this German hospital, where I feel at the mercy of doctors I don’t trust, who I know I’m ludicrously satanizing, like the dreadful Voghs (he’s probably a good guy, I’m sure he is), doctors with a priestly streak like Mengele, capable of experimenting on me, coldly and cruelly, like Mengele, who thought that his human guinea pigs were degraded, worthless beings. And consequently I am really distressed to be in Frankfurt, marooned like a ship without sails, in that city where Mengele studied and graduated in Medicine in the summer of 1938, the year when he enlisted in the evil
Schutzstaffel
, more lethally known as the SS. He was 28 and aspired to broaden the scope of German science.
7
Josef Mengele was barely a doctor aspiring to a future in the Third Reich when he met the man who was to be his protector and patron, Professor Otmar von Verschuer, director of the Kaiser William Berlin Institute for Anthropology and an influential member of the National-Socialist Party. Von Verschuer opened the doors to the fantasies of genetic experimentation: Hitler’s slogan about purifying the race needed a solid, indisputable, and above all, scientific base, and the young doctor decided to devote himself tirelessly to that end. He had been summoned to
create
a whole new race, the thousand-year race, and that was much more sublime and less tawdry than purifying it.
Thanks to his military merits—he was decorated with the First Class Iron Cross for his
cleansing actions
in the Ukraine—Mengele ensured that Auschwitz was given over to him as one huge laboratory where he would have complete freedom to carry out his experiments. And he took his responsibility seriously as a scientist who must carry out genuine
field work
and descended into that infected pool of filth, that sewer of Jews, where it was unpleasant though necessary to work, although, as he recognized, it was also an extremely exciting challenge for a man of science. It was the price to pay for the universal prestige he was sure would be his.
He was brutal.
He experimented on some 3,000 children, mainly Jews and gypsies, of which barely 200 survived in a chronically sick or deformed state. On the basis of a cursory glance as soon as the trains reached Auschwitz, the tireless Mengele made his own selection of the children he deemed suitable for his research, and put to his left or his right those he chose for the infirmary barrack in Camp B or to send straight to the gas chambers.
Mengele’s great speciality was physical pain. More specifically, his experiments focused on physical pain as suffered by children. He wanted to know everything on the subject and experimented collaterally with thresholds of pain, inasmuch as he practised on twins in order to try out perverted, unlikely techniques of genetic engineering. To that end he carried out arbitrary castrations of twin girls without anaesthetics, and thus achieved two experiments in one: he studied their genitals, almost always without proper technical means or medical preparation, in order to analyze manifestations of pain, such as screams, contractions, exudations, despair, fainting, shaking and stiffness, among others.
One can conceive of no greater cruelty or sadism than the dissections that he, with the help of other camp doctors, carried out on children who died suffering the greatest pain. Or lunatic experiments in which he injected two or three-year-old children with huge quantities of petrol or phenol to ascertain how long and in what state blood clots in the human body under the impact of synthetic, embalming liquids. Or stomach operations carried out without anesthetics, simply to study why entrails occupy such and such a place in the body and not some other.
Mengele didn’t perform by himself. He undertook and completed his experiments with the connivance, praise and real assistance he received from the doctors and nurses of Auschwitz, some of whom were proud to be invited by Mengele to associate
Schutzstaffel
, more lethally known as the SS. He was 28 and aspired to broaden the scope of German science.
7
Josef Mengele was barely a doctor aspiring to a future in the Third Reich when he met the man who was to be his protector and patron, Professor Otmar von Verschuer, director of the Kaiser William Berlin Institute for Anthropology and an influential member of the National-Socialist Party. Von Verschuer opened the doors to the fantasies of genetic experimentation: Hitler’s slogan about purifying the race needed a solid, indisputable, and above all, scientific base, and the young doctor decided to devote himself tirelessly to that end. He had been summoned to
create
a whole new race, the thousand-year race, and that was much more sublime and less tawdry than purifying it.
Thanks to his military merits—he was decorated with the First Class Iron Cross for his
cleansing actions
in the Ukraine—Mengele ensured that Auschwitz was given over to him as one huge laboratory where he would have complete freedom to carry out his experiments. And he took his responsibility seriously as a scientist who must carry out genuine
field work
and descended into that infected pool of filth, that sewer of Jews, where it was unpleasant though necessary to work, although, as he recognized, it was also an extremely exciting challenge for a man of science. It was the price to pay for the universal prestige he was sure would be his.
He was brutal.
He experimented on some 3,000 children, mainly Jews and gypsies, of which barely 200 survived in a chronically sick or deformed state. On the basis of a cursory glance as soon as the trains reached Auschwitz, the tireless Mengele made his own selection of the children he deemed suitable for his research, and put to his left or his right those he chose for the infirmary barrack in Camp B or to send straight to the gas chambers.
Mengele’s great speciality was physical pain. More specifically, his experiments focused on physical pain as suffered by children. He wanted to know everything on the subject and experimented collaterally with thresholds of pain, inasmuch as he practised on twins in order to try out perverted, unlikely techniques of genetic engineering. To that end he carried out arbitrary castrations of twin girls without anaesthetics, and thus achieved two experiments in one: he studied their genitals, almost always without proper technical means or medical preparation, in order to analyze manifestations of pain, such as screams, contractions, exudations, despair, fainting, shaking and stiffness, among others.
One can conceive of no greater cruelty or sadism than the dissections that he, with the help of other camp doctors, carried out on children who died suffering the greatest pain. Or lunatic experiments in which he injected two or three-year-old children with huge quantities of petrol or phenol to ascertain how long and in what state blood clots in the human body under the impact of synthetic, embalming liquids. Or stomach operations carried out without anesthetics, simply to study why entrails occupy such and such a place in the body and not some other.
Mengele didn’t perform by himself. He undertook and completed his experiments with the connivance, praise and real assistance he received from the doctors and nurses of Auschwitz, some of whom were proud to be invited by Mengele to associate
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