If there was one group of doctors who paid no attention to the first principle of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” it would be the doctors in the Nazi death camps who aided and abetted the murder of some 6 million Jews and other untermenschen (undesirables) during World War II. The most famous doctor of them all, of course, was “The Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. His own death, of a stroke, came (none too soon) this week (Feb. 7) in 1979, while he was swimming off the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil, having fled Nazi Germany in 1945 to go into hiding in Latin America.
Fittingly, the Holocaust’s most famous doctor worked at the Holocaust’s most famous death camp, Auschwitz, where Mengele conducted his gruesome experiments on dwarfs and others with deformities, but his passion was experimenting on twins. There are several theories as to why twins interested him. Some thought he was trying to understand the multiple-birth process so that German women could produce more babies, who would later become the millions of soldiers and administrators needed for the “Thousand Year Reich” that Hitler planned to govern much of Eurasia. Others thought he simply wanted to understand how genetic inheritance influenced behavior. Still others thought that twins were aberrations and Mengele liked being cruel to aberrations. Actually, all three theories fit with the fact that if one twin died for any reason, Mengele would instantly kill the other twin, and then do comparative autopsies.
Without question, Mengele was a sadist who reveled in the torture and death that he inflicted on Auschwitz’s prisoners. He once shot a woman and her child because they annoyed him. He injected patients with drugs that killed them instantly, and lethal germs that killed them slowly and painfully. He injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color, and many of his experimental surgeries were performed without the patient receiving anesthesia. He also dissected live babies, castrated boys (also without anesthesia) and once used an X-ray machine to sterilize a group of nuns, burning them horribly. He later joked that they were certainly “celibate now.”
Since he died before he was captured, Mengele’s ability to administer such inhuman cruelty has been the subject of much speculative psychoanalysis. What those who have studied his life find striking is that he took no pleasure from the suffering and death he inflicted. He was indifferent to it. Rather, his pleasure seemed to come from the unlimited power he had to decide who was to die, and when, and how.
The “Angel of Death” got to play God, and what could be more satisfying than that?
Mengele was not a sadist.
According to my dictionary one definition of sadism is “any enjoyment in being cruel.” Sounds like Mengele to me.