David
G. Marwell. Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel
of Death”. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.
Review
Essay by Norman Simms
PART
ONE
What
Lies Behind and Inside the Lies of a Nazi Liar?
Dr.
Joseph Mengele and his Skull
How
does one write the biography of a monster whose very life essence is evil? How
can one focus on the birth, childhood, family environment of a creature of such
utter inhumanity that it seems impossible that he had once been innocent and
without reproach? Even in his maturity, as we stare shocked at his baby-like face,
it is impossible to accept this Angel of Death as the perpetrator of
unspeakable, unimaginable horrors as Dr. Josef Mengele.
Yet
in the first part of his book David G. Marwell gives it a go, basing much of
the private and personal information on an autobiographical novel Mengele
attempted to write,
letters he and his wife sent to one another during the War years, especially
when he was working in Auschwitz, and on later testimonies that she gave long
after her husband died.
The
boyhood of Joseph, his time at home and at school, and his beginning interests
in medicine and anthropology at university are sketchy, not enough to provide
any insights into the mind of the Nazi he would become or for the
psychohistorian carry out a deep analysis of his mind. Marwell must keep
reminding himself and the reader that this relatively likeable boy and young
man would grow up into a cold-blooded Nazi doctor performing horrible
experiments on children and young adults who had no say in what was done to
them. What it looks like is that the
rise of Hitler put into positions of power and authority many Nazi-leaning
teachers along Mengele’s career path, that he was tempted by the opportunities
offered, and then shaped his interests and studies to fit in with
newly-established Third Reich. Among his friends and colleagues he was genial
and polite, showing no signs of the sadistic streak within his soul. What he
did not demonstrate was any empathy or understanding of the genocidal policies
he helped put into effect. When he could find them, he recruited Jewish
doctors, anthropologists and other educated persons to be his assistants to
whom he showed a certain degree of professional respect; but when they had
served his purposes he had no qualms about sending them to the gas chambers. As
for the image survivors of the Holocaust had of him as the SS officer standing
on the platform making selections of who lives and who dies when transports arrived
with weary, confused and often sick victims of Nazi round-ups, it turns out
that he was engaged in this duty only as his name came up on a roster, and the
many horrible tales of his behaviour on the platform conflate him with all the
other Nazi guards who took turns flicking their eyes or pointing their swagger-sticks
this way or that to separate the endlessly long lines of Jews into two
categories. Insofar as it has any
meaning, the generic picture of Mengele as the arch-villain in this pursuit,
deflects a little from the more odious traits of his character and the evil he
carried out in the service of so-called racial hygiene. Any number of fellow SS
officers could do what he was doing in the selections; but only Mengele could
have conceived and carried out the abominable parody of real medical research
he imagined himself engaged in.
Having
escaped from Auschwitz before it was liberated in early 1945 by the Soviet
Army, Mengele, stripped himself of his SS officer’s uniform and attempted to
hide out, or at least avoid capture by the Russians. He thought he would have a
better chance as a prisoner of the Americans. He knew, however, that his crimes
would eventually catch up with him, so he attempted to leave Europe. Despite
being on several lists as a wanted war criminal, he managed to avoided being
charged with his heinous activities, took advantage of the pressure on the
Allies to feed and house the displaced persons and former inmates of the many
Nazi concentration camps to evade trial and punishment. Leaving his wife and
child behind, calling in favours from friends and colleagues, he made it safely
out of Germany and Europe. He never regretted his experiments or thought of
himself as anything but a great scientist.
After
his escape Argentina, followed by hiding in Paraguay and then Brazil, Mengele remains
very much a cipher. His family, friends and Nazi-sympathizers try to protect
him and arrange for him to cross borders and receive financial support. Mossad
and other Israeli agents track him, miss him by a hair’s breath, turn their
attention to other matters, such as the capture of Adolf Eichmann or the
assassination of Nazi criminals in Egypt. His life becoming more constricted by
the need to keep a low profile and having no real occupation to follow, he grows
older and more paranoid. When the Universities in Frankfurt and Munich rescind
his two doctoral degrees, he seems bereft of any of his old intellectual
contacts. There is virtually no descriptions of him, recordings of
conversations he had with those who are shielding him from the authorities, or
even transcripts of the few letters he sent back and forth to his father in
Germany. His being alive, of course, is an insult to humanity, and his failure
to own up to his deeds or appear before any court to try to defend himself
gives him no credibility as a human being. If Eichmann is characterized by
Hannah Arendt as a prime example of the banality of evil, what do we make of
Josef Mengele? To call him “The Angel of Death” (malach ha mavays) seems overly dramatic.
Though
the Mosad, the Israeli secret service, had not been diligent enough to track
down Mengele as they had been with Eichmann, the goal remained important: not simple
revenge on an enemy of the Jewish people, but the pursuit of justice, and as a
warning to anyone who attempted to exterminate the Jewish people again that
they would never be allowed to rest in peace. The West German government (and
then after reunification, the German Republic) also had an important set of
goals: to purge their state of ex-Nazis and sympathizers and to be seen to take
the punishment of ex-Nazi war criminals seriously in the eyes of the rest of
the world. The United States became involved when documents surfaced that
Mengele had been in the custody of the US Army but was allowed to escape and
seek refuge in South America. To a lesser extent, the Canadians took up the
pursuit for similar reasons as the government in Washington. As the anniversary
of the defeat of Hitler’s regime and the liberation of the death camps, public
attention turned to what had happened, who perpetrated the crimes, and who were
still at large. Survivors of the
Holocaust and particularly families of the victims of Mengele’s cruel
experiments—dwarves, twins and other “subjects”—gathered in Auschwitz in the
mid-1980s and formed an association to track the Angel of Death down. Time was
running out for the survivors to see justice done and for the criminals to
escape punishment.
Ethical,
moral and judicial questions may be raised as to the methods employed by the
Nazi-hunters. Mengele’s family and associates were subject to surveillance,
apartments were broken into, searched, and bugged, and mail was intercepted.
Agents provocateurs tried to entice or bribe Mengele’s friends to reveal his
whereabouts. While the Germans had some qualms because they were part of a new state
attempting to establish its bona fides
as a liberal democracy in which such intrusions into peoples’ private lives
were to be avoided, the enormity of Nazi outrages against common decency and
social justice made it difficult to stay within the limits of the law. For the
Israelis, the pressing need to satisfy the Jewish world as a whole and the shrinking
generation of survivors of the Holocaust that there would never again be a Shoah
and to show justice served against the enablers and participants in the crimes
of genocide must be seen to be done. The capture and taking of Eichmann to face
a Jewish court for crimes against the Jewish people showed how important the
result was: the Israeli public and witnesses from overseas, non-Jews as well as
Jews, could see that retribution would be relentless. Old men and women who had
been reluctant to speak in public about what they had endured felt emboldened
to stand up and speak their truths. Israel would be seen as the guardian of the
whole of the Jewish people at home and throughout the Diaspora. The myth of the
timid, submissive Yiddle was smashed
forever.
Again
this means that for most of Marwel’s book the focus is not on Mengele himself
but on those whom he had victimized and those who were now tracking him down.
Israel, Germany and Brazil, along with the USA, in whose team of investigators
Marwel belonged, began to close in on their quarry, with each of the national
teams wary and suspicious of the other. Detective work proved more difficult
than anyone suspected, and even of becoming sure that the infamous doctor was
in Brazil, reports that he was dead did not mean that the chase was over.
Mengele, his family, former Nazi associates and other friends obscured the
trail, and could not be trusted when interviewed—even when they announced that
he was dead and buried. Rivalry between police and government departments,
incompetence by the Brazilian team digging up the supposed corpse and bad
luck—missed flights, mistranslated documents and other technical blunders--made
it impossible to confirm that Mengele actually was dead.
There
is a long technical discussion on the forensic examination of what had been
reportedly Mengele’s body in Brazil. However, when the official report was
produced, with the examining scientists and police specialists agreeing that
there was a high probability that remains found in a coffin were those of Josef
Mengele and not those of his father, as some had presumed in an attempt by the
family and Nazi associates to continue to hide the culprit. Interesting as the
outline of the various forensic methods used to date and identify the skeleton,
none of this tells us anything about the evil doctor himself. The survivors’ group
remained sceptical and cautious until they could be absolutely certain Mengele
was no longer alive and enjoying an undeserved old age.
As
well as the survivors of Mengele’s dreadful twin experiments, the Israeli agents
also remained cautious and refused to close the case. Marwell himself, as part
of the American team from the Justice Department, was shamed by a meeting of
the survivors and their families—they deride his naiveté and pose of
objectivity, insisting that anyone who had anything to do with Nazis knows they
are consummate liars and should never be believed—so that he decided to pursue
the matter further. Not only does Marwell take to heart the admonitions of the
men and women he met whose lives were scarred by what Mengele did to them and
their families, but he also takes seriously the fact that the evil doctor was
both a physician, specializing in anatomical “racial hygiene,” and an
anthropologist, and therefore well-trained to carry out the entire deception of
placing a phantom corpse in the crypt from which he was supposedly exhumed.
The
more I read these chapters on the forensic methods brought to bear on the case,
the more it began to take on a particular psychoanalytical pattern of what was
going on with Mengele, his helpers in eluding capture, the friends who more or less
willingly aided in the decades long deception, and the deep hurt all these
people continued to inflict upon the survivors—those men and women who had been
children when they were profoundly humiliated, excruciatingly tortured, and had
their lives ruined by the unending need to find justice and truth.
Although
I cannot expound at great length the argument necessary to explain what it
seems to me is going on, I will make some allusions to a study published by a Polish
scholar, a
synthesis of research projects carried out by two Hungarian-born scholars in
France. I will try to make brief and relevant sense out of what they discuss to
help us understand the obfuscations practiced by Josef Mengele and his fellow
Nazis. The
search to uncover the secret of Mengele’s life and death will be case study in
what these scholars call the crypt.
As
a psychohistorical study, my lengthy review of the biography of Mengele reworks
the individual-based psychoanalysis of Freud and his followers, including his
French disciple Lacan, with certain additional perspectives: first, our
examination is of historical persons in particular public and private
circumstances; second, we are concerned with shared, transmitted and sometimes
collective processes of the mind; and third, we engage long-term transmission
of images, words, gestures and rituals that are connected and driven by
traumatic experiences in moments of crisis and catastrophe. What Josef Mengele
did to Jewish children and adults in his experiments at Auschwitz fits these
criteria, as well as his own and other people’s attempts to deny, hide or
reshape the truth of what he did and its consequences. These
Nazi acts and lies are encrypted in the judicial case of formally identifying the
buried skeleton found in Brazil.
Now
let us return to Marwell’s account in the final chapters of his book about
Josef Mengele.
Tracking
down some of the colleagues Mengele had at Auschwitz and those who helped him
in the immediate post-war years to evade going to trial for his crimes, Marwell
relentlessly examined and interpreted clues, travelled back and forth to South
America and Europe, and began to put a much more refined picture together of
the fragmented corpse in the coffin found in Brazil and the detailed itinerary
of Mengele’s escape routes through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Handwriting experts,
forensic pathologists, dental anthropologists and others help go through all
the already-examined and newly discovered documents, medical reports, x-ray
records and references to Mengele’s childhood and adult injuries and illnesses.
His personal journals, letters and attempt at an autobiographical novel are
again meticulously read. Family members, professional colleagues, Nazi Party
associates and neighbours on two continents are interviewed again, and the
transcripts scrutinized and compared from many angles.
After
all the years of trying, Mengele’s son who had briefly met his father on a trip
to Latin America and wrote letters back and forth for a while gives enough
details to fill out the emerging picture of where his father is, what kind of a
man he was, and how he eluded capture for so long, and what he was thinking in
the last few months before his death. Then
DNA tests were perfected sufficiently give some of the final evidence needed to
reach a conclusion satisfactory to all involved. The skeleton in the coffin was
indeed Josef Mengele. So what?
PART TWO
A Mystery Wrapped up in an Enigma and Encrypted in
a Phantom Memory of a Fundamental Lie.
Dr. J. Mengele Performing Medical Experiments in
Auschwitz
Here
is a rough outline of what psychoanalysts mean by crypt. First of all, it is a symbol (syn-ballein). A symbol originally meant some object (such as a ring
or a plaque) that two persons shared, broke into two parts, and then each would
keep one of the parts and would remember the other person and the missing part.
One could see and touch part of the whole and remember the other part which, if
the two were brought together, would recreate the original whole. Second, in
the course of time or under pressure of circumstances, the second part and the
second person and the relationship between them were forgotten.
As
a result the persons associated with the original splitting of the object recognized
their piece as all there was or took it as a reminder that something was not
there: that their own remaining piece represented another part that was no longer
visible or understood. The absence was a sign that there had once been
something else, that the relationship between what could be seen and what was
lost had some value, and that what was lost was also precious. Third, it
eventually became clear that what was lost or forgotten or had become invisible
was repressed; and therefore the real meaning of the symbol could be found in
imagining what the original whole thing had been. Unlike the visible, tangible
and memorable symbol in hand, the thing represented was more valuable and more
meaningful because it included a mysterious otherness about it. The lost,
forgotten, invisible thing and its meaning—and the cause for the repression
(Freud’s term is Nachdrängen,
after-pressure)—were as though buried in a grave, tomb or crypt. Indeed, the missing thing and the reason for
repression was the crypt, the hole in the whole. Everything else anyone could
remember, know or imagine had meaning only because of the unspeakable,
unimaginable and inconceivable crypt, that is, the container and what it
contained and the reason for its encryption.
Here
we need to introduce another word: fors. In
French, from the Latin foris, the
word fors
is
an archaic preposition meaning “except for, barring, save.” In adition fors is the plural of the word for, which, in the French expression le for
intérieur, designates he inner heart,
‘the tribunal of conscience,’ subjective interiority. The word fors thus “means” both interiority and
exteriority, a spatial problematic that
will be developed at great length…in connection with the “crypt”… [emphasis
in original].
For
this reason, fors is something
inside, just as hors is something
outside. A fors, then, is something
inside of a hors, an outside, and yet
it also is a no-place, a non-lieu: like
a trompe l’oeil, an optical illusion. It
looks like a place that contains something, but it is beyond certainty of knowing.
As you soon as you think you recognize or remember what it is, it flutters
away. It is like an hallucination, a delusion or a dream or will-o’-the-wisp, a fata morgana. Yet is the crypt, empty of meaning and unreadable,
the thing that makes everything else meaningful but a space that creates
metaphors, ideas, images and thoughts. It the burial place for the memories that
were spawned by trauma before there were feelings, images, words and
thoughts—sensations of the inexplicable and unspeakable. The original trauma is
repeated in subsequent shocks, catastrophes and unbearable feelings, and the
secret is repressed, released only in fluttering and blurry metaphors and incomprehensible
phantom words, concepts and thoughts.
Woyjich
Michera outlines the epistemological crisis, a crisis in our understanding of
what and how we know anything:
The crypt is
not a metaphor of ordinary unconsciousness (the interior of external
consciousness) but “false” or “artificial unconsciousness, which not only
conceals something but also hides the fact of concealment, i.e., creates a
linguistic opposition to the efforts of the analyst.
It
should be evident now that this complicated discussion of crypt helps us to
understand why it is so hard to reveal who and what Josef Mengele was and what
he symbolizes. Between a man and his skull there are secrets, and one of them
is how someone who in appearance and in his professional records looks like a
normal human being and an educated scientist split off his real being from the
horrible things he did. Examining his brain, had this been possible, with
various MRI and CT scans would not reveal anything about the emotions and thoughts
within, would not explain the rationale for becoming an active Nazi and
performing unethical and cruel experiments.
The
ordinary documents and witness statements about his early life and mature
career as a Nazi SS medical doctor at Auschwitz show us what he did, but not
why and certainly not how he eluded punishment and thus continued to inflict
pain, humiliation and suffering on the lives of his victims who survived the
Holocaust. He escaped from Europe to hide in various places in South America,
often in clear view of other people who might have, who ought to have had him
arrested and put on trial. He then was said to have drowned in a boating
accident and been buried, but even the tracking down of the details of the accident
and the finding of the burial place took a long arduous search. When the grace
site was opened, the coffin was broken, the skeleton was fractured, especially
in the skull. It took over a decade to identify the corpse, with various
investigative teams from several countries working together and sometimes
against one another. Many family members, old Nazi colleagues, business
associates and doctors and dentists were interviewed and re-interviewed, spied
on and had their homes searched. Why? After nearly a half century, was the
ghost of Josef Mengele finally put to rest? What was the secret being repressed
and misunderstood. Again let me cite the Polish thinker Wojciech Michera:
It is thus
necessary to treat with a great dose of suspicion the truthfulness of ghosts,
including those haunting us in stories that come not only to make it possible
for the living to learn about the secret concealed in the grave but, on the
contrary, by proposing false secrets to preserve it only as the unutterable.
It
was no secret that Mengele performed horrible medical experiments on twins and
other victims of the Holocaust in Auschwitz nor that he did his utmost to avoid
capture and trial, nor that many people for a variety of personal and
ideological reasons aided him in these efforts and later to obfuscate the
discovery and identifying of the skeleton in the coffin found in Brazil. It
also was no secret that by delaying his capture and identifying the skeleton
remains as Mengele’s these helpers
caused continuing pain and suffering
on the survivors and their families, as well as on the whole of the Jewish
people in Israel and throughout the Diaspora.
Not to see him brought to face his accusers, to be in the power of a Jewish
court of law, was a great disappointment.
To
learn, eventually through memories of his son and letters written to the Rolf,
that he never regretted his crimes, or even saw them as anything but as part of
the paranoid ambitions of Hitler and the Nazi State to rule over a racially
purified Aryan world, gives no comfort, leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and provides
no surety that the same thing will not happen again. Nothing, in other words,
can have any lasting meaning, and no one can ever know for sure that justice
can be served in acts of such terrible enormity. There
is no possible end to grieving.
What
was revealed in the crypt in a lonely field in Brazil was a mangled corpse, the
membra disjecta of a body that once
may have been—and probably was—Josef Mengele. If the corpse were that of his
father or some other person doctored up by the cunning of an evil anatomist and
anthropologist, then the whereabouts of a living Mengele remain unknown, a
constant and repeated injury. If the body is really that of the evil doctor,
then he has outfoxed his opponents and died without ever having to face the
consequences. He never lets anyone see him in the position he put his thousands
and thousands murdered victims.
Unlike
the Nazi’s crazy racial theories, bits and pieces of flesh, blood and bone, no
matter how carefully measured, accurately analysed and meticulously compared,
tells us absolutely nothing about human beings, their characters, their
personalities, their morality or their intellectual beliefs. Mengele’s
identified corpse proves his pseudo-science of racial hygiene to be wrong, but
also allows him to have the last unspoken words and the secret of his character:
“Lies,
lies, lies.”
Part Three
Voices from
Beyond the Crypt
The Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in
Berlin-Dahlem was the centre of scientific racism in Nazi Germany. Its bad
history culminated in a research project to analyse the molecular basis of
`racial differences in the susceptibility to various diseases such as
tuberculosis. Josef Mengele, a former postdoc of the director of the institute,
Otmar von Verschuer, collected blood samples and other material in Auschwitz
from families of twins of Jews and Gypsies. The blood samples were analysed by
Gűnther Hillmann in the Berlin laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Adolf
Butenandt. Butenandt had just moved to Tűbingen.
The project was paid for by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Butenandt, Hillmann and von Vershuer made scientific careers in the Federal
Republic. To the present day [1999] this past has not been acknowledged by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft as part of its
history.
.
Has
Josef Mengele, “The Angel of Death”, been unmasked, as David G. Marwell
proclaims in the title of his book? From the very beginning of study, it is
known who Mengele was and is, and the only mystery is to prove, once ans for
all, that the skeletal remains of a body found in Brazil, are those of the evil
doctor. Despite the obfuscations and the
resistance of the many people who helped him run away to South America and hide
there until he was dead, the truth eventually came out. Many accident, mistakes
and lapses in attention kept the search for a convincing forensic report to
prove that the corpse is that of Mengele. Then, more intriguingly, the last few
pages reveal that Mengele died without regrets, still convinced of his own
heroic role in the Third Reich and the validity of his own theories of racial
and physical heredity. While the survivors groups made up of his former
experimental subjects and their families continue to be disappointed that this
monster died without having to admit his guilt or suffer any judicial
punishment for his crimes, do they have the cold comfort of knowing he is
finally dead? Can historians and the reading public, shut the book and say:
“Case closed”? Not if you read the
following account of the scientists that Mengele worked with.
Mass murder
and truth are incompatible; they do not go hand in hand. The excitement of
performing mass murder for science led von Schuerand Mengele to overlook the
fact that Abderhalden’s defence enzymes did not exist, i.e., that they were a fraud. The experiments of Mengele and
Hillmann in the laboratories of von Verschuer and of Butenandt were thus pseudoscience. And what an effort it
must have been later for thee scientists to stop all investigation into these
experiments. Truth had truly disappeared. (emphasis in original).
Nazis
are liars and their lies continue to undermine truth and justice in the world.
If those lies stand, then there is no room for anything else. So we turn back
to a few theoretical remarks to see if they help us expose the secret in the
crypt of Mengele’s life and death.
Allan
Lloyd Smith begins his revision of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny (unheimlich) by going back to Schelling’s
definition of this term: the uncanny is “the name for everything that ought to
have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light.”
What is revealed is the secret that therefore is familiar and strange at the
same time, in the way in which the body, bones and DNA of Josef Mengele is
identified with the man, but strangely tells us nothing about him. He looked
and eve n in fragments still appears to be a human being, but what he did was
monstrous and the lack of guilt or even understanding of his crimes makes him
inhuman. To call him an evil monster and inhuman, to a normal way of speaking, seems hyperbole, a rhetorical
exaggeration for shock value. We know what he did and we even know what kind of
a person he was—a Nazi without empathy for his fellow humans, a liar without
acknowledging the falsity of his statements or beliefs; but we don’t know how
or why such a person could be born into a civilized country in Europe. At the
centre of personality and character there is an emptiness, a
place where normal feelings and thoughts ought to be. It is possible to say
that conditions in Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the
first thirty years of the twentieth made it possible for someone like Mengele
to live, that extremely harsh toilet-training prevented his psyche from
developing empathetic feelings, that disruptions of the economic and political
structures in Europe gave his personality a sense of the need to dominate and
crush opposition, that the ideal of objective and positivistic measurements
would explain racial differences, and so on and so forth: but then, not every
single person born into such cohorts, even those exacerbated by the shock of
defeat in World War One, the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, the
weakness of the Weimar Republic, the stresses of a world-wide Depression—not
every European or German became a Nazi, and not every Nazi reached the depths
of depravity found in Mengele. In other words, there is no direct or causal
relationship between external circumstances in infancy, childhood, adolescence
and young adulthood and the formation of character. Following Abraham and
Torok, as summarized by Esther Rashkin,
Smith says:
It is not
axiomatic that childhood development proceeds in either predetermined ways, nor
that any particular events is traumatic for all individuals. Instead, they
stress that the process of individuation is “potentially nonlinear, and that in
certain cases it is constituted by specific influences outside the individual’s
immediate or lived experience.”
The
foetus is born into a world where there is a culture, historical institutions,
and other socio-political pressures on itself and its immediate care-givers.
These siblings, parents, relatives, neighbours and community leaders do not
know everything that they have themselves absorbed from their environments, and
the child absorbs not just what it sees and hears, any more than it understands
what it learns about the world through informal and formal education, “a
cultural inheritance incorporating certain secrets, absences, or silences.”
Each one of us, from before we have language, recognize images or know how to
imitate gestures and movements are a mystery wrapped in an enigma and encased
in a crypt of silences, invisibilities and emotional confusion. The secrets are
passed from parent to child, from other family members and friends, neighbours
and figures of authority without conscious intention or even realization. Unresolved
problems of past generations form the matrix for the mind to absorb and play
with sensations and patterns of perception.
Yet
none of this is predetermined, and not everyone in a cohort, family or community
is exactly like another. Even with so
many silences and absences in one’s awareness of what the world is constituted
and society works, individuals have a responsibility to behave like human
beings. On what grounds? If Mengele was not responsible for his actions, then
what justification is there for wanting to capture him, put him on trial, and
eventually punish him? He believed what he was doing was laudatory, would make
Germany a great power, and would save the Aryan race from contamination and degeneracy.
The laws and institutions of the National Socialist State supported him. The
universities and research institutes praised his so-called scientific experiments.
What was hidden from consciousness was that all of this Nazi military power and
racial ideology was a sham: the Thousand Year Reich was gone in a few years,
maintained only by theft of Jewish wealth and property and murder of the Jewish
people. Hitler and his gang were buffoons and their aspirations humbug. The
emperor had no new clothes; he wasn’t even an emperor, as Charlie Chaplin (“The
Dictator”) showed in his dance of Adenoid Hynkil, and The Three Stooges (“You
Nazty Spy”) who mocked Nazi cultural pretentiousness as clumsy house decorators
and Jack Benny (“To Be Or Not To Be”) who spoofed the people who swallowed the obscene
lies. How can such obvious lies be believed? Is it canny or uncanny?
So
what is buried inside the crypt, what is silent inside the enigma of his mysterious
character, and what is the terrible secret that is passed on from one
generation to the next to keep his role in intellectual history hidden from
discussion? Once more I cite Benno-Műller-Hill
Mengele died
peacefully in exile in South America. According to Posner and Ware the Mossad
lost all interest in catching him by the end of 1962. Two years after Butenandt
became president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
A public trial of Mengele in the sixties would have ended in disaster for the
science of genetics and biochemistry as practised in Germany.
But
there is no end to the way the Nazis and Neo-Nazis continue to lie, twist the
truth around, hide inside the little cysts that encase the secret memories of
the Holocaust.
A Greek newspaper likened the Greek Jewish chief executive
of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to Nazi war criminal Dr Josef Mengele on its
front page earlier this week. In an accompanying article, Makeleio claimed to readers that Albert Bourla – a Jew originating
from Thessaloniki – would “stick the needle” into them, describing Pzifer’s coronavirus
vaccine as “poison”.
Michin, “Image,
Crypt, Interpretation,” 200.
Michin, “Image,
Crypt, Interpretation,” 201.
Someone (let’s
call him Siggy since that was his name) I once knew in the 1950s worked for an
advertising agency. His job was to make up slogans and jingles. One day he
suggested selling sardines in plastic airtight sacks and calling them
“uncanny.” He waited for the laughter. “But then,” his boss said, “you could
see them.”
