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Without Auschwitz, he would probably have kept his destructive potential under control. As a wise former inmate physician told me, ''In ordinary times, Mengele could have been a slightly sadistic German professor. It was the coming together of the man and the place, the ''fit'' between the two, that created the Auschwitz Mengele. The son of a well-to-do Bavarian industrialist, Mengele is remembered by an acquaintance as a popular young man, an enthusiastic friend.
He was also intelligent, a serious student who showed ''a very distinct ambitiousness. In , at the age of 20, Mengele joined a right-wing, nationalistic organization.
He was an early Nazi enthusiast, enlisting with the SA the storm troopers in , applying for party membership in and for SS membership the following year. There are rumors that, while studying in Munich, he met such high-ranking Nazis as Alfred Rosenberg, a leading ideologue, and even Hitler himself. Mengele became a true ideologue: a man who understood his life to be in the service of a larger vision. According to an Auschwitz friend and fellow-SS physician, Mengele espoused the visionary SS ideology that the Nordic race was the only truly creative race, that it had been weakened by Christian morality of Jewish origin, and that Germany needed to revert to ancient German myths in creating an SS ''order'' to purify the Nordic race.
According to his friend, Mengele was an extreme anti-Semite, ''fully convinced that the annihilation of the Jews is a provision for the recovery of the world and Germany. I have preserved the anonymity of the people I interviewed. Those who are identified had previously made themselves known in books or other public documents. Mengele's ideology considerably influenced his intellectual choices. Matriculating not only at Munich but also at Bonn, Vienna and Frankfurt, he came to concentrate on physical anthropology and genetics, eventually working under Professor Freiherr Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at Frankfurt.
He earned a degree in anthropology as well as medicine. Mengele produced three publications before he came to Auschwitz. They dealt with physical characteristics and abnormalities and, in each case, emphasized the role of heredity -an emphasis in keeping with trends in German and international scholarship at the time. Though jammed with charts, diagrams and photographs that claim more than they prove, the papers are relatively respectable scientific works of that era.
But their conclusions uniformly reflect Mengele's commitment to bringing science into the service of the Nazi vision. Mengele seemed well on his way toward an academic career. He had the strong backing of Verschuer who, in a letter of recommendation, praised his reliability and his capacity for clear verbal presentation of difficult intellectual problems. Mengele's marriage to a professor's daughter was in keeping with his academic aspirations. His military experience loomed large in his idea of himself.
In , Mengele served six months with a specially trained mountain light-infantry regiment, followed by a year in the reserve medical corps. He spent three years with a Waffen SS unit, mostly in the East, including action in Russia, where, according to SS records, he was wounded and declared medically unfit for combat.
A commendation declared that he had ''acquitted himself brilliantly in the face of the enemy,'' and he received five decorations, including the Iron Cross First Class and Second Class. Mengele, his friend said, was the only doctor in Auschwitz who possessed that array of medals, and he was enormously proud of them; he frequently referred to his combat experience to bolster his arguments on a variety of matters. According to his friend, Mengele arrived at the camp with a special aura because he was coming more or less directly from the front.
His friend suggests something else special about Mengele: He had asked to be sent to the Auschwitz death camp because of the opportunities it could provide for his research. He continued to have the support and collaboration of his teacher, Verschuer, who convinced the German Research Society to provide financial support for Mengele's work. Like other SS doctors there, Mengele had the task of ''selecting'' prisoners for the gas chamber - the vast majority - and for the slave labor force.
SS doctors also controlled and supervised the inmate doctors who alone did whatever actual medical treatment was done. Mengele was the chief doctor of Birkenau, an Auschwitz subcamp, but seemed to many inmates to have authority beyond his position. Olga Lengyel, an inmate doctor, described Mengele as ''far and away the chief provider for the gas chamber and the crematory ovens. One reason he appeared to be especially important was that he was extraordinarily energetic. While many SS doctors did no more than what was required of them, Mengele was always on the move, busy with his work, initiating new projects.
More than any other SS doctor, he seemed to find his calling in Auschwitz. Many inmates thought that Mengele alone conducted the large ''selections. The Nazi doctors were assigned, on a rotating basis, to stand on the ramp and select those prisoners who would live, as workers at the camp, and those who would be killed.
The evidence is that Mengele took his turn at the ramp, like everyone else, but he also appeared there frequently to make sure that any twins in a ''transport,'' as the trains were called, would be collected and saved for his research. But the prisoners saw it differently. At a trial of former Auschwitz personnel, in Frankfurt in , an inmate who had been assigned to unload the transports recalled only the name of Mengele. When the judge commented, ''Mengele cannot have been there all the time,'' the witness answered: ''In my opinion, always. Night and day.
The American Psychologist , 64 1 , 1— I'm moving from an old building into a new building. Most people's view of evil is straightforward: a cruel, violent aggressor attacking a helpless victim. Winnicott, D. Billias Amsterdam: Rodopi , 13— Naso and J. It is the distinctive qualities and action capacities of images that are the necessary and sufficient condition of any psychoanalytic interpretation that purports to be accurate.
He was an elegant figure on the ramp - handsome, well-groomed, extremely upright in posture. Prisoners sometimes described him as ''very Aryan looking'' or ''tall and blond,'' when he was actually of medium height, with dark hair and a dark complexion. Inmates said Mengele ''conveyed the impression of a gentle and cultured man'' and spoke of the ''cheerful expression on his face. There was an easy rhythm in his approach to selections.
He walked back and forth, an inmate recalled, ''a nice-looking man'' with a riding crop in his hand who ''looked at the bodies and the faces just a couple of seconds'' and said, ''Links [left] , Rechts [right] , Links, Rechts Links, Rechts Links, Rechts. Prisoners were struck by the stark contrast between his calm, playful manner and the horror of what he was doing. Occasionally, though, his detachment could give way to outbreaks of rage and violence, especially when he encountered resistance to his sense of ''the rules.
Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and her child. Still raging, he ordered that all the people from that transport whom he had previously selected as workers be sent to the gas chamber. In the hospital blocks where medical treatment was given to prisoners in order to maintain the workforce, there was another kind of ''selection'' process.
Nazi doctors would weed out for the gas chamber the weakest patients, those thought unlikely to recover in two or three weeks. Mengele, Dr. Lengyel recalled, ''could show up suddenly at any hour, day or night. He collected and studied dwarfs in an effort to determine the genetic reasons for their condition. He investigated a gangrenous condition of the face and mouth called noma.
For all our knowledge of psychopathology and sociopathology--and despite endless examinations of abuse and torture, mass murder and genocide--we still. Psychoanalysis of Evil: Perspectives on Destructive Behavior (SpringerBriefs in Psychology) by Henry Kellerman () [Henry Kellerman;] on.
Though ordinarily a rare condition, it was common among gypsy inmates of Auschwitz. It was known to be caused by the kind of debilitation that inmates were subject to, but Mengele focused on what he deemed to be genetic and racial factors. He sought out inmates with a condition known as heterochromia of the iris - in which the two eyes are of different colors -and, after their death, sent their eyes to his old professor, Verschuer, at the Berlin-Dahlem Institute of Racial Biology.
With some of these inmates, Mengele took the bizarre step of attempting to change eye color in an Aryan direction by injecting methylene blue into the brown eyes of blond inmate children. But the research that most occupied Mengele, to which he devoted the greatest time and energy, was his study of twins.
In fact, he probably came to Auschwitz for that specific purpose - as a continuation of work he had done under Verschuer at the University of Frankfurt a few years earlier. As early as , Verschuer had written of the absolute necessity of research on twins to achieve ''complete and reliable determination of what is hereditary in man.
Because identical twins derived from the same ovum possess the same genetic constitution, they have traditionally been used in research on hereditary influences. Their shared physical and sometimes psychological characteristics, normal and abnormal, can be assumed to be genetically determined. Such characteristics can be assumed to be genetically determined in other people as well. Mengele recognized that Auschwitz would permit him to pursue his mentor's dream. From the hundreds of thousands of prisoners, he could collect twins in quantities never before available to a scientist.