Josef Mengele was nowhere near the upper ranks of the Nazi hierarchy yet has endured as one of the regime’s most infamous figures. Prominent in fiction as well as credulous nonfiction, he is recalled as “Dr. Death,” notorious as an SS physician at Auschwitz, where he conducted experiments on his captives.
In Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death (W.W. Norton), David G. Marwell sifts through the documentary evidence and assembles the fullest, most accurate picture yet. The author is a former director of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage and worked in the 1980s with the U.S. Justice Department to track Mengele’s whereabouts (and his possible ties to U.S. intelligence).
The facts are both more interesting and more sinister than the legend. To clear up one misconception, Marwell shows that Mengele was part of an Auschwitz team of SS physicians. They worked in shifts as the trains of victims arrived, separating those to be killed immediately from those allowed a short reprieve. Even the great Elie Wiesel mistakenly assumed that Mengele was the man who decided he would live. Every survivor claims it was Mengele, but most descriptions don’t tally with his appearance. Mengele did participate in the culling that occurred at the railroad platform but was one of many officers so tasked.
As for the experiments, Mengele was less a mad scientist than a researcher in a field shut down by mainstream science following the Holocaust: eugenics. Germany was not alone in the projects to “improve” human stock by breeding the “fit,” sterilizing the “unfit” and other measures. The U.S. was one of the leading nations with eugenic research and laws until Hitler. After 1933, Germany’s formidable medical establishment redirected its efforts toward “racial hygiene.” As Mengele completed medical school, he was taught that the individual was nothing more than a single cell of an entire people. Under the Third Reich, great institutions became engaged in mapping racial and ethnic boundaries by measuring skulls and bones and making careful notations on complexion, hair and eye color.
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As Marwell puts it, Mengele “pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses, but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards.”
Before being posted to Auschwitz, Mengele was no stranger to the peer-reviewed journals of academic science. Mengele and his colleagues were seeking the biochemical basis of race and trying to prove the heritability of intelligence, physical health and personality. In eugenics, nature trumps nurture. Mengele’s preoccupation with studying twins at Auschwitz was not unique but part of a broader study of the laws of inheritance.
For Mengele, Auschwitz was a laboratory where the minimum legal constraints preserved in Nazi Germany (parental consent) were repealed. At the death camp, he could choose from thousands of unwilling subjects and organize control groups for experiments. In death, Mengele collected their organs and bones for further study, sending many carefully preserved specimens to institutes in Berlin.
Marwell helped verify Mengele’s 1979 death by examining his exhumed bones. He ends the book on a hopeful note: advances in genetics don’t support the idea that inheritance determines habits, personalities and intelligence. Genetically, we are more alike than unlike each other.
At least one of Mengele’s associates worked with the man who identified Asperger’s as a distinct disorder, although his insights went unappreciated for decades. In Asperger’s Children (W.W. Norton), historian Edith Sheffer goes in search of Viennese psychiatrist Hans Asperger, finding that his ideas were linked to Nazi eugenic theories. Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Asperger collaborated closely with Nazi physicians who euthanized autistic and developmentally disabled children in the name of improving racial stock. Like many scientists across the world, Asperger believed in eugenics, but perhaps he was uncomfortable with the drastic steps undertaken by the Nazis? His identification of “high functioning” autistic children (with the idea that they had redeeming social value) saved at least some lives.
Asperger’s Children is a sophisticated analysis of the many shades of gray that colored life under Nazism. The acclaimed 2018 book is out now in paperback.
