Ich war mit Freuden dabei

Dr Sigburt Ramsauer was a middle-ranking killer who, having served and murdered for the Third Reich, was punished and subsequently went on to live to a ripe old age, unrepentant in the conviction that he had acted ‘decently’. His mixture of self-assurance and matchless cynicism was displayed in a remarkable film in 1992, in which he and three other aged Austrian Nazis expounded their views on the world and their own achievements, in the near certainty that no prosecutions would follow (Egon Hummer (dir), Schuld und Gedächtnis, 1992). Ramsauer’s comments included his views on medical experiments on prisoners: ‘after all someone had to have the experiments done to them. It’s just that nowadays they are done to apes’ (p. 318), and on concentration-camp prisoners: ‘They will have done something they shouldn’t have, after all we didn’t lock up the whole world’ (p. 73). When Ramsauer died shortly before the film was shown, the Carinthian medical newspaper recorded that the doctors of the province would ‘always remember and honour him’ (p. 314)

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