What oh boy, Yeah, you know what that might have been, that might have been over the line, That might have been over the line, Robert, Yeah, my god, I feel like there's some government agency we need to report me to for saying that.
Now I didn't know. Yeah, man, Robert, go to hell.
I'm leaving that was that was a step too far.
Huh, well you use that language ever?
Well years, what's wrong with you? We'll let it that all out and uh, you at home can imagine what what? What horrible thing I said? What cancellable thing I said? That will get leaked seven years from now.
Please replace it with you know, embarrassing.
Yeah, well, this is.
Garters, Matt Leeve got a fresh haircut. It's gonna be a good day.
It's gonna be a good day talking about Joseph Mangola. As usual, Robert forgot once.
Again, we're talking about something that's going to make everyone sad, and I like to think that is, you know, a guest of this podcast. I'm here to, you know, try to lighten the mood. So, along with Jargia, I brought this Excuse me, I don't want to talk about me. I just want to talk about happy things, just happy things, all right. That's so I'm gonna bust that out every time.
A little Dicky, Yeah, that's it's like Little Dicky did like a Tommy style concept album, but about Josephs together.
Oh dear god, I'm sorry.
Wow, oh boy, percentage your listeners who uh do not like grievously offended? Yes, yes, and that was for them.
Yeah. I got a new I got a new kind of offense recently where somebody was like, it's messed up that your show is called Behind the Bastards and you call the bad people bastards because that that's hurtful to people who were born out of woodlock. And oh yes, people don't use that word that more any like that. That's just not a thing that we do well. When I hear someone say bastards, I don't think, ah, yes, this is this is someone referring to a person born outside the bounds of holy matrimony.
Right, this is you know. I feel like language evolves.
Is the thing, Robert.
I raise your people being offended over the word bastards to the cocoachanell apologists in my DMS, like, oh yeah.
Boy, if you did that, I saw it. I saw it. I hope by now the liver King episodes will be dropping, So I hope you've got liver king apologists in there too, being like, look, man, a lot of people take fifteen thousand dollars in steroids every single month.
Yeah no, what's wrong with that?
Singering from you? Definitely gentlemen, m M.
Dudes speaking of a dude. Joseph Mangela definitely was a dude and his wife Irene had been married just over a month when Germany invaded Poland after carrying out a false flag attack to justify said aggression. World War two, you know, starts, and Joseph is over the moon about it.
He believes the war is the quote last desperate fight of the German nation, by which he meant that without a cleansing genocidal war to clear out large swaths of farmland, Germans would be doomed to interbreeding and genetic collapse.
God damn it.
Yeah at he buys into it. You know, he's all full throated now because he's got some health issues. It's not until nineteen forty one and the start of Operation Barbarossa that Mengla actually sees combat in Ukraine. His posting is the infamous ss Viking Division, which is spelled Wiking, and I'm gonna call it Wiking because that makes them sound silly and they are terrible war criminals.
So the Vikings was where we where we scaled, where we scale, we Wikings, we scare we Wiking. So the Viking Division is made up of Germanic peoples, mostly from outside of Germany. There is like a German battalion or whatever in there, but a lot of them are from Belgium, Norway, a lot of them are Norwegian dent people from Denmark, from France, from Holland. They're basically like Arians from all
the places the Germans have conquered. And the actions of the Wiking Division are you would call them controversial to this day. The unit fought exclusively in the East during the worst atrocities of the Second World War, and they participated in several of those atrocities. But because the membership is largely foreign, there has been a lot of effort
dedicated to minimizing the culpability of the volunteers. A good example would be this ABC Australia article about a Finnish government report that concluded the fourteen or so finish volunteers in the unit likely committed war crimes. The report notes accurately that the Finns agreed to supply soldiers for the Elite Division after their brutal war with the USSR, which is true enough, but check out how they word this Reluctantly. Finns complied and covertly recruited the first group of four
hundred SS volunteers to be sent for training. The vast majority of them had no ideological sympathies with the Nazi regime. The report said Finns were above all interested in fighting against the Soviet Union due to their brutal experiences in the Winter War. In this way, the starting point for Finn's involvement was different compared to most other countries joining SS foreign Volunteer units.
Yeah, no, didn't. They didn't have a choice. You know, just wound up in that SS unit on accident. You're stumbling home from the bar, you had a couple of rounds, and then you wind up in the SS. It happens to all of us.
You find a friend where you've got a mutual hatred of this other dude, and he happens also hate every Jew who's ever lived, and you're like, well, you know, you turn the.
Good with the bad. Yeah, and it's one of those like there's a movie coming out right now that's about like some Finnish guy murdering Nazis, And there's a concern some people have is like, are they just going to kind of whitewash the fact that an awful lot of Fins were completely on board with the Nazis? Yeah, it will now, and obviously you can note that like, yeah, the Finns had just suffered this devastating invasion from the USSR, that they had no fault in, and that that would
make things complicated. They're in a difficult geopolitical situation. But you don't need to whitewash these SS guys, especially when you read passages like this from David Marwell's book. Early in the morning of July second, Sst. And dart and Fua Wackerl, the beloved commander of the division's West Lynn Regiment, was shot and killed by a sniper near the village of Sloweitka. In the days that followed Wackerl's death, members of the Wyking Division carried out acts of extreme violence,
claiming an estimated several thousand Jews as victims. Strue present's evidence from the records of various German Army units in the area, quoting, for example, the diary of a Lieutenant Kaysburg, with the two hundred and ninety fifth Engineer's Battalion firing everywhere it crackles, the SS bumps off anyone they get
their hands on. It is horrific. The chief of staff of the fourth Army Corps absorbed that individual members of the Wiking Division were seen hunting for Jews the war diary of a unit in the area, and noted that the SS was indiscriminately shooting Russian soldiers and civilians in
large numbers. A member of the supply unit of the division, Hans Gunther Otto, in a sworn affidavit after the war, claimed that his unit had been informed that Wackel had been killed by a Jew and that their participation in the revenge actions marked the beginning of the unit's participation in the extermination of the Jews. Otto described an order
that was read to his unit after Wackerl's death. The order said that we were no longer held accountable for the killing of any Jews we could get hold of, and that we could indeed shoot any Jew we saw. So this is who Mangola serves with when he does his combat tours, great good influences. Yeah, yeah, it seems like that's going to moderate his natural shittiness a lot. Now, we unfortunately know very little about the specific details of
what Mangola did with the Viking Division. He's there for close to two years, but he is present with them through one of the most bloody periods in the history of human warfare. Given his professional expertise at identifying Jewish ancestry and the fact that his division is hunting Jews, there's a pretty good chance he was consulted on who to kill right on doomy massacre this village or not right, you know, that's pretty good chance he was enrollved in.
But they would just like wheel Mangla out to look at every villager and just be like point out which ones you think as the most Jewy? Yeah, like, oh, that's my favorite thing to do. That's what they do.
So the first massacre by the Viking Division was carried out a town at a prison in a town called Zulusiv, where the retreating Soviet army had massacred about six hundred and fifty prisoners on their way out. When the SS discovered the bodies, they and their Ukrainian allies slaughtered more
than a thousand Jews in the area. One survivor later recalled the SS people stood around the pit, and from time to time they ordered someone, especially men with beards and sidelocks, to come out and kneel in front of them. With sadistic pleasure. They hit their victim until he lay unconscious on the ground, and they kicked them back into the pit. Sometimes family members tried to help the poor people,
but then they often made their fate even worse. Some were taken out of the grave and beaten to death with unimaginable brutality. Yeah, Joey mengs everybody, this is his baptism of fire. This is kind of known as seen by historians who study him as like this is what go This is what takes us from the Joseph Mangela, who's like doing science that's kind of racist but is relativetively mid for its day, to the Joseph Mangla who is capable of doing the things he's going to do
at Auschwitz. Right, Yeah, there's a process of brutalization. You can't get a more brutalizing environment than being part of this SS division.
Of the Nazi or the Jew hunting Italian in the entire Nazi Army, one of the worst units in terms of war crimes. Yeah, I mean, I don't like him. No, I don't.
They don't sound nice to me. I'm not a fan. No. In a single week, the SS Wiking Division was responsible for between four and seven thousand murders of Jewish Ukrainians. They're often just kind of killing every person they can in a city or a town that they wind up billeted in. It's possible that Mangola participated directly and at
least some of the killing. We simply don't know. Our records of his performance only detail his combat actions, and he performed well against partisans, winning an Iron Cross second class and then first class for pulling comrades out of a burning tank. Mangola provided field medicine through a number of heavy combat actions. In the first five months in the field, his division lost twenty percent of its manpower, which is heavy. That's an intense rate of casualties.
Good.
I hope, I'm sad. Yeah, I hope, I hope they all suffered real tenseling. Yeah, now, Mengolo was praised by his superior officers, even as the tight of war turned gradually against the Nazi forces. At the end of November nineteen forty two, he was nearly killed an aerial attack. A comrade described in his unit log vigorous air activity. Again, doctor Mengola buried. Bomb explodes next to foxhole and buried him.
They got him out alas So. Another thing that a thing that is cool in this time period is the Russians counterattack at Stalingrad and the Romanian army kind of collapses, and then they surround the German sixth Army, and you know, massacret Joseph Mengola is in and around that action, and he actually gets evacuated by air during one of the last moments in which that would have been possible. No
one's really sure why he gets evacuated. He doesn't seem to have been injured, which would have been a normal reason to like pull an officer out from the front. There's a pretty good chance it's just because he's a doctor. He's seen as having high value as a rachel hygienist. The war in the East is failing, but the Nazi regime's race war they felt was still winnable and they needed Mangola on another battle front, a place called Auschwitz.
So we're only episode three. Yeah, it's mostly gonna be Auschwitz today, this is gonna be this this week is all Auschwitz. Oops, all Auschwitz. Oops. Switch it is not. So he gets.
I just fucking I just throwing SSRs in my mouth.
This is the only way to talk about Joey mengs is with with a lot of reverb. So he gets evacuated. He's in Berlin for a little while before he gets his next assignment, and he gets in touch with his old boss, Otmar von Verschuer, and Ottmar is now running the Kaiservillehelm Institute for Anthropology, so he makes Mengola a guest scholar there, you know, as he's recovering from being at the warfront, and Mengola continues to aid Verschure in
his work on an ad hoc basis. Von Verschuer had taken over for the previous Nazi in charge, Eugene Fisher, as part of an agreement between the two men that race science had now advanced to an exciting new era, one in which the study of heredity could now look at traits like criminality or heroism, or work shyness or industriousness, and determined with scientific precision to what extent those traits
were caused by heredity or by environment. The missing piece of the puzzle was that heredity science as they saw it, still could not explain how a genetic disposition became a physical trait. In his book on Mangola, Marwoll quotes historian Walter Schmuel. The idea generally accepted up to that time that every attribute was simply transmitted as dominant or recessive monofactorial genetic information did not hold up to the results
of mutation research, population genetics, or developmental physiology. Thus, Mendelian genetics was giving way, in the words of the day, to higher mendalism, which presumed much more complicated mechanisms of heredity. Now, part of why the Nazis are confused is that a lot of the things they saw as traits simply are not behaviors or traits that have a genetic component, or
just aren't traits at all. You have to consider the Nazis considered criminality a trait, and their definition of a criminal was kind of broad.
Right, Yeah, it was weirdly sounded a lot like they were just trying to describe Jews in any aspect and just trying to use science to justify it.
Yeah, so you can see how they would be confused that all of their calculations aren't adding up here.
And also what's a crime, because yeah, they would also like anything gay was a crime, and sure, you know exactly anything gender queer was a crime. So criminality quite broad as well.
Broad term for the Nazis. Now, yes, there were, and they were asking because these guys are scientists, and some of what they're asking, we're legitimate at the time, scientific questions about heredity. They were not just trying to do stuff that was nonsense race science. They were trying to answer real questions that scientists all over the world were
kind of grappling with. The pseudoscience here though, is pretty complex and not worth kind of delving into in much more detail, so we will continue to focus more on the personalities. Vershure and Fisher, both highly regarded race scientists, were obsessed with unraveling the mystery of heredity. So they made an agreement and Vershure gets made the head of the institute because he's really good at getting funding and
support from the Nazi state. I'm going to quote again now from Marwell's book, although he himself here is largely quoting the work of a historian named Sheila faith Weiss. In pursuit of this this new paradigm argues wise a combination of experimental research on animals and humans was necessary. She writes that Dalam Institute scientists could provide the necessary human clinical supplement to the ongoing experimental work in the
developmental genetics of normal and pathological traits in animals. Mengel's four month association with the institute and the winter and spring of nineteen forty three laid the foundation for a crucial link between the scientists at the institute and a colleague who could be instrumental in supplying all manner of human specimens and data to advance their work. So they hit this point where they're like, in order to do more heredity research, the only way to properly do this
is to study a bunch of humans. And that kind of study is going to involve dissection, it's going to involve autopsies, it's going to involve finding people who have rare different kind of genetic disabilities and studying their bodies after they die. If you were to do that legitimately, you know, using only bodies that people had willingly donated after their deaths, well you're not going to actually be able to do that science. It's at the rate at
which these Nazis want to do it. They're going to need a supply of human material, and that is where Joseph Mangel is going to be useful to them.
So God, it's so fucking suppressing brow.
Yes, this is I mean, these are the Mangola episodes. Yeah, yeah, Lita, people going down.
I'm sorry, you can cut that one about this one instead, except it's jarring Mesa Buston. That's always nice. It's nice to remember the finer parts of life. As we have we delve into this darkness. So Joey mangs gets assigned to work at Auschwitz in the May of nineteen forty three, and we don't exactly know why, because they get rid of a lot of their documentation around Auschwitz shortly after
this period. It is likely, and Mangola's son would later say that von Verschuer basically pulled strings to get him appointed at Auschwitz. It is worth noting doctors were never work at death camps. Not one of the SS doctors who worked at any of the death camps was there on pain that they would be punished. You didn't even suffer career consequences for refusing to work at a death camp. It was this work. Normal empathy was like, oh, I no, I'd rather not. Yeah, I get it. Bro, it's talk
about that. It's fucked up. It's fucked up. Bro, I tolt me neither.
It is often errantly stated that Mengelo was the chief medical officer at Auschwitz, but this is inaccurate. His direct supervisor was the chief medical director at the camp, and Mengela is more accurately viewed as basically the number two man in terms of like the medical system at Auschwitz. Gerald Posner credits this errant reputation to the fact that Joseph was a workaholic as well as one of the few SS men there who had seen combat in the East.
Mengela frequently referred to his combat experience, and he quickly developed a special aura in the camp because of his frontline fighting, which contrasted sharply with the desk careers of the other doctors, Mengl coupled his combat status with a
workaholic devotion to his duties. While other Auschwitz doctors did no more than was required of them, Mangelo was always undertaking new projects and extra responsibility, and one example of an extra responsibility he took on was eradicating a typhoid epidemic that occurred at one of the barracks soon after his arrival. Now, for reference, Auschwitz was made up of several labor camps, each with a different set of barracks, generally divided between men and women, but also between inmates
from different regions. As a general rule, families were split up on arrival by sex and availability to work. But sometimes too many people came in at once Auschwitz. I think the most people it ever killed in a day was nine thousand, and there were days where more than that arrived. And thus, yeah, I mean it was a factory for producing death. And so sometimes when they had too many people arrive, communities would be kept intact until
they could be exterminated. And when you stick large numbers of people in tiny, poorly made bear with no insulation in the middle of a European winter, and you feed them, maybe seven hundred calories a day, and you deprive them of clean water, illness is going to spread. And sure enough, typhoid epidemics were rampant at the time. With the technology available, it was basically impossible to stop typhus from spreading once it had become endemic and something like a crowded barracks.
This had been an intractable problem for the camp administration prior to Mangola's arrival, and the SS saw this as a serious issue, not because they cared about the comfort and safety of prisoners, but because typhoid just spreads. You know, the SS can get typhoid from the prisoners at the barracks, right, so you have high.
Foyd can't even tell who's Jewish or not. Yeah, it's really messed up.
It's like they're all's the same species.
I don't understand it. Well, you're gonna have to do more science, unfortunately.
Yeah. So something has to be done, and Joseph Mangela is going to be the guy to do it. And I'm going to quote now from a memoir by a Jewish doctor cad in Germany named Miklos n named Miklos Nisli. Miklos is interned at Auschwitz with his family and forced to work as a medical officer there by doctor Mengela and here are his recollections of how Joseph fought the
typhoid outbreak. The quarantine camp, C Camp, Dcamp and the F section were terribly overcrowded, despite the quotas which were filled daily for shipment to more distant camps and the Czech camp. Both the children and the aged had been greatly weakened by their two year ordeal. The children's bodies were mere skin and bones, and the elderly prisoners were so weak they could scarcely walk. Both had to relinquish their places to new arrivals who were still strong enough
to work. During the preceding weeks, their situation had steadily worsened. When the first Hungarian convoys began arriving, their rations had been sharply reduced. Then a few weeks later, when the stream of new deporte tees had swelled the flood proportions, the camp authorities had found themselves faced with a serious shortage of food. As usual, their remedy had both been both drastic and efficient. They had practically suppressed the ch
The check camp's rations. Altogether, hunger had reduced the prisoners to raving, moaning maniacs within a few days. There already weakened organisms had disintegrated entirely. Diarrhea, dysentery, and typhus had begun their deadly work. Fifty or sixty deaths a day was normal. Their last days were spent in indescribable suffering till at last a death came and set them free. The closing of all barracks was ordered early in the morning.
Several hundred SR soldiers surrounded the Czech area and ordered the inmates to assemble. Their cries of terror as they were loaded into the waiting vans were terrible to hear, for after two years in the KZ they no longer had any illusions about what lay in store for them. Liquidation day found some twelve thousand prisoners left in the check camp. From among that number, fifteen hundred able bodied
men and women were chosen, along with eight physicians. The rest were sent to Number two and Number three crematoriums. On the following day, the check camp was silent and deserted. I saw truck loaded with ashes leave the crematorium and head towards the Vistula, it's a river. Thus, the Auschwitz muster rolls were reduced by more than twelve thousand units, and one more bloody page was added to the Auschwitz archives.
That page contained only the following brief inscription. The checks section of the Auschwitz concentration camp was liquidated this date due to what prevalence of typhus among the prisoners signed Doctor Mengola helps to them for.
Yeah, yeah, I uh, this is exactly like forcing people to get vexed. You know, it's the same thing, same thing, bro. It doesn't punch an anti vaxer in the face. It's like, every time I listen to this podcast about like different Nazi atrocities or read about it, I'm always just like, if I ever see an anti vaxxer walk into a Baskin Robbins with a fucking star of David that says it because they're like, I don't need a vaccine, I
just want all thirty two flavors. I don't punch him in the fucking mouth.
I think it is justified to do violent to people who compare like think and it's not even you're not even being forced by the state to get a vaccine. You're being told like, yeah, man, if you want to work in a high school cafeteria, you have to get a COVID vaccine.
Well, there's a Nazi Germany.
No, it's super isn't It's it's totally not I yeah, it's it's it's one of those things, like everybody knows Auschwitz like horrible, right, Like that's not we're not We're not like blowing any minds with the fact that this was a bad place. But when you actually dig into, like I recommend if you want to get an actual degree of personal physical context for what it was like there, uh Miklos Sneezley's memoir Auschwitz, a Doctor's Eyewitness Account is short.
You can finish it in an afternoon. It's not a long book, and it's fucking harrowing, like just absolutely some of the some of the worst things that you can possibly hear.
That was just one passage you read. Yeah, I already need a nap. That's not one of the bad ones. Like it's bad, but like in terms of the degree of personal brutality involved, that's not one of the most That's not the worst thing we're going to talk about today. Cool.
Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of jar jar buddy.
Well, that smells Stinka with absolutely Jesus.
So it's important to note we just talked about the fact that, like the doctors at Auschwitz were not at all forced to be there, Auschwitz and the death camp system in general could not function without doctors. They were the key lynchpin that held the entire thing together. The kind of thugs who were doing the mass, you know, shootings of people and carrying the guns and manning the guard towers, those were much less important to the system
of killing than medical doctors. In January of nineteen forty two, a group of Nazi functionaries under friend of the pod Reinhardt Heidrich, sat down in a suburb of Verlin called Vonse to plan out technical details of the Holocaust. Prior to this moment, the genocidal vibe of the Nazis had been a mix of deportations, mass shootings, restrictive laws, and random beatings and murders. After Vonse, the death camp sprung up to full production, with a goal of cleansing Europe
from undesirable races. As we've discussed throughout these episodes, this was seen as a medical task. Doctors like von Verschuer were key advocates throughout the escalating process of preparing the German state to carry out genocide. And I'm going to quote from the book Racial Hygiene here. Ottmar von Verschuer described in his textbook the need for a complete solution
of the Jewish question. On March twenty seventh to twenty eighth, nineteen forty one, at opening ceremonies for the Institute for Research of the Jewish Question in Frankfort, Eugene Fisher and Hans F. K. Gunther were guests of honor at a meeting where possible solutions to the Jewish question were discussed.
At this meeting, Walter Gross reviewed the shortcomings of previous efforts in this regard emancipation, persecution, partial annihilation, and so forth, and claimed that a final solution could only come from the complete removal of Jews from Europe. So that's Mengla's job. That's why these doctors are there, right, They are seeing through the future health of the race by exterminating people.
And that's very much how they see their role. Mngla's first job, and the first job of all SS doctors at Auschwitz, was to sort new arrivals to the camp. The trains would arrive packed full of starving, desperate people, often jammed in with the corpses of their loved ones who had starved or died of illness. After days stuck in a dank, airless train car without access to sanitation, they would be marched out and sorted by a man like Mengola. And we're gonna talk more about that. But what.
I hope you enjoy commercial break.
Here we go. That's got everybody in a good mood, ready for capitalism.
Somehow. That was in a minor key. I don't even know. It's on autotune, and even the autotune is depressed.
Little little miracles. Oh we're back.
Oh back. I just took three thousand in prozac and I am ready to rock.
There we go, There we go. So, speaking of prozac, m Mengela and the other doctors that are there, Yeah, their job is selecting these people. And I can describe this experience of selection in broad terms, but nothing does a better job of illustrating it than the words of a man who went through it. Miklos Neiezley arrived at Auschwitz in May of nineteen forty four, less than a year into doctor Mengela's time there, and he met the
man himself immediately on arrival. We jumped to the ground, then turned over to take our wives and children in our arms and help them down, For the level of the cars was over four and a half feet from the ground. The guards had us line up along the tracks. Before us stood a young SS officer, impeccable in his uniform, a gold rosette gracing his lapel, his boots smartly polished. Though unfamiliar with the various SS ranks, I surmised from
his armband that he was a doctor. Later I learned that he was the head of the SS group, that his name was doctor Mengola, and that he was the chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the medical selector for the camp, he was present at the arrival of every train. Now, obviously you know Miklos has imperfect recall like all light witnesses, Mangolo was not the chief physician, and he was not present for the arrival of every
single train. This was a duty that doctors switched off on taking, and there's not documented evidence that Mangela did more than his share of shifts, which still means that he personally sent potentially several hundred thousand people to their annihilation.
We just don't know if he, you know, worked over time.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's evidence that he did. We'll talk a little bit more about why Miklos has some of these kind of beliefs about what Mangola did at the camp that don't line up with the documentation. Because he's not the only one. This is not like
a personal flaw. For one thing. Stress like talk to people who have been president like a mass shooting, and you'll get different accounts of what happens and when eyewitnesses, often because it's a stressful, terrifying situation, and Auschwitz is the most stressful and terrifying situation of all of the stressful terrifying situations. So, yeah, your memory is going to have a couple of errors. It doesn't mean anything about the overall trustworthiness of his account. It's just that you
get little details like that wrong. It is worth noting that the evidence suggests Mengelo was unusually well suited to the mental task of selection. Doctor Ella Lingoln's, who was also interned at Auschwitz, later noted that Joseph handled the duty with less stress than his colleagues. Quote some like Werner Roade, who hated his work and Hans Kanig, who was deeply disgusted by the job, had to get drunk
before they appeared on the ramp. Only two doctors performed the selections without any stimulants of any kind, doctor Joseph Mengela and doctor Fritz Klein. Doctor Mengelo was particularly cold and cynical, and Klein, who definitely deserves to be remembered in the same breath as a piece of shit like Mengola, had hated Jewish people with a passion ever since a Jewish guy stole his fiance when they were undergrads.
That was the way.
Really, yeah, that's that's.
His that's Holocaust, because that's my assumption for most Nazis.
No, that is absolutely what happened.
Some tall, handsome Jews such as myself, you know, like you know, maybe dated their ex girlfriend who broke their heart and now it's like, well, must kise him on that. That is perfect faces AND's a nice penis.
Is that is that is definitely that is definitely the case for doctor Fritz in cell Kleine. Klein was known to brag that he liked the smell of the crematoria. Lingoln's talked to Mangola about his own opinions on the subject, and she claimed she's one of these doctors who's forced to work at the camp because she's a prisoner. There
are a lot of these folks. Langen's talked to Mangla about his own opinions on the subject, and she claimed, quote, he once told me that there are only two gifted people in the world, Germans and Jews, and it's a question of who will be superior. So he decided that they had to be destroyed.
Yeah. See, this is like underneath all of the now. Granted, my entire like or at least most of my personal dealings with anti Semitism has been like chuds online, but it does seem very like, I don't know, like rooted in. I don't want to say they're jealous, that they're fucking jealous of us, but it does seem like a lot of it is just like Zie, it's so smart and so funny, and all the girls likes him, and I mean and me, I'm just so nice too, so all the girls I'm too nice. I need to be mean.
And then they you know, they read Jordan Peterson, they start cleaning their room, they start doing racial hygiene, and then Bob's your own.
Yeah that's the that's the it goes. Yeah, God almighty. So it's one thing to kind of give an overview of how the selection process worked, which is harrowing enough. But I think I'd be doing it a service if I didn't give you an account of meeting Joseph Mangela as a prisoner approaching selection. This one comes from our buddy Miklos, who does survive the camp. We'll talk a little bit about how later, because by God, it's a story. Quote to start, the SS quickly divided us according to sex,
leaving all children under fourteen with their mothers. So our once united group was straightway split in two. A feeling of dread overwhelmed us, but the guards replied to our anxious questions in a paternal, almost good natured manner. It was nothing to be concerned about. They were being taken off for a bath and to be disinfected, as was the custom. Afterwards, we would all be reunited with our families.
While they sorted us out for transportation, I had a chance to look around in the light of the dying sun. The image glimpsed earlier through the crack, and the box cars seemed to have changed, grown more eerie and menacing. One object immediately caught my eye, an immense square chimney built of red bricks, tapering towards the summit. It towered above a two story building and looked like a strange
factory chimney. I was especially struck by the enormous tongues of flame rising between the lightning rods, which were set at angles over the square tops of the chimney. I tried to imagine what hellish cooking would require such tremendous fire. Suddenly I realized that we were in Germany, the land of the crematory ovens. I had spent ten years in this country, first as a student, later as a doctor, and I knew that even the smallest city had its crematorium.
Yeah, before you were like, I feel like it would be a disservice to do the police feel free to deserve me. Yeah, you know, I don't need to hear all.
Sorry, it's like, yeah, I think One of the stories that's kind of worth telling about Mingola in this period is the fact that like there's one point where a doctor gets sent to the camp and he kind of realizes what is happening, and he's like, I'm not willing to do this, you know, I don't want to to go through this shit. This is like not what doctors do. I feel like it's immoral for me to be here. And so he says that he's going to like leave and like tries to get his way out of Auschwitz.
This guy, Oh, yeah, so I found it here. So yeah, this SS physician named Horse Fisher is like, yeah, he goes through like one of these selections and he's just so horrified of it that he tries to transfer out of it.
And yeah.
Fisher asks himself kind of over the next couple of weeks, like why they're doing this, Why these starving people, the poorest of the poor, who couldn't possibly have like influenced the economy or politics or harmed Germany in any way. Why these people had to be exterminated. And as he's like trying to leave the camp, he asks Mangola these questions that he's been asking himself, and Mngola responds, it was precisely from this reservoir of people that the Jews
drew new power and refreshed their blood. Without the poor but supposedly harmless Eastern Jews, the civilized Western European Jews would not be capable of survival. Therefore, it was necessary to kill all Jews. And one of the things that Mangola does is he takes this questioning doctor and he starts doing like selections with him in order to like talk him up throughout the process, until eventually the guy is willing to continue the job as an SS physician.
So he's he's yeah, yeah, he talks him into it.
Oh yeah, yeah, weak minded bitches, dude.
Yeah, I mean they're Nazis.
Just like he gets close to like feeling something close to human fucking startasy.
To recognize the dimensions of the horror that he's been complicit in. And Mengola is like, Nona, bro, you're good, Like, let me let me walk you through why we need to be doing this.
Jesus Christ.
So, our friend Miklos, who we've been talking about, is lucky by the standards of Auschwitz. His daughter is old enough to work, and so she and his wife are sent to the right so they don't get murdered immediately. Meanwhile, he gets pulled out of the mass of prisoners, along with several other doctors among the crowd, by Joseph Mengela. The SS was always shorthanded, and they needed men and women with proper medical skills, even if those men and
women were Jews who were condemned to die. Miklos and the other doctors who suited Mangela's need became part of what was known as the Saunder Commando. These special units, to translate their name literally, were used to handle most of the dirty work of actually executing the Holocaust. They would drag bodies out of the gas chamber and incinerate them. They would sort out things like gold fillings and take
other possessions from the dead. It's one of the worst things imaginable that you could be forced to do now. To keep the commando fununctional, the SS allowed them to take things like canned or preserved food from the dead and off an alcohol. The commando also found it easy to acquire gold and jewelry, which they were able to use sometimes to bribeguards for things like newspapers. These were Nazi newspapers, but they were still like they gave you some kind of outside context as to how the war
is going, like what is happening outside of Auschwitz? And this and alcohol are pretty much the only thing that kept these people functional. Miklos basically says, every night we kind of drank ourselves into, you know, sleep to a stupor. Yeah, well, how else do you do this job?
Right? Right? Well, I mean fucking Mangola is going completely sober, just like whistling.
He's not bothered by this is kind of the thing about Mangla. Most of the SS are also drunk, right. The other doctors are hammered, like everyone working this. Miklos writes a lot about this one specific SS guy who's like the trigger man, Like, whenever they need people shot, this guy, I think he's a captain, will like just go and shoot them in the head. And he does this all day. And he's like he's one of the nicer Nazis to Miklos, and he's clearly just like drinking
himself to death while he's doing this job. But not Mangola. Mangola. For Mangola, this is like an unparalleled career opportunity, right, and that's how he treats it. Yeah, So each of these sonder commando units. Obviously, you can't do this job for very long, right Like, for one thing, your brain won't handle it, and for another, the SS doesn't want these people because they have extra privileges. They don't want them around long enough to potentially execute, as they eventually
will some sort of sabotage. So every sonder commando was wiped out every four months, and the next commando units first duty was disposing of the corpses. So Miklos when he takes this job, knows like, we've got I've got four months to live, basically because I've gotten picked for this job. That said, he occupied a special position. Like other slave doctors. He would help to care for workers who took ill and keep track of things like the
outbreak of Typhus. One of the fucked up things is that, like when workers come in sick to the doctors here, they have to try to hide whatever's going on because Mangela pays attention to everyone admitted to the camp hospital, and if you're not getting well fast enough, or if it looks like you're not, you're going to be immediately killed, right like, so they have to they have to be
extremely careful. A big part of what the Sounder Commando do because they have more access to like luxury goods and things like medicine that they take off the dead, is they will like bribe SS guards with gold that they take from the dead and then use that to go into the camps and distribute medicine and food to
some of like the people in the barrackses. It's the only reason some of the people who live through Auschwitz live through Auschwitz is that you know, these people in this impossible fucking position, use this relative level of privilege that they have to save some of their fellow inmates. It's it's it's it's it's bleak quite so, Yeah, Mingla
needed Miklos in particular because he was a skilled human dissectionist. Right, he is a doctor who has pathological experience, Like he is trained to do medical pathology labs and stuff, and Mengola is not a very good doctor, right, And that's the same reason, like Miklos understatement, whenever the SS guys, yeah yeah, but whenever, like the SS guys get sick, they go to Miklos and like he actually he's able to do a lot of good for other people in the camp because like some SS guy will get like
fucked up or sick, and he will help that guy. And then when he's trying to like get into an area of the camp, he'll be like, hey, man, like I had your fucking back when you you know, got yourself the fucking clap or whatever, you know, I need I need to get in for a minute. So like again, these are kind of the ways things actually work on the ground, which you might think is weird given how
strict in theory these ideas of racial superiority are. That these assessment they're letting this untermnched doctor touch their bodies. But like again, they don't have the SS. Doctors are poor physicians often, and Joseph hates providing medical care in a clinical setting. He's also not common job of a doctor, the job of a doctor. It's a normal doctoring.
Yeah, He's also he's this whole thing where I have to you know, like I have to do the thing with the knee, make the knee move.
I like, take their vitals. I like the part of doctoring. If they've just do fucked up shits, that's that's really that's really what I'm into.
I got into this to sow people together, and now everyone wants me to fucking just put band aids on people. What is this ship?
You know what this ship isn't what the ads that support our podcasts. That's true, It isn't that. It couldn't be any less that. Yep, ah ah, we're back. Everybody's having a good time.
Everyone's having fun. Yeah. Where you know this is like, uh, I forgot that we always get to this point in the podcast where everything is just so sad that I want to die. Yeah. So sometimes I'm just going to be doing my taxes. Yeah, just letting you know this is uh. And I'll occasionally respond with, oh, you don't say that way. You'll think I'm paying attention.
See, I should probably get to my taxes as well.
Well. It's just it's weighing on my mind. Yeah, to do it. It's coming up very quickly. It'll be it'll be tax time by the time these episodes drop. Happy tax Day, everybody.
See. That's the nice thing about studying Joseph Mangela is it makes the taxes seem a lot less unpleasant.
Honestly, it really does. I was seeing that exact same thing. I was like, you know, I'm like stressing out about this. There's so many other worst things in the world. And yeah, yeah, getting all my documents together.
See that's the one song that Joseph Mengela did all of us.
Yeah, thank you, Joey mang Thanks.
So me Close takes this job that's offered to him, and he kind of nod says when Mangla makes a bunch of threats that like, if you're not good enough at doing these dissections, you know, I'll send you away to the labor camp and stuff. And this is like you have to you have to think about what an impossible fucking position me Close is in because he has no idea if his wife and daughter are still alive, like they've been immediately separated. He has no contact with them.
He's quickly told when he meets with the other sunder commander, they're like, yeah, man, they're gonna kill us all in like three months, Like that's just what they do every couple of months. Have some fucking gin you know, get through the night. So yeah, he goes for like weeks. He has no answer to the question of what's happened to his family, and he's just being handed bodies to dissect by doctor Mangola. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, but for right now, it's worth digging
into exactly what Joseph was doing at Auschwitz. The work of carrying out selections and ordering the massacre of typhoid patients was of course enough to qualify him as a bastard. We've already met the bastard threshold sometime. Agr threshold has been far surpassed. In my opinion, we hit that at the latest during the Operation Barbarossa.
Yeah, I mean I thought I have a pretty low bar for bastards. So yeah, he'd been a bastard.
Yeah, he leapt right over that low bar. So let's talk about what he was doing here. You know, we talked about what he did with those typhoid patients, but that's not why he's famous for being the angel of death. And for an overview of that, I'm going to quote now from the Urologic History Museum in an article talking
about Nazi experiments at Auschwitz. In the first phase of his experiments, Manglis subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to specific medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism usually painful and exhausting. These examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved terrified children, For such were the majority of the twins.
The subjects were photographed. Plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toeprints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a particular pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengola ordered them killed by phenal injections so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. Although gynecology was not his specialty, Mangola
conducted experiments on pregnant women. He had them infected with typhoid in order to determine whether or not the children would be born with the infection too. Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Terresenstat to Auschwitz. She said, I delivered a big, beautiful blonde girl, but Mengola ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, we can see how long a newborn baby can survive
without food. After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female check doctor gave elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's agony.
Yeah, I'm gonna go hug my baby real quick.
There's a lot of that. Some of the most unsettling stories about Mangola are the things that make it clear that like he's not this like unhinged, unchecked, like vehicle of maliciousness. Evil is for him, it's a technology, it's a tool. It's like picking up a screwdriver. Because there are stories where he will he will carefully and in an excellent advanced medical fashion, deliver a baby and then immediately send the mother and baby off to the gas chamber.
And it's yeah, so fucked up because it's like we'd like to imagine, especially someone is you know, twisted as this fucking guy, yeah, being Jigsaw. Yeah, but he's like
he's like if Jigsaw were fucking boring. He's like if Jigsaw were in you know, fucking marketing, if Jimsaw were a middle manager at a firm that reduced murdered people, right, and he is doing some bad stuff, but he's doing some bad stuff at like the administrative like like middle manager level, right, Like that's that is that is the thing kind of that he is doing, and often he is. He does kill people. He does do some of these, like Hill inject chloroform into people's hearts so that they
can be killed in autopsied. But a lot of the killing and a lot of the the butchery is just other doctors who are better that he has as slaves, that he makes them do the work for him, right, Like he's delegating a lot of this. And these doctors, by the way, like absolutely no mortal judgment on them. They are participating and helping him carry out fucked up experiments so that they can save as many people as possible right through the crack, and they are saving lives.
It's an incredibly it's literally the worst position a human being could be put in, Like they're doing this podcast.
Ye yeah, other than this podcast. So a lot of meek work at Auschwitz involved autopsying dozens of twin pairs of children who had been killed by the Nazis. Popular accounts, as we've talked about a little bit of Menglo's butchery, go whiter than this. You will find claims that he sewed sets of twins together as part of some mad experiment, and that he ejected colored dyes into their eyes to make them change colors. And this is where we get
to the stuff about Mangola that's not entirely accurate. Some of the more lurid experiments that he's accused of undertaking either didn't happen or just weren't as crazy as they sound. Mind you, all of this is bad science, but the work that Mengla did at Auschwitz was not considered unhinged or disconnected from the work of the broader German medical establishment.
Rather than being a mad scientist conducting horror at Auschwitz like some sort of demented musician, he was, as we've said, a mid level piece of an engine of scientific quackery that needed body parts and lots of them to further research into heredity. And we are going to talk about that and a lot more. But I feel like I feel like we've hit our limit for this episode of.
My limit for the next fifteen years. Yeah, this is too much for me.
I'm fine, Yeah, good, Well, for the next For the next time we have you on, Matt, we'll find some guy who, like I don't know, convinced people to drink horse piss so they'd grow muscles, that's my favorite. Yeah, we'll get one of those guys. Any do an.
Episode on mister hands on him?
Oh no, now that's a good one. Yeah. Back to Death by a Horse, that's Heroes of the Old Internet. Yes, no, this is so obviously I think we started by talking about this, but like people keep asking for Mangola over and over, like number one, as we've said, it's not responsible to just do Mangola because that's kind of falling into this great man of history. Like he was this one terrible guy who happened to get a job where
he could hurt people. No, no, no, he was part of a massive engine of man tyranny that was created by the Nazis as part of like their racial plans, and he was tied in directly to mainstream medical like the mainstream medical establishment of his time, and that's an important part of his story. But also, like this is just so much worse than most of our episodes. There's not like there's not like these you know moments where he does he's never silly, like, he's never ridiculous, he's
like it only makes him more evil. Yeah, no, he's he's a quiet, competent monster.
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's the worst kind of evil because you know, he's not even occasionally stepping on a rake and hidden his face.
You know, yeah, Donald Trump is evil, but you get those moments of beautiful comedy where he gets arrested or something.
Yes, yes, and and this guy is just yeah, he's the worst type of evil. He's the type of evil that makes me want to do my taxes. Yeah, yeah, that's really evil.
This this episode has been sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service the i r S. We don't seem so bad, now, do well?
Yes, the i r S. Who has you know at this point my endorsement. I'm a big fan of the way you make me think about other things. So pay your taxes on time. Yeah, I think you know, I think it's time to end those thirteen years of sobriety. I have guys, JK.
Yeah, I'm I'm I'm. I'm gonna just kind of sit and stare at the wall for several minutes.
M h.
I'm gonna hug my child, and I'm gonna remind you that if you like podcasts, I do the wire Rewatch podcasts. Pot yourself a gun, we do the Sopranos, And now we're doing the Wire. It's a lot of fun and it's a good time. Everyone have fun.
Yeah, listen to that. I'll be on your wire podcast.
Soon, Yes you will.
Yeah, we'll lighten the load a little bit.
Absolutely, and you know it's uh, it's got its depressing moments, but not so much. Yeah.
Man, none compared to this ship, all right.
The Zoomba.
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.