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