Authors: Edwin Black
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (68 page)
To attract more twins, the Nazi Party and the National Socialist Welfare League promoted “twin camps” for the holidays. Verschuer circulated handy text references for all German physicians who might encounter twins. W’hen Verschuer opened his Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1936, the event created such fanfare in
Eugenical News
partially because, “Dr. Verschuer states that the object of his investigation is mankind, not the individual man, but families and twins; and in this work there will not [only] be investigated … interesting twins, but all twins and families of definite geographical origin.”
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At about that time, German neuropsychiatrist Heinrich Kranz of the University of Breslau published extensive genealogical details about seventy-five pairs of twin brothers and fifty pairs of opposite gender twins, seeking correlations on criminal behavior. In a
Journal of Heredity
essay, Popenoe lauded Kranz’s investigation and predicted that such efforts would help identify “born criminals.” Popenoe welcomed more such German research because “it has become one of the most dependable methods of studying human heredity.”
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Indeed, a plethora of Nazi scientific journals were brimming with regular coverage of eugenic investigations of twins. Several publications were devoted solely to the subject, such as
Zwillingsforschungen (Twin Research)
and
Zwillingsund Familienforschungen (Twin and Family Research).
Verschuer frequently wrote for these journals. In some cases Mengele coauthored the articles, including an article on systemic problems and cleft palate deformation published in
Zwillingsund Familienforschungen.
Some published twin research credited Mengele as the principal investigator, such as an article on congenital heart disease, also for
Zwillingsund Familienforschungen.
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Verschuer’s preoccupation with twin studies expanded feverishly. He required more and more twins. In a September 1938 application for funds from the German Research Society, Verschuer explained his plans. “Large-scale research on twins is necessary to explore the question of the hereditary aspects of human characteristics, especially illnesses. This research can take two paths: 1. Testing of all twins in a specific geographic area, done at our institute by Miss Liebmann. All twins in the Frankfurt district back to 1898 have been listed and almost all have been examined; she discussed some interesting cases in several articles and a comprehensive summary is being done. 2. Listing of series of twins. Based on cases in over 100 hospitals in west and southwest Germany, the number of twins among them were determined and the cases were examined according to illnesses.” He listed rheumatism, stomach ulcers, cancer, heart defects, anemia and leukemia as the conditions he was focusing on. Verschuer assured, “A good deal of material has been collected.”
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In 1939, Interior Minister Frick issued a public decree compelling all twins to register with their local Public Health Office and make themselves available for genetic testing. The Reich Statistics Bureau would cooperate in the identification campaign. The announcement in the Nazi medical publication
Ziel und Weg (Goal and Path)
was published with a lengthy quotation from
Mein Kompf
on the cover: “We must differentiate most stringently between the state as a mere
container
and race as its
contents.
This container is meaningful only when it has the ability to preserve and protect the contents; otherwise it is worthless.”
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American eugenicist T. U. H. Ellinger was in Germany shortly after the decree to visit with Fischer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. In a
Journal of Heredity
essay on his visit, Ellinger flippantly reported to his colleagues, “Twins have, of course, for a long time been a favorite material for the study of the relative importance of heredity and environment, of nature and nurture. It does, however, take a dictatorship to oblige some ten thousand pairs of twins, as well as triplets and even quadruplets, to report to a scientific institute at regular intervals for all kinds of recordings and tests.”
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When twins did report to the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, they were often placed in small, specially-constructed examination rooms, each lined with two-way mirrors and motion picture camera lenses camouflaged into the wallpaper. The staff proudly showed Ellinger all of these facilities.
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However, eugenicists at the institute could only go so far with mere observations.
Reich scientists needed more if they were to take the next step in creating a super race resistant to disease and capable of transmitting the best traits. Autopsies were required to discover how specific organs and bodily processes reacted to various experiments. Verschuer needed more twins and the freedom to kill them. The highest ranks of the Hitler regime agreed, including Interior Minister Frick, who ran the concentration camps, and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.
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Millions of dispensable human beings from across Europe-Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables-were passing through Hitler’s camps to be efficiently murdered. Among these millions, there were bound to be thousands of twins.
Shortly after Verschuer took over for Fischer at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, he proposed a
Zwillingslager,
or “twins camp,” within Auschwitz. He applied to the German Research Society, which between July and September of 1943 passed his application through the various steps needed for approval and funding. The grant covered a six-month period beginning in October 1943 under contract number
0296/1595.
The camp was approved and was bureaucratically filed under the keyword “Twins Camp.”
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At the end of May 1943, Mengele arrived in Auschwitz, where he took control of the ramps where Jews were brought in. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, “My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturm Führer [captain] and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichs Führer [Rimmler]. “
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Nazi Germany had now carried eugenics further than any dared expect. The future of the master race that would thrive in Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lay in twins. For this reason, there would now be a special class of victims at Auschwitz. There would be a special camp, special medical facilities and special laboratories-all for the twins.
After the locomotives lurched to a final stop at Auschwitz, after the whistle shrieked and the doors rolled open, after the bewildered masses tumbled out of the boxcars and onto the ramp, above the tumult of their own fear and the incessant barking dogs, all of them heard one word, and they heard it shouted twice.
As the SS passed through the trembling crowds lining up for the gas chambers, they cried out for all to hear:
Twins! Twins!
LEA LORINCZI:
“When we got off the trains, we could hear the Germans yelling, ‘Twins, twins!’”
Lea and her brother were spared.
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MAGDA SPIEGEL:
“SS guards were yelling, ‘Twins, twins, we want twins.’ I saw a very good-looking man coming toward me. It was Mengele.
“ They were also spared.
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JUDITH YAGUDAH:
“When it was our turn, Mengele immediately asked us
if
we were twins. Ruthie and I looked identical.
We
had similar hairdos.
We
were wearing the same outfits. Mengele ordered us to go in a certain direction-and our mother, too.”
Judith and Ruthie were spared.
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EVA MOZES:
“As I clutched my mother’s hand, an
SS
man hurried
by
shouting, ‘Twins! Twins!’ He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike.
We
were wearing similar clothes. ‘Are they twins?’ he asked my mother. ‘Is that good?’ she replied. He nodded yes. ‘They are twins,’ she said.”
Eva and Miriam were also pulled out of the gas chamber line.
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ZVI KLEIN:
“My twin brother and I were marching toward the gas chambers when we heard people yelling, ‘Twins! Twins!’ We were yanked out of the lines and brought over to Dr. Mengele."
Zvi and his brother were spared
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MOSHE OFFER: “/
heard my father
cry
out to them he had twins. He went over personally to Dr. Mengele and told him,
I
have a pair of twin boys.
‘ …
But we didn‘t want to be separated from our mother, and so the Nazis separated us
by
force. My father begged Mengele
…
As we were led away,
I
saw my father fall to the ground. “
The Offer boys lived. Their parents disappeared into the selection.
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HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN:
“Some prisoners told [my mother} in Yiddish, ‘Tell them you have twins. There is a
Dr.
Mengele here who wants twins. Only twins are being kept alive.
‘“ The Stern sisters lived to tell their story.
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All of them lived through the
Selektion.
But now they lived in Mengele’s world of torture and testing, electroshock and syringes, eye injections and other hideous experiments-where live children and fresh cadavers were equally prized-all to achieve the eugenic ideal of a superior race in a place where mankind had sunk to the nadir of humanity.
* * *
Sadistic science at Auschwitz was part of Nazi Germany’s eugenic desire to create its master race.
Like Verschuer, Mengele considered himself a warrior in the battle for eugenic supremacy. In an autobiographical account, Mengele spoke of his desire to create a super race as his initial motive for becoming a doctor. He traced his own family pedigree-pure Aryan stock-back four generations. An inmate anthropologist, Martina Puzyna, saved from death in order to work with Mengele, recalled, “He believed you could create a new super-race as though you were breeding horses…. He was mad about genetic engineering.” A prisoner pathologist forced to work closely with Mengele wrote that the Angel of Death was obsessed with “the secret of the reproduction of the race. To advance one step in the search to unlock the secret of multiplying the race of superior beings destined to rule was a ‘noble goal.’ If only it were possible, in the future, to have each German mother bear as many twins as possible.”
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Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, Mengele established Verschuer’s twin camp at Barrack 14 in Camp F. Mengele had his pick of assistants from the finest doctors and pathologists in Europe, who came to Auschwitz condemned in sealed boxcars. One whom he selected from the ramp was a Hungarian Jewish pathologist named Miklos Nyiszli, a graduate of Friedrich WIlhelm University medical school in Breslau. He became one of Mengele’s favorite assistants. Nyiszli’s task was to dissect the endless torrent of special corpses and create meticulous postmortem reports. For this process, Mengele would not settle for a typical ramshackle, makeshift concentration camp facility. Instead, amid the filth and squalor of Auschwitz, Mengele requisitioned and created a modem well-equipped pathology lab
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The lab had everything needed for perfect autopsies. It was eerily professional, with light green painted walls surrounding a red concrete floor. A polished marble dissection table with fluid drains abutted a utility basin with shiny nickel faucets. Three white porcelain sinks lined the wall. Mosquito screens covered the windows. In the adjacent room, Nyiszli found a well-stocked library with the latest publications, three microscopes, and a closet full of mortuary supplies-everything from aprons to gloves. Nyiszli recalled it as “the exact replica of any large city’s institute of pathology.”
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Dina, a Czech inmate known for her skillful paintings, was selected at the ramp to become Mengele’s anthropological artist. She would create anatomical drawings of the twins’ features: noses, ears, mouths, hands, feet and skulls. Her artwork would accompany the experimentation data in each patient’s folder.
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Mengele was happy in his work, frequently whistling as he selected human guinea pigs, discarded others to the gas chambers, inflicted his experiments and then reviewed the autopsies. A broad smile lit up his face as he surveyed his precious subjects, especially the children. “Almost like he had fun,” one surviving twin recalled, adding, “He was very playful.” Diligent and detailed, he once noticed a smudge on a bright blue file cover and sternly turned to Nyiszli, asking, “How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love!”
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Love was a corrupted word for Mengele. He certainly loved his work. At times, he seemed to love the youngest twins. All of Mengele’s twins were better fed than other prisoners and even allowed small personal freedoms, such as roaming around the camp. Sometimes he served the children chocolates, patted them on the head affectionately, chaperoned them to camp concerts and made them feel as though he were a father figure looking after them. Eva Kupas remembered that once, when she wanted to see her twin brother, Mengele personally escorted her and “held my hand the whole way.” He seemed to identify with one very young boy who somewhat resembled him, and actually trained the child to say “My name is ‘Mengele.”‘
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But without warning Mengele could fly into uncontrollable murderous frenzies. One teenage girl wept and begged when she was separated from her mother and sisters. She recounted that Mengele “grabbed me by the hair, dragged me on the ground and beat me.” When the girl’s mother pleaded, Mengele brutally beat her with his riding crop. In one case, a frantic mother fought to remain with her younger daughter. Mengele simply drew his pistol and shot the woman and her daughter, then waved the entire transport to the gas chambers, remarking, “Away with this shit!” Another time he caught a woman named rbi, who had cleverly evaded the gas chambers six times by jumping off the truck just in time. A suddenly enraged Mengele shrieked, “You want to escape, don’t you. You can’t escape now! … Dirty Jew!” As he screamed, Mengele viciously beat the woman to death and kept beating her until her head resembled a bloody, formless mass. After these savage incidents, Mengele could immediately Jekyll-Hyde back to the charming, whistling clinician enchanted with his subjects and his science.
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