Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 Sept. 1997) was an Austrian Jew and Psychiatrist. In 1942, he and his family were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. On 19 October 1944, he was deported to the Dachau subcamp Kaufering III, where he arrived on 25 October, after a brief layover of three days in the transit-camp section at Auschwitz.

After the war, he wrote a book about his experiences in the concentration camps. The English translation of this book, titled Man’s Search for Meaning, became a huge bestseller in the U.S. In this book, Frankl gave the false impression that he spent considerable time at Auschwitz, when in fact he was never even admitted to the camp itself. He also claimed to have been liberated at Auschwitz in the spring of 1945, hence half a year after having been deported there, although Auschwitz was captured by the Red Army already on 27 January 1945.

On the one hand, he reported about medical care that injured and sick inmates received at Auschwitz, but on the other hand, he also reported to have seen jets of huge flames shooting out of the crematorium chimneys. Because this was technically impossible, this is simply a lie. (See the entry on Flames, out of Crematory Chimneys.)

Frankl mentioned twice that he was pleased, in fact delighted, to see water really come out of the showerheads. Thus, he cleverly implied that, sometimes, gas must have come out through the showerheads – although he never explicitly wrote this.

In this book, Frankl often mixes his actual experiences with rumors, assumptions and insinuations, and wraps it all in a language of doom and gloom. It is the typical work of a psychiatrist whose life work is manipulating other peoples’ minds.

Interestingly, the transport by which Frankl and his family were deported, is mentioned in Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle. Only a few of the 1,500 Jews in this transport were admitted to that camp. The rest, Czech insists, were “killed in the gas chamber of Crematorium III.” As usual, she does not provide any proof for this homicidal claim (Czech 1990, page 736). Therefore, either Frankl was one of the miraculous and lucky few, or… no one was gassed at all. (For more details, see O’Keefe 2001; Schepers 2023.)

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A recent article has revealed that Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist and emblematic Auschwitz survivor, greatly embroidered on his meager time at Auschwitz. This news casts a shadow over the veracity of Frankl’s famous memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning. Of even more interest, however, is a question that arises when considering the Auschwitz State Museum’s records regarding Frankl’s time at Birkenau: Was Viktor Frankl gassed at Auschwitz?

Few men who emerged from the camps can match the late Viktor Frankl for acclaim. A psychiatrist from Vienna who died in 1997, Frankl gained international renown for the theories of mental health he expounded through his psychiatric school, logotherapy. Inextricably bound up with Frankl’s fame, teachings, and moral authority was his experience of the German concentration camps, above all Auschwitz, as described in Man’s Search for Meaning (U.S., 1959) a worldwide bestseller that has been ranked as one of the ten most influential books of the twentieth century by the Library of Congress.

In his reminiscence, Frankl recounted his stay at Auschwitz as if it had lasted an eternity. Now comes Timothy Pytell, adjunct professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York City, to inform us that, based on his research for an intellectual biography of Frankl, the celebrated survivor spent at most three days at Auschwitz, while in transit from Theresienstadt in Bohemia to a subcamp of Dachau in October 1944. As Pytell observes, a reader of Man’s Search for Meaning would “be stunned to discover that Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz.” In the book, Frankl devotes some thirty pages to Auschwitz. Besides recording his experiences on arrival (shaving, showering, delousing, etc.), Frankl makes observations about the lot of inmates there that strongly imply that, at the very least, he spent months, not days, at the camp. (“We had to wear the same shirts for half a year, until they had lost all appearance of being shirts.”) As Pytell writes of Frankl’s depiction of his stay at Auschwitz: “But if truth be told, Frankl’s rendition is contradictory and profoundly deceptive.”

Was Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Gassed at Auschwitz? →

Abstract

Viktor Frankl gained international recognition based upon his heroic survival of Auschwitz and his subsequent claim to have founded the third Viennese school of psychotherapy — logotherapy. This article revises this traditional view of Frankl by examining how logotherapy was actually developed under the auspices of the nazi-sponsored Goering Institute in the 1930s. In addition, his survival of Auschwitz is problematized by the questionable medical experimentation he performed in 1940–42 on Jews who had committed suicide in order to avoid deportation, and his limited (three-day) experience in Auschwitz. This new contextualization explains the mass appeal of Viktor Frankl as both a peculiar case of the Austrian burial of the ‘ambiguous past’ and the longing amongst Americans for an uplifting version of the Holocaust.

The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: A Reflection on the Odd Career of Viktor Frankl →

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