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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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339 |
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| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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[de…] scribed as “strict Catholic,” and
Mengele identified himself as a Catholic on all his official forms, rather than
using the more favored Nazi category of “believer in God.” He is
remembered from his youth as a serious student, a popular and enthusiastic
friend in whom one could recognize "a very distinct ambitiousness,” a
young person with intelligence but more or less ordinary.4
His early right-wing nationalism was
reflected by his joining the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet, a nationalistic
war veteran’s organization) in 1931, at the age of twenty. He subsequently
became enthusiastic about the Nazi movement, joining the SA in 1934, and
applying for Party membership in 1937 and for SS membership upon being admitted
to the Party the following year. There are rumors that, while studying in
Munich, he met such high-ranking Nazis as Alfred Rosenberg and even Hitler
himself — rumors that, in the absence of evidence, fit well with his
mythology.
What does seem clear, and what Ernst E. emphasized to me
concerning his friend, is that these Nazi leanings had considerable influence
on his intellectual choices. Matriculating at the universities not only of
Munich but also of Bonn, Vienna, and Frankfurt, Mengele came to concentrate on
the physical anthropology and genetics of his time, eventually working under
Otmar von Versehuer at the Frankfurt University Institute of Hereditary Biology
and Racial Hygiene: the model institute mentioned earlier in connection with
the quest for a “biologized” society by means of a national system of
files on individual genetic characteristics. Verschuer’s son much later
remembered Mengele as “a friendly man,” so kind that women at the
institute referred to him as “Father Mengele” — a nickname that
could of course have other connotations.5
Mengele produced three publications prior to his Auschwitz arrival. The
first, completed in 1935 but appearing in 1937, was his dissertation in the
Anthropological Institute (in the department of philosophy) at the University
of Munich, and was entitled “Racial-Morphological Examination of the
Anterior Portion of the Lower Jaw in Four Racial Groups.” In this study he
was intent upon demonstrating structural differences in a portion of the lower
jaw in old Egyptians, Melanesians, short-skulled Europeans (mostly Eastern and
Dinaric [Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia]), and long-skulled Europeans, primarily
Nordic. He insisted that a previous investigator’s failure to determine
differences was due to deficiencies in method; and that “wherever a
distinction is possible, it must be made.” In following the practice of
his time and place, he depended upon extensive measurements precisely rendered.
He concluded, not surprisingly, that these anterior segments of the lower jaw
“show clear differences well suited for racial distinctions.” But his
division of the two European racial groups is both cavalier and vague,
especially in his undefended assumption that the long-skulled European material
“represents primarily the Nordic element.”6
His medical dissertation, published in
1938 and entitled “Genealogical Studies in the Cases of Cleft
Lip-Jaw-Palate,” prefigured his Auschwitz |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 339 |
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