Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Josef Mengele & The Nazi Doctors

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to conclude our series on Josef Mengele. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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iHeartland on Roblox has been walloped by a winter snowstorm. It is a winter wonderland. You can now ice skate at State Farm Park. In State Farm neighborhood, you can compete in snowball fights, grab a hot cocoa and cookies, and more. There's also special events from your favorite artists and podcasters all month, along with scavenger hunts, exclusive content, and unique items. So enjoy the festive winter weather at iHeartland on Roblox. Head to iHeartRadio.com slash iHeartland today. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, where we talk about atrocities, talking about sad things.

Ah, what an incredible introduction. Sophie, I need to get one of those. Can we, can we put one on order? Yeah, we're putting one on order. You really should. You really should. You know, they're, they're not that expensive and they make the sad stuff hurt less. Yeah, I think I should get one of those, and that's how I should just read every episode. I could just sing all of these stories. Yeah, it's like you could, it's you can learn and also you can cope at the same time, which is nice. You can lope. Yeah, don't we all want to lope? I do. Sophie's, Sophie's eyes and her, her, her words say no, but my desire to have one of those

things says yes. No. Your face is saying no, but your mouth is also saying no. Both are saying no. All right. Oh, God. Oh, what an exciting episode we have for today. A lot of fun drama. There's going to be a car chase. Matt's going to finish his taxes. Yeah, yeah. You get back to those taxes and I'll start talking about Joey Meng's again. Yeah, well, you know, I'm going to, I'm once again, I did this the first episode, I'm doing this the last episode. I'm opening with a plug, Motherfuckers, because.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Plug out. This is the thing. I mostly talk about the wire and, or, you know, TV shows in general. I, we did, it's pot yourself a gun is the name of the podcast, pot yourself a gun, give us five stars in review and listen to us talk about the wire. We just finished season two, which was on the docks. And, you know, that was definitely a polarizing season, but. That was my favorite season. Yeah, I think it's important. It shows a lot of the under, under discussed side of how the drug trade works. Exactly. And it also, you know, it talks about Polish people and, you know, how many of

the history's greatest monsters. Yes, absolutely. Glad we're talking about this. Right. You know, it talks about how many of them it takes to screw in a light bulb. Yeah. Oh, a lot. A lot. Yeah. A shocking number. A shocking number. And on the next episode of behind the bastards, the Polish people. Wow. All of them. That is especially inappropriate given that we are talking about Auschwitz. Yes. Yes. But there are people who want to cancel you for that are going to have to get in line between behind all the other things. I mean, seriously, at this point. Yeah. The Jar Jar sound bites alone. I mean, you know, very rude. And I understand why you wouldn't be busting, but you know what still?

Mesa busting. Mesa busting. So. Thank you. Thank you for that. That gentle landing back into Mengele territory. So Joseph Mengele. He gets portrayed a lot in kind of popular media. You know, if you watch stuff like The Boys from Brazil or whatever, he's like this Nazi mad scientist. He's obsessed with creating, you know, new Aryan people or hit clones of Hitler, all this kind of like, like Marvel ass shit. Right. Dr. Wolfenstein type guy. Yeah. And that's very much how Mengele almost immediately after the war, how Mengele gets contextualized up until David Marwell's book on masking the angel of death. And Marwell points out Mengele, what he's doing like his research is not him just being a crazy asshole or him wanting to hurt people.

He's not doing anything for out of pure maliciousness. What he's doing is carrying out experiments for on behalf of other scientists who are more highly regarded than him in order to like pursue ends that they could not pursue without the sheer quantity of bodies that Auschwitz provided them with. He was planning to use the research that he did at the camp as the basis for his habilitation schrift, which is the German word for a postdoctoral thesis, which was kind of if you want to be a professional academic and that was his dream to be a respected scientist. That's a thing you have to do first. He is not the only scientist at a death camp who is in this who is a doctor at a death camp who's in this boat of like, I've got my MD, I want to be an academic

scientist when the war ends. So I'm going to do research here and I'm going to help people who are more respected than I am do research here so that I can grease palms and get my way into basically they're all like gunning for fucking getting the equivalent of a tenure, you know, like that's that's the kind of thing he's looking for here. And he's hoping that like if I help people out here, you know, I'm just trying to get job stability guys. Come on. That is what he's doing. It's very, very competitive. So if I have to do a little bit of murder, a little bit of torture, it's part of it. Yeah, you can't you can't even get into a postgraduate program here without both the 1600 on your SATs and two years at a death camp. Yeah, it's very important. You

have to get very, very high on your death camp SATs. And I'm sorry, you can't. Hey, don't blame me for having the grind set mindset. And it's specifically the meat grinder set minders. It's actually more fucked up than that, because one of Mengele's colleagues at Auschwitz, Dr. Hans Del Mott, is also working on getting doing his postdoctoral thesis, but he's not doing it on his own. He saves a Jewish inmate physician who he enslaves and makes him help him with his dissertation. Like that's literally what these guys are doing is they're enslaving better doctors so that they can get help getting their fucking dissertations. Insane, just completely insane. See, make sure not as worried about chat GPT cheating on tests, right? Yeah, that's not even that bad compared

to this. This is why fucking, you know, people are like, oh, but it's positive stereotypes. Well, sometimes those can be used against you. Yeah, I know a lot of bad Jewish doctors. Okay, so fucking and don't enslave the good ones, please. Yeah, don't ensla... Well, yeah. So like his fellow Nazi doctors, Joseph deliberately cultivated a stable of gifted slave doctors, men and women to help him carry out research and prepare human body parts for transfer to institutions in Germany, like the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Before the war, twin studies had been hard to carry out, but during Mengele's time at Auschwitz, more than 750,000 people passed through its doors, which is a lot of twins alongside people with all manner of disabilities he wanted samples from.

At one point, he came across a hunchback and his son who had a club foot. Mengele was immediately fascinated by both men and he sent them off to Dr. Miklos, whose office was the dissecting room by the number one crematorium. Here's Miklos. Father and son, their faces wanned from their miserable years in the Liesmann Strat Ghetto were filled with forebodings. They looked at me questioningly. I took them across the courtyard, which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight. On our way to the dissecting room, I reassured them with a few well-chosen words. Luckily, there were no corpses on the dissecting table. It would have indeed been a horrible sight for them to come upon. To spare them, I decided not to conduct the examination in the

austere dissecting room, which reeked with the odor of formaldehyde, but in the pleasant, well-lighted study hall. From our conversation, I learned that the father had been a respected citizen of Litzmannstad, a wholesaler in cloth. During the years of peace between the wars, he had often taken his son with him on his business trips to Vienna to have him examined and treated by the most famous specialists. I first examined the father in detail, admitting nothing. The deviation of his spinal column was the result of retarded rickets. In spite of a more thorough examination, I discovered no symptom of any other illness. I tried to console him by telling him that he would probably be sent to a work camp.

But he was not. Both father and son are shot on Mengele's orders, and Miklos is forced to autopsy them while they are still warm. After that, yeah. Yeah, it gets bleaker. Late in the afternoon. Does it? Yeah, it does. It does get worse. It gets a lot worse. Late in the afternoon, having already sent at least 10,000 men to their death, Dr. Mengele arrived. He listened attentively to my report concerning both the in vivo and postmortem observations made on the two victims. These bodies must not be cremated, he said. They must be prepared and their skeletons sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin. What systems do you know for the preparation of skeletons?

And there are a couple of ways to prepare a skeleton when a living thing dies. The ultimate solution Miklos picked was basically to boil the dead bodies until the meat could be removed. He had to sit and wait by the casks, bubbling over a fire while they cooked. At one point, a group of Polish prisoners found them and starving, mistook them for stew, and they had to be stopped. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's nightmarish. It's ghastly. I don't know what to tell you. I feel like it's not enough to say he had people killed and sent their body parts to universities. I don't think that gets at, if you want the story of Joseph Mengele, it's important to have the texture of like, this is what's being done. Like, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know how else to tell the story. You need to know this stuff, but... Yeah. No, it's a fucking nightmare. Doing my taxes. Yeah, do it right now. Getting those deductions in. What is it in 1095, B? I was gonna search. Now, there was some actual scientific research done at Auschwitz and done under Mangola. The best example of this would be a study into a rare illness called Noma.

David Marwell recounts in a chilling passage how he first became aware of this research. In the mid 1980s, he was going through a historical collection in a German town called Bad Erelson when he came across a form signed by Dr. Mengele, requesting that histological sections be made from a medical specimen sent to the SS laboratory on June 29, 1944. The specimen was almost certainly prepared by our friend Miklos. Quote, it indicated that the specimen being sent to the laboratory was the head of a 12-year-old boy. At the time, I was unaware of any conceivable reason why such a specimen would be of interest to Joseph Mengele, and this document only reinforced my notion of him as a wildly sadistic grotesque monster. But Marwell dug into precisely why

the sample had been made. Now, it did not challenge the opinion that Mengele is a monster, but it did make it clear that there was nothing wild or sadistic about why he was doing this. Noma is a rare disease. It's been with us for thousands of years and is sometimes called the grazer. In fact, noma is derived from the Greek word nimo, which means to graze or devour. When human beings are forced to live in close quarters with poor sanitation and little nutrition, they get these ulcers in their mouth, and left untreated, these ulcers grow and will eventually devour the cheek and lip and basically the entire head. These necrotic lesions expose bone and teeth and are fatal. One Czech inmate doctor later testified, whole chunks of flesh

would come off the affected areas. The lower jaw was also affected. I never saw such severe cases of gangrene of the cheek. And these are the samples, these are the heads, the heads of people with this disease are what Mengele is preserving and sending off to educational institutions in the Reich. Mengele was excited by the outbreak of noma because it provided him with an opportunity to send his colleagues samples of this extremely rare disease. That's where the sadistic part comes in, the part where he is excited about the outbreak. Yeah. It gets so fucked up. They do attempt to treat this and he assigns a prominent pediatrician who had been arrested by the Nazis to manage the research of how to treat this.

And this guy named Epstein, this doctor, he and Mengele experiment with a number of treatments for noma from medications to diets. Some of what Mengele did is basically like he's alleged to have taken fluid from the ulcers of noma suffers and injected it into healthy inmates to try to study how it spreads, which is a horrible, horrible crime. But he is, you can see he's not like doing this for no reason. He's doing this because he's trying to get a dissertation basically. Right. It's not like random madness that's driving this. He's not actually doing what I think, like you've been saying, the popular culture would have you believe that it is just a guy who's just like, what if I fucking make an eight armed person?

Just to make something horrible and grotesque, just to prove my evil. In this case, it's just like what if a sociopath also was into experiments? Yeah. And what if and the thing like the important thing is that like the reason he's excited is partly because he knows that other doctors are interested in this. And so he's able to provide them with things that they need that will improve their opinion of him and his standing in the medical establishment. Yeah. So part of why he's excited is he says more opportunities for fucking career advancement. Yeah. He's a career guy, right? Yeah. Oh, this would be great for my LinkedIn page. Eat a dick. Now Epstein is a competent physician and because he has more test subjects than anyone who has

studied NOMA before have ever had, he succeeds in creating a pretty groundbreaking treatment for NOMA, which is like good. It's good to solve, you know, a disease to find a way to treat it. But I would hesitate that people like credit this as a medical advancement due to death camp experiments, because as Marwell notes, it must be kept in mind that the disease was a product of the camp itself. Simple measures of sanitation and a modest standard of nutrition were all that would have been necessary to prevent an outbreak. Epstein might have solved the riddle of the treatment, but no child he cured of this disease survived the camp. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's solving a problem with an outbreak that you fucking created.

Yeah. Yeah. It's bombing the village to save it kind of logic. Right. Now this begs the question, though. What kind of twin research did Mengele get up to at Auschwitz and what was its actual purpose? Gerald Posner, who wrote one of the earlier biographies of Mengele, like most people, imagines his purpose as some nefarious ploy to try and create new Arians by finding ways to recreate the conditions which cause people to have twins, right? And this is, this is like the standard line on Mengele for decades is that like, well, he was doing all this twin research because he was trying to find ways to like help Arians have more twins, right? Right. Right. And a big reason why this spreads is because of Dr. Miklos. He's probably the first person to

suggest this. And he suggests this because he works directly for Mengele on twins who had been murdered at Auschwitz. But Mengele did not treat Miklos like an academic equal. He's not like walking him through why he's doing all of this stuff. And so Miklos' belief is understandable, but it doesn't reflect the most likely explanation for these experiments. Mar-well points out that if that had been the purpose of Mengele's research, he would have been studying the parents of twins, right? Because that's at least as important if what you're trying to do is make there be more twins. What he was actually doing with all these twin studies is providing his mentor, von Verschur, with a steady supply of twins he could run tests on to check all sorts of

heredity theories, right? He is getting letters from different doctors saying, hey, can you conduct this kind of study? Can you conduct this kind of study? And then he's conducting them. He's killing the twins. He's autopsying them. And that's why he's doing it, right? So it's not, he is not, what's important here is he is not the only person morally culpable in the death of these kids. The other doctors asking all of these motherfuckers, right? Yeah, exactly. And von Verschur is like the biggest of them. And the fact that he has access to all these kids, this kind of what these doctors see as a resource that has never existed before, makes Mengele, who had previously been a middling to low-level figure in German medicine,

invaluable to the most respected doctors in the country. Marwell writes, although twin research was well funded and promising in its potential to produce meaningful results, its pursuit presented a number of obstacles. It was an extremely involved undertaking, requiring personnel to carry out the various measurements and record keeping. A supply of appropriate twin pairs had to be identified, located, and induced to participate. The entire process required a huge investment of time and money. In the case of Verschur's own research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, it took more than seven months to distribute 1,200 questionnaires to schools in search of twin subjects. That effort produced 1,000 possible twin pairs, but resulted

in only 40 who were actually examined. The proposed experiment might be unpleasant, painful, or have side effects. Beyond the disincentives presented by the inconveniences and unknowns of the process, there were also legal hurdles. It was forbidden in Germany, even under the Nazis, to intentionally infect a German citizen with a disease, a prohibition that led many scientists to conduct experiments on themselves. So they're really cutting through the red tape. Exactly. And they're doing it because Mengele, he's like a dealer. He's like a twin dealer to doctors in the Reich. Like, oh, you got some twin studies you need done. Like Joey Mangs, he's got your back. Maybe help him with his dissertation when he gets out of Auschwitz.

I know a guy. He's kind of a piece of shit, but he's got the twins you need. So people would send him requests. He would do the studies. He'd kill the twins. Then he'd have Miklos, you know, take off parts of their bodies or whatever, and they would be mailed to different institutes, marked urgent war materials. Now, this was, that's not like, this seems like it's probably just like, oh, it's a convenient way for them to get priority in the packages. But for soldier scientists like Mengele, this is part of the war effort. This is the war effort, right? This is the whole war for him. It's a race war. This is why, and this is how the broader German Nazi establishment sees it, which is why in the last days of the war, when they are getting

their asses handed to them, they're diverting crucial military resources to ensure ensuring the camps can continue to operate, because that's a front of the battle for them. Insane. Yeah. I mean, fucking Nazis, man. Yeah. Once again, on record, anti-Nazi. Anti-Nazi. Do not like them. Good. Fair. So back at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, von Verschur planned to create a department of embryology and a vast collection of human samples and embryos, including fetuses and stillborn infants removed at the camp and sent to his institute. Now. God, I do not want to go there. Like, that's got to be the creepiest fucking institute of all time. Oh, yeah. I mean, the building is still in use, right?

They don't call it that anymore. Yeah. Did they get rid of their jar room? Probably. Yeah. That, I mean, not as quickly as you'd expect. Really? God. A lot of the body parts that are taken out are in use up until like the 80s, 90. I mean, there was a story in 2014 on what used, because it's like a college campus, and what used to be the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Right outside, they find like a bunch of people's bones, and like, they don't know who's like, the government got rid of those very quickly. It was like, yeah, we don't need to be looking into why these bones are here, whose bones they are. Let's get those bearings just pop up. It's the old dinosaurs. Yeah. Those are dinosaur bones.

Let's move on. Speaking of moving on, you know what really helps me move on? What makes you move on? Is it products and services? It is products and services, products and services that had no role in, say, Auschwitz, which in addition to being a death camp was not also a manufacturing facility for modern day corporations like the IG Farben company, who now makes your aspirin. Oh, yeah. They didn't use slave workers who were worked to death, ensuring their future profits, which they were allowed to roll into the business after the Holocaust and the end of the Reich. That didn't happen. That would be fucked up. You wouldn't let that happen. No, these are good products and services.

Yeah. I'm never going to take aspirin again. Mm hmm. That's right, baby. Never. Advil. Oh shit. Advil. Oh, we were. Yeah, Bayer. Yeah. Oh, it is Bayer. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, I'm looking up who makes Advil. Because I think we could get a pretty good, pretty good, pretty good ad out of this. You know, Advil, we were not involved in the Holocaust. Advil, we were not involved in the Holocaust. Yeah. No, it's clear. Boots UK. I think we're good. Yeah. I thought Advil was Pfizer. No, it looks like it was invented at least by some British company.

But it's manufactured by Pfizer. Is it not? Sure. But they didn't kill any people. They didn't. They're not responsible also for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Sophie, that doesn't seem right. Robert Evans, a big pharma apologist. I know. It's fine. Weird take from you, sir. Some people can't stand the rain. But at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in,

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pharma bro, like Martin Sprelly. That's right. So the best known story about Mengele at Auschwitz is is the the one that like the idea that he's supposedly sewed two inmates together to try and create a Siamese twin. Yeah, that is a frequent myth. There's also allegations he tried to quote make boys into girls and girls into boys through cross-transfusions and that he connected the urinary tract of a seven-year-old girl to her own colon. And if you hear these stories, like, that's all mad, crazy doctor shit. Obviously, because the Nazis destroyed a lot of records and Joseph himself is not a reliable source on his activities, we will never know exactly what he did. But David Marwell points out that a lot of these stories are either false or exaggerations

of reality or kind of misattributions of real crimes to Mengele. And this gets us into a really complicated piece of Holocaust history, which is the Mengele effect. In the aftermath of World War 2, spoilers, Mengele escapes, right? He gets away in large part because he doesn't get that tattoo on his arm that all the SS guys get. So when he's being after he gets, you know, the unit he's with gets captured because he embeds with a Wehrmacht unit. When the Americans are processing them, they don't immediately see, oh, this is a fucking SS guy. Let's put him in, you know, make sure he's not one of the ones that we're looking for. So he does get away. But by that point, Auschwitz had already kind of written itself into the heart and soul of the

human race. And the first inmates to be interviewed talked about the doctors who had so often been the architect of their misery. Some of the people who survived in best health and thus were in the best position to talk were Mengele's patients. Because his patients, the twins and stuff that he works with, he took really good care of a lot of the time. They would enjoy good food and better accommodations until they were killed, right? And he's not doing that out of the goodness of his heart. It's because he wants the test subjects that can withstand the testing that he was going to do. But because of this, some of the people who he hadn't got to when he flees Auschwitz are some of the first people who were able to talk. And just in general, Mengele's name spreads

very quickly as one of the architects of this nightmare that is Auschwitz. And a curious thing occurs after that, which is that more and more Auschwitz inmates over the years record Mengele experiences than could possibly have known or seen him. Part of how we know that these are not accurate recollections is that he's often described as tall, blonde and well built. Mengele was five foot eight and dark haired. Historians Adenech Zofka claims that almost all inmates at Auschwitz would later claim to have been selected personally by Mengele when they arrived at the camp, which can't have been possible. We simply know that many other doctors were doing that job. Hermann Langbein was an Auschwitz survivor and author of the seminal book People in Auschwitz.

He noted that many former inmates not only insisted they'd had direct contact with Mengele, but and this is really strange, they tended to remember him as being hot. And I'm like, try not to joke about this, but I'm going to read you a quote from this guy's book. It's very strange. Some well known SS men have been positively idealized after the fact. Thus, Fanny Fennelon has called Mengele a handsome Siegfried. And Therese Cisang writes, Mengele is immaculate in his belted uniform tall with shiny black boots that bespeak cleanliness, prosperity and human dignity. He does not move a muscle. He is insensitive. Elie Wiesel mentions that Mengele's characteristic attributes as white gloves, a monocle and the

rest. Jiri Steiner, a twin used by Mengele in his series of experiments, speaks of his angelic smile. And Siegfried van der Berg believes in that in a film Mengele should be portrayed by no less than the famous lady killer Ramon Navarro. Karl Laszlo describes Mengele as a strikingly handsome man who had a fascinating spellbinding effect even on female prisoners and continues, Mengele came with a motionless face and his beautiful regular cold features that seemed to be carved out of stone appeared to be the mark of death itself. In his shiny boots, he walked rhythmically on the camp road. I saw Mengele almost every day in the office of the SS infirmary, where he was doing routine bureaucratic work. And he struck me as neither particularly attractive

nor elegant. I never saw him wear a monocle. Now, Langbean, obviously these guys are all at Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel is one of the most famous Holocaust survivors there is. You know, he writes fucking night. They're not like it like the again, there's no I'm not putting any shade on these people for the fact that their memories of this are kind of fucked up. And Langbean coins the term the Mengele effect to describe what he calls a form of memory displacement, where real memories of trauma are mutated sometimes into different acts of terror and generally credited not to whichever Nazi had committed them, but to the man who became the most famous symbol of Nazi evil at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele. Langbean makes one of the most important observations

in Holocaust studies, one that inspired this series when he writes, quote, those who kept the machinery of murder going and Auschwitz were not devils. They were humans. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's I don't know. I mean, there is also part of me that's just like, yeah, you know, this is just sounds like years and years of conditioning of my dad being like, marry a doctor. And this eventually you start looking at anyone as a doctor is hot. So that's that's probably what happened. It's just like he's a doctor, you say. I mean, I'm telling it's something it's a it's a very Jewish trait. We all want to marry a doctor. So we see a doctor doesn't matter if it's Oz or Mengele, I guess. Equally bad, by the way. Boy, howdy.

So David Marwell elaborates on episodes on this podcast. They did. They did. They did. They did. Both bastards can't talk about that. That is true. That is true. So David Marwell elaborates on this kind of peculiar aspect of Auschwitz further. The notion of Mengele as unhinged driven by demons and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something perhaps even more unsettling. Mengele was in fact in the scientific vanguard enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. And yeah, that's that's kind of the most unsettling thing or at least one of them about this is that experimentation is the norm at Auschwitz and Mengele joined many of his colleagues in

utilizing patients as experimental resources. They were able to justify this to themselves, not by saying, you know, fuck these people. They all have it coming. Most of them did not talk about it that way. And most of them were capable of being perfectly like polite and even to some degree sensitive to the patients or to the inmates that they worked with on a daily basis. Right. But this ideology based on like, well, this is great for the greater scientific good of our particular race. And now they found also aside from that, they found other ways. A lot of ways they would justify it is like that, well, these people are sick. They're all going to die anyway. We might as well learn something from them. You know, the government's decided they're

going to kill all these people. So what can I do? I can't do anything, but maybe I can help a few people here and there, you know? Yeah. And isn't it probably the most sickening part of it is the people going like, you know, these people are all going to die anyway. And it's like, not if you don't let it happen. You don't have to do this. You're part of the machine. Yeah. God damn. Yeah. Yeah. They don't they don't seem to take that into account. So we have some idea of how Joseph rationalized his own behavior, because half a lifetime later, when he's on the run, he spends two weeks with his estranged son, Rolf. And this is when he's an old man, he's kind of near death. And Rolf is Rolf is an interesting character. He's part of how Pozner's biography gets written,

because he brings Pozner after his dad dies, his dad's Mengele writes a memoir that's like he writes it like a fiction novel where he gives himself a fake name and like kind of fictional, right? So basically, this is the fictional story of a doctor at Auschwitz. He doesn't he doesn't if I did it, like he does. He doesn't owe Jay with his fucking memoirs. But Rolf, you know, Mengele's family supports him for his the entire rest of his life. They're like, because they're rich, they're still to this day, there's the Mengele company is successful. They're sending him money, they help him stay on the run. And Rolf kind of grows up, he only meets Mengele once when he's a child. And he's being he's told that Joseph is not his dad, but his uncle, who's like on the run,

because the allies are unfairly prosecuting him. But as he grows up, they exchange letters when he becomes an adult. And Rolf, number one, winds up being left wing, which like his family is deeply conservative, they're fucking Nazis. And so eventually he's very he's very conflicted. He comes to accept he is number one, there's less information available, you know, at this period of time, like the internet's not a thing. But he comes to accept, maybe I don't know exactly what my dad did, maybe the allied stories aren't exactly accurate. But my dad did fucked up shit at Auschwitz and it's indefensible, right? He comes to that conclusion, which fair enough, good for you, Rolf. Um, and so he he travels to meet his dad in Brazil near kind of the end of his father's life

for a two week period. And Rolf, you know, again, had educated himself a little on the Holocaust and Pozner talks to him for his book. And here's what he says about this meeting where he talks to his dad about what his dad did at Auschwitz. I proposed that and this is Rolf, Rolf talking, I propose that whatever he or anyone else did or did not do in Auschwitz, I deeply detested it since I regard Auschwitz as one of the most horrible examples of inhumanity and brutality. He said, I did not understand. He went there, had to do his duty to carry out orders. He said that everybody had to do so in order to survive the basic instinct of self preservation. He said he wasn't able to think about it. From his point of view, he was not

personally responsible for the incidents at the camp. He said he didn't invent Auschwitz, it already existed. He said that he wanted to help people in the camp, but there had been a limit to what he could do. As far as selections were concerned, he said, the situation was analogous to a field hospital during a time of war. If 10 wounded soldiers are brought into the hospital in critical condition, the doctor must make almost instantaneous decisions about whom to operate on first. By choosing one, then necessarily another must die. My father asked me, when people arrived at the railhead, what was I supposed to do? People were arriving infected with disease, half dead. He said it was beyond anyone's imagination to describe the circumstances there.

His job had been to classify only those able to work and those unable to work. He said he tried to grade as many people as able to work as possible. What my father was trying to do was persuade me that in this manner, he had saved thousands of people from certain death. What am I one man supposed to do when given so many twins to kill? You saying in my position, you wouldn't do the same thing. You wouldn't kill all those twins, those beautiful twins waiting to die? But I have to learn about them. What'd you learn? I don't know, but someone will figure out something I learned.

We figured out how to cure a disease that we caused them. Yeah, exactly. I was just like any regular doctor who has a bunch of slave doctors working for them to do experiments on twins to die. We've all been there. Ask anyone who's been to medical school whether or not they would have done the same thing. I think you'll find I'm normal. I'm going to continue Roth's quote. He said that he did not order and was not responsible for gassings. And he said that twins in the camp owed their lives to him. He said that he personally had never harmed anyone in his life. Yeah, I had a slave do that. Geez. He says, geez, guys. Or is that an SS man who was drinking himself to death?

Yes, he was the one who shot those people. He was the one who shot those men or slaves. I, on the other hand, was sober the whole time. So that's good, right? You know it is good, though. What? What could possibly be good? Services, you know, both of those things. Yeah, those are good. Those are good. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out to staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again.

Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I.com. And see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Hello, true crime listeners. Stories of people getting conned and taking advantage of, well, they can sure be engrossing. But the truth is that nefarious things are happening all around us as well, like just with slightly lower stakes. And I promise we're not trying to freak you out. But how to money is here to help you avoid an ugly financial fate. That's right. We are two best buds offering personal finance advice to help you to protect yourself in an era of hyped up crypto schemes, different multi-level marketing pitches out there,

as well as the social media scam attempts that we are all facing. The ripoffs abound and we want you to avoid them. That's 100% true. But we also want you to save wisely, invest for your future, and develop better personal finance habits. We release three episodes a week to help you do just that. If your personal finances could use some protecting, be sure to listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, have a podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So we know that Mengele's claims that he didn't directly harm anyone are an obscenity and not just bullshit. Would be laughable if I wasn't crying already. Yeah. The crimes that we have already covered that Joseph committed personally

are enough to make him one of the worst bastards that has ever been on this show. And we have just kind of scraped the surface of the shit that this guy got up to. And while it is possible some of these are examples of the Mengele effect, all of them were present on the indictment that he received from a West German court. At one point, he said to have taken a newborn child of a Russian woman, grabbed it by the head and thrown it into a pile of corpses to kill it. At another, he is said to have become so furious when a work gang capo allowed several prisoners selected to die to hide with his men that he shot the capo with his own pistol. At one point, an old man selected to the gas chamber tried to flee to his son who was in a

work group. Mengele bashed his brains open with an iron bar, killing him. At another point, he got angry because a woman gave birth and the selection doctors had failed to warn him she was pregnant. He threw the newborn baby into a stove. He is said to have shot a 16 year old girl who fled onto the roof out of fear of the gas chamber. Worst of all is the testimony of inmate Anani Silovic Petko, a Russian survivor of Auschwitz. He was there the day a group of 300 children were brought into the camp, having been separated from their parents. They were all under five years old. When Mengele saw the group of children, he complained that it was too hard to gas five year old children. So he selected another strategy. Quote, and this is from Petko.

After a while, a large group of SS officers arrived on motorcycles, Mengele among them. They drove into the yard and got off their motorcycles. Upon arriving, they circled the flames. It burned horizontally. We watched to see what would follow. After a while, the trucks arrived, dumped trucks with children inside. There were 10 of these trucks. After they had entered the yard, an officer gave an order and the trucks backed up to the fire, and they started throwing those children right into the fire, into the pit. The children started to scream. Some of them managed to crawl out of the burning pit. An officer walked around it with sticks and pushed those back in who managed to get out. Hess and Mengele were present and were

giving orders. I have three pieces of nicotine gum in my mouth. Yeah, that's about the worst thing I've ever read. I can't imagine anything worse than that. And that's Joseph Mengele. Obviously, I considered doing a whole episode about how he fled from justice. It is an interesting story. It's interesting to me all of these stories. The gist of it basically is that he spends a couple of years on a farm in Germany living low. He eventually escapes to South America. He bounces around from like Brazil to Paraguay. There's a period of time where he's able to live under his own name pretty openly. And then the Israelis get Eichmann and suddenly he has to go deep underground because after Eichmann, Mengele is like the big prisoner that they haven't caught,

you know, or the big war criminal that they haven't caught. But he's successful and he's able to stay hidden basically because a lot of Nazis have real solidarity with him. Like it's all old Nazis and just South American dudes who like the Nazis and they hide him. But it's kind of worth noting all of these sort of fictional depictions of Mengele. There's like all sorts of stories of him as a mad scientist in Latin America trying to remake the master race or whatever. Right. That's not at all his life. He's an old man. He spends most of his time where he's working, either selling real estate or working as like a contractor for his family company, selling like farming equipment. He lives off grid for a while with a couple with a family.

And like eventually they split up with him because they have a bunch of art. Yeah. But it takes like ten or it takes like a decade or more. Like he's not too long. That's too long to be with Mengele. That's never mind. One of the things that's most disturbing though is that like he never does anything terrible while he's on the run that there's any documentation of. Some people will say he was kind of a dick. And as he got older, kind of an unpleasant person, he would send some letters to his son that they weren't emotionally abusive, but they were kind of like, I wish you'd come and visit, you know, I don't approve of, you know, you should get a big thing. Like the biggest thing that he gives his son shit for is that his son became a lawyer,

but didn't get a PhD in law. And he's like, you should become a doctor. Yeah, follow your father footsteps. You know, the world is another doctor Mengele. The point is though that he, there's evil is not a thing. Mengele is not just some sort of monster who would have caused horrible harm no matter where he went. He was a guy who was willing to use unfathomable evil as a tool for personal advancement and the advancement of what he saw as science. And when that opportunity ended, he was a pretty normal old man. Right. And that's, I think, more frightening. It's way more frightening. Yeah. It's one of the reasons why every time I see like a Marvel movie, I think it was like, I don't know, it was a fucking Captain America or something. And they like insist on

showing the Nazis trying to do like time travel or some something where they're like, this electricity makes Frankenstein. And it's just like you, you know, in making this super villainy, you're actually undercutting what makes it frightening and what makes it evil because it's, you know, it's, it's the banality of it, you know, fucking, you know, I don't want to sound cliche and whatnot, but it really is the banality and the bureaucracy and just kind of the, the, the efficiency models and the flow charts. It's all the fucking office shit that makes it awful. It's, you know, it's why I don't, you know, want to work in an office. Yeah. It's because it's too close to Nazis. Yeah. And that is you bring up working in an office. The thing that is most frightening about

Joseph Mengele is that every single person listening to this knows somebody with Mengele potential. Yeah. They don't, they're not serial killers. They're like, they are, they are the people who care so much about their own advancement and are able to get themselves so committed to whatever they believe that if they were put in an Auschwitz, they would do all the same things. I've worked under so many manglas. Yeah. Like hell of a lot of them in the entertainment industry. Medical industry, tech industry, tech industry. Oh, tons in the tech industry. There's a lot of manglas out there. Oops, all manglas. That's like the new Facebook logo. Oops, all manglas. Oops, all manglas. Yeah. It's just like

literally people who are just like, you know, oh, it's too bad. That's not, you know, that it's illegal to do experiments on humans is like, wait, is that the only reason you wouldn't do it? Yes. That's why it's, you get this also when people will talk about like, I mean, the Nazis were fucked up, but people we did learn a lot from those. No, we didn't. No, we fucking didn't. No, we fucking didn't. There was, there is one experiment the Nazis carried out on prisoners that taught us anything like really meaningful. And it was about like how the body responds to hyperthermia and stuff. And like a bunch of nonsense, a huge amount of nonsense. Like it's, we will talk a little bit about the other doctors because this is also

a podcast about them. But I do want to give, I don't know, it's, it's weird to call this a hopeful story, but I want to talk about how our friend Miklos gets out of Auschwitz and specifically how he saves his family, his wife and his daughter. It's not going to start as a happy story, but it does end as happily as an Auschwitz story can end. Sure. Once when I was dissecting the body of a fairly old man, I discovered some very beautiful gallstones in the bladder, knowing that Dr. Mengele was an ardent collector of such items. I washed the stones, dried them, and then arranged them in a large necked flask, stoppered with a glass cork. I stuck a label on the flask, giving the person's name, the kind of stones they were and their pathological characteristics.

During his visit the next day, I gave them to Dr. Mengele. He admired the beautiful crystals. Turning the flask round and round, he looked at the gallstones and then turning abruptly to me, asked if I knew the ballad of the warrior Wallenstein. His question was completely out of keeping with the surroundings, but I answered, I know the story of the warrior Wallenstein, but not the ballad. Whereupon smiling, he began to recite, he says some German, which translates into English. In the Wallenstein family, there are more gallstones than precious stones. My superior recited several stanzas of that comic ballad. He was in such a good mood that I decided to ask a great favor of him, that he let me go look for my wife and child. Only after I had

uttered the request did I realize how daring it was, but it was already too late. He looked at me with astonishment. You're married and have a child? Yes, captain. I'm married and have a 15-year-old daughter, I told him, my voice breaking with emotion. Do you think they are still here? he asked. Yes, captain, because at our arrival three months ago you selected them and sent them to the right hand column. They have since been sent to another camp, he said. Suddenly I thought of the crematorium smoke. Perhaps they had been dispatched with that smoke to some celestial camp. Dr. Mengele, who was seated, his head bent forward, seemed lost in thought. I remained standing behind him. I'm going to give you a pass to go look for them, but he said, and placing a forefinger

on his lips, he looked at me menacingly. I understand, captain, and thank you. So Mengele gives him a pass and he finds his wife and his daughter who are alive. And he, because of the position he occupies, realizes that their camp is like a day or two way from being liquidated. And so he warns them and he gets them to basically tells them how they can transfer to a work gang that's being moved to a separate location, which is not a clear survival thing, right? But it's like, look, if you get moved to this work gang, maybe you die there, but it's at least more days than you'll have here because they're going to kill everyone in this block. And they get out and they are, you know, Miklos survives the end of the war. He winds up

on like what is supposed to be a death march with the SS guards as they flee. But he like it's fucking this guy's story is fucking miraculous. He makes it. And he kind of like after everything is over, winds up kind of stumbling back to his empty house and like sits down there. And it's just like, I don't know what to do with my life anymore. Like I'm never going to be a doctor again. I refuse to conduct another autopsy or anything like that. So he's just like alone in this house. And then like a couple of days later, his wife and his daughter show up. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. They survived. They live. Yes. Yes. Like I said, this is like I'm sorry, I'm busting over that. That's the best. Yeah, it's that is literally the best

possible of the outcomes. Yeah. It's yeah. I mean, there's there's there's so much more to like say one thing that is probably worth noting is that the Sander commando that Miklos is with the guys that he's kind of he's have been selected with him. He like lives in the barracks with them. They drink together. They wind up getting guns smuggled to them by partisans and carrying out a rebellion. And their entire goal in this rebellion inside the camp is that one of them escape so that people they could someone can tell the world about what happened there. Wow. And they don't succeed in this. None of the Sander commando who rebels survive, they get massacred. But they succeed in destroying one of the crematoria ovens as they die, which significantly limits the ability

of Auschwitz to kill and dispose of people saving God knows how many lives. So that's cool. It sucks because it's just like, you know, the that is an incredible act of heroism. And it's just like so many of those stories, I feel like I've not been introduced to so many of the story like the majority of them are just these awful fucking, you know, it's it's it's so much more common to tell stories of suffering than stories of resistance. Right. You know, there are numerous stories, especially in like the Polish territories. Yeah. Of Jewish people and other victims who gain access to guns. They either had them before or they sometimes make them or they steal them from Nazis. And they fight back. And that is that is a part of the Holocaust too. And because they

fight back, you know, even in each of these incidents, you know, maybe only a few people get saved, the descendants of those people who were saved through acts of resistance number today in the hundreds of thousands. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's a big deal. Dr. Mengele obviously is hounded for the rest of his natural life until he dies drowning off the coast of or at a lake in Brazil. And he's like he's drowned to death. Oh, yeah. He drowns like a little fucking asshole. Yeah. Waited drown you loser. Oh, that's great. That's how he died. Yeah, he fucking drowns. That's fucking cool. That is. Yeah. I mean, it's it's not the most painful way he could have gone. I would have preferred like hit by a car that has like a big spiky front end that just impales him

in the dick and he's dragged for like 30 miles. Yeah. He could have died, but at least it wasn't like, oh, he peacefully died and it's like, no, he fucking. He does he does drown while on vacation. That's great. Him drowning is good. Drowning is, you know, I'll take it. It's panic before death. It's yeah, he's at least scared. That's good. And he's in bad health for years. He's very lonely. He has a crush on this like child that he has as his housekeeper, but he can't marry her. It's he's he's yeah, he's a gross piece of shit. Fuck him. The other doctors, though, who had enabled his work and been his colleagues and benefited from the research he did were not punished. Dr. Julius Hallervorden was a respected neuropathologist and head of the

histopathology department at the Kaiserville Helm Institute. He received hundreds of brains taken from euthanasia victims. And he also killed many children at the Brandenburg Gordon clinic where he worked and later removed their brains. He described these specimens to a colleague as wonderful material, feeble minded, malformations and early infantile disease. After the war, he had a neurological research position at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. At the Brain Research Institute in Frankfurt, Hallervorden's specimens, including brains from the euthanasia program, were used by doctors until 1990 when they were finally buried in a cemetery. We had a happy ending. We had him drowning. He was drowning. He was sad. He couldn't fuck a child.

There's some people who got away with it. Yeah, because most of the people who enabled Mengele pretty much all did. There's Dr. Fritz Lenz, who was a medically trained geneticist. After 1933, he was... What's the section called in your notes? Bum out Matt even more. In case Matt gets happy at end, give him more sad. Yeah, get a little bit extra sad. He was the head of the Department of Racial Hygiene at the Kaiserville Helm Institute and was one of the architects of the Holocaust. From 1946 to 1957, he was the director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Gottingen. He continued to publish until the 1970s. And of course, our friend, Ottmar von Verschauer. As head of the Kaiserville Helm Institute, obviously, he was responsible for a whole bunch

of fucked up shit. Post-war, he was interned by the Allies in 1946. In 1951, he accepted a position at the University of Munster, where he established one of West Germany's largest genetic research centers. Verschauer retired in 1965 and died in 1969. I stopped listening after you said Dr. Dushbag drowned. Yeah. This is the most depressing epilogue ever. Yeah. It's just freeze frames of all of the people. It's not great. They all survived forever. I was like really into the drowning part. Yeah. I bet he shit himself when he was drowning, too. We can all hope so. Poop in the pool, buddy. And he probably drank some of this shit water. I hope so. That sounds nice. And he probably vomited

when he drank the shit water. And then he ended up drinking more of the vomit shit water. And he did it forever till he died. Yeah. Wow. I mean, let's all hope. Let's all hope and pray. We're all hoping this and we're praying this. And let's not think too much about the fact that a great deal of these race scientists continued working into the 70s and that a significant number of professional genetics researchers are not only influenced of their work, but still believe in aspects of racial science, which is still influential in genetic research to this day. Fun. There's a fucked up history of how much of this shit is still talked about. You can look at the fucking bell curve guy as an example. Charles Murray. Yeah. Charles Murray. This is still a

problem. And part of why it's a problem is that when the war ended, all of these doctors who had spent their time at institutes, but who had been directly responsible for this kind of shit weren't rounded up and shot in the back of the head. Yeah. Which is what we should have done. Easily. They were right there. You had guns. Yeah. You had so many guns. You were literally the allies. You could have gotten rid of them. Yeah. This is why I don't trust white allies. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. They should have just shot him, but instead now we have the bell curve guy and people still taking that garbage seriously. But you know what we also, oh, sorry. No, I was just going to say it's just crazy how much of race science still exists today

and just like how there's, it just considered like part of like normal conservative thought. You know, it's just because it always has been. It always has been, but it's just like so deeply ingrained in the ideology that it's like to lose the race science part of it is to lose like what holds it together. It's like the glue. And so that's why, you know, whenever someone is like, well, you know, I'm a fiscal conservative as if it like makes them somehow like, well, I'm not a racist conservative and I'm like, yeah, your whole point of view is poison. Yeah. Yeah. Part of identifying as a fiscal conservative means that you're okay caucusing with the conservatives who are, you know, the other kind. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. It's like, you're just, you're cool with a little bit of race science. Oh, not me. No, not me personally, but I'll gladly just shepherd them into power and whatever will be will be. Yeah. K. Saras and Nazi. I don't know. You want to plug anything, Matt? Absolutely. There's a, you see, Philip Morris also makes nicotine gum products, and I want to plug those right now. Oh, hell yeah. Thank you, Philip Morris. You're trying to quit smoking, but you don't want to stop giving money to the people who got you addicted. Nicorette gum, it comes in four milligram and two milligram, but you can eat two of them. Yeah. I also want to plug my, the wire podcast slash the promise podcast, pod yourself a gun.

Yeah. Fucking listen to it. Give us a review. Fucking be our friend. And you know, it's a lot of fun. It's a good podcast. You will enjoy it if you enjoy me. I hope you do because I love you guys out there. I want to pivot off that and note that we now have a behind the bastards branded nicotine gum, you know, big league chew. It's just 50% big league chew and 50% actual tobacco chew. Oh, I love it. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. It's bigger league chew. Yeah. It's big league chew for adults. Exactly. Yeah. You only get half oral cancer. Yeah. You get that Nick rush and a sugar rush. It's great. It's perfect. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles, super charged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I.com and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. Hereafter with Megan Devine every Monday on the Amy Brown podcast network,

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