{"id":85421,"date":"2021-05-16T17:05:51","date_gmt":"2021-05-16T15:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=85421"},"modified":"2021-05-08T07:11:53","modified_gmt":"2021-05-08T05:11:53","slug":"30-05-55","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=85421","title":{"rendered":"Memory Plays Tricks About Mengele"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Memory Plays Tricks About Mengele<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

JONATHAN MARK<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
New biography examines the Auschwitz \u2018Angel of Death.\u2019<\/span><\/h5>\n

Mengele was less an anomaly than \u201ca product and the promise of the German scientific establishment,\u201d Marwell says.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I<\/span>n the Talmud, when Hillel was challenged to teach the entire Torah \u201cwhile standing on one foot,\u201d Hillel answered, \u201cLove your neighbor as yourself,\u201d but \u201cRemember\u201d might have been a better answer. \u201cRemember\u201d is found 169 times in the Bible, including \u201cremember Amalek,\u201d about the merciless people mythically linked to everyone from Haman to Hitler. Holocaust memories, in particular, are sacred, but what if truth is elusive, lost in memory\u2019s fog?<\/span><\/p>\n

Ask Auschwitz survivors about their first day in hell, waiting to be directed to the gas chambers or to camp slavery, and they\u2019ll almost certainly tell you about the Nazi making the selection. \u201cIt was Mengele,\u201d survivors remember with a shiver. Dr. Josef Mengele, the most notorious Nazi in the most notorious concentration camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mengele wasn\u2019t the first of the \u201cdoctors from Hell,\u201d as one chronicler described them. He didn\u2019t innovate, but he epitomized.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marwell writes, \u201cIf Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, then Mengele \u2026 has come to serve a similar role for the death camp itself. Perhaps for this reason, much of what is known of Mengele\u2019s time in Auschwitz [May 1943 to January 1945] is more trope than truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In his book, Marwell seeks to uncover the truth. Director emeritus of The Museum of Jewish Heritage \u2013 A Living Memorial to The Holocaust, he has done more than most others to unravel the mystery of Mengele, from his early career as a promising pre-war medical researcher to his post-war disappearance into South America, the most notorious Nazi to evade capture or punishment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marwell worked on the Mengele case for the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s. By then, the Nazi doctor had died by drowning \u2014 presumably while suffering a stroke \u2014 on Feb. 7, 1979. The exhumed body was only proven to be Mengele\u2019s many years after the fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Was Mengele evil above and beyond what we know of Auschwitz? \u201cIt\u2019s much more satisfying to write him off as some kind of anomaly,\u201d answered Marwell, \u201cpresumably motivated by an obsessed, grotesque interest in sadism, when he was much more a product and the promise of the German scientific establishment, and in a way that\u2019s a more frightening picture.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mengele pursued his experiments, Marwell writes, \u201cnot 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Holocaust was a two-tiered phenomenon, perpetrated by lower-class street thugs and upper-class intellectuals and scientists in academia, law, government \u2014 and Auschwitz. The intellectuals claimed to understand the \u201cJewish race\u201d scientifically and medically. At the Wannsee Conference, the pivotal 1942 summit of high-ranking Nazis formulating the Final Solution, eight of the 15 participants had doctorates. At all camps, not just Auschwitz, the \u201cselections\u201d were always assigned to medical doctors, to give the veneer of medical triage to the decisions of who was too sickly, too old or too needy to be worth saving.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mengele\u2019s experiments on children, little people, twins and Roma were cruel and grotesque \u2014 he was quite interested in eyeballs and shipped a crate of them to a lab back in Germany \u2014 but such medical experiments were hardly unusual in the camps.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor was Mengele, who operated almost exclusively in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the only such doctor in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz I, the main camp, Dr. Carl Clauberg, a research gynecologist, conducted painful or deadly sterilization experiments on hundreds of Jewish women. Clauberg also conducted experiments on women (his test \u201crabbits\u201d) in the Ravensbruck camp.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Auschwitz III, there were electro-shock experiments. Dr. Bruno Weber tested drugs on prisoners. In Dachau, Dr. Hubertus Strughold had prisoners submerged into ice-cold water, or left naked in freezing temperatures, all experiments supposedly justified by military or academic necessity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mengele was hardly a solo practitioner. He answered to SS Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief medical authority in Auschwitz, who answered to Dr. Eno Lolling, the chief physician of all concentration camps. Few remember their names.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marwell points out that Mengele \u201cwas almost certainly planning to use his Auschwitz research as the basis for his \u2026 post-doctoral thesis.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mengele, writes Marwell, explained to another Auschwitz doctor, Hans Delmotte, who tried to refuse selection duty, \u201cthe necessity of eliminating the Jews.\u201d Mengele compared it to a battlefield doctor, making selections, knowing he can\u2019t treat everyone. Added Mengele, Berlin had already decided \u201cto eradicate the Jews.\u201d They were as good as dead, so why be so bothered? Delmotte resumed his selection duty, and killed himself at the end of the war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Horst Fischer was another hesitant selection boss, asking why these ragged, powerless Jews had to be killed. Mengele explained that \u201cit was precisely from this reservoir of people that the Jews drew new power and refreshed their blood. Without the poor but supposedly harmless Eastern Jews, the civilized West European Jews would not be capable of survival. Therefore it is necessary to destroy all Jews.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this excited Mengele. He \u201cthrived in Auschwitz,\u201d writes Marwell. Mengele never denied what he did or accepted guilt. When confronted by his adult son long after the war, Mengele argued that the selections were not his policy, and Auschwitz existed long before he arrived.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet it was Mengele who lodged in the memories of so many survivors. Marwell cites historian and former Auschwitz inmate Hermann Langbein, who identified \u201cthe Mengele effect,\u201d a form of \u201cmemory displacement,\u201d in which, says Langbein, \u201cI heard survivors say that Mengele did this or that to them, even though Mengele had not yet arrived in Auschwitz at the time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

recommended by: Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nElie Wiesel even wrote of Mengele\u2019s monocle, though Langbein, who worked with Mengele almost daily in the SS infirmary, said Mengele never wore a monocle. Hungarian survivors say Mengele spoke to them in Hungarian, a language he did not speak.<\/span><\/p>\n

Israeli historian Na\u2019ama Shik suggests that survivors\u2019 accounts decades after the fact could be shaped by what \u201cthey have read and heard\u201d in the years since. Langbein adds, \u201cIf a member of the SS is repeatedly named in public in connection with especially monstrous deeds, it is possible that survivors will project their experiences on to him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Marwell\u2019s biography places Mengele exactly where he belongs: not as a singular perpetrator of evil, but as one of the many cogs in a monstrous machine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Memory Plays Tricks About Mengele JONATHAN MARK New biography examines the Auschwitz \u2018Angel of Death.\u2019 Mengele was less an anomaly than \u201ca product and the promise of the German scientific establishment,\u201d Marwell says. In the Talmud, when Hillel was challenged to teach the entire Torah \u201cwhile standing on one foot,\u201d Hillel answered, \u201cLove your neighbor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85421"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85644,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85421\/revisions\/85644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}