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

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Matt and Robert continue their discussion of Joey Mengs, and the collapse of the German Medical Establishment into Nazi terror. FOOTNOTES: https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/the-sentimental-memoirs-of-the-angel-of-death/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-biography-of-josef-mengele-the-angel-of-death/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-31/verschuer-fisher-letters-on-tobacco-and-nazi-medicine/101376720 https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/profiles/ https://archive.org/details/racialhygienemed0000proc/page/210/mode/2up?q=mengele https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01968-z https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/science-race https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/200707/did-josef-mengele-produce-any-useful-medical-research-data-gathered/ https://www.urologichistory.museum/collections/the-scope-of-urology-newsletter/issue-1-spring-2020/mengeles-experiments#:~:text=His%20experiments%20also%20distinguished%20between%20genetic%20traits%20and,evidence%20for%20the%20ideas%20of%20the%20Nazi%20party. https://www.thoughtco.com/mengeles-children-twins-of-auschwitz-1779486 https://archive.is/h7GWf#selection-633.0-633.955 https://www.amazon.com/People-Auschwitz-Published-Association-Holocaust/dp/0807828165 https://www.amazon.com/Mengele-Complete-Gerald-L-Posner/dp/0815410069/ref=sr_1_3?crid=XRGA8K0JK2PM&keywords=mengele+posner&qid=1681353028&s=books&sprefix=mengele+posne%2Cstripbooks%2C180&sr=1-3 https://www.amazon.com/Auschwitz-Doctors-Eyewitness-Miklos-Nyiszli/dp/161145011X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=281P91NN3S4WM&keywords=auschwitz+a+doctors&qid=1681353057&s=books&sprefix=auschwitz+a+doctors%2Cstripbooks%2C133&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Mengele-Unmasking-David-G-Marwell-ebook/dp/B07TK2ZM56/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1681353075&sr=1-1 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Next Question, we're going to try something a little bit different. This time around, we're talking all about resilience. Courage in the face of adversity. Digging deeper. I feel stronger. It's finding strength with them. Think of this show as a toolkit to help you navigate this crazy world we live in. We're digging deep into something psychologists are now calling post-traumatic growth. Focus on those things that are within your control and you'll do better.

I am really excited for us to explore all these things together. Listen to Next Question with Katie Couric on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah! What's artificial my intelligence? I am Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's not about AI, large language model learning tools, but might be because I want to confess something to you, Sophie, and to you, Matt Leib. That's been troubling me.

I don't want to remember my name, dude. Sorry, I'm hungover. So Matt, Sophie, I've been thinking about playing around with some of these these AIs that everybody's getting into where you can like have them generate images and shit, right? Yeah, seems kind of cool, but I haven't done it yet because I can't get a specific prompt out of my head, which is a hybrid of Epstein and Carly Rae Jepsen. That's just called Carly Rae Jepstein. I don't know why it won't leave my head. It's an intrusive thought. I can't get rid of it, but yeah, yeah. So I bet they could do a great job. AI, you know, they make all sorts of combinations.

I love it. You're a little AI mingle over here. Call me maybe. Same song with Carly Rae Jepstein. Different subtext. Oh, god. No, you're going to get in trouble for that. We're bleepin' that. Look, we will bleep this, but yeah, I did have a little red corvette parody I did about Jeffrey Epstein that people did not appreciate, Matt. I'm just saying, you know, that was if it's parody song, I feel like parody. That's what I felt. But when I sang, well, they're all wrong. I'm not even going to sing the second verse because

please don't. We're bleeping all of this. We're cutting a large. Oh, boy. That was a fun 45 seconds of material that would have ended both of our careers. Oh, Matt. Yeah, that was great. I'm trying to die. So, you know, end me. You and I both got the. Oh, wow. You stopped me from making my next joke, which was going to be to say that we'd both contracted the Epstein. Oh, get it. That's when you get drunk and make Jeffrey Epstein jokes that get you canceled. Yeah, get it. That's not a bad one. Okay. Yeah, I didn't hate it, but my God, we have to add a lot out of this beginning.

We've been recording for 45 years. We have. We have. And all 45 years have been cut. If you want to hear the cut versions, go to the.com. Oh, yeah. The truth behind the bastards. Yeah, this is where Matt Lee and I have a weekly podcast where we do our B-sides with Jordan Peterson. We drink a single pint of cider. We don't sleep for 27 days. It's a great time. So let's move on from the unpleasant story. You're making Epstein jokes and you're laughing about it. Look, Matt. You laugh about it. We have to move on from the depressing tale of Jordan Peterson to talk about a less sad individual, Joseph Mengele. Oops. So in his early days at school,

Mengele still leaned towards dentistry as a career due to the fact, again, his homeland had, or his hometown had no dentists. But of course, it's his conversation that he asked with his friend Julius Deisbach, who's a year older than him, who tells him dentistry is too specialized. You should do a broader thing. You like anthropology. There's a degree program in anthropology and genetics. Just do that. So he decides to take his friends advice. And in kind of. So some people will argue that Mengele was a narcissist. You know, I'm not a, I can't diagnose anybody with anything. It's certainly a thing that gets brought up, but including by like professionals who go over his notes and stuff, because he wrote a memoir. And he definitely

had ADHD if TikTok has taught me anything. Oh, for sure. He had that ADHD. Sometimes you lose your keys. Yeah. So I don't really know how to finish that joke, Matt. But what I do know is that David Marwell will point out that like, there's evidence kind of in his later writings that he sort of mythologizes this conversation with his friend Deisbach, where Deisbach's like, hey, maybe consider doing a broader thing. He writes, quote, despite the circumstances, a casual conversation, Mengele's choice was not superficial. Indeed, he claims it awakened a passion in him. I had no idea then of the many cited nature of medicine, but the kindled flame of enthusiasm would retain its warmth, if not its brilliant luminosity forever. How was it possible

in so short a time to transform someone who was, one could almost say, resigned into someone who was enchanted? Mengele answered his own question by suggesting that his friend had unlocked a potential that was already present within him. Deisbach was a magician filled with the beauty, grandeur, and high values of his science and art, who did not speak of the practical possibilities of medicine or the possibility for employment. Rather, he knew only, probably quite unconsciously, how to incite my scientific curiosity and how to translate it into enthusiasm for such a versatile subject. He needed it only to tell me which subjects I would need to take in the first semester, and my decision was unshakable, as if I had never even thought of another subject to study.

Mengele elevated the intervention of his friend at just the right moment to mythic proportions, comparing the encounter to that of Athena visiting Odysseus in the form of a deer. The eerie fact that he never saw his friend again caused him to use that perhaps it really had been Athena in disguise. I can just imagine like Deisbach becomes like a pediatrician or something, he moves to Iowa, you know, 1945, he's like waking up in the morning, he puts on the radio, he's got a cup of coffee, story about Mengele comes on, he's like, oh shit, oh boy, I can't tell anybody about this. Yeah, don't inspire. Never knew him, never knew him. No, no, no, my name is Deisbach,

not Deisbach. Yeah, sorry. No, no, no, you got the wrong guy, wrong guy. I've never even been to Germany. So I don't know, the message of this is never inspire your friends. If your friends say, I want to be a dentist, say, yeah, teeth fucking rule, bro. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, I am not getting involved. You never know where that fucking branch. I don't know what the fuck you should do. Why are you talking to me? I'm not Athena, fuck off. Yeah, yeah. If a friend ever asks you what to do with their life, tell them I am not a God. I don't know, world needs janitors, man. Yeah, janitors have pretty much never done anything wrong. Yeah, do something simple and valuable. Yes. So Mengele's first few years in school were characterized by a growing obsession with genetics and evolution.

The men who tutored him, first in Munich and then in Frankfurt, were an adherents of a school of evolutionary theory that believed modern society and social justice movements had corrupted the purity of Darwinian evolution. There's a big attitude among the Nazis, very similar wording to what the right uses today, that social justice, which they called it, was a Jewish invention, right? And it was specifically, it was part of an insidious Jewish plot, because if you believe all this shit about race science, then doing stuff like feeding the starving, like putting vagrants in housing, you're doing that to weaken the bloodline of the Germans by allowing those people to persist and breed. And so it's an attempt to betray Germany for the next war.

Yeah. If you've wondered why are the social justice stuff on the right, like where a lot of that comes from, that's a big part of it. Yeah, yeah. You scratch it a little bit and then all of a sudden you get into, like, Judeo-Bolshevism or some weird shit, cultural Marxism, and then there's, like, for some reason, a star of David, and you're like, oh, okay, okay. So one of Joseph's first mentors was Dr. Ernst Rudin, who was a prominent backer of the idea that doctors should proactively destroy what he called life devoid of value. This would evolve into the Nazi concept of life unworthy of life, which is kind of the most direct translation of how Nazi's talked about this in German. Rudin would go on to author the first Nazi compulsory

sterilization laws, which were instituted in July of 1933. This is seven months after the Enabling Act, I think, or seven months after Hitler rises to power. I think it's a little less than that after the Enabling Act, but that should, the fact that this happens so quickly, this is almost the first thing the Nazis do, should give you an idea of the centrality the Nazis placed on this idea. The law for the protection of hereditary health provided the first list of conditions that qualified one for mandatory sterilization, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, deafness, Huntington's disease, all physical deformities and what was called feeble mindedness, alcoholism, drug addiction, these are all believed

to be hereditary and thus problems that could only be stopped by excising them from the human genome. The fact that alcoholism is on there is funny if you've ever like spent 35 seconds in Berlin. You can buy a liter of beer for two dollars and drink it on a train. Clarifying question, what do you consider alcoholism? Just want to know how many beers we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I agree, very degenerate. Anyone having more than 16 to 20 beers a day, you know. Yeah, weirdos have to die, but you know, 50. So, yeah, that's some good. It's always fun to do jokes like that with the Germans because, you know, they gave up the right to be offended. Absolutely, it's my favorite thing. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, Texans. So, casual

observers of the Nazi regime often accuse Hitler of being obsessed with racial purity and believing that Germans were Aryan supermen. Now, it's usually not worth like just correcting people, but that is fundamentally wrong. That is not what Hitler believed. He did not believe the Germans were Aryan supermen. Instead, he believed in the perfectability of Aryan descended people like the Germans through careful scientific guidance. And that is different. He's not saying, we are supermen. He is saying, using science and breeding, we can become supermen by excising these these like degenerate influences from our bloodline and encouraging people who are more pure to breed together, right? That is that is a different thing. Yeah, he was doing a manifestation,

you know, yeah, doing wellness. Yeah. Well, I think I think the reason it is worth kind of pointing out why the more common belief is wrong is because the common belief is just racism, just like, hey, we're better than everybody, which is less unsettling and less toxic than what the Nazis believed, which is we can make people like a lot of the Holocaust comes because we are attempting to make people better, right? Right. That is what Mengele, the people he kills will die in service of this goal. So it is important to get that right. Obviously, Hitler is a massive advocate and supporter of the German medical establishment. That was the most important part of the German state to him. In one of his first speeches as Führer, Hitler addressed the

National Socialist German Physicians League, or NSDAB. He told them that lawyers and engineers and architects were all replaceable in his vision of the future. None of those career paths were crucial to Nazism succeeding. But national socialist doctors were utterly necessary. He told them, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour. If not for you, if you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles if the health of our people is in danger? Key to this idea is the concept that doctors should not be concerned primarily with the health of the individual. For this is secondary to the health of the Volk or people. This means that a Nazi doctor is not violating his Hippocratic oath if he sterilizes or kills people as long as

those people are threats to the well-being of the people's racial community. Right? Fun. Yeah. That is how they justify. I'm not saying they're not, obviously, they are in fact violating the Hippocratic oath. But this is how they see it, right? An early NSDAB guideline stated, from the first day, we have made it clear that the major turnabout in the world view of our days, an essential portion of which is vanquishing the individual through experiencing the people, must be the guiding principle of the morality and ethics of the medical profession. That is a crucial phrase, vanquishing the individual through experiencing the people. That's the Holocaust. That is the Holocaust in a nutshell.

Young Joseph would spend the best days of his career vanquishing individuals in order to support the Volk. He was not an immediately committed Nazi, though, for in those last days of Weimar, the German nationalist right was large enough to fill several movements that did not all see eye to eye. Rather than joining the Nazis early on in March of 1931, he joined the youth wing of the Stahlhelm, an ex-soldier organization who marched in uniform and were kind of like a more organized, you know, like the oath keepers, how they're mostly like silly bastards. This is the oath keepers if they had all spent like four years drowning in the blood of their best friends in the trenches. Right, exactly. Just watching all of their homies get sucked into mud bogs and

sucking in mustard gas. Yeah, if the oath keepers had been at J6, they would not have been turned away by mason tear gas. Exactly. Or yeah, if the Stahlhelm, sorry, had been at J6, not the oath keepers. They're a bunch of seditious babies. Not to praise them. These guys are far right. They're assholes. They massacre communists in the street. They're horrible people. They're just frightening. So as he progresses through his studies in the 1930s, he comes to conceive of himself as a biological soldier for the health of the Volk, which is actually a direct quote from the Reich Health Office president Hans Reiter, who added that the destiny of the German Volk rests entirely in the hands of the German physician. Mengele's professors were not all committed

Nazis, of course, nor was all of this genetic science that he studied based on pseudoscientific principles. One of his teachers was Carl von Frisch, a zoologist who authored pioneering studies of honeybees and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1973. It's Frisch who Mengele credits with sparking his lifelong fascination with zoology, quote, in such a lasting way that I have kept this fire my entire life and have all too often been warmed by it. Frisch would come into contact. And again, Frisch is one of the guys who inspires Mengele to go down this path. He is not a Nazi. He actually gets in trouble with the Nazis a number of times because he insists on employing Jewish assistants after they come to power, many of whom are women. He employs a lot of Jewish female

scientists during the Third Reich. And he almost gets like, like he gets fired, but he gets brought back because he's just such a good scientist. But he actually protects a lot of Jewish people by like basically sheltering them through his fame. Another scientist who teaches Mengele and is this kind of guy is Otto Weiland. Weiland is a chemistry professor. Mengele actually does not like Weiland. He thinks he's brilliant, but he's a bad teacher because he's just more interested in his research. Weiland actually wins a Nobel Prize. He's a very, very good scientist. And during the Nazi regime, Weiland also shields Jewish students using his notoriety to protect them from the Holocaust. And that's part of the complexity of this is that these guys are not hardcore race scientists,

obviously. They're just geneticists. They're doing that kind of science, but it all gets lumped in together. So a number of the people that Mengele admires are folks who will risk their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust. Just again, you know, it's complicated. Yeah, you know, it sounds like the recurring theme is just like, you know, you're picking and choosing a little bit of facts from each, you know, exactly, exactly. Each study to try to bolster your weird race science thing. So yeah, whereas as opposed to like Fritz and Weiland, who are very focused, have like really are have become incredible experts on a specific thing, deep, deep rigor. He's just kind of picking a la carte shit and ignoring the whole,

I'm going to shield a bunch of Jews during the Holocaust because it's fucked up stuff that they do. See, that's why you should be a dentist. Yes, it's a specialty, but you know what, you won't be a Nazi. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. There were a lot of not one of the guys he works with at Auschwitz is in fact a dentist. So I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, Mengele imbibed the scientific lessons of these men, but obviously not their morality. Unfortunately, this was also the case for the teacher he respected most as an undergraduate, Siegfried Malier, the director of the Munich University Anatomical Institute. I'm going to quote from David Marwell's book Mengele here. Malier or Malier, whatever, counseled his students that a good physician must conceive

of body and soul as a unity. He spoke of the majesty of death that they would encounter in their work. Later, when Malier instructed them in the in the anatomy lab, Mengele wrote that the great teacher wanted them to have a deep, even intuitive understanding of anatomy and not just memorized terms. He definitely demonstrated what was visible through dissection, the functional relationship and the structural efficiency of the components of the human body. Mengele was particularly moved by Malier's introduction to the dissection labs. My entire life, even in the most difficult situations, I can hear his solemn words from that time when he spoke of the rights of the dead that we should always approach the dead with dignity and gravity. As long as they're

dead. I mean, he doesn't really do that. It's one of those. It's weird how much he idolizes this guy because that is I would argue not how he treats the dead, although he I will explain his argument a little more later when we get to that portion of it. So during his first years in college, Joseph still suffered from the after effects of blood poisoning that had darkened his adolescence. The future arbiter of racial health was not well enough to walk the distance between his various classes. So his parents bought him a car. This proved to be the saving grace of his social life. Having a car made it easier to make friends or at least to hang around with other young people who needed a ride. This is the exact type of guy. He's the car guy. Yeah, he's the car guy in high

school who's like he's really intense. He writes a lot of poetry. He's kind of fucking weirdo, but yeah, we're all going to the beach. We got to get fucking joey. Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, my version of that was the car guy who was 10 years older than us and would buy us beer. But yeah, same kind of guy really. I'm sure maybe he's a Nazi now. So in his memoirs, Mengele remembered this period as a lonely one, quote, it is precisely this feeling of being alone, the lack of an intimate connection to family, the lack of a true friendship that I felt so bitterly in the first few semesters. He notes that he engaged in superficial pleasure seeking using his access to money to engage in the trappings of a social life while living a shallow existence. Mengele claimed that during

his early college years, he did not seek an honest friendship. He claimed failing to overcome his isolation disguised this inner inability in an easily misinterpreted preservation of the remoteness of cool impersonality and unsocial arrogance, which may have had the effect of discouraging all who otherwise came to me in friendship and affection. In other words, he can't like let anybody in so he pretends that he's better than everyone else so that he doesn't have to actually get to know anybody and accept vulnerability. Yeah. I mean, a normal adolescent, you know, struggles, you know, save for the whole, you know, the race science stuff. Aside from the race science, yeah, pretty, pretty understandable. Yeah. I mean, at this point in his life,

you could write a nice little coming of age novel. Sure. If the ending is different. Yeah. I'm actually working on a series of Nazi coming of age novels. Oh, yeah. No, it's going to be going to be good. Yeah, exactly. That's what we don't have enough of. Why not? Why Nazi books? Yeah. Yeah, it is. There's a there's a series of detective books that I read from time to time, the Bernie Gunther books, which are like about a detective who is not a Nazi, but is first in the Weimar state and that is in the Nazi state. And because he's such a good detective, he gets like brought in by Nazis when there's these murder mysteries or assassinations of Nazi. He's like forced into the SS. It's a really there's there's some good books.

There's some weird stuff in a couple of them. Yeah. Like it's it's firmly anti Nazi. He portrays them all as monsters, but he has to do it. There's some sweatiness to explain. How are you in the SS and like not part of war cry? It's it's weird. Some pretty good books about anything. It's a fiction. You can go in any world you want. And instead, you want to make something. I don't know, guys, it's hard to explain. You wrote it. So the books, the earlier books in the series, where he's like a detective in Weimar Berlin during the fighting between Nazis and communists, there's some really cool stuff there because he knows his stuff about the historical period. Some of the later stuff gets a little weirder. But you know, if you're looking for a fucking

Nazi themed detective novel, there you go. So starting in 1934, Mengele began taking pediatric medicine courses with the whimsically named Dr. Franz Hamburger, a proponent of right wing volkish medicine who joined the Nazi party that same year. His clinic advocated for euthanasia and regularly sent disabled children to a nearby hot spittle where hundreds of them were murdered by the state. Like a doctor doing war crimes. And I'm just like, all I can picture is Mayor McCheese. Yeah, it's really well, you know, Mayor McCheese was actually had some strong opinions on on racial hygiene, which is a big part of why all of his patties are 100 percent beef. But anyway, it was his work for Dr. Hamburger that would get Mengele his first kind of experience with twin

studies, which is going to become he's going to like become a lifelong sort of he's going to develop a lifelong fascination for twins. And we're going to talk about why in a scientific sense that was the case. But first, Matt, you want to talk about some products, some services? I love products. I love services. I love being told what to buy and when to do it. You know, we are often told by our marketing department that there's nothing advertisers like more than being led into an ad by talking about Joseph Mengele's first twin studies. That really that really moves the subscription boxes. Yeah, I mean, you know, people hear twins and they get immediately horned up.

Yeah, man. Once you're doing it, speaking of twins, we got a two for the price of one deal. We'll probably bleep some of that. Here's some ads. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100 percent waterproof shoes that look and feel anything. But imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged 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 dot com and see for yourself. Vessie, come alive in the rain.

There are things women never talk about. Infidelity is one of them. But that changes right now. In my new podcast, She Wants More. I'm Joe Piazza. For the past year, I've been talking to real women and reporting on the surprising and provocative reasons why they chose to have an affair. I don't think you can get everything from a partner. And if you do, you're going to have expectations that are not fulfilled. I just feel like it's something that I needed, something I deserved. I think we need to take the stigma out of all of this. Like, what could be more dishy or delicious or devastating than affairs? There's one podcast everyone is going to be talking about.

Listen to She Wants More on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Katie Couric. We've been through a lot over the past few years. I developed anxiety and depression. I didn't even want to leave the house. Sometimes I feel like all I hear is bad news. So, on our new season of my podcast, Next Question, we're going to try something a little different. We're talking about resilience. Think of this show as a toolkit to help you navigate this crazy world we live in. We're digging deep into something psychologists are now calling post-traumatic growth. I'll be talking to some pretty amazing guests. Some you'll know, some you may not. But all of

them will have stories that will teach all of us to bounce back, regroup, and live better. Listen to Next Question with Katie Couric on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So, then and now, then being Nazi times, twin studies are considered incredibly useful for studying the difference between, for example, nature and nurture on health outcomes, right? There's two kinds of twins. There's identical twins and fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the same, you know, baby goo things, zygote, or whatever. And thus differences because they, you know, are genetically identical. The differences between them can be kind of attributed. It's either going

to be an environmental or a social factor, right? When you have health difference in outcome. Do you guys know that? I didn't know that. Yeah, I have a twin sister. And that's the other kind. So, you're not as useful to Joseph Mengele. He's still he still would have been interested in you guys. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, he would, but he would have found a different reason. Maybe. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, they use both kinds of twins. So, twins are useful for studying hereditary illnesses, right? For among other things. Mengele's first attempt to study twins involved the daughters of a colleague and ended in awkward failure. He like comes over to her house and he's like, hey,

can I talk to your daughters? And she's like, what do you want to talk to me about? Oh, you know, twin stuff, science stuff, like. And they're like, they're like weirded out by them. They don't agree to work with them. Good, good parenting call, not letting Joseph Mengele and your twins. Maybe a Nazi, but I'm not a fucking weirdo. Get the hell out of here, Joey. And the fact that he does this so awkwardly is kind of evidence of the fact that while twin studies are incredibly valuable, scientists who are in this field are always looking for groups of twins that they can carry out studies on. It's like number one, it's always hard to get parents to agree for that. There's a limit to the kind of studies you can do when you consider

them human beings. And there's not that many twins. So that's a problem for guys like Joseph. It's not always going to be a problem for guys like Joseph, but it's a problem for him at this point. On April 5, 1933, Hitler announced that German doctors needed to move with all energy towards solving the race question. The center of this scientific effort was again based around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics. In 1934, another bout of ill health forced Mengele to quit the Stahlhelm, which by then had been absorbed into the Nazi brown shirts. He had not yet joined the party officially. He decided his physical weakness meant he needed to dedicate his energy towards his studies. And so he did, as Gerald

Posner writes. The man who gave Mengele his first real leg up on the academic ladder was Professor T. Mollinson of Munich University. His experience in the field of heredity and racial hygiene led Mollinson to claim that he could tell if a person had Jewish forebears simply by looking at a photograph. In 1935, Mollinson awarded Mengele a PhD for his thesis entitled, Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups. Just look at him. Yeah, just look at these guys. I know a Jew and I see one. I can always tell. Posner will argue that like Mengele's report, number one, he's like, Mollinson is pretty unscientific in a lot of his claims. Mengele's report is very scientific. It's well argued. It's not explicitly racist. Like he's not dropping a

bunch of slurs. He's being like, look, you know, we have all these jaw bones from people from this part of the world and they have this and whatever. That's how Posner describes the study. Mollinson himself was more critical of Mengele's study, calling his work clumsy, although acknowledging it fulfilled his requirements. So his thesis advisor is like, it's not great, but I guess you get a PhD anyway. You didn't fail. So here you go. Now, given the fact that like the guy who who judged his work as clumsy was like the, eh, it looks like a Jew to me, dude. I don't know if you want to like take that as an actual criticism. That said, so that we can actually criticize this. In 2008, a group of modern geneticists analyzed Mengele's thesis and they pointed out that he

makes a lot of very basic statistical errors and failures of analysis. And most kind of the biggest thing to critique about this is that his obsession with the concept of race has no grounding in objective science. So like there's not, there's not really a center of hard science to what he's doing here. Mengele's in-person questioning went better. He was awarded his doctor of philosophy degree Summa Cum Laude after being drilled by a board of judges or whatever in November of 1935. Now, this is the point at which things started to look up for the new doctor. His health took a turn for the better as he opted for the time-honored strategy of just forcing himself to sprint until he peed blood. This actually worked somehow, so I don't know. Yeah, no medical science is weird

that way where it's just like, you know, people would do the leeches and stuff and then sometimes they'd be cured and you'd be like, I guess. Look, I won't agree with Joseph Mengele on anything but this, sprint until you piss blood. That's my, that's my medical advice for all of our listeners. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. That's my Pilates. We actually sell a line of running shorts that just have a red line right down the middle so that no one will, no one will notice. You just be like, no, these are just my running shorts. It's a racing stripe. It's merch behind the blood stains. Yeah. Good stuff. So Joseph's first paid medical job was at the University of Leipzig Medical Clinic. He passed his state medical exam in the summer of 36 and he worked there for four

months as a junior doctor. This was a requirement for his degree. You know, it's kind of the first step of becoming an MD as you have to spend some time at a hospital. He hates this. Working with live human patients is not his strong suit. He finds the work kind of degrading. The only benefit as far as Joseph saw it was that he met a young woman named Irene Schoenbein, the daughter of a professor who he falls in love with. Now, Irene is 19 and Joseph is 25. And shortly after they fall for each other, Joseph receives the first big break of his career, an appointment to work at the New Reich Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity in Frankfurt under the prominent Nazi doctor,

Ottmar von Verschur. Now, this is the guy we to normal and good. It's a normal, fun name to have. Certainly. Yeah. Yeah. Not a sketchy ass Nazi name. No. And Ottmar, he had worked at the Kaiser Wellum Institute. We talked about him last episode. He's the guy who's really interested in twins. And I'm going to quote now from the book Racial Hygiene Medicine Under the Nazis. In the Third Reich, twin studies were lavishly funded as part of an effort to prove that heredity was the key to many human talents and imperfections. Twin studies purportedly demonstrated the heredity of everything from epilepsy, criminality, memory, and hernias to tuberculosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and divorce. In 1933, Ottmar Fryhair von Verschur published a book purporting

to provide exact ratios of relative influence of heredity and environment in a wide range of bodily traits. He derived his data from the study of several thousand identical and non-identical twins. Verschur's studies were followed by hundreds of others. By 1936, Otto Resch's Institute for the Study of Racial Volk had examined 1,250 pairs of twins, recording 42 separate physical or physiognomic traits for each pair. Eugene Fisher called twin studies the single most important research tool in the field of racial hygiene. Verschur called twin research the sovereign method for genetic research in humans. Racial hygienists were able to convince Nazi authorities that twin studies warranted substantial government support. In 1939, Interior Minister Wilhelm

Frick ordered the registration of all twins, triplets, or quadruplets born in the Reich for the express purpose of research to isolate the effects of nature and nurture. I'm sorry, all of this sounds incredibly horny to me. Just the constant fucking focus on twins and identical twins. I don't know why in my head this is just very horny piled. Yeah, it's also weird that you're registering your twins. You give birth to twins and the doctor comes out, you got a license for those twins. Yeah. I need to put them in this database of twins. No reason. No reason, it's fine. So, while Mollison had viewed Mengele as a mediocre student, Verschur treats him like a protégé.

Now, von Verschur is also a devoted Nazi. He credited Hitler as being the first statesman to recognize hereditary biology and race hygiene. Von Verschur didn't just consider himself in his institute to be organs of science, though. They were part of the national defense apparatus. He defined their role as caring for German genes to provide such a strong basis that it will withstand any attacks from outside. Now that Mengele was working at the heart of Nazi race science, joining the party had become compulsory. He saw it as a moral necessity. The problem was that after 1933, the Nazis had closed party membership, worried their ascent to power would draw on a bunch of Johnny Cumb lately

fascists who wanted social benefits of being in the party, but weren't committed. Now, there were ways around the block and Mengele's prior membership in the Stahlhelm ensured him special consideration. He was approved in 1938 and became party member number 5574974. So that's good. That's not a bad number. Yeah, that's, you know, yeah, not an early adopter, but yeah, you got there. You got there. So his first duty for the fascist state was helping the new judicial system determine who was and who was not a Jew cohabitating with an Aryan spouse. It's illegal to be in an inner race marriage as the Nazis consider it. So you have a bunch of cases where people say like, I'm not Jewish or whatever. So it's cool for me to stay married.

And you have to determine whether or not they meet the legal definition of a Jew under the Nuremberg race laws. That's fun. That's yeah, it's super fun. Yeah. So there's a known as me having dinner with my Jewish side of the family. And I'm just being like, well, you're not really Jewish or shut up. Yeah. So it's a long, long, long, long line of that. So in the Nazi version of this, you can't just like, it's not as clear as just like looking at the law to determine whether or not someone counts as Jewish in this. You have to have like all the air was probably like, come on, I just look at him. I tell, I can tell. No, I mean, that is actually me. Matt, you joke. That is actually the standard is having a doctor be like, yeah, looks like a Jew

to me. So most of the it's one of those things where like this guy, von Breschuer, one of the things he does is he's he's helping the courts determine who isn't isn't Jewish. He has a bunch of his assistants helping. Most of them are just like molluscs. And they're like, yeah, it looks like a Jew to me or nah, that guy doesn't in the Jew. Mengele is develops a reputation for being obsessive about this world. He's doing all the genealogy. He's like spending hours looking at pictures of their jaws from different angles. And it's actually as a result of this, his judgments are often beneficial to the person being tried. Overall, he found that they were not a full Jew two thirds of the time. This is not due to a lack of racism, but more to the fact that he was weirdly

obsessed with jaws. There was one odd case in July of 1937 that biographers were all will often bring up when Mengele was asked to analyze a man with an Aryan mother and a legally Jewish father who claimed that his real dad had been an Aryan and had had an affair with his mother. So this guy on paper, his dad is Jewish. But he's like, nah, it's not my real dad. My mom was sleeping around. So it's cool for me to be married. So this is kind of a thorny case. And Mengele decided that the man was a full Jew. But the court disagreed. Because they were like, well, based on just like the report you wrote, you say there's actually a pretty good chance that this guy's claims are true. And if that's the case, we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt,

which points to kind of the fact that these Nazi race courts are a lot more inconsistent and messy than you might think. Right. Because this hierarchy they're trying to develop is not based on rigorous silence, right? It's all weirdos speculating about jaws and ears and shit. I'm going to quote though from Mengele. A lot of people doing the look at them test and then arguing amongst each other. That's got to be a fucking annoying, boring life to just be the person who's just like trying to, you know, like always over the dinner table, you're just arguing with people over pictures of various possible Jews. No, he has a bohemian ear lobe. Yeah, no, that's just a Roman nose. God damn it. He's a lap lander, can't you tell? Good old timey racism. So he did. Yeah, I'm going to

quote now from Mengele unmasking the angel of death. Mengele's examination included where possible, a comparison of 12 different areas, including blood type and factors, eyes and eyebrows, as well as finger and footprints. He determined that there was nothing to rule out the paternity of Alexander's legal father, that some areas of similarity made the paternity probable, and that there was no pronounced similarity between the photograph of the alleged biological father and the son. So it's a it's a peculiar situation to try and analyze the decisions of a Nazi court wherein both sides are Nazis, but one side saying, nah, this guy's not a Jew. He could stay married and Mengele is saying, oh, he's definitely a Jew. He should, you know,

be arrested. I don't know. I don't know what the father, this guy is just like, everyone agrees I'm a cock at least. That's fun. So this guy, Vershure, when the court rules against Mengele, Vershure is angry, saying that their decision undermined the Nuremberg laws by turning a Jew into a half Jew. David Marwell continues, Dr. Walter Gross of the racial policy office of the Nazi party responded to Vershure by criticizing Mengele for the lack of clear and precise information in his racial determination and for his fickle testimony at trial. He concluded, I do not think that the court would have ignored a totally clear position of the assistant Mengele. Mengele must have learned from his mistake, Weiss noted, since she was unable to find any other instances where

the court questioned a racial certificate that he issued. So, you know, he learns from this. That's good. Little hero's journey there for our race scientist friend, Joseph Mengele. That's good. That's good. Isn't that good? Yeah, that's nice. You know what else is nice, Matt? What's nice and great? Products and services. That's right. You know, while Nazi race science was often arbitrary and ascientific, the science that our advertisers use to target you with the perfect ad is flawless. So don't question it. Don't ask anything. Don't think. Just give them give them your money, you know? 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 Lin-Als 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. There are things women never talk about. Infidelity is one of them. But that changes right now. In my new podcast, She Wants More. I'm Joe Piazza. For the past year, I've been talking to real women and reporting on the surprising and provocative reasons why they chose to have an affair. I don't think you can get everything from a partner. And if you do, you're going to have expectations that are not fulfilled.

I just felt like it's something that I needed, something I deserved. I think we need to take the stigma out of all of this. Like, what could be more dishy or delicious or devastating than affairs? There's one podcast everyone is going to be talking about. Listen to She Wants More on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Katie Couric. We've been through a lot over the past few years. I developed anxiety and depression. I didn't even want to leave the house. Sometimes I feel like all I hear is bad news. Climate change. Wars. Racism. So on our new season of my podcast, next question, we're going to try something a little different. We're talking about resilience. Courage in the face of adversity. Digging deeper. I feel stronger.

It's finding strength within. Think of this show as a toolkit to help you navigate this crazy world we live in. We're digging deep into something psychologists are now calling post-traumatic growth. Focus on those things that are within your control and you'll do better. I'll be talking to some pretty amazing guests. Some you'll know, some you may not. But all of them will have stories that will teach all of us to bounce back, regroup and live better. Listen to next question with Katie Couric on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're all back. We're all feeling good. So the inconsistency and arbitrariness of most Nazi racial designations came with some minor consequences for Mengele himself. As he'd risen

to work at von Verschur's side, he'd made the decision to join the SS. While he should stoffle had started as a simple bodyguard unit for Hitler back in the old street fighting days, under Heinrich Himmler's leadership, it had started to grow into a state within a state dedicated to cultivating and breeding a Nazi racial elite. As such, it was a natural place for an ambitious young race scientist like Mengele to join. Doctors actually joined the SS in greater numbers than members of any other vocation. Did you know that? I did not know that, but that makes a lot of sense and makes me sad and angry. Do you want to know? I hate doctors. Do you want to guess how much more likely doctors were to be in the SS than normal employed German

males? I couldn't possibly know the answer to that. It is seven times. Seven times likelier than any other. An under-discussed story from Nazi Germany is that not only did doctors love the SS, Germany has, at the time the Nazis come to power, the most advanced and progressive medical system in the world. Fully half of all doctors in Germany joined the Nazi party. Physicians joined the Nazi party at a rate higher than members of any other profession. By comparison, only about 20% of German teachers joined the party. Doctors in Germany cannot get enough of the Nazis. You know what? Hitler actually was kind of the original podcaster, Matt. The eight-off Hitler experience, where he's just talking about how mushrooms are good.

He was the first politician, at least in Europe, to really make great use of the radio and of microphones. Himmler, can you pull up that clip? Yeah. Hitler and his buddy, the fucking Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert, talking about vaccines. Good stuff. There's microchips in there, everybody. God, podcast Hitler actually makes a ton of sense. Yeah, no, that is absolutely what he would have been doing today. That's not even a question in my mind. It is brought you by me, undies. He only likes a specific kind from me, undies. Pure white undies. There's the best. Also, sherry's berries. Get yourself a bouquet of white chocolate berries. We are very happy today to be hosting some ads from the Washington State Highway Patrol.

Not quite the organization I want them to be yet, but soon. Very soon. So, one of the few things that separated Mengele from his fellow SS men was that, so in the SS, when you join, you have to have your blood group tattooed on your arm, right? Sorry, is this American Reich? Oh, my whole face is purple. I love Dan Carlin, but I'm fighting to stop myself from doing a meme worth the two hands meeting in the middle, and it's like Hitler and Dan Carmen, 16 hour podcasts on World War One. Very different 16 hour podcasts. Let's be clear. Extremely different.

Extremely different. They're not at all coming from the same place, but no, no, but similar in length, probably. Yeah. So one of the few things that again, so in the SS, you got to get this blood group tattoo on your arm. It's like it's actually after the war, one of the things that makes it easy to tell who's been in the SS, because a lot of them like put on normal army uniforms to try to escape. Mengele does not get this tattoo. And it's his ex-wife would later say it's because he had a habit. His like hobby was staring at his shirtless body in the mirror. Like after he gets healthy and starts to bulk up, he just likes looking at himself naked, and he can't stand the thought of marring his skin with a tattoo.

That is absolutely the most like the just default Nazi setting is just looking in the mirror and going, I am so fucking strong. It's just, you know, see Andrew Tate. Yeah, exactly. Very, very taty. So joining Himmler's racial elite came with extra hoops to jump through if you wanted to do something like get married. For one thing, his fiance, Irene, had to pass a series of tests to become the wife of an SS man. Now, I know what you're all wondering, could I be an SS wife? You know, ladies, ladies at home, if you want to know, do you have what it takes to marry an SS man? That's what we're talking about right now. New show on Bravo, the real housewives of the SS.

Oh boy, that is a fucking. So the first thing she has to do, she had to get two recommendations from men who knew her. And both of those men had to fill out questionnaires to prove that she had what it took to be an SS wife. She was rated by them as being very reliable, very fond of children, comradely and not domineering and efficient. Irene also had to undergo a body type analysis. And I'm going to, yeah, boy outie. Here's here's Mar-well again. One section of the form called for an inventory of 10 physical characteristics with a list of associated values and descending order of desirability. For instance, for body type, the physician could choose muscular, athletic, plump, slim or puny, with the first clearly being the most positive. For eye color,

the following choices were available. Blue, gray, greenish, light brown and dark brown. These physical attributes thought to be expressions of the racial mixture that the person represented were observed and noted. In Irene's case, Dr. Schwarzweller awarded her nine out of ten of the attributes with the highest value and only one hair form as the second highest. Sleek, which was one step down, step down from straight, but better than wavy, curly or crinkly. I love that. It's like, there's, you're almost perfect. There's a little Jew in your hair. Yeah, I'm going to have to dock you a little bit for the Jew in that hair there. Yes, but don't worry, we have a straight iron cross that we will use to straighten that little

Jew out. Let's get the kinks out, so to speak. So the combination of these features led Schwarzweller to conclude that Irene was primarily of the Nordic race with some dynaric influences. She was found to be an excellent health and perhaps of key significance likely to be able to bear children, noting her wide pelvis. That's good. You have wide pelvis, you have a very nice feet. They relate. Little benaric, but you know, that's a race the Nazis know. Don't worry about that. We know about that one. Honestly, Irene, I was searching for a term, then I pulled up my Nazi thesaurus. There's all sorts of categorizations we've done here. We've got words.

So even with all even all of this was not enough for the SS. Irene also needed to prove that she was racially pure free of any Jewish influence. For the sake of SS paperwork, this meant providing information about her family line that dated back to the piece of piece of Westphalia in 1648. This was the end of the Thirty Years War, which killed millions of German people and set in motion kind of one like one of the more direct things that set in motion the series of events that leads to the creation of the German state. So that's why they pick it. The problem for Irene came with the fact that in 1886, her grandfather had been born out of wedlock and his father, his father could not be verified. Now there was no evidence of direct

taint. So Irene was approved to marry Mengele, but because her ancestry could not be sufficiently confirmed, she and Joseph were unable to add their names to the Sippenbuch der SS. That's honestly that's unfair. I know it's fucked up. I'm gonna go out and say big yikes to that. Yeah. So a Sippenbook, if you guys aren't like me and Matt, because we're big Sippenbook guys. Oh, we love a big good Sippenbook. Yeah, it's a book, a genealogical clan book that lists your ancestry. Every SS member was supposed to carry one, but there's a grand Sippenbook for the entire organization that lists all of the family lines. Because Himmler was kind of planning on breeding a new nightly nobility more or less. Yeah. So this is like the highest honor in the SS and Mengele

just doesn't quite meet the bar, which is sad, sad. Honestly, it's just it's one of the bigger, bigger tragedies of the era. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. So the good news is that Mengele had little time to dwell on this because the 1930s were coming to an end and events in the wider world were about to turn him from a simple, bigoted piece of shit into one of the greatest mass killers in medical history. Oh, yeah. All right. So you're telling me this podcast is gonna get worse. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's about to get a lot worse. So July of nine is I'm sorry. I know no more Jar Jar. I just I know that the Jar Jar is coming to an end. So I'm trying to get rid of all of them. Wow. There's got to be like a I mean, it's probably pornographic, but there's got to be

Jar Jar SS like art out there. There's a deviant art account out there. Yeah. I don't know why people are mad at me. Yeah. And it's both horny, but also shows like an unsettling degree of understanding of like minutiae of SS daily life. They've got their little sipping books on Jar Jar has got his blood group tattooed on a fucking bicep. So in July of 1938, Frankfurt University awards Mangola a full medical degree. He was now a licensed MD as well as a PhD. He had a promising career ahead of him in the field of being a racist with a lab coat. But his ambition would not let him simply continue to work as a research scientist while his nation went to war. So he decided to join the Waffen or weapons SS. Now, this is the because the SS is a bunch of things, right?

But the the Waffen SS is like the SS that also fights alongside the Wehrmacht, right? They're they're a military organization. This would become one of the war crimeist units of the war crimeist army ever to war crime. And Mangola was dedicated to being a part of it. At the end of 1938, he did three months of basic training with the Wehrmacht to prepare himself for the rigors ahead. He spent about a year or so serving as basically a National Guardsman. And while he's kind of doing this, he's continuing to work with von Verschur on publishing studies about ear lobe differences between the races and the like. Just before the invasion of Poland, he wrote a review for a book on detecting congenital heart defects. In this review, he lamented,

quote, unfortunately, the author did not use subjects where the diagnosis could be verified by an autopsy. He spent a lot of time talking about how unfortunate is there weren't enough corpses to study to like fully prove this guy's claims about congenital heart defects. And alas, he was about to have all of the autopsy subjects he could ever want. But that is going to be in part three. Oh, boy, part three. Yeah, three more. Oh, then just two more after this. Yeah, we're good. You know, it's just a breezy five hours. Yeah, you know, this is we're not that different from Dan Carlin podcast here. We're getting increasingly similar. Absolutely. Hey, you know what? I'm going to be honest, Hitler probably would have done a behind the

bastard style podcast with a very different definition of bastards. Kissinger still would have been there, but for different reasons. Welcome back to my six part series on this Jew who was in the train with me and took the chair that I wanted to sit in. This next series is all about different art teachers who said I was made. Yeah, it turns out they're made for the next four weeks. Me and my guest, Joe Rogan, are going to talk about the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Chapter three. This next one is a short story from New York. Now look, it's a little horny. So oh, yeah. It's about twins and other fetish women being stuck in Zidraia. Oh boy. Oh, Matt. What? Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. What was the what was the what was

the first baffling internet fetish pornography you ever learned about? Quicksand porn. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. I discovered that accidentally on YouTube. I don't know how I got there, but it was just a video of a lady slowly sinking. Hell yeah. And I was like, this is so weird. And then after a while, I was like, oh no, I'm horny. And so, you know, I'm in therapy now. That's good. That's good. For me. The thing about the Quicksand porn is there's not, you know, there doesn't even need to be titties. It's just the sinking. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is something else. It sure is. For me, it was, there's actually a similarity here. It was Roy Orbison clean wrap fetish porn. Why are we doing that? It was like fetish stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped

in clean wrap. Why are you both doing this to your careers? Because I think you can still find the Roy Orbison clean wrap fetish pornography online. That's so cool. Why are you telling people? It's not Nazi Sophie. So Roy or Orberson. I never got a good answer on that one. Can you just be clingwrapped and be any? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't yuck their yum, Matt. You know, that's I would never yuck a yum. Look, some people, you know, sometimes you feel like masturbating to Roy Orbison wrapped in clean wrap and sometimes you don't. Robert. I have so many pluggables. Check out this American right coming to you. Listen to my TV rewatch podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun. We did the Sopranos and now we are just ending season two of The Wire. And it is a lot of fun, a lot of great guests.

And, you know, even if you haven't seen the show, it's fun. But mostly give us five stars in review and say something about Jar Jar. The Wire. Hitler would not have liked it. No, he would not have. 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 whenever Lin-Al's 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. Three years ago, I got a tip. It just came out out of nowhere. The biggest flyer to 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 unravel 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. I'm Katie Couric. On our new season of my podcast, Next Question,

we're going to try something a little bit different. This time around, we're talking all about resilience. Courage in the face of adversity. Digging deeper. I feel stronger. It's finding strength within. Think of this show as a toolkit to help you navigate this crazy world we live in. We're digging deep into something psychologists are now calling post-traumatic growth. Focus on those things that are within your control and you'll do better. I am really excited for us to explore all these things together. Listen to Next Question with Katie Couric on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.