Mengele? Does Revisionism discuss him?

[Samantha]

There's a guy I haven't read anything good about or any excuses. They say he performed really horrific and unnecessary experiments on living people and twins. Revisionists don't seem to mention him, shall I take that as admission that it's all so?

Anybody got any documents ready at hand that might help me out here?

thanks...

[Hannover]

The stories about Mengele, IMO, are unsubstantiated as alleged.

A Dr. Nyiszli, an alleged assistant, actually talks of Mengele's "experiments" in order TO SAVE lives.
- see earlier post on Nyiszli

We seem to have the same low quality 'eyewitness" statements about Mengele as we do for the dumb 'gas chambers' and other absurd assertions.

We need to apply the same thought processes and scrutiny to the allegations against Mengele as we do for any other alleged crime.

I would be interested in hearing your 'evidence' against him.

- Hannover

[Sailor]

There's a guy I haven't read anything good about or any excuses. They say he performed really horrific and unnecessary experiments on living people and twins. Revisionists don't seem to mention him, shall I take that as admission that it's all so?

There are about 175 articles at the VHO site, at least 50 at CODOH and 50 at IHR that make reference to Mengele. Why Revisionists don't seem to mention him? Did you forget to check?

fge

[Hyman]

There's a guy I haven't read anything good about or any excuses. They say he performed really horrific and unnecessary experiments on living people and twins. Revisionists don't seem to mention him, shall I take that as admission that it's all so?

Anybody got any documents ready at hand that might help me out here?

thanks...

Revisionists don't dispute that there was a program in which medical experiments were performed on some camp inmates by certain German doctors. I've heard it said that inmates used in experiments which would result in their deaths had already been condemned to death for some other reason anyway, but that may just be those famous Nazi apologetics. In interviews with twins experimented on by Mengele, I have heard them say that their association with Mengele was an advantage to them in surviving the camp system, because it meant they were provided for better than the average inmate.

If Mengele helps bolster Holocaust revisionism at all, it is through calling into question the good faith and veracity of eyewitness testimony by certain camp inmates (which is almost always accepted at face value by reporters and court historians). It seems that almost every Jew at Auschwitz had some sort of rendevous with Mengele. He truly must have been one of those "nazi supermen" for it seems he was on duty 24 hrs a day, never leaving the disembarking platform.

[Dan]

It seems like the question was asked in good faith. Perhaps we should try to get a good picture of the man. I started a thread on Soap Libel on the other board, and it went well as long as there are specific points to address.

I have an open mind about Mengele. Perhaps one of you with more knowledge than me should post a list of accusations against him, and we can go through them one my one. I admit that my view of Nyiszli isn't very high, but let's see what we can do, and encourage Samantha to participate without having to be defensive.

[steve]

Actually, Samantha's question is not unreasonable.

I also have not seen much in regard to Mengele. Of course, that does in no way mean I think the revisionists are 'avoiding' the topic. After all, I do not see much even from the Huckster's writings.

Anyway, it seems Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. make the news. Hence, the revisionist response in those areas.

Another reason seems to be that the Mengele claims seem even more fairy tale like than usual. All you can do to respond is by asking, "where is the evidence?". (You can address cremation rate, for example.)

Here's a puzzler, however. I recall either Rimland, or someone writing about Rimland, claiming her son's health problems were cause by Mengele. I dismissed it, but, I confess, I probably should have pursued it. I do not remember why I had no serious attitude towards it.

Steve

[Samantha]

Thank you :-)

The reason I asked is very simple. I was born to scribble silly romantic stories, and yet a scribbler hasn't always the free time she would like, so having late one night scribbled the first couple chapters of a story about a fictional Mengele grandson, I need some words to put in the man's mouth. Typical eh, write first, research later... but there we are. I thought I could save some time by looking at the internet rather than My Local Library. Google yields, of course, nothing but what you'd expect.

I hate doing research, scribbling is more fun. So I was hoping somebody else had already gathered some and could share it with me. I asked on another message board also... and all anybody wants to tell me is to go do research! *sulk*

There are about 175 articles at the VHO site, at least 50 at CODOH and 50 at IHR that make reference to Mengele. Why Revisionists don't seem to mention him? Did you forget to check?

I've been casually reading Revisionist literature since I was eighteen. Mengele didn't specifically engage my interest until a few nights ago when his fictional grandson wandered across my keyboard with every intention of living happily ever after with my heroine. I don't remember seeing any articles where someone talked about Mengele specifically as to what he DID do rather than just what generally DIDN'T go on at Auschwitz.

Okay, really I need more than just a 'mention' of him. If you know where there's a page with facts about him which are good facts, could you be a darling and post the URL-- please?

I would be interested in hearing your 'evidence' against him.

Not mine at all... but all Google wants to barf up right now is the most negative sort, which isn't helping thaw my heroine at all.

Crimelibrary.com, or whatever the main page is... I'm using that for source on what his appearance would be, etc.

It seems that almost every Jew at Auschwitz had some sort of rendevous with Mengele.

Mmhm-- many years ago I saw an interview on TV of a couple old ladies who had Survived, one of whom told the interviewer with a straight face that Dr. Mengele had walked up and for no particular reason kicked her right between the breasts. Excuse me while my eyebrow scrapes the ceiling. On top of everything else the guy knows karate?? or else he was extraordinarily flexible in the hips...
:-D

Oh, there, see, husband just drove up and kitchen's a mess. THAT was how much free time I have to devote to this project... :-)

[Hannover]

I wouldn't say Samantha's inquiry was 'unreasonable', but I think in general it appeared to place the onus upon Revisionists to respond to an overly general, somewhat loaded question. As Sailor said, there is lot's of Revisionist material available, if you look for it. But hey, now Samantha knows.

Having said that, I can relate to the awkwardness of a new participant; we were all new once. We were all Believers.......once.

I hope we hear more from Samantha.

- Hannover

[Hebden]

It seems that almost every Jew at Auschwitz had some sort of rendevous with Mengele. He truly must have been one of those "nazi supermen" for it seems he was on duty 24 hrs a day, never leaving the disembarking platform.

But whatever his demeanor, it was Mengele above all others, whom the survivors watching the selections most vividly recall. In the 1964 trial of twenty-two Auschwitz defendants, one witness, Arie Fuks, said that while he worked near the arrival ramps he constantly saw Mengele perform the selections. "But Mengele cannot have been there all of the time?" asked the incredulous judge. "In my opinion, always," responded Fuks. "Night and day."

The above comes from the book Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner and John Ware. Most of the book is devoted to Mengele's post-war life in South America, but the sole chapter on his service in Auschwitz contains the usual seductive weaving of fact and legend.

At times Auschwitz resembled the the theater of the absurd. There were even traffic regulations in the camp, and red and green traffic lights. Infractions brought an investigation by the SS traffic court, as Mengele himself discovered a month after his arrival when he hit an SS armaments truck while speeding on his motorbike toward Birkenau. Mengele was "injured and parts of his uniform as well as the motorcycle were damaged," but the court found that "the SS Hauptsturmfuhrer's guilt could not be established."

There were many other Dantesque aspects to life at Auschwitz. The camp had its own soccer stadium, library, photographic lab, theater, SS swimming pool, and symphony orchestra. There was even a brothel called "The Puff," used by SS men and some favored prisoners.

When Mengele entered the nightmare world of Auschwitz, he immediately set himself apart from the other SS doctors. He was the only camp doctor to have served on eastern front and to have been awarded the Iron Cross and other decorations. Dr Hans Munch, an SS doctor who served in a bacteriological laboratory in a subcamp of Auschwitz and who became a close friend of Mengele's remembers the Mengele was enormously proud of his medals and wore them prominently displayed on his uniform. Mengele frequently referred to his combat experience, and he quickly developed a special aura in the camp because of his front-line fighting, which contrasted sharply with the desk careers of the other camp doctors.

Mengele coupled his combat status with workaholic devotion to his duties. While other Auschwitz doctors did no more than was required of them, Mengele was always undertaking new projects and extra responsibility. He flourished in Auschwitz - so much so that even today some survivors still mistakenly refer to him as the chief physician of the camp, a post in fact held by Dr. Eduard Wirths, who appointed Mengele senior doctor in the women's camp in Birkenau.

[Samantha]

And I did find what I was basically looking for, here:

http://vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/6/3/Weber377-383.html

[Breker]

Hyman told us:

If Mengele helps bolster Holocaust revisionism at all, it is through calling into question the good faith and veracity of eyewitness testimony by certain camp inmates (which is almost always accepted at face value by reporters and court historians). It seems that almost every Jew at Auschwitz had some sort of rendevous with Mengele. He truly must have been one of those "nazi supermen" for it seems he was on duty 24 hrs a day, never leaving the disembarking platform.

For laborers at Auschwitz, it would seem there is a certain cachet to claiming interaction with Mengele. We shouldn't be suprprised at this. My observations tell me that "eyewitnesses" try to outdo each other with ever growing fantasies.
Breker

[PLAYWRIGHT]

One reason Revisionists don't write much about Mengele is because his story is actually somewhat off-topic. Mengele was not a government official and did not set Nazi policy, nor were his actions sanctioned and funded by a deliberate policy of the Nazi government, though they do seem to have given him an unofficial license to do as he pleased. This is the big difference between what Mengele is alleged to have done, and the Tuskegee Experiment here in America - the Tuskegee Experiment WAS sanctioned and funded by the U.S. Government.

Most of what is known about Mengele comes from Doctor At Auschwitz by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, noted above. Paul Rassinier tore Nyiszli's account to shreds in several articles over a period of ten years, including a truly funny exchange of letters with Nyiszli's publisher; and even Jean-Claude Pressac had to admit that Nyiszli's account was wildly exaggerated in his monumental book Auschwitz: Technique And Operation Of The Gas Chambers.

Dentist At Auschwitz by Benjamin Jacobs is another account that presents Mengele as a comic-book supervillain who never sleeps and is everywhere at once. Eli Weisel also talks of selections carried out by Mengele at Monowitz, six miles away from Birkenau, in his unintentionally hilarious book Night. Monowitz, by that time, was a separate camp with its own medical staff.

I've seen no credible evidence that Mengele engaged in the lurid Frankenstienish experiments he's been accused of. In the Gypsy camp, he did study a still undefined form of chicken-pox (varicella) which was fatal to Gypsies, and noma, a mysterious disease that leads to a localized gangrene in the cheeks. What noma is, what causes it, why Gypsies got it enmasse and apparently only at Auschwitz, how it spreads and other medical questions are, to this day, completely unknown, and Mengele's notes on the subject would be of no small interest if found, especially for doctors working in Africa, where the disease is most prevelant.

The lurid crap about injecting dye into children's eyes in order to change their color, or sewing children together to create Siamese twins needs no comment. Doctors in those days were neither ignorant nor stupid.

Supposedly the records of Mengele and other camp doctors were shipped from Auschwitz to Germany in three trailers that mysteriously disappeared.

In regard to his experiments with twins, everything I've read suggest that these were nothing more than admittedly unethical double-blind studies of the typhus vaccines he helped develop, vaccines that he didn't hesitate to give to himself, and which saved his life in 1943 when he caught the disease.

I've had fun in the past tearing apart the fables of superstar twin Eva Moses Kor, she of the suspicious fire in her unpopular museum in Indiana.

Kor describes morbidly about how Mengele gave her several "unknown" injections, unremarkable when you consider that in those days, a typhus vaccine was a multi-stage system of injection followed by booster shots, delivered over a period of weeks. She describes how the injections made her sick, but the symptoms she describes (fever, aches, edema, lassitude) are consistent with the typical side effects of a vaccine of those days, which always elicited a strong histaminic reaction (something not solved until the mid-1960's). German soldiers getting the same vaccine often presented with the same symptoms, and the American actor Tony Randall has written about how, after his induction into the U.S. Army during World War Two, he spent a miserable couple of weeks sick as a dog after his required vaccinations at the induction center.

Among my Kor favorites is her claim that, while recovering from her reaction, she overheard Mengele laugh and say "too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live", after examining her temperature chart.

First off, such a prognosis cannot be made by looking at a temperature chart. Secondly, at the time, Kor was an ten-year old Hungarian girl raised in Romania. Mengele didn't speak Hungarian (one of the world's most difficult languages), and she didn't speak German. I'm dying to know how she could have understood what he said.

After the war she made claims of health problems she and her sister suffered from their time in the camp, blaming them all on Mengele. The most ludicrous one was to blame her sister Miriam's insufficiently developed kidneys and death from a rare kidney cancer on Mengele's "unknown" injections.

But one twin is always favored over another in the womb, so the disparity in kidney development is nothing unusual. AND, looking through the National Cancer Institute's web page, I can't find anything that refers to a method of inducing kidney cancer after a delay of SIXTY YEARS through chemical injection. There is nothing that Mengele could have injected into a ten-year old girl that would induce a cancer when she reached her seventies.

Looking at the famous Soviet movie, with Eva and Miriam Kor leading the procession of twins, what you see are two healthy, rosy cheeked and actually rather plump children who show no signs of trauma, in spite of supposedly having been Mengele's guinea pigs for over eight months. That pretty much says it all.

If you can catch the PBS documentary on him, Mengele denied any monsterous experiments to his son, Rolf Mengele, calling them "fabrications". Brazilian police seized some 85 of Mengele's dairies and letters in 1985, but predictably, only heavily edited excerpts have been published. One excerpt that has been published is Mengele's statement: "At Auschwitz I didn't take life; I gave it".

I think those diaries are what you need for your story.

[Hannover]

Excellent post, PLAYWRIGHT.

- Hannover

[Gertrud]

Secondly, at the time, Kor was an ten-year old Hungarian girl raised in Romania. Mengele didn't speak Hungarian (one of the world's most difficult languages), and she didn't speak German. I'm dying to know how she could have understood what he said.

German was widely understood in the northwestern parts of Romania which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

[Haldan]

I would really love to read his diaries and the autobiography which started whilst in Bavaria after the end of the war. All unpublished from what I understand.

Also, as it is written in the Mark Weber article 'Lessons of the Mengele Affair':

A long-time friend of both Dr. Mengele and the Mengele family in Germany, Hans Sedlmeier, told a reporter: "I could tell you what Mengele did, what he did during Auschwitz, what he did after Auschwitz, but you wouldn't believe me. The newspapers won't print the truth, because it's not in the interest of the Jews.... I refuse to talk about the Mengele affair. Journalists have already written so many lies, and what the Jewish press has asserted..."

I remember reading somewhere, I can not recall the source now, that Mengele said something along the lines of "I did not take life, I gave life."

It is just another person who has been maligned by a pack of unscrupulous falsifiers, liars and so on and so forth.

-haldan