Villainy Apprehended at the Talbot County Free Library

by Bill Peak

World War II came to an end. The Korean War began and came to an end. The Russians put the first man in space. The Vietnam War began. We put the first man on the moon. The Vietnam War came to a crushing, dispiriting end. Time moves on. Reggie Jackson becomes Mr. October. “Star Wars” wins seven Oscars. The first cellular phone goes on the market. The Susan B. Anthony dollar is minted. And still, somewhere—we all knew it—Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's “Angel of Death,” continued to live and breathe and, as it seemed, thumb his nose at the very notion that there was justice in this world.

My father was a doctor. My grandfather was a doctor. And for the first three years of college, I was pre-med; but, fortunately for the patients of this world, I wasn't smart enough to make the cut. Still, thanks to Dad, whom I looked up to as you might a minor god, and those undergraduate years, which taught me how dedicated you have to be to get into medical school, I have long admired and honored doctors. Which probably goes some way toward explaining why I have also long been fascinated, and scandalized, by Josef Mengele. How could anyone go through all the work and effort required to become a physician, learn each of the microscopic miracles that must take place in perfect sequence to turn a bit of undifferentiated protoplasm into a human being that walks on two legs, reads books, and listens to Bach ... end up putting small children to death so he could harvest their eyes?

Mengele, for those of you too young to recognize the name—a 2018 survey found that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 didn't know what Auschwitz was—served as the doctor at that most infamous of Nazi concentration camps. Every day at the camp's railhead, Mengele inspected a long line of new arrivals, took a quick glance at each in turn, then pointed either left or right. Those sent left ended up in the camp, doomed to perform slave labor for as long as they survived. Those sent right were delivered immediately to the gas chambers. But there was a third category Mengele also watched for. Whenever a pair of twins appeared at the head of that dreadful line, Mengele had them torn away from their parents and sent to his laboratory so he could experiment upon them. He was particularly interested in eyes.

A monster through and through, but at least—or so I always told myself—a lone monster, an outlier, an anomaly, the exception that proved the rule of medical benevolence. Then I read David G. Marwell's new book, “Mengele: Unmasking the 'Angel of Death.'” Marwell, a member of the investigative team put together by the Reagan administration to bring Mengele to justice, tells two stories in his book. First, and by far the best part of the work, is the tale of Mengele himself, his unremarkable youth, his medical training, his career as an SS doctor, and then, after the fall of the Third Reich, the series of near-misses by Allied authorities that allowed him to escape to South America. The second tells the story of the international inquiry conducted by historians, pathologists, and law enforcement agencies that finally determined how Mengele met his end.

Reading the book, one learns it was the very training that should have turned him into a gentle, caring physician that eventually led Mengele to so callously destroy the lives of those he was meant to heal. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as scientists began to understand the laws of genetics and their application in animal breeding, some began to unflinchingly recommend similar steps be taken with the human population. When they came to power, the Nazis enthusiastically endorsed the idea of eugenics and the focus of medical training shifted accordingly. Young doctors were taught that the health of the patient sitting on the examining table before them mattered only insofar as it affected the health of the German people as a whole. Sterilization and euthanasia lay not far behind.

In Nazi Germany, Mengele wasn't an outlier, he was the ideal. He wasn't the only SS doctor. He wasn't even the only doctor at Auschwitz. He was just the doctor whose experiments upon twins made him the perfect symbol of (and whipping boy for) the many physicians that wore the death's head insignia.

I cannot recommend “Mengele: Unmasking the 'Angel of Death'” unequivocally. The second half of the book, which covers the search for Mengele by Marwell's team, lacks the drama of the first and ends, inevitably, in anticlimax. Still, the work as a whole provides an object lesson in the limits of both science and justice. The art of medicine must be practiced indiscriminately, and always with compassion. There can be no exceptions to the rule: “First, do no harm.” And justice, sadly, does not always prevail. Mengele did not die wracked by guilt, haunted by visions of the children he destroyed. He died unrepentant. We can only pray that the type of thinking that could lead a doctor to commit such atrocities died with him.