Aufgabenbereiche, Handlungsspielräume und Nachkriegsnarrative eines SS-Lagerarztes

August Bender was second camp doctor of Buchenwald concentration camp during the Third Reich and responsible for numerous selections of prisoners, including transports to the Auschwitz extermination camp. After the war, he became a popular general practitioner and one of the notables in a rural community. Using this biographical example, this article attempts to approach the demands placed on physicians in the Waffen SS, their fields of activity in the concentration camp, and narrative strategies in the Federal Republic. As will be shown in the case of Bender and his predecessor as a troop doctor, Peter Hofer (1903-1965), SS physicians in camp service had far-reaching individual scope of action and the option of refusal. Based on Bender’s rehabilitation strategy after 1945, it will also be possible to show how former members of the Waffen SS and even the concentration camp SS succeeded in inscribing themselves in the narrative of the “clean Wehrmacht” against the background of the post-war social framework. In addition, his memoirs written in 1993 show that Bender remained closely attached to the perpetrator perspective and apologetic mindsets of the 1950s despite a change in social mentality. As can be seen from eyewitness accounts, Bender succeeded in paradigmatic social integration as a country practitioner despite his occasionally open glorification of the Waffen SS and the consolidation of the myth that he had been a “soldier like any other”.