Survival Through Stupor: Eddy de Wind and Early-Postwar Psychoanalytic Studies of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Eddy de Wind’s Last Stop Auschwitz was written in a few weeks while de Wind was working as a survivor-physician with Soviet medics in post-liberation Auschwitz. The book, as well as de Wind’s subsequent prolific output in psychiatry journals, merit analysis not only because in his professional writing he adumbrated what later became known as PTSD and much of the underpinnings of trauma theory. He also advocated a theory of survival that offers a compelling contrast to well-known “self-help” theories put forward by Bruno Bettelheim and, especially, Viktor Frankl. This chapter traces the ways in which de Wind’s theory of survival challenged the simplistic narratives that were already emerging about the Nazi crimes in the late 1940s, explains how his writing informed the changing field of psychiatry after the war, and considers the relevance of his work for the historiography of the Holocaust today. From the perspective of history of ideas, I argue that the reception and publication of de Wind’s book then and now—including the kitsch marketing of the latest English version—tells a story about the ways in which “Holocaust consciousness” has changed over the decades, sometimes in problematic ways.