Flesh, Blood, and the Angel - ProvokatoR magazine

Flesh, Blood, and the Angel

on 28-02-2007 03:03

Published in : , Misc

Dr. Menegle and His Experiments

art by www.muttwerks.com

by Martina Čermáková

A loaded guitar riff, one of thrash metal’s best known, slithers through the silence. One full breath in and out, a relentless onslaught of drums. The assaultive speed of the beats thaws the heart, makes the organ pound at the music’s will. Blood gushes faster and faster through the veins. Just as this downpour holds back for a breath, a scream rips open the darkest and most macabre of things. Blackness pours. Then, it’s goddamn fast five minutes of brutal yet melodically driven noise and vocals swelling with merciless words and hellish imagery. In 1986’s “Angel of Death,” Slayer hands over a decaying black heart as it dissects one of history’s most frightening scientists: butcher-doctor Josef Mengele.

The legend of Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death, is fed by the cold-blooded experiments he performed on Auschwitz prisoners. The doctor presented a spine-chilling package of angelic appearance, sadistic conduct, and no remorse.

Eva & Miriam Mozes survived genetic experiments under Mengele

“Mengele was no boggard at all, not a murderer like Buntrock,” the Terezín Initiative Institute quotes Toman Brod as saying when he recalls his stay in the Auschwitz children’s block. “He was a very delicate and polite man who walked around in his SS uniform and white gloves.” Survivors agree on Mengele’s character, which at times bordered on assuming an uncle or father figure for children. The man was in his early 30s when he was put in charge of the children’s, women’s and Romany sections of the camp. Dressed in his impeccably clean and pressed uniform, SS cap and shiny black boots, and with a handsome face and a kind smile, Mengele daily stood at the ramp where new prisoners were unloaded from wagons, playing with his cane and whistling his favorite opera melodies. “He would point his cane at each person and direct them with one word: ‘right’ or ‘left,’ ” recalls another doctor for inmates, Olga Lengyel, according to the Crime Library. “He seemed to enjoy his grisly task.” Those sent to the right, 70 percent of newcomers, were immediately condemned to death in gas chambers, while the 30 percent sent to the left had their lives spared for the moment. For some, being chosen for the left side would amount to a more torturous experience.

Twins presented special interest for Mengele. Tracked down by guards at the unloading ramp, the children were brought to a barrack called the Zoo, where their stay would be characterized by special treatment, such as being able to keep their hair and clothing, and getting extra food rations. Mengele kept “children” fit so that they would last. One twin served for experiments, the other for reference. Amputations, intentionally infected wounds, and injections of solutions into the scalp and eyes to change hair and iris color, and of blood samples from a twin of one pair into another of a different blood type were regular procedures. He attempted to create Siamese twins by sewing children together. Their wounds became infected and death followed three days later. If one child died, Mengele killed the other to allow for simultaneous autopsy.

Mengele’s twin studies were but a portion of his experiments. Procedures such as sex change, incestuous impregnation, removal of organs and limbs, and various attempts at sterilization all happened in the name of science—racial hygiene in particular. Mengele hoped to unlock the secrets of multiple births, heredity, and genetics to further Eugenics-based theories about Aryan superiority and the power to control the quality of a race through selection. Auschwitz presented the opportunity.

In 2004, the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo—Sao Paulo being Mengele’s asylum since 1960—published 85 of Mengele’s postwar essays, letters, and diary entries, in which he expands his theories on race, genetics, and society. The documents breathe his lifelong conviction: “I gave life in Auschwitz; I did not take it.”
During his 21-month stay at Auschwitz, Mengele pointed 400,000 people to gas chambers and “used” 1,000 pairs of twins. But numbers do not earn him his monarchical status in the Dr. Death realm; the opposites within him, the sadistic surgeon core with an almost divine crust, as reflected in his Angel of Death title, do.

Medical Torture Today