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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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361 |
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| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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any case, we can be reasonably sure that Mengele was
seeking to further his own scientific name, and that he would have published
results under that name alone.
This gangrenous condition of the face
and mouth is known to result from extreme debilitation, and prisoner doctors
had no doubt that such debilitation or cachexia (a general wasting of the body)
from Auschwitz diet and general conditions was the fundamental. cause of the
frequent occurrence in Gypsy children of this ordinarily rare disease. Mengele
did not entirely dispute this assumption, as he permitted Professor Epstein to
give at least one lecture on noma in which the importance of cachexia was
stressed. But Mengele was clearly more interested in a genetic or racial
source, so that a prisoner doctor who was given the task of bacteriological
work on the condition, could ask, “But why did the German physicians, not
think, … as we thought ourselves, that this noma epidemic was to be
attributed to the misery, lack of hygiene and nutrition, to which these
children were submitted, rather, than to another cause?”
Eva C.,
the artist who worked with Mengele, recalls an incident in which he took her to
an extremely debilitated Gypsy boy moribund from advanced noma — “a
little bundle of bones” — and asked her, “Would you believe that
this kid is ten years old?” C.’s sense was that Mengele was not so
much commenting on how much younger the boy appeared as implying that
“this is that kind of race, … like he didn't realize that he did it
to that kid.” This pattern of blaming the victim was especially blatant in
Mengele’s noma work.
Mengele again killed for science. One
prisoner doctor told me how Mengele one day brought in “two heads …
wrapped in newspaper … children's heads … smelling of phenol.”
It was clear that Mengele had had the children killed in order to make possible
their postmortem study, and he was bringing the heads to this doctor for
bacteriological examination.
Mengele’s work on eye
color was a particularly strange and revealing episode in his Auschwitz
research career. Characteristically, it began with a scientific basis. He
regularly sent eyes of Gypsies back to the Berlin Institute, where a study was
being conducted of hereditary factors in eye color, with special focus on a
condition known as heterochromia of the iris, in which the two eyes of a person
are of different colors. A woman physician named Magnussen who worked at the
institute was in charge of the eye project. Dr. Nyiszli reports the occurrence
of heterochromia, with one blue and one brown eye, in six of eight Gypsy twins
he was ordered on one occasion to dissect. His dissection showed that these
twins had been killed by phenol injection, though he also found evidence in all
of hereditary syphilis and in some of tuberculosis. Mengele said that, because
of the syphilis and tuberculosis, they “would not have lived in any
case” — a comment Nyiszli took as a signal to write in these diseases
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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 361 |
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