Paul Doll's exploitative sexual relationship with Alisz Seisser

Paul Doll's exploitative sexual relationship with Alisz Seisser turns the camp's hierarchy into an intimate arrangement: he can present himself as her protector while deciding what happens to her body. His account emphasizes her gratitude and his own need for reassurance, but the encounters take place under conditions in which Alisz is a prisoner and Doll is the commandant. The relationship's defining contradiction is that he treats care as proof of his decency even as his authority makes her vulnerable to his demands.

An intimacy shaped by authority

Doll describes visiting Alisz at a regular hour. When she is crouched on a stool with her hands slowly writhing in her lap, he tells her to stop crying and says he has spoken to the physician. He presents the proposed procedure as simple and routine, attempting to settle her fears by making it sound familiar and manageable. Alisz points out that there are no women doctors in the camp; Doll answers that there are hundreds, because the prisoners are doctors. When she says they have toolkits rather than proper instruments, he replies that not all of them do. The exchange leaves him controlling the explanation and the decision, while Alisz's objections register the dangers she sees.

Doll then has Alisz sit beside him on the bed and says he reassures her for a considerable time. She tells him she feels better and thanks him, adding that he always finds an answer. Her response is part of the relationship as he records it: she appears to receive his reassurance as comfort, but the scene also shows how completely he sets the terms. He selects the physician, supplies the assurances, and places himself in the role of the person who can solve the problem.

Sexual access and self-justification

Doll recalls that his usual scruples around a pregnant woman receded. He proceeds to have sex with Alisz during this visit, and describes his reasoning as a willingness to go further once he has already crossed a line. The casualness of that reasoning sits against the circumstances of the encounter: Alisz is distressed about her pregnancy and depends on the commandant who has undertaken to arrange its termination. His narration makes the act part of his own decision-making rather than giving Alisz an independent account of what she wanted.

He later explains that his encounters with Alisz are necessary to maintain his dignity and self-respect. He points to her gratitude and esteem, as well as the pleasure she appears to express, and treats them as a counterweight to what he calls the appalling conditions at Doll Villa. This self-description converts the relationship into a resource for Doll: Alisz's attention becomes evidence, for him, that he remains valued and can still feel like a respectable man. The account does not establish that she shares this interpretation or that her apparent gratitude makes the relationship equal.

The abortion and Doll's presence

In a later scene, Doll again dismisses Alisz's distress. He tells her that the procedure happens everywhere and that there is no need to make a fuss. The surrounding details refuse the cleanliness and ease promised by his reassurances: a stool, a chemical toilet, and a cauldron of water beginning to boil on an office hotplate. When the procedure is about to start, he urges her to brighten up and describes the termination as something to celebrate. His tone makes her fear an inconvenience to be managed rather than a response to a serious medical intervention.

Doll had intended to leave when the procedure began, claiming to be fastidious about women's bodies. Instead, he stays while Miriam Luxemburg applies the cleansing solution and injects the local anesthetic, remains through dilation with a speculum, and watches the curettage. He remarks on his own lack of squeamishness. Afterwards, he drives Miriam Luxemburg back to the SS-Hygienic Institute and gives her an additional 400 Davidoffs in a paper bag; he also asks how long it will take Alisz to recover. These acts show him involved in both the practical arrangements and the procedure itself. They do not undo the power imbalance: the medical intervention, Doll's payment, and his attention to Alisz's recovery all remain within a system he controls.

Relationship to Doll's self-image

Doll's account of Alisz belongs to a larger pattern of defending his conduct by appealing to normality, order, and a supposed greater good. He declares his agreement with the Reichsführer-SS against pampering and insists that the camp is not a rest home. At the Spring Meadow, he similarly describes himself as a normal man with normal feelings, then argues that kindness to Jews would be cruelty to Germans. In this moral framework, practical outcomes replace ordinary distinctions between right and wrong. Alisz's distress is thus met with administrative reassurance and command, while his own sexual and emotional needs are presented as legitimate.

The contrast becomes especially sharp when Doll asks, in a private moment of reflection, why the camp's work smells so bad, why its perpetrators drink so brutally, and why they make the snow brown. He recognizes the ugliness around him, yet that recognition does not lead him to relinquish his power over Alisz. Instead, he continues to describe the affair as necessary to his self-respect. The relationship exposes the gap between his capacity to notice moral and physical degradation and his willingness to protect the person subject to his authority.

Meaning within the narrative

Alisz is chiefly presented through Doll's account: her gestures, fear, gratitude, and pleasure are narrated by the man who has power over her. That imbalance matters. His language repeatedly translates her situation into terms that comfort him—routine procedure, reassurance, gratitude, restored dignity—while the material circumstances of the abortion reveal the coercive environment in which those terms operate. The narrative does not require a claim that Alisz feels nothing or that every expression of gratitude is false; it shows that such expressions cannot by themselves make the relationship reciprocal.

Doll's involvement is both sexual and managerial. He offers comfort, decides how the pregnancy will be handled, participates in arranging the abortion, watches the curettage, and later asks about Alisz's recovery. He treats these actions as compatible with his self-image as a dignified, ordinary man. Their accumulation instead shows how care can serve as a form of control when the person offering it also commands the setting and the choices available. Alisz's relationship with Doll is therefore not simply an affair within the camp: it is one of the clearest instances of his turning another person's vulnerability into support for his own sense of self.