Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (28 page)

Dr. Josef Mengele:
Darwin’s angel of death 

INTRODUCTION

D
r. Josef Mengele (March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979) symbolizes the worst of Nazi Germany’s criminals for his grossly barbaric and often lethal medical experiments on prisoners. He is a leading example of where the logical implications of evolution can lead. Today, he symbolizes Nazi brutality and the Nazi Party’s goal of producing a superior race by means of directing evolution and applying Darwinism to society by government decree.

Mengele not only committed acts of unspeakable barbarism on young, weak, sick and often innocent humans in the name of science, but totally escaped formal punishment for his hideous crimes.
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Reared in a devout Catholic family, the former altar boy and model child proved to be an excellent student, earning both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at leading German universities.
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As a student he developed an early interest in Darwinism that ruled his life and work.

MENGELE BECOMES A DARWINIST

As a young college student, the charming and articulate Mengele abandoned his religion due to his secular studies. He also became more and more receptive to Hitler’s goals of a “new Germany” and producing a superior race.
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At the University of Munich, Mengele studied under Darwinist professor Ernst Rüdin, “who taught his students that some lives were not worth living and doctors had a responsibility to destroy such lives for the good of society as a whole.”
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Professor Rüdin

was one of the leading proponents of a theory that called for the extermination of people he deemed inferior. He believed that the lives of those afflicted with particular disabilities served no purpose and should be eliminated for the betterment of the race. He went so far as to suggest that doctors had a responsibility to destroy such life. Mengele’s acceptance of this philosophy would help explain his ability in future years to experiment on concentration camp inmates without showing the slightest bit of remorse.
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Rüdin and other leading members of the medical community were the chief architects of Hitler’s compulsory sterilization laws and other similar legislation that formed the basis of the Holocaust. When Mengele embraced these evolutionary and eugenic ideas he became

even more serious about his studies. He decided that his real interest lay in evolution rather than in medicine. Mengele took to his work with renewed vigor and ambition. He was determined to make a success of himself in his chosen field and to work for the betterment of his beloved homeland.
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The extent of the open racism in German academia was so pervasive that

Race purity and the contaminant threat of Jews became gospel in lower and higher education. When Mengele began his college studies at the University of Munich, anti-Semitism had already sprouted in the sciences, along with the more standard atomic tables and Newton’s laws of motion. The impressionable young man…soaked up writings like those of a German oriental scholar, Paul de Lagarde, who despised “those who out of humanity defend these Jews, or who are too cowardly to trample these usurious vermin to death.”
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Darwinism and German anti-Semitism even infected the non-academic culture. Richard Wagner, “whose operas so entranced Mengele” (and Hitler) openly proclaimed his disdain for Jews.
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In Mengele’s freshman year, Hitler electrified the nation with his speeches, and the

center piece of Hitler’s speeches was a call for “racial purity,” an idea that was to become the driving force of Mengele’s existence. The future dictator beguiled his audiences with his dream—a country populated by blond, blue-eyed supermen and superwomen, a vision that would be achieved through…the elimination of all “inferior” races, especially the Jews
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In medical school Mengele completed courses in anthropology and paleontology, as well as medicine.
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Medicine in German universities was then taught in accordance with the “guidelines of the social Darwinists’ theories that Hitler and a growing number of German academics found” very appealing, an orientation that closely matched Mengele’s real interest—evolution.
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Mengele’s chosen fields of anthropology and genetics were especially influenced by the racist theories of Nazi dogma. While some were using violence to achieve their Nazi goal of a superior race, “genetic scientists were hard at work inside their laboratories,” buttressing the Nazi theory of Jewish “racial inferiority” with the ‘science’ of eugenics.
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Mengele’s consummate ambition in life was to “succeed in this fashionable new field of evolutionary research.”
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As a result of his enthusiasm for Darwinism, by early 1934 Mengele was increasingly consumed by his studies. He was not regarded as a gifted student but rather

distinguished himself more by hard work than anything else. “He was essentially more industrious and ambitious than others,” said a fellow student and friend, Dr. Kurt Lambertz. “The more he became involved with the study of anthropology, genetics, heredity and such things, the more his interests grew.”
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His research was supported by a leading academic, Professor Theodor Mollison, of the University of Munich, whose “expertise in the field of heredity and ‘racial hygiene’ led Mollinson to claim that he could tell if a person had Jewish forebears simply by looking at a photograph.”
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Mengele earned a Ph.D. for a thesis awarded in 1935 “proving” that a person’s “race” could be determined by examining their jawbone. His thesis, titled, “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups” was described as a

dry but meticulously illustrated dissertation, and concluded that it was possible to detect different racial groups by studying the jaw. In contrast to Mollinson’s unscientific assertions, Mengele’s report was cogently argued and contained no anti-Semitic or racist overtones.
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For his second doctorate he did another thesis on eugenics, this one titled, “Genealogical Studies in the Cases of Cleft Lip-Jaw-Palate.” Mengele then served as an intern at the University Hospital in Leibzig before returning to do research under Professor von Vershuer at the
Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene
(Institute for Heredity and Eugenics) at the University of Frankfurt.
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In 1937, Mengele was appointed as a research assistant at The Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity.
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Dr. Mengele was now fully convinced that the human race could be improved by deliberately selecting those persons whom he judged were more fit, and then encouraging them to reproduce. A second part of his plan was eliminating those who were judged as less fit. His end goal was to produce a superior race, and he was determined to use Darwinian theory to achieve it.

By 1938, Mengele had joined the infamous SS as part of the physician’s group. Assigned to the combat division of the Waffen SS, Mengele was injured as a result of rescuing two German soldiers trapped under a burning tank. For his heroism, he was awarded Germany’s highest award for bravery, the Iron Cross First Class.

Mengele’s wounds prevented him from returning to the front line and, consequently, as a doctor he was assigned to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. At Auschwitz, his main research project was to devise methods of eradicating inferior genes in order to learn how to direct the evolution of Hitler’s “perfect race.” Mengele also took turns with the other SS doctors to determine who would survive as slave labourers, and who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. Many of the SS doctors claimed to have disliked this task, but Mengele reportedly performed it with relish.
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Only days after his arrival, Mengele sent close to a thousand dark-haired, dark-skinned people believed to have originally migrated from India, known as Gypsies, directly to the gas chambers, purportedly to prevent the spread of typhus bacteria. In his entire tenure at Auschwitz, Mengele personally sent as many as 400,000 inmates to their deaths.
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In the Auschwitz camp, the new prisoners were divided into four groups. The first were those who were judged unable to do heavy work, which included about three quarters of all the inmates, including all children, most woman with children, the elderly and those judged physically unfit—not uncommonly for minor reasons such as a limp.
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The second group included the men who appeared healthy enough for hard labour. The third group consisted of women who were put to work on various tasks, such as sorting the inmates’ belongings so they could be sent to Germans in need.

The fourth group were those that Mengele wanted to use for his race research, including twins, dwarfs and others. During his twenty-one months at Auschwitz, Mengele was able to experiment on 3,000 twins alone.
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This group often suffered greatly from excruciating pain as a result of Mengele’s experiments.
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Ironically, Mengele was also known for the kindness he expressed to those he experimented on, and for this reason was known as “the angel of death”—he exhibited a bizarre combination of elegance, politeness and evil.
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One reason for the kindness was he did not want his experimental subjects beaten or mistreated because such treatment could affect his research results.

Much of his twin research was directed toward producing “a master race of blond, blue-eyed Aryans.”
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He injected them with a variety of chemicals to determine if different races reacted differently. He also researched the physical and psychological effects of sickness and starvation to determine if racial differences existed in response to the treatment he administered.
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OTHER MEDICAL RESEARCH

Yet another experiment was designed to understand the effects of high-altitude flight on pilots, specifically to determine the limits tolerable by humans. Nazi research scientist Dr. Rascher proposed using camp inmates to determine these limits. A witness described the tests he devised:

I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured…. They would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums. These cases usually ended in the death of the subject.
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Of the close to 200 inmates who were subjected to these “experiments,” about half died, and those who survived usually were murdered. Dr. Rascher was highly praised by the academic community for the information he gained from this research and soon had completed another research proposal—to study the limits of the extremely low temperatures that aviators experienced. One Nuremberg trial account explains the research protocol: