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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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341 |
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| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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In talking about his friend, Dr. B. made clear that
Mengele came to Auschwitz with a special aura because he arrived more or less
directly from the front (“because he was wounded”) and because he
apparently chose Auschwitz: asked to be sent there because of the opportunities
it could provide for his research. We now know that, upon Mengele’s being
sent to Auschwitz, Verschuer applied for and received from the German Research
Society, (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft) financial support for his
student’s work there.*
What did Mengele actually do in Auschwitz?
Some prisoners thought him unimportant there and have wondered at his later
notoriety. A former SS man, for instance, who spent more than four years with
the Political Department testified that among the SS doctors he knew he had
never encountered Mengele and in fact had “never heard [his] name …
during the whole time I was in Auschwitz.”11 And Dr. Jacob R. told me, as did a few other
prisoner doctors, that Mengele did not seem exceptional: “At the time I
just saw him as one of the many SS doctors.” But more frequent was the
opposite impression, expressed by Dr. Henri Q., that Mengele was a key
Auschwitz participant “whose role was very important, more than that of
the others” — and who was seemingly ubiquitous: “He had a
reputation, it was a name that was heard the most. He was everywhere. He was
seen the most often — the others were less prominent — which
means he was the most active among them.” That quality of being
"everywhere," and everywhere active, was at the heart of Mengele’s impact
in Auschwitz and of his mode of being in the camp.
He also committed
real crimes, murderous crimes, direct murder. The Frankfurt Court, in indicting
him for extradition, spoke of “hideous crimes” committed alone or
with others “willfully and with bloodlust.” These crimes included
selections, lethal injections, shootings, beatings, and other forms of
deliberate killing. And this list was distilled conservatively from the
testimony of hundreds of survivors. But by the SS’s standards at
Auschwitz, Mengele was an admirable, indeed outstanding, medical officer. In
recommending him for promotion in August 1944, Eduard Wirths spoke of his
“open, honest, firm … [and] absolutely dependable” character and
“magnificent” intellectual and physical talents; of the
“discretion, perseverence, and energy with which he has fulfilled every
task … and … shown himself equal to every situation”; of his
“valuable contribution to anthropological science by making use of the
scientific materials available to him”; of his “absolute ideological
firmness” and “faultless conduct [as] an SS officer” ; and of
such personal qualities as “free, unrestrained, persuasive, and
lively” discourse that rendered him “especially dear to his
comrades.”12 Allowing for excesses in
any |
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* Mengele arrived in
Auschwitz on 30 May 1943, and the grants were approved on 18 August 1943. The
confirmation described the work for one grant obscurely as concerning
“specific albuminous matter” (spezifische Eiweisskörper);
the other was to study “eye color.” Verschuer later wrote that the
work had “the authorization of the Reichsführer SS (Himmler)
and consisted of “anthropological examinations”; further, “blood
tests are sent to my laboratory”.10 |
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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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