Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bestards where we talk about a trucities.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about. Said, ah, what an incredible introduction, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I need to get one of those. Can we can
Speaker 2: we put one on order? Yeah, we're putting one on order.
Speaker 1: And should you know they're they're not that expensive and
Speaker 1: they make the sad stuff hurt less.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think I should get one of those. And
Speaker 2: that's how I should just read every episode. I could
Speaker 2: just sing all of these stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like you could. It's you can learn and
Speaker 1: also you can cope at the same time, which is nice.
Speaker 2: You can lope. Yeah, don't we all want to lope?
Speaker 2: Sophie's Sophie's eyes and her her her words say no,
Speaker 2: but my desire to have one of those things says yes.
Speaker 1: Your face to sing no, but your mouth is so
Speaker 1: so saying no.
Speaker 2: Booth.
Speaker 1: All right, Oh god, what an exciting episode we have
Speaker 1: for today. A lot of yeah drama, there's goingbe a
Speaker 1: car chase. Matt's gonna finish his taxes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you get back to those taxes, and I'll
Speaker 2: start talking about Joey Mengs again because you.
Speaker 1: Know I'm gonna I'm once again I did the first episode.
Speaker 1: I'm doing this the last episode. I'm opening with a plug.
Speaker 1: Motherfucker's because oh yeah, yeah, yeah plug.
Speaker 2: This is the thing.
Speaker 1: I mostly talk about the Wire and or you know
Speaker 1: TV shows in general.
Speaker 2: We did.
Speaker 1: Uh, it's part of Yourself a Gun is the name
Speaker 1: of the podcast. Part of Yourself a Gun. Give us
Speaker 1: five stars in review and listen to us talk about
Speaker 1: the Wire. We just finished season two, which was on
Speaker 1: the Docks, and uh, you know, that was definitely a
Speaker 1: polarizing season, but uh, that was my favorite season one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's important. It shows a lot of
Speaker 2: the under underdiscussed side of how the drug trade works exactly.
Speaker 1: And it also, you know, it talks about Polish people
Speaker 1: and you know, how many of.
Speaker 2: The history's greatest monsters. Yes, absolutely, we're talking about this right,
Speaker 2: you know, it talks about how many of them it
Speaker 2: takes to screw in a light bulb. Yeah, oh a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 2: shocking number, a shocking number. And on the next speaking
Speaker 2: of behind the bastards, the Polish people, wow, all of them.
Speaker 2: That is especially inappropriate given that we are talking about Auschwitz. Yes,
Speaker 2: but that people who want to cancel you for that
Speaker 2: are going to have to get in line between behind
Speaker 2: all the other things. I mean seriously at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if the jar J sound bites alone, I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, very rude, and I understand why you wouldn't
Speaker 3: be busting, but you know what still Mesa Bustin's.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you for that, that gentle landing back
Speaker 2: into Mangola territory. So, Joseph Mangola, he gets portrayed a
Speaker 2: lot in kind of popular media. You know, if you
Speaker 2: watch stuff like The Boys from Brazil or whatever, He's
Speaker 2: like this Nazi mad scientist. He's obsessed with creating you know,
Speaker 2: new Ariyan people or hit clones of Hitler, all this
Speaker 2: kind of like like Marvel ass shit, right, doctor Wolfenstein type. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And that's very much how Mangolo almost immediately after the war,
Speaker 2: how Mangola gets contextualized up until David Marwell's book Unmasking
Speaker 2: the Angel of Death, and Marvell points out Mengola what
Speaker 2: he's doing, like his research is, is not him just
Speaker 2: being a crazy asshole or him wanting to hurt people.
Speaker 2: He's not doing anything for out of pure maliciousness. What
Speaker 2: he's doing is carrying out experiments for on behalf of
Speaker 2: other scientists who are more highly regarded than him, in
Speaker 2: order to pursue ends that they could not pursue without
Speaker 2: the sheer quantity of bodies that Auschwitz provided them with.
Speaker 2: He was planning to use the research that he did
Speaker 2: at the camp as the basis for his habilitation shrift,
Speaker 2: which is the German word for a postdoctoral thesis, which
Speaker 2: was kind of if you want to be a professional academic,
Speaker 2: and that was his dream to be a respected scientist,
Speaker 2: that's the thing you have to do first. He is
Speaker 2: not the only scientist at a death camp who is
Speaker 2: in this who isn't doctor at a death camp who's
Speaker 2: in this boat of like, I've got my MD. I
Speaker 2: want to be an academic scientist when the war ends.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to do research here, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to help people who are more respected than I am
Speaker 2: do research here so that I can grease palms and
Speaker 2: get my way into Basically, they're all like gunning for
Speaker 2: fucking getting the equivalent of a tenure, you know, Like
Speaker 2: that's the kind of thing he's looking for here, and
Speaker 2: he's hoping that like if I help people out here,
Speaker 2: you know, just.
Speaker 1: Trying to get job stability, Guys come on what he's doing.
Speaker 1: It's very very competitive.
Speaker 2: So if I have to.
Speaker 1: Do a little bit of murder, a little bit of torture,
Speaker 1: it's part of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't even get into a postgraduate program here
Speaker 2: without both the sixteen hundred on your SATs and two
Speaker 2: years at a death camp. Yeah, it's very important.
Speaker 1: You have to get very very high on your death
Speaker 1: campus aities, and I'm sorry you can't. Hey, don't blame
Speaker 1: me for having the grind set mindset, and it's specifically
Speaker 1: the meat grinder set minder set.
Speaker 2: It's actually more fucked up than that because one of
Speaker 2: Mengel's colleagues at Auschwitz, doctor Hans Delmott, is also working
Speaker 2: on getting doing his post doctoral thesis, but he's not
Speaker 2: doing it on his own. He saves a Jewish inmate
Speaker 2: physician who he enslaves and makes him help him with
Speaker 2: his dissertation. Like that's literally what these guys are doing,
Speaker 2: is they're enslaving better doctors so that they can get
Speaker 2: help getting their fucking dissertations. Insane, just completely insane. Say,
Speaker 2: mix not as worried about chat GPT sheeting on tests. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's not even that bad compared.
Speaker 1: To this is this is why fucking you know people
Speaker 1: are like, oh, but it's positive stereotypes. Well, sometimes those
Speaker 1: can be used against you, all right, Yeah, I know
Speaker 1: a lot of bad Jewish doctors. Okay, so fucking don't
Speaker 1: enslave the good ones, please, yeah, don't in slate.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, So, like his fellow Nazi doctors, Joseph deliberately
Speaker 2: cultivated a stable of gifted slave doctors, men and women
Speaker 2: to help him carry out research and prepare human body
Speaker 2: parts for transfer to institutions in Germany, like the kaiserville
Speaker 2: Helm Institute. Before the war, twin studies had been hard
Speaker 2: to carry out, but during Mangelo's time at Auschwitz more
Speaker 2: than seven hundred and fifty thousand people passed through its doors,
Speaker 2: which is a lot of twins alongside people with all
Speaker 2: manner of disabilities he wanted samples from. At one point,
Speaker 2: he came across a hunchback and his son who had
Speaker 2: a club foot. Mengelo was immediately fascinated by both men,
Speaker 2: and he sent them off to doctor Miklos, whose office
Speaker 2: was the dissecting room by the number one crematorium. Here's
Speaker 2: miklos father and son, their faces wan from their miserable
Speaker 2: years in the Liesmanstrat Ghetto were filled with forebodings. They
Speaker 2: looked at me questioningly. I took them across the courtyard,
Speaker 2: which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight.
Speaker 2: On our way to the dissecting room, I reassured them
Speaker 2: with a few well chosen words. Luckily there were no
Speaker 2: corpses on the dissecting table. It would have indeed been
Speaker 2: a horrible sight for them to come upon. To spare them,
Speaker 2: I decided not to conduct the examination in the austere
Speaker 2: dissecting room, which wreaked with the odor of formaldehyde, but
Speaker 2: in the pleasant, well lighted study hall. From our conversation
Speaker 2: I learned that the father had been a respected citizen
Speaker 2: of Lietzminstad, a wholesaler in cloth. During the years of
Speaker 2: peace between the wars, he had often taken his son
Speaker 2: with him on his business trips to Vienna to have
Speaker 2: him examined and treated by the most famous specialists. I
Speaker 2: first examined the father in detail, omitting nothing. The deviation
Speaker 2: of his spinal column was the result of retarded rics gets.
Speaker 2: In spite of a most thorough examination, I discovered no
Speaker 2: symptom of any other illness. I tried to console him
Speaker 2: by telling him that he would probably be sent to
Speaker 2: a work camp, but he was not. Both father and
Speaker 2: son are shot on Mangla's orders, and Miklos is forced
Speaker 2: to autopsy them while they are still warm. After that, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it gets bleaker. Late in the afternoon, Yeah, it does,
Speaker 2: it does. It does get worse. That's it gets a
Speaker 2: lot worse late in the afternoon. Having already sent at
Speaker 2: least ten thousand men to their death, doctor Mangola arrived.
Speaker 2: He listened attentively to my report concerning both the InVivo
Speaker 2: and post mortem observations made on the two victims. These
Speaker 2: bodies must not be cremated, he said, They must be
Speaker 2: prepared and their skeletons sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.
Speaker 2: What systems do you know for the preparation of skeletons?
Speaker 2: And there are a couple of ways to prepare a
Speaker 2: skeleton when a living thing dies. The ultimate solution me
Speaker 2: close picked was basically to boil the dead bodies until
Speaker 2: the meat could be removed. You had to sit and
Speaker 2: wait by the casks bubbling over a fire while they cooked.
Speaker 2: At one point a group of Polish prisoners found them
Speaker 2: and starving mistook them for stew and they had to
Speaker 2: be stopped. Yeah, I mean it's like it's it's like
Speaker 2: it's nightmarish, it's it's ghastly. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 2: know what to tell you, Like, I feel like it's
Speaker 2: not enough to say he had people killed and sent
Speaker 2: their body parts to universities, Like, I don't think that
Speaker 2: gets at If you want the story of Joseph Mangla,
Speaker 2: it's important to have the texture of like, this is
Speaker 2: what's being done. Like, Yeah, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 2: know the story. Yeah, No, it's it's a fucking nightmare,
Speaker 2: do it getting getting those getting those deductions in search? Yeah. Now,
Speaker 2: there was some actual scientific research done at Auschwitz and
Speaker 2: done under Mangola. The best example of this would be
Speaker 2: a study into a rare illness called NOMA. David Marwell
Speaker 2: recounts in a chilling passage how he first became aware
Speaker 2: of this research. In the mid nineteen eighties. He was
Speaker 2: going through a historical collection in a German town called
Speaker 2: bad Arrolson when he came across a form signed by
Speaker 2: doctor Mengela requesting that histological sections be made from a
Speaker 2: medical specimen sent to the SS Laboratory on June twenty ninth,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four. The specimen was almost certainly prepared by
Speaker 2: our friend Miklos quote. It indicated that the specimen being
Speaker 2: sent to the laboratory was the head of a twelve
Speaker 2: year old boy. At the time, I was unaware of
Speaker 2: any conceivable reason why such a specimen would be of
Speaker 2: interest to Joseph Mangola, and this document only reinforced my
Speaker 2: notion of him as a wildly sadistic, grotesque monster. But
Speaker 2: Marwll dug into precisely why the sample had been made. Now.
Speaker 2: It did not challenge the opinion that Mangela is a monster,
Speaker 2: but it did make it clear that there was nothing
Speaker 2: wild or sadistic about why he was doing this. Noma
Speaker 2: is a rare disease. It's been with us for thousands
Speaker 2: of years and is sometimes called the grazer. In fact,
Speaker 2: noma is derived from the Greek work word nemo, which
Speaker 2: means to graze or devour. When human beings are forced
Speaker 2: to live in close quarters with poor sanitation and little nutrition,
Speaker 2: they get these ulcers in their mouth, and left untreated,
Speaker 2: these ulcers grow and will eventually devour the cheek and
Speaker 2: lip and basically the entire head. These necrotic lesions expose
Speaker 2: bone and teeth and are fatal. One check inmate doctor
Speaker 2: later testified whole chunks of flesh would come off the
Speaker 2: affected areas. The lower jaw was also affected. I never
Speaker 2: saw such severe cases of gangrene of the cheek. And
Speaker 2: these are the samples. These are the heads. The heads
Speaker 2: of people with this disease are what Mangola is preserving
Speaker 2: and sending off to educational institutions in the Reich. Mangelo
Speaker 2: was excited by the outbreak of NOMA because it provided
Speaker 2: him with an opportunity to send his colleague samples of
Speaker 2: this extremely rare disease.
Speaker 1: That's where the sadistic part comes in, the part where
Speaker 1: he is excited about the.
Speaker 2: App Yeah, that's like and I mean it gets it's
Speaker 2: so fucked up, Like, so he does they do attempt
Speaker 2: to treat this, and they do. He assigns a prominent
Speaker 2: Pedia patrician who had been arrested by the Nazis to
Speaker 2: like manage the research of how to treat this, and
Speaker 2: this guy named Epstein, this doctor, he and Mangola experiment
Speaker 2: with a number of treatments for noma from medications to diets.
Speaker 2: Some of what Mangla did is basically like he's alleged
Speaker 2: to have taken fluid from the ulcers of noma sufferers
Speaker 2: and injected it into healthy inmates to try to study
Speaker 2: how it spreads, which is a horrible, horrible crime. But
Speaker 2: he is you can see, he's not like doing this
Speaker 2: for no reason. He's doing this because he's trying to
Speaker 2: get a dissertation basically once, right, Like, it's not it's
Speaker 2: not it's not like random madness, you know that's driving this.
Speaker 1: He's not actually doing what I think, like you've been saying,
Speaker 1: like the popular culture would have you believe that it
Speaker 1: is just a guy who's like, what if I, you know,
Speaker 1: fucking make an eight armed person, Yeah, just to make
Speaker 1: something horrible and grotesque, just to prove my evil. And
Speaker 1: in this case, it's just like what if associopath also
Speaker 1: was into experiments?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what if? And the thing, like, the important
Speaker 2: thing is that, like the reason he's excited is partly
Speaker 2: because he knows that other doctors are interested in this,
Speaker 2: and so he's able to provide them with things that
Speaker 2: they need that will improve their opinion of him and
Speaker 2: his standing in the medical established. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, so part of why he's excited is this is
Speaker 1: more opportunities for fucking career advantage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a career guy, right, Yeah, God, oh this
Speaker 2: would be great for my LinkedIn page neat a dick. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 2: Epstein is a competent physician, and because he has more
Speaker 2: test subjects than anyone who has studied noma before have
Speaker 2: ever had, he succeeds. He succeeds in creating a pretty
Speaker 2: groundbreaking treatment for noma, which is like, good, it's good
Speaker 2: to saw, you know, a disease to find a way
Speaker 2: to treat it. But I would hesitate that people like
Speaker 2: credit this as a medical advancement due to death camp experiments, because,
Speaker 2: as Marwell notes, it must be kept in mind that
Speaker 2: the disease was a product of the camp itself. Simple
Speaker 2: measures of sanitation and a modest standard of nutrition were
Speaker 2: all that would have been necessary to prevent an outbreak.
Speaker 2: Epstein might have solved the riddle of the treatment, but
Speaker 2: no child he cured of this disease survived the camp. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's you know, it's solving a problem with an
Speaker 1: outbreak that you fucking created.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's bombing the village to save it kind
Speaker 2: of logic. Now this begs the question, though, what kind
Speaker 2: of twin research did Mangola get up to at Auschwitz
Speaker 2: and what was its actual purpose. Gerald Posner, who wrote
Speaker 2: one of the earlier biographies of Mangola, like most people,
Speaker 2: imagines his purpose as some nefarious ploy to try and
Speaker 2: create new arians by finding ways to rea create the
Speaker 2: conditions which cause people to have twins. Right, And this
Speaker 2: is like the standard line on Mangola for decades is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: he was doing all this twin research because he was
Speaker 2: trying to find ways to like help arians have more twins, right, right,
Speaker 2: And a big reason why this spreads is because of
Speaker 2: doctor Miklos. He's probably the first person to suggest this,
Speaker 2: and he suggests this because he works directly for Mangola
Speaker 2: on twins who had been murdered at Auschwitz. But Mangela
Speaker 2: did not treat Miklos like an academic equal. He's not
Speaker 2: like walking him through why he's doing all of this stuff,
Speaker 2: and so Miklos's belief is understandable, but it doesn't reflect
Speaker 2: the most likely explanation for these experiments. Mar Well points
Speaker 2: out that if that had been the purpose of Mengela's research,
Speaker 2: he would have been studying the parents of twins, right,
Speaker 2: because that's at least as important if what you're trying
Speaker 2: to do is make there be more twins. What he
Speaker 2: was actually doing with all these twins studies is providing
Speaker 2: his mentor von Verschuer, with a steady supply of twins
Speaker 2: he could run tests on to check all sorts of
Speaker 2: heredity theories. Right. He is getting letters from different doctors saying, hey,
Speaker 2: can you conduct this kind of study? Can you conduct
Speaker 2: this kind of study? And then he's conducting them. He's
Speaker 2: killing the twins, he's autopsyeing them, and that's why he's
Speaker 2: doing it, right, So it's not he is not. What's
Speaker 2: important here is he is not the only person morally
Speaker 2: culpable in the death of these kids. The other doctors
Speaker 2: are asking all of these motherfuckers, right, yeah, exactly, and
Speaker 2: von Verschure is like the biggest of them. And the
Speaker 2: fact that he has access to all these kids, this
Speaker 2: kind of what these doctors see as a resource that
Speaker 2: has never existed before, makes Mengela, who had previously been
Speaker 2: a middling to low level figure in German medicine, invaluable
Speaker 2: to the most respected doctors in the country. Marwell writes
Speaker 2: although twin research was well funded and promising in its
Speaker 2: potential to produce meaningful results, it's pursuit presented a number
Speaker 2: of obstacles. It was an extremely involved undertaking, requiring personnel
Speaker 2: to carry out the various measurements and record keeping. A
Speaker 2: supply of appropriate twin pairs had to be identified, located,
Speaker 2: and induced to participate. The entire process required a huge
Speaker 2: investment of time and money. In the case of Reschuer's
Speaker 2: own research at the Kaiservillhelm Institute, it took more than
Speaker 2: seven months to distribute twelve hundred questionnaires to schools in
Speaker 2: search of twin subjects. That effort produced one thousand possible
Speaker 2: twin pairs, but resulted in only forty who were actually examined.
Speaker 2: The proposed experiment might be unpleasant, painful, or have side effects.
Speaker 2: Beyond the disincentives presented by the inconveniences and unknowns of
Speaker 2: the process, there were also legal hurdles. It was forbidden
Speaker 2: in Germany, even under the Nazis, to intentionally infect a
Speaker 2: German citizen with a disease, a prohibition that led many
Speaker 2: scientists to conduct experiments on themselves so in fact, we're
Speaker 2: really cutting through the red tape, is well exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: And they're doing it because Mangle he's like a dealer.
Speaker 2: He's like a twin dealer to doctors in the Reich, like, oh,
Speaker 2: you got some twin studies you need done, Like Joey
Speaker 2: Meng's he's got your back, you know, maybe help him
Speaker 2: with his dissertation when he gets at Auschwitz.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I noah, guy, Yeah, he's kind of a piece
Speaker 1: of shit, but.
Speaker 2: He's got the twins you need. So people would send
Speaker 2: him requests, he would do the studies, he'd kill the twins.
Speaker 2: Then he'd have miklos you know, take off parts of
Speaker 2: their bodies or whatever, and they would be mailed to
Speaker 2: different institutes marked urgent war materials. Now this was that's
Speaker 2: not like this seems like it's probably just like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a convenient way for them to get priority in
Speaker 2: the packages. But for soldier scientists like Mengola, this is
Speaker 2: part of the war effort. This is the war effort,
Speaker 2: this is the whole war. For him, it's a race war.
Speaker 2: This is why, and this is how the broader German
Speaker 2: Nazi establishment sees it, which is why in the last
Speaker 2: days of the war when they are getting their asses
Speaker 2: handed to them. They're diverting crucial military resources to ensuring
Speaker 2: the camps can continue to operate, because that's a front
Speaker 2: of the battle for them in saying yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: fucking Nazis.
Speaker 1: Man, yeah, once again on record and Nazi.
Speaker 2: Anti Nazi good fair. So. Back at the Kaiser Vilhelm Institute,
Speaker 2: von Varschuer planned to create a department of embryology and
Speaker 2: a vast collection of human samples and embryos, including fetuses
Speaker 2: and stillborn infants, removed at the camp and sent to
Speaker 2: his institute.
Speaker 1: Now, God, I do not want to go that, Like,
Speaker 1: that's got to be the creepiest fucking institute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the building is still in use, right,
Speaker 2: they don't call it that anymore. Yeah. Did they get
Speaker 2: rid of their jar room? Probably? Yeah, that, I mean
Speaker 2: not as quickly as you'd expect. Really, a lot of
Speaker 2: the body parts that are taken out are in use
Speaker 2: up until like the eighties ninety. I mean, there was
Speaker 2: a story in Deals with fourteen on what used Because
Speaker 2: it's like a college campus and what used to be
Speaker 2: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Right outside, they find like a
Speaker 2: bunch of people's bones and like they don't know who's Like.
Speaker 2: The government got rid of those very quickly, was like, yeah, wait,
Speaker 2: we don't need to be looking into why these bones
Speaker 2: are here, whose bones they are? Let's get those just
Speaker 2: pop up?
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Those are dinosaur bones. Let's move on. Speaking of
Speaker 2: moving on, you know what really helps me move on,
Speaker 2: but much makes you move on? Is it products and services.
Speaker 2: It is products and services, products and services that had
Speaker 2: no role in say Auschwitz, which, in addition to being
Speaker 2: a death camp, was not also a manufacturing facility for
Speaker 2: modern day corporations like the ig Farbin company who now
Speaker 2: makes your aspirin. Oh yeah, they didn't use slave workers
Speaker 2: who were worked to death ensuring their future profits which
Speaker 2: they were allowed to roll into the business after the
Speaker 2: Holocaust and the end of the right. That didn't happen.
Speaker 2: That would be fucked up. You wouldn't let that happen. No,
Speaker 2: these are good products and services.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm never gonna take asprint again.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm that's right, baby, never Advil, Advil company leave
Speaker 2: the zut Oh we were yeah bear yeah, yeah, yeah, wait,
Speaker 2: I'm looking up who makes Adville? Who makes Adville? Look
Speaker 2: it up because I think we could get a pretty good,
Speaker 2: pretty good uh uh, pretty good ad out of this.
Speaker 2: You know, Adville, we were not involved in the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: Adville, we were not involved in the hall.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's clear, Boots Uk, I think we're good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're nothing.
Speaker 1: A dude.
Speaker 2: Take some pills you it will go. Pizer. No, it
Speaker 2: looks like it was invented at least by some British company,
Speaker 2: but it's it's manufactured by Pfizer, is it? Not sure?
Speaker 2: But they didn't kill any people. They didn't. They're not
Speaker 2: responsible also for hundreds of thousands of death, Sophie. That
Speaker 2: doesn't seem I did was make boner pills. And now
Speaker 2: my deck is hot. Robert Evans, big pharma apologist. Yah know,
Speaker 2: it's fine. Weird take from you, sir. We're back and
Speaker 2: we're talking about all the different big pharma companies that
Speaker 2: and how I have didn't love them the huge fan
Speaker 2: love them, big big pharma farmer bro like Margrelly. That's right.
Speaker 2: So the best known story about Mangola at Auschwitz is
Speaker 2: probably is the the one that like the idea that
Speaker 2: he supposedly sewed two inmates together to try twin myth. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that is a frequent myth. There's also allegations he tried
Speaker 2: to quote make boys into girls and girls into boys
Speaker 2: through cross transfusions, and that he connected the urinary tract
Speaker 2: of a seven year old girl to her own colon.
Speaker 2: And if you hear these stories like, that's all mad
Speaker 2: doctor shit. Obviously, because the Nazis destroyed a lot of
Speaker 2: records and Joseph himself is not a reliable source on
Speaker 2: his activities, we will never know exactly what he did.
Speaker 2: But David Marwell points out that a lot of these
Speaker 2: stories are either false or exaggerations of reality, or kind
Speaker 2: of misattributions of real crimes to Mangola. And this gets
Speaker 2: us into a really complicated piece of Holocaust history, which
Speaker 2: is the Mengola effect. In the aftermath of World War
Speaker 2: Two spoilers, Mengola escapes right. He gets away in large
Speaker 2: part because he doesn't get that tattoo on his arm
Speaker 2: that all the SS guys get. So when he's being
Speaker 2: after he gets you know, the unit he's with gets
Speaker 2: captured because he embeds with a Wehrmacht unit. When the
Speaker 2: Americans are processing them, they don't immediately see, oh, this
Speaker 2: is a fucking ss guy. Let's put him in, you know,
Speaker 2: make sure he's not one of the ones that we're
Speaker 2: looking for. So he does get away. But by that point,
Speaker 2: Auschwitz had already kind of written itself into the heart
Speaker 2: and soul of the human race, and the first inmates
Speaker 2: to be interviewed talked about the doctors who had so
Speaker 2: often been the architect of their misery. Some of the
Speaker 2: people who survived in best health and thus were in
Speaker 2: the best position to talk were Mengela's patients. Because his patients,
Speaker 2: the twins and stuff that he works with, he took
Speaker 2: really good care of. A lot of the time they
Speaker 2: would enjoy good food and better accommodations until they were killed, right,
Speaker 2: And he's not doing that out of the goodness of
Speaker 2: his heart. It's because he wants the subjects that can
Speaker 2: withstand the testing that he was going to do. But
Speaker 2: because of this, some of the people who he hadn't
Speaker 2: got to when he flees Auschwitz are some of the
Speaker 2: first people who were able to talk. And just in general,
Speaker 2: Mengela's name spreads very quickly as one of the architects
Speaker 2: of this nightmare that is Auschwitz, and a curious thing
Speaker 2: occurs after that, which is that more and more Auschwitz
Speaker 2: inmates over the years record Mengola experiences than could possibly
Speaker 2: have known or seen him. Part of how we know
Speaker 2: that these are not accurate recollections is that he's often
Speaker 2: described as tall, blonde, and well built. Mengolo was five
Speaker 2: foot eight and dark hair. Historian zadenek Zofka claims that
Speaker 2: almost all inmates at Auschwitz would later claim to have
Speaker 2: been selected personally by Mengola when they arrived at the camp,
Speaker 2: which can't have been possible. We simply know that many
Speaker 2: other doctors were doing that job. Hermann Langbein was an
Speaker 2: Auschwitz survivor and author of the seminal book People in Auschwitz.
Speaker 2: He noted that many former inmates not only insisted they'd
Speaker 2: had direct contact with Mengela, but and this is really strange,
Speaker 2: they tended to remember him as being hot. And I'm
Speaker 2: like trying not to joke about this, but I'm going
Speaker 2: to read you a quote from this guy's book. It's
Speaker 2: very strange. Some well known ss men have been positively
Speaker 2: idealized after the fact. Thus, Fannia Fenelon has called Mengela
Speaker 2: a handsome Siegfried and teres chesaang writes, Mengelo is immaculate
Speaker 2: in his belted uniform, tall with shiny black boots that
Speaker 2: bespeak cleanliness, prosperity and human dignity. He does not move
Speaker 2: a muscle. He is insensitive. Eli Vizell mentions that Mengela's
Speaker 2: characteristic tributes as white gloves, a monocle, and the rest.
Speaker 2: Jiri Steiner, a twin used by Mangola in his series
Speaker 2: of experiments, speaks of his angelic smile, and Siegfried van
Speaker 2: der Berg believes that in a film, Mangola should be
Speaker 2: portrayed by no less than the famous lady killer Ramon Navarro.
Speaker 2: Carl Laslow describes Mengola as a strikingly handsome man who
Speaker 2: had a fascinating, spellbinding effect even on female prisoners, and continues,
Speaker 2: Mengola came with a motionless face and his beautiful, regular
Speaker 2: cold features that seemed to be carved out of stone,
Speaker 2: appeared to be the mark of death itself. In his
Speaker 2: shiny boots, he walked rhythmically on the camp road. I
Speaker 2: saw Mangola almost every day in the office of the
Speaker 2: SS Infirmary, where he was doing routine bureaucratic work, and
Speaker 2: he struck me as neither particularly attractive nor elegant. I
Speaker 2: never saw him where a monocle, now lang been Obviously
Speaker 2: these guys are all at Auschwitz. Elie Vizzell is one
Speaker 2: of the most famous Holocaust survivors there is, you know,
Speaker 2: He writes, fucking night, they're not like it like the
Speaker 2: there's no I'm not putting any shade on these people
Speaker 2: for the fact that their memories of this are kind
Speaker 2: of fucked up, and Langbean coins the term the Mangola
Speaker 2: effect to describe what he calls a form of memory displacement,
Speaker 2: where real memories of trauma are mutated, sometimes into different
Speaker 2: acts of terror, and generally credited not to whichever Nazi
Speaker 2: had committed them, but put to the man who became
Speaker 2: the most famous symbol of Nazi evil at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengela.
Speaker 2: Langbean makes one of the most important observations in Holocaust studies,
Speaker 2: one that inspired this series, when he writes, quote, those
Speaker 2: who kept the machinery of murder going in Auschwitz were
Speaker 2: not devils. They were humans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: there is also part of me that's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, this is just sounds like years and years
Speaker 1: of conditioning of my dad being like, marry a doctor,
Speaker 1: and this eventually you start looking at anyone as a
Speaker 1: doctor is hot.
Speaker 2: That's qually what happened.
Speaker 1: Just like he's a doctor, you say, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: telling you this is it's something. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: very Jewish trait. We all want to marry a doctor.
Speaker 1: So we see a doctor. Doesn't matter if it's Awes
Speaker 1: or Mangola.
Speaker 2: I guess equally. Boy by the way, boyowty. So David
Speaker 2: Marwell elaborates get episodes on this podcast. They did, they did,
Speaker 2: they did, they did. World bastards, you can't talk about it.
Speaker 2: That's true, that is true. So David Marwell elaborates on
Speaker 2: this kind of peculiar aspect of Auschwitz. Further, the notion
Speaker 2: of Mangola is unhinged, driven by demons and indulging grotesque
Speaker 2: and sadistic impulses, should be replaced by something perhaps even
Speaker 2: more unsettling. Mangolo was in fact in the scientific vanguard,
Speaker 2: enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field.
Speaker 2: And that, yeah, that's that's kind of the most unsettling thing,
Speaker 2: or at least one of them about this is that
Speaker 2: experimentation is the norm at Auschwitz, and Mengelow joined many
Speaker 2: of his colleagues in utilizing patients as experimental resources. They
Speaker 2: were able to justify this to themselves not by saying,
Speaker 2: you know, fuck these people, they all have it coming.
Speaker 2: Most of them did not talk about it that way,
Speaker 2: and most of them were capable of being perfectly like
Speaker 2: polite and even to some degree sensitive to the patients
Speaker 2: or to the inmates that they worked with on a
Speaker 2: daily basis.
Speaker 1: Guys like this ideology based on like, well, this is
Speaker 1: for the greater scientific good of exactly particular race.
Speaker 2: And they found also aside from that, they found other ways.
Speaker 2: A lot of ways they would justify it, is like that, well,
Speaker 2: these people are sick. They're all going to die anyway.
Speaker 2: We might as well learn something from them. You know,
Speaker 2: the governments decided they're going to kill all these people,
Speaker 2: So what can I do? I can't do anything, but
Speaker 2: maybe I can help a few people here and there,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, And isn't it.
Speaker 1: Probably the most sickening part of it is that people
Speaker 1: going like, you know, these people are all gonna die anyway,
Speaker 1: and it's like not.
Speaker 2: If you don't let it happen. You don't have to
Speaker 2: do this part of the machine. Yeah, God damn, yeah,
Speaker 2: they don't. They don't seem to take that into account.
Speaker 2: So we have some idea of how Joseph rationalized his
Speaker 2: own behavior because half a lifetime later, when he's on
Speaker 2: the run, he spends two weeks with his estranged son Rolf,
Speaker 2: and this is when he's an old man. He's kind
Speaker 2: of near death. And Ralf is Ralph is an interesting character.
Speaker 2: He's part of how Posner's biography gets written because he
Speaker 2: brings Posner after his dad dies. His dad's Mengela writes
Speaker 2: a memoir that's like he writes it like a fiction
Speaker 2: novel where he gives himself a fake name and like
Speaker 2: kind of fictional writes it. Basically, this is the fictional story.
Speaker 2: And the doctor ed Auschwitz. He doesn't, he doesn't if
Speaker 2: I did it like he does. He doesn't know Jay
Speaker 2: with his fucking memoirs. But Ralf, you know, mengel Is
Speaker 2: family supports him for the entire rest of his life.
Speaker 2: They're like, because they're rich, they're still to this day,
Speaker 2: there's the Mngola company is successful. They're sending him money.
Speaker 2: They help him stay on the run and Rolf kind
Speaker 2: of grows up. He only meets Mengola once when he's
Speaker 2: a child and he's being he's told that Joseph is
Speaker 2: not his dad but his uncle, who's like on the
Speaker 2: run because the Allies are unfairly prosecuting him. But as
Speaker 2: he grows up, they exchange letters when he becomes an adult,
Speaker 2: and Rolf Number one winds up being left wing, which
Speaker 2: like his family is deeply conservative. They're fucking Nazis. And
Speaker 2: so eventually, like he has, he's very he's very conflicted.
Speaker 2: He comes to accept he is the number one. There's
Speaker 2: less information available, you know, at this period of time,
Speaker 2: like the internet's not a thing. But he comes to accept,
Speaker 2: maybe I don't know exactly what my dad did, maybe
Speaker 2: the Allied stories aren't exactly accurate, but my dad did
Speaker 2: fucked up shit at Auschwitz and it's indefensible, right. He
Speaker 2: comes to that conclusion, which fair enough, good for you, Rolf.
Speaker 2: And so he travels to meet his dad in Brazil
Speaker 2: near kind of the end of his father's life for
Speaker 2: a two week period, and Ralph, you know again, had
Speaker 2: educated himself a little on the Holocaust, and Posner talks
Speaker 2: to him for his book, and here's what he says
Speaker 2: about this meeting where he talks to his dad about
Speaker 2: what his dad did at Auschwitz. I proposed that, and
Speaker 2: this is Ralph Ralph talking. I propose that whatever he
Speaker 2: or anyone else did or did not do in Auschwitz,
Speaker 2: I deeply detested it, since I regard Auschwitz as one
Speaker 2: of the most horrible examples of inhumanity and brutality. He said,
Speaker 2: I did not understand he went there had to do
Speaker 2: his duty to carry out orders. He said that everybody
Speaker 2: had to do so in order to survive the basic
Speaker 2: instinct of self preservation. He said he wasn't able to
Speaker 2: think about it. From his point of view. He was
Speaker 2: not personally responsible for the incidents at the camp. He
Speaker 2: said he didn't invent Auschwitz, it already existed. He said
Speaker 2: that he wanted to help people in the camp, but
Speaker 2: there had been a limit to what he could do
Speaker 2: as far as selection were concerned. He said the situation
Speaker 2: was analogous to a field hospital during a time of war.
Speaker 2: If ten wounded soldiers are brought into the hospital in
Speaker 2: critical condition, the doctor must make almost instantaneous decisions about
Speaker 2: whom to operate on first. By choosing one, then necessarily
Speaker 2: another must die. My father asked me when people arrived
Speaker 2: at the railhead, what was I supposed to do? People
Speaker 2: were arriving infected with disease, half dead. He said, it
Speaker 2: was beyond anyone's imagination to describe the circumstances there. His
Speaker 2: job had been to classify only those able to work
Speaker 2: and those unable to work. He said. He tried to
Speaker 2: great as many people as able to work as possible.
Speaker 2: What my father was trying to do was persuade me
Speaker 2: that in this manner he had saved thousands of people
Speaker 2: from certain death.
Speaker 1: He says, what am I, one man supposed to do?
Speaker 1: Is and given so many twins to kill? You saying,
Speaker 1: in my position, you wouldn't do the same thing.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't kill all those twins, those beautiful twins waiting
Speaker 2: to die. But I have to learn about them.
Speaker 1: What you learn, I don't know, but someone will figure
Speaker 1: out something I learned.
Speaker 2: God, we figured out how to cure a disease that
Speaker 2: becausts them exactly. Listen.
Speaker 1: I was just like any regular doctor who has a
Speaker 1: bunch of slave doctors working for them to do experiments.
Speaker 2: Guy, we've all been there. We've all been there.
Speaker 1: Ask anyone who's been to medical school whether or not
Speaker 1: they would have done the same thing.
Speaker 2: I think you'll find. Yeah, I'm going to continue Roff's quote.
Speaker 2: He said that he did not order and was not
Speaker 2: responsible for gassings, and he said that twins in the
Speaker 2: camp owed their lives to him. He said that he
Speaker 2: personally had never harmed anyone in his life. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: had to slave do that. Gee geez, guys. Or is
Speaker 2: that ss man who was drinking himself to death?
Speaker 1: Yes, he is the one who shot or slaves. I,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, was sober the whole time. So
Speaker 1: that's good, right, you know it is good? Though, what
Speaker 1: what could possibly be good services? You know, both of
Speaker 1: those things?
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are good. Those are good. Ah, we're back.
Speaker 2: So we know that Mangela's claims that he didn't directly
Speaker 2: harm anyone are an obscenity, uh and and not just bullshit?
Speaker 2: Would if I wasn't crying already. Yeah, the crimes that
Speaker 2: we have already covered that Joseph committed personally are enough
Speaker 2: to make him one of the worst bastards that has
Speaker 2: ever been on this show. And we have just kind
Speaker 2: of scraped the surface of the shit that this guy
Speaker 2: got up to. And while it is possible some of
Speaker 2: these are examples of the Mangola effect, all of them
Speaker 2: were present on the indictment that he received from a
Speaker 2: West German court. At one point he said to have
Speaker 2: taken a newborn child of a Russian woman, grabbed it
Speaker 2: by the head, and thrown it into a pile of
Speaker 2: corpses to kill it. At another he is said to
Speaker 2: have become so ferus when a work gang capo allowed
Speaker 2: several prisoners selected to die to hide with his men,
Speaker 2: that he shot the capo with his own pistol. At
Speaker 2: one point, an old man selected to the gas chamber
Speaker 2: tried to flee to his son, who was in a
Speaker 2: work group. Mangola bashed his brains open with an iron bar,
Speaker 2: killing him. At another point, he got angry because a
Speaker 2: woman gave birth and the selection doctors had failed to
Speaker 2: warn him she was pregnant. He threw the newborn baby
Speaker 2: into a stove. He is said to have shot a
Speaker 2: sixteen year old girl who fled onto the roof out
Speaker 2: of fear of the gas chamber. Worst of all is
Speaker 2: the testimony of inmate Anani Sailovich Petko a Russian survivor
Speaker 2: of Auschwitz. He was there the day a group of
Speaker 2: three hundred children were brought into the camp, having been
Speaker 2: separated from their parents. They were all under five years old.
Speaker 2: When Mangola saw the group of children, he complained that
Speaker 2: it was too hard to gas five year old children,
Speaker 2: so he selected another strategy quote and this is from Petco.
Speaker 2: After a while, a large group of SS officers arrived
Speaker 2: on motorcycles. Among them, they drove into the yard and
Speaker 2: got off their motorcycles. Upon arriving, they circled the flames.
Speaker 2: It burned horizontally. We watched to see what would follow.
Speaker 2: After a while, the trucks arrived, dump trucks with children inside.
Speaker 2: There were ten of these trucks. After they had entered
Speaker 2: the yard, an officer gave an order and the trucks
Speaker 2: backed up to the fire, and they started throwing those
Speaker 2: children right into the fire into the pit. The children
Speaker 2: started to scream. Some of them managed to crawl out
Speaker 2: of the burning pit. An officer walked around it with
Speaker 2: sticks and pushed those back in who managed to get out.
Speaker 2: Hesse and Mangelo were present and were giving orders. I
Speaker 2: have three pieces of nicotine gum in my mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's about the worst thing I've ever read. I can't
Speaker 2: imagine anything worse than that. And that's you know, Joseph Mangola.
Speaker 2: Obviously I considered doing a whole episode about how he
Speaker 2: fled from justice. You know, it is an interesting story.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to me all of these stories. Like the
Speaker 2: gist of it basically is that he spends a couple
Speaker 2: of years on a farm in Germany, living low. He
Speaker 2: eventually escapes to South America. He bounces around from like
Speaker 2: Brazil to Paraguay. There's a period of time where he's
Speaker 2: able to live under his own name pretty openly, and
Speaker 2: then the Israelis get Iikman and suddenly he has to
Speaker 2: go deep underground because after Iikman, Mangel is like the
Speaker 2: big prisoner that they haven't caught, you know, or a big,
Speaker 2: big war criminal that they haven't caught. So he but
Speaker 2: he's successful and he's able to stay hidden basically because
Speaker 2: a lot of Nazis have real solidarity with him, Like
Speaker 2: it's all old Nazis and just South American dudes who
Speaker 2: like the Nazis, and they hide him, but he's it's
Speaker 2: kind of worth noting all of these sort of fictional
Speaker 2: depictions of Mangola. There's like all sorts of stories of
Speaker 2: him as a mad scientist in Latin America trying to
Speaker 2: remake the Master race or whatever. Right, that's not at
Speaker 2: all his life. He's he's an old man. He spends
Speaker 2: most of his time where he's working, either selling real
Speaker 2: estate or working as like a contractor for his family
Speaker 2: company selling like farming equipment. He lives off grid for
Speaker 2: a while with a couple with a family and like
Speaker 2: eventually they split up with him because they have a
Speaker 2: bunch of arcola. Yeah, but it takes like ten it
Speaker 2: takes like a decade or more like he's not too
Speaker 2: long be longed to be with Mangola. That's he. That's
Speaker 2: one of the things that's most disturbing those that like
Speaker 2: he never does anything terrible while he's on the run
Speaker 2: that there's any documentation of. Some people will say he
Speaker 2: was kind of a dick, and as he got older,
Speaker 2: kind of an unpleasant person. He would send some letters
Speaker 2: to his son that they weren't emotionally abusive, but they
Speaker 2: were kind of like I wish you'd come and visit.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't approve of you know, you should
Speaker 2: get a big thing. Like, the biggest thing that he
Speaker 2: gives his son shit for is that his son became
Speaker 2: a lawyer but didn't get a PhD in law, and
Speaker 2: he's like, you should become a doctor. Yeah, father foot Stead,
Speaker 2: you know the world, here's another doctor Mengola. The point
Speaker 2: is though that he there's evil is not a thing.
Speaker 2: Mengola is not just some sort of monster who would
Speaker 2: have who would have caused horrible harm no matter where
Speaker 2: he went. He was a guy who was willing to
Speaker 2: use unfathomable evil as a tool for personal advancement and
Speaker 2: the advancement of what he saw as science. And when
Speaker 2: that opportunity ended, he was a pretty normal old man, right,
Speaker 2: And that's I think more frightening. It's more frightening.
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons why every time I see
Speaker 1: like a Marvel movie, I think it was like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it was a fucking Captain America or something,
Speaker 1: and they like insist on showing the Nazis trying to
Speaker 1: do like time travel or some something where they're like
Speaker 1: this electricity makes Frankenstein's yea.
Speaker 2: And it's just like.
Speaker 1: You, you know, in making this uh super villainy, you're
Speaker 1: actually undercutting what makes it frightening and what makes it
Speaker 1: evil because it's, uh, you know, it's it's the banality
Speaker 1: of it, you know, Yeah, fucking you know, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound cliche and whatnot, but it
Speaker 1: really is the banality and the bureaucracy and uh just
Speaker 1: kind of the the the efficiency models and the flow charts.
Speaker 1: It's all the fucking office shit that means it awful.
Speaker 1: It's what, you know. It's why I don't, you know,
Speaker 1: want to work in an office. Yeah, it's because it's
Speaker 1: too close to Nazis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that is you bring up working in an office.
Speaker 2: The thing that is most frightening about Joseph Mangola is
Speaker 2: that every single person listening to this knows somebody with
Speaker 2: Mangola potential. Yeah, they don't. They're not serial killers. They're
Speaker 2: like they are. They are the people who care so
Speaker 2: much about their own advancement and are able to get
Speaker 2: themselves so committed to whatever they believe that if they
Speaker 2: were put in an auschwitz, they would do all the
Speaker 2: same things.
Speaker 1: I've worked under so many Mangolas. Yeah, like, hell of
Speaker 1: a lot of them in the entertainment and it's industry
Speaker 1: medical industry or industry, tech industry.
Speaker 2: Oh tons in the tech industry. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: mangalis out there. Sis. That's like the new Facebook logo ooops, mangliss.
Speaker 1: It's just literally people who were just like, you know, oh,
Speaker 1: it's too bad, that's not you know that it's.
Speaker 2: Illegal to do experiments on humans. It's like, wait, is
Speaker 2: that the only reason you wouldn't do it? Yes, that's
Speaker 2: why it's You get this also when people will talk about, like,
Speaker 2: I mean, the Nazis were fucked up, but people, we
Speaker 2: did learn a lot from those No we didn't, No, no,
Speaker 2: we fucking didn't. There was there There is one experiment
Speaker 2: the Nazis carried out on prisoners that taught us anything,
Speaker 2: like really meaningful, and it was about like how the
Speaker 2: body responds to hyperthermia and stuff, and like a bunch
Speaker 2: of nonsense, a huge amount of nonsense. Like it's we
Speaker 2: will talk a little bit about the other doctors, because
Speaker 2: this is also a podcast about them, but I do
Speaker 2: want to give I don't know, it's weird to call
Speaker 2: this a hopeful story, but I want to talk about
Speaker 2: how our friend Miklos gets out of Auschwitz, and specifically
Speaker 2: how he saves his family, his wife and his daughter.
Speaker 2: It's not going to start as a happy story, but
Speaker 2: it does end as happily as an Auschwitz story can end. Sure. Once,
Speaker 2: when I was dissecting the body of a fairly old man,
Speaker 2: I discovered some very beautiful gallstones in the bladder. Knowing
Speaker 2: that doctor Mengelo was an ardent collector of such items,
Speaker 2: I washed the stones, dried them, and then arranged them
Speaker 2: in a large necked flask stoppered with a glass cork.
Speaker 2: I stuck a label on the flask, giving the person's name,
Speaker 2: the kind of stones they were, and they're pathological characteristics.
Speaker 2: During his visit the next day, I gave them to
Speaker 2: doctor Mengela. He admired the beautiful crystals, turning the flask
Speaker 2: round and round. He looked at the gallstones, and then,
Speaker 2: turning abruptly to me, asked if I knew the ballad
Speaker 2: of the Warrior Wallenstein. His question was completely out of
Speaker 2: keeping with the surroundings, but I answered, I know the
Speaker 2: story of the Warrior Wallenstein, but not the ballad, whereupon,
Speaker 2: smiling he began to recite. He says some German which
Speaker 2: translates into English. In the Wallenstein family. There are more
Speaker 2: gallstones than precious stones. My superior recited several stanzas of
Speaker 2: that comic ballad. He was in such a good mood
Speaker 2: that I decided to ask a great favor of him,
Speaker 2: that he let me go look for my wife and child.
Speaker 2: Only after I had uttered the request did I realize
Speaker 2: how daring it was. But it was already too late.
Speaker 2: He looked at me with astonishment. You're married and have
Speaker 2: a child. Yes, Captain, I'm married and have a fifteen
Speaker 2: year old daughter. I told him, my voice breaking with emotion.
Speaker 2: Do you think they are still here? He asked, yes, Captain,
Speaker 2: because at our arrival three months ago, you selected them
Speaker 2: and sent them to the right hand column. They have
Speaker 2: since been sent to another camp, he said. Suddenly, I
Speaker 2: thought of the crematorium smoke. Perhaps they had been dispatched
Speaker 2: with that smoke to some celestial camp. Doctor Mangelo, who
Speaker 2: was seated his head bent forward, seemed lost in thought.
Speaker 2: I remain standing behind him. I'm going to give you
Speaker 2: a pass to go look for them, but he said,
Speaker 2: and placing a forefinger on his lips, he looked at
Speaker 2: me menacingly. I understand, captain, and thank you so that
Speaker 2: Mngli gives him a pass and he finds his wife
Speaker 2: and his daughter who are alive, and he, because of
Speaker 2: the position he occupies, realizes that their camp is like
Speaker 2: a day or two way from being liquidated, and so
Speaker 2: he warns them and he gets them to basically tells
Speaker 2: them how they can transfer to a work gang that's
Speaker 2: being moved to a separate location, which is not a
Speaker 2: clear survival thing, right, but it's like, look, if you
Speaker 2: get moved to this workang, maybe you die there, but
Speaker 2: it's at least more days than you'll have here, because
Speaker 2: they're going to kill everyone in this block. And they
Speaker 2: get out and they are you know, Miklos survives the
Speaker 2: end of the war. He winds up on what is
Speaker 2: supposed to be a death march with the SS guards
Speaker 2: as they flee. But he like, it's fucking this guy's
Speaker 2: story is fucking miraculous. He makes it, and he kind
Speaker 2: of like after everything is over, ends up kind of
Speaker 2: stumbling back to his empty house and like sits down
Speaker 2: there and it's just like I don't know what to
Speaker 2: do with my life anymore. Like I'm never going to
Speaker 2: be a doctor again. I refuse to conduct another autopsy
Speaker 2: or anything like that. So he's just like alone in
Speaker 2: this house and then like a couple of days later,
Speaker 2: his wife and his daughters show up. Oh wonderful. Yeah
Speaker 2: they live. Yes, Yes, Like I said, this is like busting.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm busting over that. That's yeah, it's hoped for.
Speaker 2: That is literally the best possible of the outcomes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's yeah. I mean, there's there's there's so much more
Speaker 2: to like say. One thing that is probably worth noting
Speaker 2: is that the Saunder commando that me close is with
Speaker 2: the guys that he's kind of he's have been selected
Speaker 2: with him. He like lives in the barracks with them.
Speaker 2: They drink together. They wind up getting guns smuggled to
Speaker 2: them by partisans and carrying out a rebellion. And their
Speaker 2: entire goal in this rebellion inside the camp is that
Speaker 2: one of them escape so that people, they someone can
Speaker 2: tell the world about what happened there. Wow. And they
Speaker 2: don't succeed in this. None of the Saunder commando who
Speaker 2: rebel survive. They get massacred, but they succeed in destroying
Speaker 2: one of the crematoria ovens as they die, which significantly
Speaker 2: limits the ability of Auschwitz to kill and dispose of people,
Speaker 2: saving god knows how many lives. So that's cool.
Speaker 1: It sucks because it's just like, you know, that is
Speaker 1: an incredible act of heroism, and it's just like so
Speaker 1: many of those stories, I feel like I've not been
Speaker 1: introduced to so many of the stories, like the majority
Speaker 1: of them are just these awful fucking you know.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's so much more common to tell stories
Speaker 2: of suffering than stories of resistance. But you know, there
Speaker 2: are numerous stories, especially in like the Polish territories, of
Speaker 2: Jewish people and other victims who gain access to guns
Speaker 2: they either had him before or they sometimes make them,
Speaker 2: or they steal them from Nazis, and they fight back,
Speaker 2: and that is that is a part of the Holocaust too.
Speaker 2: And because they fight back, you know, even in each
Speaker 2: of these incidents, you know, maybe only a few people
Speaker 2: get saved. The descendants of those people who were saved
Speaker 2: through acts of resistance number today in the hundreds of thousands. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and you know that's a big deal. Doctor Mangela obviously,
Speaker 2: is hounded for the rest of his natural life until
Speaker 2: he dies drowning off the coast of or at a
Speaker 2: lake in Brazil. And he's like, yeah, drowned to death.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he drowns like a little fucking asshole. Yeah,
Speaker 2: way to drown, you loser. Oh yeah, that's great. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he fucking drowns. Cool. That is yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 2: It's not the most painful way he could have gone.
Speaker 2: I would have preferred like hit by a car that
Speaker 2: has like a big spiky front end that justin pales
Speaker 2: him in the dick and he's dragged for like thirty miles. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he could have died, but at least it wasn't like, oh,
Speaker 2: he peacefully died and it sleeping fucking he do. He
Speaker 2: does drown while on vacation. Oh that's great. Him.
Speaker 1: Drowning is good. Drowning is you know, take it. It's
Speaker 1: panic before death. It's yeah, he's at least scared. That's good.
Speaker 2: And he's in bad health for years. He's very lonely.
Speaker 2: He has a crush on this like child that he
Speaker 2: has as his housekeeper, but he can't marry her. It's
Speaker 2: he's yeah, he's a gross piece of shit. Fucking uh.
Speaker 2: The other doctors, though, who had enabled his work and
Speaker 2: been his colleagues and benefited from the research he did,
Speaker 2: were not punished. Doctor Julius haller Vorden was a respected
Speaker 2: neuropathologist and head of the histopathology department at the kaiserville
Speaker 2: Helm Institute. He received hundreds of brains taken from euthanasia
Speaker 2: vicctims UH and he also killed many children at the
Speaker 2: Brandenburg Gordon Clinic where he worked and later removed their brains.
Speaker 2: He described these specimens to a colleague as wonderful material,
Speaker 2: feeble minded malformations and early infantile disease. After the war,
Speaker 2: he had a neurological research position at the Max Planck
Speaker 2: Institute in Berlin. At the Brain Research Institute in Frankfurt,
Speaker 2: haller Vorden's specimens, including brains from the euthanasia program, were
Speaker 2: used by doctors until nineteen ninety when they were finally buried.
Speaker 2: We had a happy ending. We had him drown in.
Speaker 2: He was drowning, he was sad, couldn't fuck a child.
Speaker 1: It was then you're like, here, there's some people who
Speaker 1: got away with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because most of the people who enabled mangla pretty
Speaker 2: much all did. There's doctor Fritz Lenz, who was a
Speaker 2: medically trained geneticist. After nineteen thirty three, he was at
Speaker 2: a section called in your notes. It was like bum
Speaker 2: out man even more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in case Matt gets happy at end, give him more.
Speaker 2: Said yeah, yeah, get a little bit of extra sad.
Speaker 2: He was the head of the Department of Racial Hygiene
Speaker 2: at the Kaiserville Helm Institute and was one of the
Speaker 2: architects of the Holocaust. From nineteen forty six to nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty seven he was the director of the Institute for
Speaker 2: Human Genetics at the University of Gottingen. He continued to
Speaker 2: publish until the nineteen seventies, and of course our friend
Speaker 2: ottmar Vaughan Verschuer as head of the kaiserville Helm Institute,
Speaker 2: obviously he was responsible for a whole bunch of fucked
Speaker 2: up shit post war. He was interned by the Allies
Speaker 2: in nineteen forty six. In nineteen fifty one he accepted
Speaker 2: a position at the University of Munster, where he established
Speaker 2: one of West Germany's largest genetic research centers. Verschuer retired
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty five and died in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: I stopped listening after you said doctor douchebag drowned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the most depressing epilogue ever. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: just freeze frames of all of the people.
Speaker 2: It's not great. They all survived forever. I was into
Speaker 2: the drown part. Yeah. I bet he shiped himself when
Speaker 2: he was drowning too. We can all hope. So poop
Speaker 2: in the drink some of the shit water, I hope.
Speaker 2: So that sounds he probably.
Speaker 1: Vomited when he drank the shit water, and then he
Speaker 1: ended up drinking more of the vomit shitwater, and he
Speaker 1: did it forever till he died.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow, I mean, let's let's all hope. Let's all
Speaker 2: hope and pray. We're all hoping this and we're in this.
Speaker 2: Let's not think too much about the fact that a
Speaker 2: great deal of these race scientists continued working into the seventies,
Speaker 2: and that a significant number of professional genetics researchers are
Speaker 2: not only influenced of their work, but still believe in
Speaker 2: aspects of racial science, which is still influential in genetic
Speaker 2: research to this day. There's a fucked up history of
Speaker 2: how much of this ship is still talked about. You
Speaker 2: can you can look at the fucking Bell curve guy
Speaker 2: as an example, right, Yeah, Charles Murray, this is still
Speaker 2: a problem. And part of why it's a problem is
Speaker 2: that when the war ended, all of these doctors who
Speaker 2: had spent their time at institutes but who had been
Speaker 2: directly responsible for this kind of ship went rounded up
Speaker 2: and shot in the back of the head, which is
Speaker 2: what we should have done easily. It just just they
Speaker 2: were right there. You had guns, Yeah, so many guns.
Speaker 2: You were literally the allies you could have you could
Speaker 2: have gotten rid of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is like, you know, fucking this is why
Speaker 1: I don't trust white allies.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, yeah, they should have just shot him and
Speaker 1: said now we have the Bell curve guy and still
Speaker 1: exactly garbage. Seriously, but you know what we also sorry, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say, it's just crazy how much of
Speaker 1: race science still exists today and just like how there's
Speaker 1: it's just considered like part of like normal conservative thought.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just because it always has been. It
Speaker 2: always has been.
Speaker 1: But it's just like so deeply ingrained in the ideology
Speaker 1: that it's like to lose the race science part of
Speaker 1: it is to lose like what holds it together.
Speaker 2: It's like the glue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's why you know, whenever someone is like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I'm a fiscal conservative as if it
Speaker 1: like makes them somehow like, well, I'm not a racist conservative,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, your whole point of view is poison.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Part of identifying as a fiscal conservative means
Speaker 2: that you're okay caucusing with the conservatives. Who are you know,
Speaker 2: the other kinds right exactly exactly, Yeah, you're you're It's
Speaker 2: like you're just you're cool with a little bit of
Speaker 2: race science.
Speaker 1: Oh not me, no, no, not me personally, but uh
Speaker 1: gladly just shepherd them into power and whatever will be
Speaker 1: will be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kase Aras and not c I don't know. You
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