Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (29 page)

A prisoner was placed naked on a stretcher outside the barracks in the evening. He was covered with a sheet and every hour a bucket of cold water was poured over him. The test person lay out in the open like this into the morning. Their temperatures were taken. Later Dr. Rascher said it was a mistake to cover the subject with a sheet and to drench him with water…. In the future the test person must not be covered.
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Rascher hoped to use Auschwitz, not Dachau to do these experiments because it was colder there, and the larger grounds created less outrage in the camp when the test persons screamed as they froze to death. Although Dr. Rascher was forced to do the research at Dachau, several bouts of intensely cold weather allowed him to achieve his research goals. Some subjects were forced to remain nude for 14 hours at 21 degrees Fahrenheit, lowering their interior temperature to 77 degrees and causing severe peripheral frostbite.
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Other research methods involved putting subjects into tanks of icy cold water. As the victims froze to death, their temperature, heartbeats, and respiration were regularly recorded. At first Dr. Rascher did not allow use of anesthesia on his subjects but they screamed so loudly that it was impossible to continue the research without it.

In the end, Dr. Rascher conducted close to 400 “freezing” experiments on 300 prisoners. A third froze to death, the rest were gassed or shot afterward. Rascher thought that the experiments he had conducted were “fully justified by the great value of the scientific results obtained,” and he

saw nothing wrong in exposing a couple of dozen people to intense cold, in water or air, and then attempting their resuscitation. He was in fact very proud of having discovered a technique which he said would save the lives of thousands who would otherwise have died from exposure.
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The extreme cold experiments designed to determine how long it took the average subject to die found that it required, on average, 70 minutes for cold levels typical in the North Sea to produce the level of hypothermia required to kill an experimental subject. Ironically, Dr. Rascher himself ended up as a camp inmate, evidently because he had attempted to publish the results of his research in a Swiss medical journal that could benefit British seamen who, after they were rescued from the sea when their ships were torpedoed, frequently died without ever recovering consciousness.

Other “experiments” included research on treating phosphorous burns caused by incendiary bombs. The SS doctors smeared phosphorous on the arms of inmates then set their arms aflame. Survivors of this barbaric experiment testified that the pain was extremely excruciating.
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The doctors then experimented with various ointments and nostrums. Evidently all of these experiments proved to be of little or no benefit.

An example of the many experiments performed by the Nazi scientists included injecting substances in healthy victims to determine which one was most effective to kill him or her. After much data was collected they determined that gasoline was among the most efficacious. Other research included decompression and oxygen reduction.

Mengele’s activities and those of the other professors were actively supported by the German academic establishment: “The notion that some lives were not worth living, soon to become academically respectable, may explain why Mengele experimented on concentration camp inmates as though they were laboratory rats.”
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His experiments were part of his Habilitation degree, required of all German academics for a university professorship.
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Lagnado and Dekel concluded that many of Germany’s most eminent

scientists and research centers joined forces with the Nazis and actively helped to implement the Nuremberg Laws. But none did so with more fervor than the University of Frankfurt’s Professor Otmar von Verschuer, possibly the most acclaimed racial scientist of his day. Since the early 1930s, Verschuer had been receiving generous financial support from the Nazis to build his lavish new Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity, which specialized in racial studies.
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Mengele and the other Nazi doctors who completed research, such as the so-called terminal experiments that killed the subjects, published their research in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Mengele and other Darwinists believed this research would demonstrate scientifically that his racist goals were scientifically valid. The camp held regular research seminars with his assistants, including medically qualified inmates, to discuss their research, individual cases, and treatment strategies.

The Nazi doctors presented the results of their gruesome, often lethal, research to various scientific conferences and rarely did the august audience of German scientists raise any objections.
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The Nazi government strongly supported science to the degree that, during the height of the Nazi regime, Germany ranked second in the world in science productivity behind only the United States.
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All this changed when America entered the conflict and Germany began losing the war.

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

The work of the German academic and medical establishment, of which Mengele was a prominent part, began with a programme of racial purification by focusing on health issues. Although the Nazi doctors may have began with good intentions, they ended up producing one of the worst genocides in history:

The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health established the mental and physical conditions that qualified for compulsory sterilization: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, deafness, physical deformities, Huntington’s disease, and alcoholism.
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The leading German eugenic racial scientists had very strong support from the German scientific establishment, which was confident that their genocide programmes would

improve the “quality” of the German race. In fact, they were the start of a series of escalating genocidal programs: first, euthanasia or “mercy” killing for the incurably insane; then the mass killings of people the Nazis judged to be biologically inferior, such as Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews; finally
Die Endlösung
, the Final Solution, Hitler’s cover name for his plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.
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The scientific underpinnings used to justify the debasement of Jews was supplied by leading German scientists and academicians, such as agricultural expert Walter Darre, whose book
Blood and Soil
was published by the Nazi Party and “extrapolated barnyard eugenics to humans. Not surprisingly his ideas captivated the former chicken breeder, Heinrich Himmler, who chose Darre to operate the SS’s Race and Settlement Office.”
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Mengele also tried to prove that certain diseases now known to be contagious were caused by racial inferiority. Therefore, the Darwinists reasoned, as one does not negotiate with trichinae and bacilli, nor can trichinae and bacilli be educated. Likewise, the inferior races cannot be effectively educated, but rather must be “exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible.”
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Use of the “metaphor of Jews as diseased organisms was of inestimable value for the purveyors of mass murder, particularly physicians intent upon justifying their actions to outsiders and to themselves.”
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Mengele was “absolutely convinced he was doing the right thing” and, as a result, had no qualms, “not with his conscience, not with anybody, not with anything” about implementing his killing programme for the sake of applying what they believed was the proven science of Darwinism.
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They concluded because Darwinism was an empirical fact, applying it to benefit humanity was both a moral and laudable goal.

Germany was not alone in its support of anti-Semitism. In the United States, polls taken between 1938 and 1942 indicated that 10 to 15 percent of Americans supported anti-Semitic statutes but “only in Germany did it rally significant political groups” in support.
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The Nazi Party’s end goal was to take “absolute control of the evolutionary process…in orchestrating their own ‘selections,’ their own version of human evolution.”
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THE WAR ENDS

After the war, Josef Mengele hoped to be able to resume his Darwinian racist “research” in Germany, but he soon realized that this was no longer possible. Since the Nazis were no longer in power, he managed to flee to Argentina on an Italian ship. The former leading evolutionary scientist spent the next thirty years in hiding, sheltered by various neo-Nazi networks in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.
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Mengele died in 1979, a lonely and bitter man, his dream of creating a more perfect race of humans in Germany shattered.

SUMMARY

Mengele’s young mind was corrupted by a combination of the political climate in Nazi Germany and the fact that his strong

interest in genetics and evolution happened to coincide with the developing concept that some human beings afflicted by disorders were unfit to reproduce, even to live. Perhaps the real catalyst in this lethal brew was that Mengele, first at Munich and later at Frankfurt, studied under the leading exponents of this “unworthy life” theory. His consummate ambition was to succeed in this fashionable new field of evolutionary research.
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Unfortunately, he succeeded all too well, but in ways that the world now regards as one of the worst tragedies in human history. And the evolutionary ideas that Mengele so enthusiastically absorbed at his university

were precisely the ones that would propel him down the road to Auschwitz. His apprenticeship as a mass murderer formally began not on the selection lines of the concentration camp but in the classrooms of the University of Munich.
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Jewish historian Robert Lifton, in his extensive study of Nazi doctors, wrote that he “began and ended” his study of Nazi crimes with Mengele. Indeed, very few men are as closely associated with the Holocaust in the public’s mind as Professor Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D.

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1
Linda Schmittroth and Mary Kay Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust,
Vol. 1: A-J (Detroit: Gale, 1998), 311.

2
Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel,
Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz
(New York: William Morrow, 1991), 34.

3
John Grabowski,
Josef Mengele
(Farmington Hills: Lucent Books, 2004), 19.

4
Claire Welch,
Rise & Fall of the Nazis
(London: Magpie Books, 2008), 310.

5
Grabowski,
Josef Mengele
, 22.

6
Grabowski,
Josef Mengele
, 22.

7
Gerald L. Posner and John Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1986), 9–10.

8
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9–10.

9
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 41.

10
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9.

11
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9.

12
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 41

13
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9.

14
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 10.

15
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 10.

16
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 10.

17
Gerald Astor,
The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele
(New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985).

18
Schmittroth and Rosteck,
People of the Holocaust
, 1:313.

19
Welch,
Rise & Fall of the Nazis
, 301.

20
Grabowski,
Josef Mengele
, 10.

21
Richard J. Evans,
The Third Reich at War
(New York: Allen Lane, 2008), 610.