trapdoor, hesitate. “There is something I don’t understand.”
    â€œYes?” He turns up the wick of the kerosene lamp.
    â€œI’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to tell me—about your memory of—about Germany.”
    â€œWhat is there to understand?”
    â€œAre you trying to tell me that the Nazis were not to blame?”
    â€œNo. They were to blame. Everything you’ve ever heard about them is true. I saw Dachau.”
    â€œAre you suggesting that it was the psychiatrists who were the villains?”
    â€œNo. Only that they taught the Nazis a thing or two.”
    â€œScientists in general?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen is it the Germans? Are you saying that there is a fatal flaw peculiar to the Germans, something demonic?”
    â€œDemonic?” The priest laughs. “I think you’re pulling my leg, Tom.” He looks at me slyly, then narrows his eyes as if he is sizing me