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

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Matt and Robert finally get to the worst part of the Mengele story: his time at Auschwitz, and his nightmarish medical experiments.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Oh boy. Yeah, you know what? That might have been, that might have been over the line. That might have been over the line. Robert. Yeah. Oh my god. I feel like there's some government agency we need to report me to for saying that now. I didn't. No.

Yeah, man. Robert, Robert, go to hell. I'm leaving. That was that was a step too far, huh? Well, Robert, I've never heard you use that language ever. Well, five fucking years. What's wrong with you? We'll edit that all out and you at home can imagine what horrible thing I said. What cancelable thing I said that'll get leaked seven years from now.

Please replace it with, you know. Peace in Paris soon. Yeah. Well, this is behind. Jar Jar's back, baby. Jar Jar's back. Matt Leib got a fresh haircut. It's going to be a good day.

It's going to be a good day talking about Joseph Mengele. Oh, no. Wait, J.K., J.K., wait or ruin the vibe as usual, Robert. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I forgot that once again we are talking about something that's going to make everyone sad and I like to think that is, you know, a guest of this podcast. I'm here to, you know, try to lighten the mood. Excellent.

So along with Jar Jar, I brought this. Excuse me. I don't want to talk about Mengele no more. I just want to talk about happy things. Just happy things. All right. That's I'm going to bust that out every time. Oh, it's so little dicky.

Wow. Yeah. That's it's like little dicky did like a Tommy style concept album, but about Joseph Mengele. I love it. Oh, fuck me. We're sewing twins together. Oh, dear God. I'm sorry.

Wow. Oh, boy. Oh, you're about to be in. There's a small percentage of your listeners who do not like grievously offended. Yes. Yes. And that was for them. Yeah.

I got a new I got a new kind of offense recently where somebody was like it's messed up that your show is called behind the bastards and you call the bad people bastards because that that's hurtful to people who were born out of wedlock. And like, yes, people don't use that word that more anymore. Like that's just not a thing that we do when I hear someone say bastards. I don't think, ah, yes. This is this is someone referring to a person born outside the bounds of holy matrimony. Right.

This is, you know, I feel like language evolves as a thing. Robert, I raise your people being offended over the word bastards to the Coco Chanel apologists in my DMs. Like, oh boy, howdy. If you did that, I saw it. I saw it. I hope by now the liver king episodes will be dropping. So I hope you've got liver king apologists in there too.

Being like, look, man, a lot of people take $15,000 in steroids every single month. Yeah. No, what's wrong with that? I look forward to hearing from you. Definitely gentlemen. 100% dudes. Speaking of a dude, Joseph Mengele. Definitely was a dude and his wife Irene had been married just over a month when Germany

invaded Poland after carrying out a false flag attack to justify said aggression. World War Two, you know, starts and Joseph is over the moon about it. He believes the war is the, quote, last desperate fight of the German nation, by which he meant that without a cleansing genocidal war to clear out large swaths of farmland, Germans would be doomed to interbreeding and genetic collapse. God damn it. Yeah, exactly. He buys into it, you know, he's he's all full-throated.

Now, because he's got some health issues, it's not until 1941 and the start of Operation Barbarossa that Mengele actually sees combat in Ukraine. His posting is the infamous SS Viking division, which is spelled wiking. And I'm going to call it wiking because that makes them sound silly. And they are terrible war criminals. So let's, let's. The wikings were very, very scary. Where we scare we wikings.

Where we scare we wikings. So the wiking division is made up of Germanic peoples, mostly from outside of Germany. There is like a German battalion or whatever in there, but a lot of them are from Belgium, Norway, a lot of them are Norwegian people from Denmark, from France, from Holland. They're basically like Aryans from all the places the Germans have conquered. And the actions of the wiking division are, you would call them controversial to this day. The unit fought exclusively in the east during the worst atrocities of the Second World War, and they participated in several of those atrocities.

But because the membership is largely foreign, there has been a lot of effort dedicated to minimizing the culpability of the volunteers. A good example would be this ABC Australia article about a Finnish government report that concluded the 14 or so Finnish volunteers in the unit likely committed war crimes. The report notes accurately that the Finns agreed to supply soldiers for the elite division after their brutal war with the USSR, which is true enough. But check out how they word this. Reluctantly, Finns complied and covertly recruited the first group of 400 SS volunteers to be sent

for training. The vast majority of them had no ideological sympathies with the Nazi regime, the report said. Finns were, above all, interested in fighting against the Soviet Union due to their brutal experiences in the Winter War. In this way, the starting point for Finns' involvement was different compared to most other countries joining SS foreign volunteer units. No, they didn't have a choice, you know, just wound up in that SS unit on accident. Just, you know how you're stumbling home from the bar, you've had a couple rounds,

and then you wind up in the SS. It happens to all of us. You find a friend where you got a mutual hatred of this other dude, and he happens to also hate every Jew who's ever lived, and you're like, well, you know, you take the good with the bad. Yeah, and it's one of those, like, there's a movie coming out right now that's about, like, some Finnish guy murdering Nazis, and a concern some people have is, like, are they just going to kind of whitewash the fact that an awful lot of Finns were completely on board with the Nazis?

Yes, they will. No, and obviously, you can note that, like, yeah, the Finns had just suffered this devastating invasion from the USSR that they had no fault in, and that would make things complicated. They're in a difficult geopolitical situation, but you don't need to whitewash these SS guys, especially when you read passages like this from David Marwell's book. Early in the morning of July 2nd, SS Stendartenfuhrer Wackerl, the beloved commander of the division's Westland Regiment, was shot and killed by a sniper near the village of Slowitka. In the days that followed Wackerl's death, members of the Viking division carried out

acts of extreme violence, claiming an estimated several thousand Jews as victims. Struve presents evidence from the records of various German army units in the area, quoting, for example, the diary of a Lieutenant Kaysberg with the 295th engineer's battalion. Firing everywhere. It crackles. The SS bumps off anyone they get their hands on. It is horrific. The chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps absorbed that individual members of the Viking

division were seen hunting for Jews. The war diary of a unit in the area noted that the SS was indiscriminately shooting Russian soldiers and civilians in large numbers. A member of the supply unit of the division, Hans Gunther Otto, in a sworn affidavit after the war, claimed that his unit had been informed that Wackerl had been killed by a Jew and that their participation in the revenge actions marked the beginning of the unit's participation in the extermination of the Jews. Otto described an order that was read to his unit after Wackerl's death.

The order said that we were no longer held accountable for the killing of any Jews we could get hold of and that we could indeed shoot any Jew we saw. So this is who Mengele serves with when he does his combat tours. Great. Good influences. Yeah, yeah, it seems like that's going to moderate his natural shittiness a lot. Now, we unfortunately know very little about the specific details of what Mengele did with the Viking division. He's there for close to two years, but he is present with them through one of the most

bloody periods in the history of human warfare. Given his professional expertise at identifying Jewish ancestry and the fact that his division is hunting Jews, there's a pretty good chance he was consulted on who to kill, right? On do we massacre this village or not, right? You know, that's a pretty good chance he was involved in that sort of thing. But they would just like wheel Mengele out to look at every villager and just be like, point out which ones you think are the most Jewish. Yeah, like, oh, that's my favorite thing to do.

That's what they do. Oh, so the first massacre by the Viking division was carried out at a prison in a town called Zolosev, where the retreating Soviet army had massacred about 650 prisoners on their way out. When the SS discovered the bodies, they and their Ukrainian allies slaughtered more than a thousand Jews in the area. One survivor later recalled, the SS people stood around the pit and from time to time they ordered someone, especially men with beards and sidewalks, to come out and kneel in front of them with sadistic pleasure.

They hit their victim until he lay unconscious on the ground and they kick them back into the pit. Sometimes family members tried to help the poor people, but then they often made their fate even worse. Some were taken out of the grave and beaten to death with unimaginable brutality. Yeah, Joey Mengs, everybody. This is this is his baptism of fire. This is kind of known as seen by historians who study him as like, this is what this is what takes us from the Joseph Mengele, who's like doing science that's

kind of racist, but is relatively mid for its day to the Joseph Mengele, who is capable of doing the things he's going to do at Auschwitz, right? Yeah. There's a process of brutalization. You can't get a more brutalizing environment than being part of this SS division. Yeah, part of the Nazi or the Jew hunting battalion. Yeah, one of the in the entire Nazi army, one of the worst units in terms of war crimes. Yeah, I mean, I don't like them.

No, they don't sound nice to me. I'm not a fan. No, in a single week, the SS Viking division was responsible for between four and seven thousand murders of Jewish Ukrainians. They're often just kind of killing every person they can in a city or a town that they wind up billeted in. It's possible that Mengele participated directly in at least some of the killing. We simply don't know our records of his performance only detail his combat actions and he performed

well against partisans winning an iron cross second class and then first class for pulling comrades out of a burning tank. Mengele provided field medicine through a number of heavy combat actions in the first five months in the field. His division lost 20 percent of its manpower, which is which is heavy. That's an intense rate of casualties. Good. I hope it made him sad.

Yeah, I hope I hope they all suffered real bad. Yeah. Now Mengele was praised by his superior officers, even as the tide of war turned gradually against the Nazi forces. At the end of November, 1942, he was nearly killed in an aerial attack. A comrade described in his unit log vigorous air activity again. Dr. Mengele buried. Bomb explodes next to Foxhole and buried him.

They got him out alas. So another thing that a thing that is cool in this time period is the Russians counterattack at Stalingrad and the Romanian army kind of collapses. And then they surround the German 6th Army and, you know, massacre it. Joseph Mengele is in and around that action and he actually gets evacuated by air during one of the last moments in which that would have been possible. No one's really sure why he gets evacuated. He doesn't seem to have been injured, which would have been a normal reason to like pull

an officer out from the front. There's a pretty good chance. It's just because he's a doctor. He's seen as having high value as a Rachel hygienist. The war in the east is failing. But the Nazi regime's race war, they felt was still winnable. And they needed Mengele on another battlefront, a place called Auschwitz. So we're going to Auschwitz.

Only episode three. Only episode three. Yeah, it's mostly going to be Auschwitz today. This is going to be this week is all Auschwitz. Oops. All Auschwitz. Oops. All Auschwitz.

Oh boy. This isn't going to be fun. It is not. So he gets. Sorry. He gets. I don't know what to say to this. Or I just fucking.

I just throw SSRIs in my mouth. This is the only way to talk about Joey Mengs is with with a lot of reverb. So he gets evacuated. He's he's in Berlin for a little while before he gets his next assignment. And he gets in touch with his old boss, Ottmar von Verschauer. And Ottmar is now running the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. So he makes Mengele a guest scholar there, you know, on his his as he's recovering from being at the warfront.

And Mengele continues to aid Verschauer in his work on an ad hoc basis. Von Verschauer had taken over for the previous Nazi in charge, Eugene Fisher, as part of an agreement between the two men that race science had now advanced to an exciting new era, one in which the study of heredity could now look at traits like criminality or heroism or work shyness or industriousness and determine with scientific precision to what extent those traits were caused by heredity or by environment. The missing piece of the puzzle was that heredity science, as they saw it, still could not explain how a genetic disposition became a physical trait.

In his book on Mengele, Marwall quotes historian Hans Walter Schmool. The idea generally accepted up to that time that every attribute was simply transmitted as dominant or recessive, monofactorial genetic information did not hold up to the results of mutation research, population genetics, or developmental physiology. Thus, Mendelian genetics was giving way, in the words of the day, to higher mentalism, which presumed much more complicated mechanisms of heredity. Now, part of why the Nazis are confused is that a lot of the things they saw as traits simply are not behaviors or traits that have a genetic component or just aren't traits at all.

You have to consider the Nazis considered criminality a trait and their definition of a criminal was kind of broad, right? Yeah, it weirdly sounded a lot like they were just trying to describe Jews in any aspect and just trying to use science to justify it. Yeah, so you can see how they would be confused that all of their calculations aren't adding up here. And also, what's a crime? Because they would also like anything gay was a crime. Oh, for sure.

Exactly. Anything genderqueer was a crime. So criminality, quite broad as well. Broad term for the Nazis. Now, there were, and they were asking, because these guys are scientists, and some of what they're asking are legitimate at the time scientific questions about heredity. They were not just trying to do stuff that was nonsense race science. They were trying to answer real questions that scientists all over the world were kind of grappling with.

The pseudo science here, though, is pretty complex and not worth kind of delving into in much more detail. So we will continue to focus more on the personalities. Vershure and Fischer, both highly regarded race scientists, were obsessed with unraveling the mystery of heredity. So they made an agreement and Vershure gets made the head of the Institute because he's really good at getting funding and support from the Nazi state. I'm going to quote again now from Mar-well's book, although he himself here is largely quoting the world. He's largely quoting the work of a historian named Sheila Faith Weiss. In pursuit of this new paradigm, argues Weiss, a combination of experimental research on animals and humans was necessary. She writes that,

Dalam Institute scientists could provide the necessary human clinical supplement to the ongoing experimental work in the developmental genetics of normal and pathological traits in animals. Mengele's four month association with the Institute in the winter and spring of 1943 laid the foundation for a crucial link between the scientists at the Institute and a colleague who could be instrumental in supplying all manner of human specimens and data to advance their work. So they hit this point where they're like, in order to do more heredity research, the only way to properly do this is to study a bunch of humans. And that kind of study is going to involve dissection, it's going to involve autopsies, it's going to involve finding people who have rare different kind of genetic disabilities and studying their bodies after they die. If you were to do that legitimately, using only bodies that people had willingly donated after their deaths, well, you're not going to actually be able to do that science at the rate at which these Nazis want to do it.

They're going to need a supply of human material. And that is where Joseph Mengele is going to be useful to them. Oh, God, it's so fucking depressing, bro. I mean, these are the Mengele episodes. These are people going to die. Oh, I'm sorry, you can cut that one. How about this one instead? It's Jargar saying Mesa busting.

That's always nice. It's nice to remember the finer parts of life as we delve into this darkness. So Joey Mengele gets assigned to work at Auschwitz in the May of 1943. And we don't exactly know why because they get rid of a lot of their documentation around Auschwitz shortly after this period. It is likely, and Mengele's son would later say that von Verschur basically pulled strings to get him appointed at Auschwitz. It is worth noting doctors were never forced to work at death camps. Not one of the SS doctors who worked at any of the death camps was there on pain that they would be punished. You didn't even suffer career consequences for refusing to work at a death camp.

It was entirely up to you if you did this work. Normal empathy was like, oh, no, I'd rather not. Yeah, I get it, bro. It's fucked up. It's fucked up, bro. Me neither. It is often erently stated that Mengele was the chief medical officer at Auschwitz, but this is inaccurate. His direct supervisor was the chief medical director at the camp,

and Mengele is more accurately viewed as basically the number two man in terms of like the medical system at Auschwitz. Gerald Posner credits this errant reputation to the fact that Joseph was a workaholic, as well as one of the few SS men there who had seen combat in the East. Mengele frequently referred to his combat experience, and he quickly developed a special aura in the camp because of his frontline fighting, which contrasted sharply with the desk careers of the other doctors. Mengele coupled his combat status with a workaholic devotion to his duties. While other Auschwitz doctors did no more than was required of them,

Mengele was always undertaking new projects and extra responsibility. And one example of an extra responsibility he took on was eradicating a typhoid epidemic that occurred at one of the barracks soon after his arrival. Now, for reference, Auschwitz was made up of several labor camps, each with a different set of barracks generally divided between men and women, but also between inmates from different regions. As a general rule, families were split up on arrival by sex and availability to work, but sometimes too many people came in at once.

Auschwitz, I think the most people it ever killed in a day was 9,000, and there were days where more than that arrived. Yeah, I mean, it was a factory for producing death. And so sometimes when they had too many people arrive, communities would be kept intact until they could be exterminated. And when you stick large numbers of people in tiny, poorly made barracks with no insulation in the middle of a European winter, and you feed them maybe 700 calories a day and you deprive them of clean water,

illness is going to spread. And sure enough, typhoid epidemics were rampant. The time with the technology available was basically impossible to stop typhus from spreading once it had become endemic in something like a crowded barracks. This had been an intractable problem for the camp administration prior to Mengele's arrival. And the SS saw this as a serious issue, not because they cared about the comfort and safety of prisoners, but because typhoid just spreads.

You know, the SS can get typhoid from the prisoners at the barracks, right? The typhoid can't even tell who's Jewish or not. It's really messed up. It's like they're all the same species. I don't understand it. We're going to have to do more science. Unfortunately, yeah. So something has to be done and Joseph Mengele is going to be the guy to do it. And I'm going to quote now from a memoir by a Jewish doctor, educated in Germany, named Miklos Niesli.

Miklos is interned at Auschwitz with his family and forced to work as a medical officer there by Dr. Mengele. And here are his recollections of how Joseph fought the typhoid outbreak. The quarantine camp, C camp, D camp and the F section were terribly overcrowded despite the quotas which were filled daily for shipment to more distant camps. In the Czech camp, both the children and the aged had been greatly weakened by their two-year ordeal. The children's bodies were mere skin and bones and the elderly prisoners were so weak they could scarcely walk.

Both had to relinquish their places to new arrivals who were still strong enough to work. During the preceding weeks, their situation had steadily worsened. When the first Hungarian convoys began arriving, their rations had been sharply reduced. Then a few weeks later, when the stream of new deportees had swelled the flood proportions, the camp authorities had found themselves faced with a serious shortage of food. As usual, their remedy had been both drastic and efficient. They had practically suppressed the Czech camp's rations altogether. Hunger had reduced the prisoners to raving, moaning maniacs.

Within a few days, their already weakened organisms had disintegrated entirely. Diarrhea, dysentery and typhus had begun their deadly work. 50 or 60 deaths a day was normal. Their last days were spent in indescribable suffering, till at last a death came and set them free. The closing of all barracks was ordered early in the morning. Several hundred SS soldiers surrounded the Czech area and ordered the inmates to assemble. Their cries of terror as they were loaded into the waiting vans were terrible to hear.

For after two years in the KZ, they no longer had any illusions about what lay in store for them. Liquidation Day found some 12,000 prisoners left in the Czech camp. From among that number, 1,500 able-bodied men and women were chosen, along with eight physicians. The wet rest were sent to number two and number three crematoriums. On the following day, the Czech camp was silent and deserted. I saw a truck loaded with ashes leave the crematorium and head towards the Vistula, the river. Thus, the Auschwitz muster rolls were reduced by more than 12,000 units, and one more bloody page was added to the Auschwitz archives. That page contained only the following brief inscription.

The Czech section of the Auschwitz concentration camp was liquidated, this date due to a prevalence of typhus among the prisoners. Signed Dr. Mengele Haupsturmführer. Yeah. This is exactly like forcing people to get vexed. It's the same thing. Same thing, bro. I want to punch an anti-vaxxer in the face. Every time I listen to this podcast about different Nazi atrocities or read about it, I'm always just like, if I ever see an anti-vaxxer walk into a Baskin Robbins with a fucking star of David

that says vaccine on it because they're like, I don't need a vaccine. I just want all 32 flavors. I don't punch him in the fucking mouth. I think it is justified to do violence to people who compare like, and it's not even, you're not even being forced by the state to get a vaccine. You're being told like, yeah, man, if you want to work in a high school cafeteria, you have to get a COVID vaccine. What is this? Is this a Nazi Germany? No, it's super isn't.

It's totally not. Yeah, it's one of those things like everybody knows Auschwitz, like horrible, right? Like that's not, we're not like blowing any minds with the fact that this was a bad place. But when you actually dig into like, I recommend if you want to get an actual degree of personal physical context for what it was like there. Miklos Niesli's memoir Auschwitz, a doctor's eye witness account is short. You can finish it in an afternoon. It's not a long book and it's fucking harrowing. Like just absolutely some of the some of the worst things that you can possibly hear.

That was just one passage you read and I already need a nap. That's not one of the bad ones. Like it's bad, but like in terms of the degree of personal brutality involved, that's not one of the most. That's not the worst thing we're going to talk about today. Oh, cool. Yeah, you're going to need a lot of Jar Jar, buddy. Well, that smells stinkin' with. Absolutely.

Jesus. So it's important to note we just talked about the fact that like the doctors at Auschwitz were not at all forced to be there. Auschwitz and the death camp system in general could not function without doctors. They were the key linchpin that held the entire thing together. The kind of thugs who were doing the mass, you know, shootings of people and carrying the guns and manning the guard towers. Those were much less important to the system of killing than medical doctors. In January of 1942, a group of Nazi functionaries under friend of the pod, Reinhard Heydrich, sat down in a suburb of Berlin called Wonsei to plan out technical details of the Holocaust.

Prior to this moment, the genocidal violence of the Nazis had been a mix of deportations, mass shootings, restrictive laws, and random beatings and murders. After Wonsei, the death camp sprung up to full production with a goal of cleansing Europe from undesirable races. As we've discussed throughout these episodes, this was seen as a medical task. Doctors like von Verschur were key advocates throughout the escalating process of preparing the German state to carry out genocide. And I'm going to quote from the book Racial Hygiene here. Atmar von Verschur described in his textbook the need for a complete solution of the Jewish question. We're guests of honor at a meeting where possible solutions to the Jewish question were discussed. So that's Mengele's job. That's why these doctors are there, right?

They are seeing through the future health of the race by exterminating people, and that's very much how they see their role. Mengele's first job, and the first job of all SS doctors at Auschwitz, was to sort new arrivals to the camp. The trains would arrive, packed full of starving, desperate people, often jammed in with the corpses of their loved ones, who had starved or died of illness after days stuck in a dank, airless train car without access to sanitation. They would be marched out and sorted by a man like Mengele. And we're going to talk more about that, but um... But what? Yes.

I hope you enjoy this commercial break. There we go. That's got everybody in a good mood, ready for capitalism. Somehow that was in a minor key. I don't even know. It's on autotune, and even the autotune is depressed. Little, little miracles. 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 Linneauts 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 dot com. And see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. VTV's official challenge podcast is back for another season, and for the first time ever, the competition is coming from all over the world in the Challenge World Championship. We are bringing you episode recaps, interviews with competitors, and exclusive behind-the-scenes looks from the season. We'll be witnessing the competitive journeys of global MVPs from Argentina, Australia, the UK, and the USA teamed up with your favorite challenge legends. These pairs will have to work together to climb the game and become the first-ever world champion.

It's going to be the ultimate test to prove their worth for not just their country, but the entire world. Yes, will these pairs have what it takes to avoid elimination and endure the challenge? Join us to find out. Listen to MTV's official challenge podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. I'm back. I just took 3,000 Prozac, and I am ready to rock. There we go. There we go. Speaking of Prozac, Mengele and the other doctors that are there, their job is selecting these people. I can describe this experience of selection in broad terms, but nothing does a better job of illustrating it than the words of a man who went through it.

Miklos Niezli arrived at Auschwitz in May of 1944, less than a year into Dr. Mengele's time there, and he met the man himself immediately on arrival. We jumped to the ground, then turned over to take our wives and children in our arms and help them down. For the level of the cars was over four and a half feet from the ground. The guards had us line up along the tracks before us stood a young SS officer impeccable in his uniform, a gold rosette gracing his lapel, his boots smartly polished. Though unfamiliar with the various SS ranks, I surmised from his armband that he was a doctor. Later, I learned that he was the head of the SS group, that his name was Dr. Mengele, and that he was the chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the medical selector for the camp, he was present at the arrival of every train. Now, obviously, you know, Miklos has imperfect recall, like all light witnesses.

Mengele was not the chief physician, and he was not present for the arrival of every single train. This was a duty that doctors switched off on taking, and there's not documented evidence that Mengele did more than his share of shifts, which still means that he personally sent potentially several hundred thousand people to their annihilation. We just don't know if he, you know, worked overtime. Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's evidence that he did. We'll talk a little bit more about why Miklos has some of these kind of beliefs about what Mengele did at the camp that don't line up with the documentation, because he's not the only one. I mean, this is not like a personal flaw for one thing. Like, talk to people who have been present at like a mass shooting,

and you'll get different accounts of what happens and when. Because it's a stressful, terrifying situation, and Auschwitz is the most stressful and terrifying situation of all of the stressful, terrifying situations. So, yeah, your memory is going to have a couple of errors. It doesn't mean anything about the overall trustworthiness of his account. It's just that you get little details like that wrong. It is worth noting that the evidence suggests Mengele was unusually well suited to the mental task of selection. Dr. Ella Lingans, who was also interned at Auschwitz, later noted that Joseph handled the duty with less stress than his colleagues. Quote,

And Klein, who definitely deserves to be remembered in the same breath as a piece of shit like Mengele, had hated Jewish people with a passion ever since a Jewish guy stole his fiancee when they were undergrads. Wait, really? Yeah, that's his road to the Holocaust. Because that's my assumption for most Nazis. No, that is absolutely what happened. Some tall, handsome Jew such as myself, you know, like, you know, maybe dated their ex-girlfriend who broke their heart, and now it's like, we must kill them all with some perfect faces and some nice penises.

That is definitely the case for Dr. Fritz Insel Klein. Klein was known to brag that he liked the smell of the crematoria. Lingans talked to Mengele about his own opinions on the subject, and she claimed she's one of these doctors who's forced to work at the camp because she's a prisoner. There are a lot of these folks. Lingans talked to Mengele about his own opinions on the subject, and she claimed, quote, he once told me that there are only two gifted people in the world, Germans and Jews, and it's a question of who will be superior. So he decided that they had to be destroyed.

Yeah, see, this is like underneath all of the, now granted, my entire like, or at least most of my personal dealings with anti-Semitism has been like chuds online. But it does seem very like, I don't know, like rooted in, I don't want to say they're jealous that they're fucking jealous of us, but it does seem like a lot of it is just like, it's so smart and so funny, and all the girls like them. And I mean, and me, I'm just so nice to all the girls. I'm too nice. I need to be mean. And then they, you know, they read Jordan Peterson, they start cleaning their room, they start doing racial hygiene, and then Bob's your own. Yeah, that's the way it goes. Yeah. God almighty. So it's one thing to kind of give an overview of how the selection process worked, which is harrowing enough. But I think I'd be doing it a service if I didn't give you an account of meeting Joseph Mengele as a prisoner approaching selection.

This one comes from our buddy, Miklos, who does survive the camp. We'll talk a little bit about how later, because by God, it's a story. Quote, to start, the SS quickly divided us according to sex, leaving all children under 14 with their mothers. So our once united group was straight away split in two. A feeling of dread overwhelmed us, but the guards replied to our anxious questions in a paternal, almost good-natured manner. It was nothing to be concerned about. They were being taken off for a bath and to be disinfected, as was the custom. Afterwards, we would all be reunited with our families. While they sorted us out for transportation, I had a chance to look around.

In the light of the dying sun, the image glimpsed earlier through the crack in the boxcar seemed to have changed, grown more eerie and menacing. One object immediately caught my eye, an immense square chimney built of red bricks tapering towards the summit. It towered above a two-story building and looked like a strange factory chimney. I was especially struck by the enormous tongues of flame rising between the lightning rods, which were set at angles over the square tops of the chimney. I tried to imagine what hellish cooking would require such tremendous fire. Suddenly, I realized that we were in Germany, the land of the crematory ovens. I had spent 10 years in this country, first as a student, later as a doctor, and I knew that even the smallest city had its crematorium. Yeah.

Before you were like, I feel like it would be a disservice to do the... Feliz, feel free to disserve me. Yeah. You know? I don't need to hear all. Sorry. It's like... Yeah, I think one of the stories that's kind of worth telling about Mengele in this period is the fact that, like, there's one point where a doctor gets sent to the camp and he kind of realizes what is happening.

And he's like, I'm not willing to do this, you know? I don't want to go through this shit. This is, like, not what doctors do. I feel like it's immoral for me to be here. And so he says that he's going to, like, leave and, like, tries to get his way out of Auschwitz. This guy... Oh, yeah, so I found it here. So, yeah, this SS physician named Horst Fischer is like... Yeah, he goes through, like, one of these selections and he's just so horrified of it that he's tries to transfer out of it. And, yeah, Fischer asks himself kind of over the next couple of weeks, like, why they're doing this, why these starving people, the poorest of the poor, who couldn't possibly have, like, influenced the economy or politics

or harmed Germany in any way, why these people had to be exterminated. And as he's, like, trying to leave the camp, he asks Mengele these questions that he's been asking himself, and Mengele responds, it 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 Western European Jews would not be capable of survival. Therefore, it was necessary to kill all Jews. And one of the things that Mengele does is he takes this questioning doctor

and he starts doing, like, selections with him in order to, like, talk him up throughout the process until eventually the guy's willing to continue the job as an SS physician. So he's not just... He actually convinces him? Yeah, yeah, he talks him into it. Ugh. Yeah, yeah. Weak-minded bitches, dude.

Yeah, I mean, they're Nazis. I'm just like... You know, it's like, he gets close to, like, feeling something close to human fucking sympathy. He starts to recognize the dimensions of the horror that he's been complicit in. And Mengele is like, nah, nah, bro, you're good. Like, let me walk you through why we need to be doing this. Jesus Christ.

So our friend Miklos, who we've been talking about, is lucky by the standards of Auschwitz. His daughter is old enough to work, and so she and his wife are sent to the right so they don't get murdered immediately. Meanwhile, he gets pulled out of the mass of prisoners, along with several other doctors among the crowd, by Joseph Mengele. The SS was always shorthanded, and they needed men and women with proper medical skills, even if those men and women were Jews who were condemned to die. Miklos and the other doctors who suited Mengele's need became part of what was known as the Sonder Commando. These special units, to translate their name literally,

were used to handle most of the dirty work of actually executing the Holocaust. They would drag bodies out of the gas chamber and incinerate them. They would sort out things like gold fillings and take other possessions from the dead. It's one of the worst things imaginable that you could be forced to do. Now, to keep the commando functional, the SS allowed them to take things like canned or preserved food from the dead and off in alcohol. The commando also found it easy to acquire golden jewelry, which they were able to use sometimes to bribe guards for things like newspapers. These were Nazi newspapers, but they were still like, they gave you some kind of outside context as to how the war is going, like what is happening outside of Auschwitz.

And this and alcohol are pretty much the only thing that kept these people functional. Miklos basically says every night we kind of drank ourselves into, you know, sleep. To a stupor. Yeah. Well, how well, how else do you do this job? Right? Well, I mean, fucking Mengele is going completely sober, just like whistling. He's not bothered by this is kind of the thing about Mengele. Most of the SS are also drunk, right? The other doctors are hammered. Like everyone working this, Miklos writes a lot about this one specific SS guy who's like the trigger man.

Like whenever they need people shot, this guy, I think he's a captain will like just go and shoot them in the head. And he does this all day and he's like, he's one of the nicer Nazis to Miklos. And he's clearly just like drinking himself to death while he's doing this job. But but not Mengele Mengele for Mengele. This is like an unparalleled career opportunity, right? And that's how he treats it. Yeah. So each of these Sonderkommando units, obviously you can't do this job for very long, right?

Like for one thing, your brain won't handle it. And for another, the SS doesn't want these people because they have extra privileges. They don't want them around long enough to potentially execute as they eventually will some sort of sabotage. So every Sonderkommando was wiped out every four months. And the next commando unit's first duty was disposing of the corpses. So Miklos, when he takes this job, knows like we've got I've got four months to live basically because I've gotten picked for this job. That said, he occupied a special position like other slave doctors. He would help to care for workers who took ill and keep track of things like the outbreak of typhus.

One of the fucked up things is that like when workers come in sick to the doctors here, they have to try to hide whatever's going on because Mengele pays attention to everyone admitted to the camp hospital. And if you're not getting well fast enough or if it looks like you're not, you're going to be immediately killed, right? Right. So they have to be extremely careful. A big part of what the Sonderkommando do, because they have more access to like luxury goods and things like medicine that they take off the dead, is they will like bribe SS guards with gold that they take from the dead and then use that to go into the camps and distribute medicine and food to some of like the people in the barracks. It's the only reason some of the people who live through Auschwitz live through Auschwitz is that, you know,

these people in this impossible fucking position use this relative level of privilege that they have to save some of their fellow inmates. It's bleak. So yeah, Mengele needed Miklos in particular because he was a skilled human dissectionist, right? He is a doctor who has pathological experience like he is trained to do medical pathology labs and stuff. And Mengele is not a very good doctor, right? And that's the same reason like... That's an understatement. No, but I know it's me.

Yeah, but whenever like the SS guys get sick, they go to Miklos. And like he actually, he's able to do a lot of good for other people in the camp because like some SS guy will get like fucked up or sick and he will help that guy. And then when he's trying to like get into an area of the camp, he'll be like, hey man, like I had your fucking back when you, you know, got yourself the fucking clap or whatever, you know? I need to get in for a minute. So like, again, these are kind of the ways things actually work on the ground, which you might think is weird given how strict in theory these ideas of racial superiority are that these SS men, they're letting this Unterminch doctor touch their bodies. But like, again, they don't have the SS doctors are poor physicians often.

And Joseph hates providing medical care in a clinical setting. He's also not competent. The job of a doctor? The job of a doctor. It's normal doctoring. Oh, I hate this whole thing where I have to, you know, like I have to do the thing with the knee, make the knee move. I like to take their vitals. I like the part of doctoring where we just do fucked up shit.

That's really, that's really what I'm into. I got into this to sew people together and now everyone wants me to fucking just put band-aids on people. What is this shit? You know what this shit isn't. What? The ads that support our podcast. That's true. It isn't that.

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That's V-E-S-S-I dot com. And see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain. MTV's official challenge podcast is back for another season. And for the first time ever, the competition is coming from all over the world in the Challenge World Championship. We are bringing you episode recaps, interviews with competitors, and exclusive behind the scenes looks from the season. We'll be witnessing the competitive journeys of global MVPs from Argentina, Australia, the UK, and the USA teamed up with your favorite Challenge Legends. These pairs will have to work together to climb the game and become the first ever world champion.

It's going to be the ultimate test to prove their worth for not just their country, but the entire world. Yes, will these pairs have what it takes to avoid elimination and endure the challenge? Join us to find out. Listen to MTV's official challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Everybody's having a good time. Everyone's having fun. We're, you know, this is like, I forgot that we always get to this point in the podcast where everything is just so sad that I want to die. So sometimes I'm just going to be doing my taxes.

Yeah. Just letting you know. And I'll occasionally respond with, oh, you don't say that way. You'll think I'm paying attention. See, I should probably get to my taxes as well. Well, it's just, it's weighing on my mind. Yeah. Let's do it. It's coming up very quickly.

It'll be, it'll be tax time by the time these episodes drop. Happy tax day, everybody. See, that's the nice thing about studying Joseph Mengele is it makes the taxes seem a lot less unpleasant. Honestly, it really does. I was thinking that exact same thing. I was like, you know, I'm like stressing out about this. There's so many other worst things in the world and getting all my documents together. See, that's the one solid that Joseph Mengele did all of us. Yeah. Thank you, Joey Mengs. Thanks, Joe. You're welcome.

Oh, good times. Lies a lot of broomstick. So, Miklos takes this job that's offered to him and he kind of nods as well. Mengele makes a bunch of threats that like, if you're not good enough at doing these dissections, you know, I'll send you away to the labor camp and stuff. And this is like, you have to, you have to think about what an impossible fucking position Miklos is in because he has no idea if his wife and daughter are still alive. Like, they've been immediately separated. He has no contact with them. He's quickly told when he meets with the other Sonder commander, they're like, yeah, man, they're going to kill us all in like three months. Like, that's just what they do every couple of months. Have some fucking gin, you know, get through the night.

So, yeah, he goes for like weeks. He has no answer to the question of what's happened to his family. And he's just being handed bodies to dissect by Dr. Mengele. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But for right now, it's worth digging into exactly what Joseph was doing at Auschwitz. The work of carrying out selections and ordering the massacre of typhoid patients was, of course, enough to qualify him as a bastard. We've already met the bastard threshold some time ago. Yeah, the bastard threshold has been far surpassed, in my opinion. We hit that at the latest during the Operation Barbarossa. Yeah, I mean, I thought I have a pretty low bar for bastards. So, yeah, he'd been a bastard.

Yeah, he leapt right over that low bar. So, let's talk about what he was doing here. You know, we talked about what he did with those typhoid patients. But that's not why he's famous for being the Angel of Death. And for an overview of that, I'm going to quote now from the Urologic History Museum in an article talking about Nazi experiments at Auschwitz. In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to specific medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children, for such were the majority of the twins. The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toe prints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a particular pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injections so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments,

the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. Although gynecology was not his specialty, Mengele conducted experiments on pregnant women. He had them infected with typhoid in order to determine whether or not the children would be born with the infection, too. Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Therisenstadt to Auschwitz. She said, I delivered a big beautiful blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, we can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food. After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female check doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's agony. I'm going to go hug my baby real quick. There's a lot of that. Some of the most unsettling stories about Mengele are the things that make it clear that he's not this unhinged, unchecked vehicle of maliciousness.

Evil is for him, it's a technology, it's a tool. It's like picking up a screwdriver because there are stories where he will carefully and in an excellent advanced medical fashion deliver a baby and then immediately send the mother and baby off to the gas chamber. It's so fucked up because we like to imagine, especially someone as twisted as this fucking guy, being Jigsaw. But he's like, if Jigsaw were fucking boring, he's like if Jigsaw were in fucking marketing. If Jigsaw were a middle manager at a firm that produced murdered people. And he is doing some bad stuff, but he's doing some bad stuff at the administrative middle manager level. That is the thing that he is doing. And often he does kill people, he does do some of these like, he'll inject chloroform into people's hearts so that they can be killed and autopsied.

But a lot of the killing and a lot of the butchery is just other doctors who are better that he has as slaves, that he makes them do the work for him. He's delegating a lot of this. And these doctors, by the way, absolutely no moral judgment on them. They are participating and helping him carry out fucked up experiments so that they can save as many people as possible through the crack. And they are saving lives, it's an incredibly, it's literally the worst position a human being could be put in. Other than doing this podcast. Yeah, other than doing this podcast. So a lot of Miklos' work at Auschwitz involved autopsying dozens of twin pairs of children who had been killed by the Nazis.

Popular accounts, as we've talked about a little bit of Mengele's butchery, go whiter than this. You will find claims that he sowed sets of twins together as part of some mad experiment and that he ejected colored dyes into their eyes to make them change colors. And this is where we get to the stuff about Mengele that's not entirely accurate. Some of the more lurid experiments that he's accused of undertaking either didn't happen or just weren't as crazy as they sound. Mind you, all of this is bad science, but the work that Mengele did at Auschwitz was not considered unhinged or disconnected from the work of the broader German medical establishment. Rather than being a mad scientist conducting horror at Auschwitz like some sort of demented musician, he was, as we've said, a mid-level piece of an engine of scientific quackery that needed body parts and lots of them to further research into heredity. And we are going to talk about that and a lot more, but I feel like we've hit our limit for this episode. I've hit my limit for the next 15 years.

Yeah. This is too much for me. No, I'm fine. I'm good. Well, for the next time we have you on, Matt, we'll find some guy who, like, I don't know, convinced people to drink horse piss so they'd grow muscles. That's my favorite. Yeah. We'll get one of those guys in here.

Do an episode on Mr. Hands. Have you done him? Oh, no. No, that's a good one. Fuck the death by a horse. That's fun. Heroes of the old internet. Yes.

No, this is so obviously, I think we started by talking about this, but, like, people keep asking for Mengele over and over. Of course. Number one, as we've said, it's not responsible to just do Mengele because that's kind of falling into this great man of history like he was this one terrible guy who happened to get a job where he could hurt people. No, no, no. He was part of a massive engine of medical tyranny that was created by the Nazis as part of, like, their racial plans and he was tied in directly to mainstream medical, like, the mainstream medical establishment of his time. And that's an important part of his story, but also, like, this is just so much worse than most of our episodes. There's not, like, there's not, like, these, you know, moments where he does. He's never silly.

Like, he's never ridiculous. He's like... Which only makes him more evil. It's like, no, he's a quiet, competent monster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the worst kind of evil because, you know, he's not even occasionally stepping on a rake and hitting his face, you know?

Donald Trump is evil, but you get those moments of beautiful comedy where he gets arrested or something. Yes. Yes. And this guy is just... Yeah, he's the worst type of evil. He's the type of evil that makes me want to do my taxes. Yeah. Yeah.

That's real evil. This episode has been sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS. We don't seem so bad now, do we? Oh, yes, the IRS who has, you know, at this point, my endorsement. I'm a big fan of the way you make me think about other things. So, pay your taxes on time. Yeah.

I think, you know, I think it's time to end those 13 years of sobriety I have, guys. JK, I'm just playing. Yeah. I'm going to just kind of sit and stare at the wall for several minutes. Mm-hmm. I'm going to hug my child. Yeah. And I'm going to remind you that if you like podcasts, I do the wire rewatch podcast.

Pod yourself a gun. We do the spranos, and now we're doing the wire. It's a lot of fun. And it's a good time. We're going to have fun. Yeah. Listen to that. I'll be on your wire podcast soon.

Yes, you will. Yeah. We'll lighten the load a little bit. Absolutely. And, you know, it's got its depressing moments, but not so much. Yeah, man, none compared to this shit. Yup. Yup, yup, yup, yup.

All right. Bazumba. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone 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, supercharged with waterproof tech.

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It just came out out of nowhere. The biggest flash of my life. For decades, a deadly incident has been covered up for political reasons. What was so big about this incident. On NPR's new podcast, Taking Cover, we unraveled the story behind the worst marine-on-marine friendly fire in modern history and why it was kept secret. What did y'all have to hide? Listen to Taking Cover on NPR's embedded on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.