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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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348 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE
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[Frank…] furt a few years earlier: Mengele’s
teacher, was the man who in late 1935 had insisted, “What is absolutely
needed is research on series of families and twins selected at random …
with and … without hereditary defects.” One could then achieve
“complete and reliable determination of heredity in man” and
“the extent of the damage caused by adverse hereditary influences,”
as well as “relations between disease, racial types, and
miscegenation.” 27 No wonder that Verschuer
supported Mengele’s research so enthusiastically, or that Mengele
regularly sent specimens to his teacher and visited, while stationed at
Auschwitz, the latter’s research institute in Berlin.
In
Auschwitz, Mengele found a way to live out this intellectual dream derived from
his mentor. While he could not always have the family data going back over
several generations that Verschuer wished for, he could arrange to his
heart’s content what his teacher called “a fixed minimum of
examinations … in all cases.”28 Indeed,
Mengele could exploit the unique opportunity Auschwitz provided for quick and
absolute availability of large numbers of these precious research subjects,
especially identical twins.
Mengele did not merely issue orders that
twins be rounded up: he was a central, even fanatical, figure in the
rounding-up process. Teresa W., who was sometimes in a position to observe ramp
selections from close up, told how Mengele, looking “strange,” would
plunge into the “river” of arriving Hungarian Jews, “going
quickly, … the same speed [as] the crowd and [shouting] only,
‘Zwillinge heraus!’… with such a face that I would think
he’s mad.”
Once he had selected the twins, Mengele made them
part of an elaborate research structure, Auschwitz style. Besides the general
SS doctors’ unit (used by all SS doctors), he had three additional
offices, mainly for his work with twins: one in the men’s camp, one in the
women’s camp, and one in the Gypsy camp. In all these places, twins had
special status. They were given a special number sequence, and in many cases
“ZW” (for Zwillinge, or “twins”) was made part of
the tattooed number. They were frequently permitted to keep their own clothing
and sometimes their hair. Twins, mostly children, had special blocks, usually
within medical units and often together with other research subjects of
Mengele, such as dwarfs or inmates with other abnormalities. An older child or
an adult from among the twins, generally known as the Zwillingsvater
(literally, “twins’ father”) would be put in charge and would
become, in effect, the block chief. In each area, then, there took shape an
extraordinary twin-dominated world of Mengele’s “odd” research
subjects.
As one of them, Simon J., describes: |
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We were very close. …There was a little
fellow, … two-and-a-half, … the darling of the … block.... We
had all sizes and shapes … a pair of eighteen-year-old strapping,
magnificent boys from Hungary, excellent football-soccer players, …
completely identical, We |
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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 348 |
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