Part Two: Josef Mengele & The Nazi Doctors

so Matt, Sophie. I've been thinking about playing around with some of these these AIS that everybody's getting into, where you can like have them generate images and shit right where they Yeah, seems kind of cool, but I haven't done it yet because I can't get a specific prompt out of my head, which is a hybrid of of of Um of Epstein and Carle ray Jepson that's just called Carly ray Jepstein. I don't know why it won't leave my head. It's an intrusive thought. I can't get

rid of it. Um. But yeah, yeah, so I bet they could do a great job AI. You know, they make all sorts of combinations. I love it. You're a little imingle over call me maybe same song with Carly ray Jepstein, different different, different subtext. Um. Oh god, no, you're gonna get in trouble for that. We're bleeping that. Look, we will, we will do this. But I yeah, I did. I did have a little red Corvette parody I did

about Jeffrey Epstein that people did not appreciate. Matt. I'm just saying, you know, that was if it's parody song, I feel like parody. That's what I felt. But when I sang, well, they're all wrong, I'm not even gonna sing the second verse because please, we're bleeping, we're belief all of this. We're cutting a large Oh boy, that was a fun forty five seconds of material that would have ended both of our careers. I'm Matt, Yeah that was great. I'm trying to die so, you know, and me,

you and I both got the Oh wow. You stopped me from making my next joke, which was going to be to say that we both contracted the Epstein. Oh I get it, I get it. That's when you get drunk and make Jeffrey Epstein jokes that get you canceled. Get it, get it. That's not a bad one. Okay, Yeah I didn't hate it, But my god, we have to end in a lot. Out of this beginning we've been rec forty five years we have we have all forty five years have been cut. If you want to

hear the cut versions, go to the dot com. Oh yeah, the truths behind the Bastards. Yeah, this is where Matt matt Leeb and I matt Leeb and I have a weekly podcast where we do our b sides with Jordan Person. We drink a single pint of cider. We don't sleep for twenty seven days. It's a great time. So let's move on from the unpleasant story. You're making Epstein jokes and you're laughing about it. Look, we have to move on from the depressing tale of Jordan Peterson to talk

about a less sad individual, Joseph Mangola. Um oops. So in his early days at school, Mangola still leaned towards dentistry as a career due to the fact again his homeland had or his hometown had no dentists. But of course it's his conversation that he asked with his friend Julius Diisbach, who's a year older than him, who tells him dentistries too specialize. You should do a broader thing. You like anthropology. There's a degree program and anthropology and

genetics just do that. So he decides to take his friend's advice and kind of so some people will argue that Mangola was a narcissist. You know, I'm not a I can't diagnose anybody with anything. Um, it's certainly a thing that gets brought up by including by like professionals who go over his notes and stuff. Because he wrote a memoir and years later if TikTok has taught me anything, oh for sure, for sure he had that add he

actually is your keys. Yeah. So I don't really know how to finish that joke, mat But what I do know is that David Marwell will point out that, like there's evidence kind of in his later writings that he sort of mythologizes this conversation with his friend D's back where these backs like, hey, you know, maybe consider doing a broader thing, he writes. Quote, despite the circumstances a casual conversation, Mingola's choice was not superficial. Indeed, he claims

it awakened a passion in him. I had no idea then of the mini cited nature of medicine, but the kindled flame of enthusiasm would retain its warmth if not it's brilliant luminosity forever. How was it possible in so short a time to transform someone who was, one could almost say, resigned, to someone who was enchanted. Mingola answered his own question by suggesting that his friend had unlicked

to potential that was already present within him. Diesbach was a magician, filled with the beauty, grandeur, and high values of his science and art, who did not speak of the practical possibilities of medicine or the possibility for employment. Rather, he knew only, probably quite unconsciously, how to incite my scientific curiosity and how to translate it into enthusiasm for

such a versatile subject. He need it only to tell me which subjects I would need to take in the first semester, and my decision was unshakable, as if I had never even thought of another subject to study. Mangola elevated the intervention of his friend at just the right moment to mythic proportions, comparing the encounter to that if Athena visiting Odysseus in the form of a deer. The eerie fact that he never saw his friend again caused him to muse that perhaps it really had been Athena

in disguise. That dude definitely just said I gotta get the fuck away from Yeah, they're just like talk and Bappo's life. Maybe I should be a dentist. And he's like, I don't know, you seem more interfitt in anthropology. Are you a Greek god? Are you mad? Jake? You know what, man, I'm gonna go to another country. I feel like Germany is not in a good mark here. If you flame inside my soul, a flame that tells me to dude, so horrible jeans. I just imagine like Desbak becomes like

a like a pediatrician or something. He moves to Iowa, you know, nineteen forty five. He's like waking up in the morning, he puts on the radio, he's got a cup of coffee. Story about Mangela comes on. He's like, ah shit, oh boy, I can't tell anybody about this. Yeah, don't inspire. Never knew him, never knew him. No, no, no, no, my name is Disbach, not Desbak. Yeah sorry, no, no, no, you got the wrong guy. Wrong guy. I've never been

to Germany. Um So I don't know the message of this is, never inspire your friends if your if your friends say I want to be a dentist, say yeah, teeth fucking rule bro? Yeah whatever, Yeah, I am not getting involved. You never know where the branch. I don't know what the fuck you should do. Why are you talking to me? I'm not athen a fuck off? Yeah. Yeah. If a friend ever asked you what to do with their life, tell them I am not a god. I

don't know. World needs janitors. Many janitors have pretty much never done anything wrong. Do something simple and valuable. Yes, So. Mangelis first few years in school were characterized by a growing obsession with genetics and evolution. The men who tutored him, first in Munich and then in Frankfurt were adherents of a school of evolutionary theory that believed modern society and social justice movements had corrupted the purity of Darwinian evolution.

There's a big attitude among the Nazis, very similar wording to what the right use of today. That social justice, which they called it, was a Jewish invention, right, and it was specifically it was part of an insidious Jewish plot, because if you believe all the shit about race science, then doing stuff like feeding the starving like putting vagrants

in housing. You're doing that to weaken the bloodline of the Germans by allowing those people to persist in breed, and so it's an attempt to betray Germany for the next war. If you've wondered, why are the social justice stuff on the right, like where a lot of that comes from. That's a big part of it. Yeah, yeah, you scratch it a little bit, and then all of a sudden you get into like Judeoe Bolshevism or some weird shit cultural Marxism, and then there's like, for some reason,

a star of David. You're like, oh, okay. So one of Joseph's first mentors was doctor Ernst Rudin, who was a prominent backer of the idea that doctors should proactively destroy what he called life devoid of value. This would evolve into the Nazi concept of life unworthy of life, which is kind of the most direct translation of how Germans talked about the Nazis talked about this in German.

Rudin would go on to author the first Nazi compulsory sterilization laws, which were instituted in July of nineteen thirty three. This is seven months after the Enabling Act. I think or seven months after Hitler rises to power. Thing, it's a little less than that after the Enabling Act, but that should the fact that this happens so quickly, this is almost the first thing the Nazis do, should give you any idea of the centrality the Nazis placed on

this idea. The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health provided the first list of conditions that qualified one from mandatory sterilization. Schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, deafness, Huntington's disease, all physical deformities, and what was called feeble mindedness, alcoholism, drug addiction. These are all believed to be hereditary and thus problems that could only be stopped by excising them from the human genome. The fact that alcoholism is on

there is funny. If you've ever liked spent thirty five seconds in Berlin a single, you can buy a leader of beer for two dollars and drink it on a train. Like clarifying question, what do you consider alcoholism? You just just want to know how many beers were talking about? Yeah, I mean, I agree, very degenerate. Anyone having more than sixteen to twenty beers a day. You know. Goodles have to die, you know, so, yeah, that's some good. It's always fun to do jokes like that with the Germans

because you know, they gave up the right to be office. Absolutely. Yeah, it's like I don't know Texans. So casual observers of the Nazi regime often accused Hitler of being obsessed with racial purity and believing that Germans were Aryan superman. Now it's usually not worth like just correcting people, but that is fundamentally wrong. That is not what Hitler believed. He

did not believe the Germans were Aryan superman. Instead, he believed in the perfectability of Aryan descended people like the Germans through careful scientific guidance. And that is different. He's not saying we are superman. He is saying, using science and breeding, we can become superman by excising these these like degenerate influences from our bloodline and encouraging people who are more pure to breed together. Right, That is a

that is a different thing. Yeah, he was doing a manifestation, you know, he's doing wellness basically, Well, I think I think the reason it is worth kind of pointing out why the more common belief is wrong is because the common belief is just racism, just like, hey, we're better than everybody, which is less unsettling and less toxic than what the Nazis believed, which is we can make people like. A lot of the Holocaust comes because we are attempting

to make people better, right, that is what Mingle. The people he kills will die in service of this goal, so it is important to get that right. Obviously. Hitler is a massive advocate and supporter of the German medical establishment that was the most important part of the German state to him, and one of his first speeches is Fearer. Hitler addressed the National Socialist German Physicians League or in

s DAB. He told them that lawyers and engineers and architects were all replaceable in his vision of the future. None of those career paths were crucial to Nazism succeeding, but National Socialist doctors were utterly necessary. He told them, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single if not for you, if you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles

if the health of our people is in danger. Key to this idea is the concept that doctors should not be concerned primarily with the health of the individual, for this is secondary to the health of the Volk or people. This means that a Nazi doctor is not violating his Hippocratic oath if he sterilizes or kills people as long as those people are threats to the well being of the people's racial community. Right fun, Yeah, that is why.

That is how they justify I'm not saying they're not, obviously they are in fact violating the hypocritic, but this is how they see it. Right and early Nsdab Guideline stated, from the first day, we have made it clear that the major turnabout in the world view of our days, an essential portion of which is vanquishing the individual through experiencing the people, must be the guiding principle of the morality and ethics of the medical profession. That is a

crucial phrase. Vanquishing the individual through experiencing the people. That's the holocaust. That is the holocaust in a nutshell, Young Joseph would spend the best days of his career vanquishing individuals in order to support the Volk. He was not an immediately committed Nazi, though for in those last days of Weimar, the German nationalist right was large enough to fill several movements that did not all see eye to eye.

Rather than joining the Nazis early on in March of nineteen thirty one, he joined the youth wing of the Stahalhelm, an ex soldier organization who marched in uniform. And we're kind of like a more organized ver you know, like the Oathkeepers. How they're mostly like silly bastards. This is the Oathkeepers. If they had all spent like four years drowning in the blood of their best friends in the trash exactly, just yeah, watching all of their homies get

sucked into yeah mud bogs and sucking in mustard gas. Yeah, if the oath Keepers had been at J six, they would not have been turned away by Mason tier Gas exactly. Or yeah, if the Stallhelm sorry had been at J six, not the Oathkeepers. They're a bunch of seditious babies. Not to praise them. These guys are far right. Their assholes, They massacre Communists in the street. They're horrible people. They're

just frightening. So as he progresses through his studies in the nineteen thirties, he comes to conceive of himself as a biological soldier for the health of the Volk, which is actually a direct quote from the Reich Health Office president Hans Writer, who added that the destiny of the German Volk rests entirely in the hands of the German physician. Mangolist professors were not all committed Nazis, of course, nor was all of this genetic science that he studied based

on pseudoscientific principles. One of his teachers was Carl von Frisch, a zoologist who authored pioneering studies of honeybees and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in nineteen seventy three. It's Frisch who mangel A credits with sparking his lifelong fascination with zoology. Quote in such a lasting way that I have kept this fire my entire life and have all too often been warmed by it. Frisch would come into contact and again fritch is one of the guys who

inspires Mangola to go down this path. He is not a Nazi. He actually gets in trouble with the Nazis a number of times because he insists on employing Jewish assistance after they come to power, many of whom are women. He employs a lot of Jewish female scientists during the Third Reich, and he almost gets like like he gets fired, but he gets brought back because he's just such a good scientist. But he actually protects a lot of Jewish

people by basically sheltering them through his fame. Another scientist who teaches Mangola and is this kind of guy, is Otto Violent. Violent is a chemistry professor. Mangel actually does not like Violent. He thinks he's brilliant, but he's a bad teacher because he's just more interested in his research. Violind actually wins a Nobel Prize. He's a very very good scientist, and during the Nazi regime, Violent also shields Jewish students using his notoriety to protect them from the Holocaust.

And that's part of the complexity of this is that these guys are not hardcore ray scientists. Obviously, they're just geneticists. They're doing that kind of science. But it all gets lumped intogether. So a number of the people that Mangela admires are folks who will risk their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust. M just again you know, complicated.

M Yeah, you know, yeah, it's uh, it's sounds like the recurring theme is just like you know, you're taking just you're picking and choosing a little bit of facts from each you know, exactly exactly each study to try

to bolster your weird race science thing. So yeah, where as opposed to like Fritsch and Violin, who are very focused have like really are have become incredible experts on a specific thing from deep deep rigor, he's just kind of picking a la carte shit and ignoring the whole I'm gonna shield a bunch of Jews during the Holocaust because it's fucked up stuff that they do. See this one. You should be a dentist. Yes, it's a specialty, but you know what, you won't be a Nazi. Yeah maybe,

I don't know. There were a lot of not one of the guys he works with that Auschwitz isn't acted dentist. St Yeah. Um. Anyway, Mangola imbibed the scientific lessons of these men, but obviously not their morality. Unfortunately, this was also the case for the teacher he respected most as an undergraduate, Siegfried Moliere, the director of the Munich University Anatomical Institute. I'm going to quote from David Marwell's book.

Mangola here, Molier or Malier whatever, counseled his students that a good physician must conceive of body and soul as a unity. He spoke of the majesty of death that they would encounter in their work. Later, when Mollier instructed them in the in the Anatomy Lab, Mangola wrote that the great teacher wanted them to have a deep, even

intuitive understanding of anatomy, and not just memorized terms. He definitely demonstrated what was visible through dissection, the functional relationship and the structural efficiency of the components of the human body. Mangola was particularly moved by Mollier's introduction to the dissection labs my entire life, even in the most difficult situations. I can hear his solo words from that time when he spoke of the rights of the dead, that we

should always approach the dead with dignity and gravity. Yeah, as long as they're dead. M Yeah, I mean he doesn't really do that. It's one of those It's weird how much he idolizes this guy, because that is I would argue not how he treats the dead, although he I will explain his argument a little more later when we get to that portion of it. So, during his first years in college, Joseph still suffered from the after

effects of blood poisoning that had darkened his adolescence. The future arbiter of racial health was not well enough to walk the distance between his various classes, so his parents bought him a car. This proved to be the saving grace of his social life. Having a car made it easier to make friends, or at least to hang around with other young people who needed a ride. He's exact type of guy. He's the car guy. Yeah, he's the car guys school, who's like, he's really intense, he writes

a lot of poetry. He's kind of fucking weirdo. But yeah, we're all going to the beach. We gotta get yeah fucking Joey m Yeah. I mean my version of that was the car guy who was ten years older than us and would buy us beer. But yeah, same kind

of guy. Really, I'm sure maybe he's a Nazi now. So. In his memoirs, Mengela remembered this period as a lonely One quote It is precisely this feeling of being alone, the lack of an intimate connection to family, the lack of a true friendship, that I felt so bitterly in the first few semesters. He notes that he engaged in superficial pleasure seeking, using his access to money to engage in the trappings of a social life while living a

shallow existence. Mengela claimed that during his early college years he did not seek an honest friendship. He claimed, failing to overcome his isolation disguised this inner and ability in an easily misinterpreted preservation of the remoteness of cool impersonality and unsocial arrogance, which may have had the effect of discouraging all who otherwise came to me in friendship and affection. In other words, he can't let anybody in, so he pretends that he's better than everyone else so that he

doesn't have to actually get to know anybody and accept vulnerability. Um, yeah, I mean, normal adolescent you know struggles, Yeah, safe for the whole you know, the race science stuff aside from the race science, yeah, pretty pretty understandable. So I mean, at this point in his life, you could write a nice little coming of age novel. Sure if the end yeah, it's different. Yeah, I'm actually working on a series of Nazi coming of age novels. Um. Oh yeah, no, it's

gonna be gonna be good. Um, gonna be yeah, exactly. That's what we don't have enough of. Why why a Nazi books? Yeah, yeah it is. There's a there's a series of detective books that I read from time to time, the Bernie Gunther books, which are like about a detective who is not a Nazi but is first in the Weimar State and that is in the Nazi state, and because he's such a good detective, he gets like brought in by Nazis when there's these murder mysteries or assassinations

of Natzi, he's like forced into the SS. It's really there's there's some good books. There's some weird stuff in a couple of them. Um yeah, like it's it's firmly anti Nazi. He portrays them all as monsters, but he has to do it. There's some sweatiness to explain how are you in the SS and like not part of war craft. It's it's weird some, but there's a pretty good books about anything fiction. You can go in any world you want and instead you want to make something.

I don't know, guys, it's hard to explain. So the books, the earlier books in the series, where he's like a detective in Weimar, Berlin during the fighting between Nazis and Communists, there's some really cool stuff there because he knows his stuff about the historical period. Some of the later stuff gets a little weirder, but you know, if you're looking for a fucking Nazi themed detective novel, there you go.

So starting in nineteen thirty four, Mangela began taking pediatric medicine courses with the whimsically named doctor Franz Hamburger, a proponent of right wing Vulkish medicine who joined the Nazi Party that same year. His clinic advocated for euthanasia and regularly sent disabled children to a year by hotspital, where hundreds of them were murdered by the state, like Gurger doing war crimes. And I'm just like all I can pictures Mayor meet Cheese. Yeah, it's really well, you know.

Mayor mccheese was actually had some strong opinions on racial hygiene, which is a big part of why all of his patties are one hundred percent beef. But anyway, Um, it was his work for Doctor Hamburger that would get Mangela his first kind of experience with twin studies, which is going to become he's going to like become a lifelong sort of he's going to develop a lifelong fascination for twins. And we're going to talk about why in a scientific sense that was the case. But first, Matt, you want

to talk about some products, some services. I love products, I love services. I love being told what to buy and want to do it. You know, we are often told by our marketing department that there's nothing advertisers like more than being led into an ad by talking about Joseph Mangela's twin studies. Um, that really, that really moves the subscription boxes. Yeah. I mean, you know, people here twins and they're not immediately horned up. Yeah, man doing it.

Speaking of twins. We got a two for the price of one deal. We'll probably bleep some of that. Ah, here's some ads. Oh we're back, so then and now then being Nazi times, twin studies are considered incredibly useful for studying the difference between, for example, nature and nurture. On health outcomes. Right, there's two kinds of twins. There's

identical twins and fraternal twins. Identical twins come from the same you know, baby goo things zygote or whatever, um, and thus differences because they you know, are genetically identical, the differences between them can be kind of attributed. It's either going to be an environmental or a social factor. Right, when you have a health who you are? I didn't know that. Yeah, I have a twin sister, and that's the other kind. Um, So you're not as useful to

Joseph Mangle. He's still useless. He still would have been interested in you guys, don't don't don't get me wrong, Yeah he would, but he would have found a different reason maybe yeah, yeah, well yeah, I mean they use both kind of twins. So twins are useful for studying hereditary illnesses right, for among other things. Mangel's first attempt to study twins involved the daughters of a colleague and

ended an awkward failure. He like comes over to her house and he's like, hey, can I talk to your daughters? And she's like, what do you want to talk to him about? Oh? You know, twins, stuff, sign stuff, and they're like, they're like weirded out by him. They don't agree to work with him. Good good parent in call not letting Joseph Mangel and are your twins Nazi? But I'm not a fucking weirdot. Get the hell out of here, Joey.

And the fact that he does this so awkwardly is kind of evidence of the fact that while twin studies are incredibly valuable, scientists who are in this field are always looking for groups of twins that they can carry out studies on. It's like number one, it's always hard to get parents to agree for that. There's a limit to the kind of studies you can do when you consider them human beings. And there's not that many twins,

so that's a problem for guys like Joseph. It's not always going to be a problem for guys like Joseph, but it's it's a problem for him at this point. On April fifth, nineteen thirty three, Hitler announced that German doctors needed to move with all energy towards solving the race question. The center of this scientific effort was again based around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics,

and eugenics. In nineteen thirty four, another bout of ill health forced Mangela to quit the Staalhelm, which by then had been absorbed into the Nazi brown Shirts. He had not yet joined the party officially. He decided his physical weakness meant he needed to dedicate his energy towards his studies, and so he did. As Gerald Posner writes, the man who gave Mangela his first real leg up on the

academic ladder was Professor T. Mollinson of Munich University. His experience in the field of heredity and racial hygiene led Mollinson to claim that he could tell if a person had Jewish forebears simply by looking at a photograph. In nineteen thirty five, Mollinson awarded Mangola a PhD for his thesis entitled Racial Morphological Research on the lower jaw section of four racial groups entitled Oh just look at him?

Yeah just ladies, guys, Yeah, yeah, now always tell Posner will will argue that, like, uh, Mangels Report number one. He's like, Mallinson is pretty unscientific, and a lot of his claims. Mangels Report is very scientific, it's well argued, it's not explicitly racist. Like he's not dropping a bunch of slurs. He's being like, look, you know, we have all these job bones from people from this part of the world, and they have this in whatever. That's how

Posner describes the study. Mollison himself was more critical of of mangelis study, calling his work clumsy, although acknowledging it fulfilled his its requirements. So, like his thesis advisor is like, it's not great, but I guess you get a PhD. Anyway, you didn't fail, so here you yeah, now, yeah, given the fact that, like the guy who judged his work as clumsy was like, the hey, it looks like a jude to me. Dude, I don't know if you want to like take that as an actual criticism that said,

so that we can actually criticize this. In two thousand and eight, a group of modern geneticists analyzed mangels thesis, and they pointed out that he makes a lot of very basic statistical errors and failures of analysis, and most kind of the biggest thing to critique about this is that his obsession with the concept of race has no grounding and objective science, so like there's there's not really a center of hard science to what he's doing here,

mangel Is in person questioning went better. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree summa cum laude after being drilled by a board of judges or whatever in November of nineteen thirty five. Now this is the point at which things started to look up for the new doctor. His health took a turn for the better as he opted for the time honored strategy of just forcing himself

to sprint until he paid blood. Um, this actually worked somehow, So I don't know, like, yeah, no, menimal science is weird that way, where it's just like, you know, yeah, people would do the leeches and stuff, and then sometimes they be cured and you'd be like, I guess, look, I won't agree with Joseph Minglaw on anything, but this sprint until you piss blood. That's my that's my medical advice for all of our listeners. Yeah um yeah, yeah good,

that's my pilates. We actually sell a line of running shorts that just have a red line right down the middle so that no one will no one will notice you just be like, no, these are just my running storts. It's a racing stripe behind. Yeah good, stuff. So Joseph's first paid medical job was at the University of Leipzig Medical Clinic. He passed his state medical exam in the summer of thirty six and he worked there for four months as a junior doctor. This was a requirement for

his degree. You know, it's kind of the first step of becoming an mds. You have to spend some time at a hospital. He hates this. Working with live of human patience is not his strong suit. He finds the work kind of degrading. The only benefit, as far as Joseph saw it, was that he met a young woman named Irene Shoneban, the daughter of a professor, who he

falls in love with. Now Irene is nineteen and Joseph is twenty five, and shortly after they fall for each other, Joseph receives the first big break of his career, an appointment to work at the new right third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity in Frankfurt under the prominent Nazi doctor Otmar von Verschure. Yeah yeah, it's a normal, fun name to have certain Yeah yeah, not a sketchy ass Nazi name. Now and Atmar, he had worked at

the Kaiser Weelham Institute. We talked about him last episode. He's the guy who's really interested in twins. And I'm going to quote now from the book Racial Hygiene Medicine under the Nazis. In the Third Reich, twin studies were lavishly funded as part of an effort to prove that heredity was the key to many human talents and imperfections. Twin studies purportedly demonstrated the heredibility of everything from epilepsy, criminality, memory,

and hernias to tuberculosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and divorce. In nineteen thirty three, Ottmar Freiher von Verschure published a book purporting to provide exact ratios of relative influence of heredity and environment in a wide range of bodily traits. He derived his data from the study of several thousand identical and non identical twins. Verschure's studies were followed by hundreds of others.

By nineteen thirty six, Ottoreesh's Institute for the Study of Racian Vulkul examine at twelve hundred and fifty pairs of twins, recording forty two separate physical or physiognomic traits for each pair. Eugene Fisher called twin studies the single most important research tool in the field of racial hygiene. Verschure called twin research the sovereign method for genetic research and humans. Rachel hygienists were able to convince Nazi authorities that twin studies

warranted substantial government support. In nineteen thirty nine, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick ordered the registration of all twins, triplets or quadruplets born in the Reich for the express purpose of research to isolect the effects of nature and nurture. I'm sorry, this just all of this sounds incredibly horny to me. Just the constant, like fucking focus on twins and identical twins. Just I don't know why. In my head this is

just very horny, pilled. Yeah, it's also weird that you're like registering your twins, Like you give birth to twins and the doctor comes out, you've got a license for those twins. Yeah, I need to put them in this database of twins. No reason, no reason, It's fine. Yeah. So, while Mollison had viewed Mangola as a mediocre student, Von Verschure treats him like a protege. Now Von Verschure is also a devoted Nazi. He credited Hitler as being the

first statesman to recognize hereditary biology and race hygiene. Von Verschure didn't just consider himself in his institute to be organs of science. Though they were part of the National defense apparatus, He defined their role as caring for German genes to provide such a strong basis that it will withstand any attacks from outside. Now that Mangola was working at the heart of Nazi race science, joining the party had become compulsory. He saw it as a moral necessity.

The problem was that after nineteen thirty three, the Nazis had closed party membership, worried their assent to power would draw on a bunch of Johnny come Lately fascists who wanted social benefits of being in the party but weren't committed. Now there were ways around the block, and Mangoli's prior membership in the Staalhelm ensured him special consideration. He was approved in nineteen thirty eight and became party member number five five seven four nine seven four. So that's good,

that's not a bad number. Yeah, that's you know, yea not an early adopter, but you know, he got there. He got there. So his first duty for the fascist state was helping the new judicial system determine who was and who was not a Jew cohabitating with an area and spouse. It's illegal to be in an inner, you know, race marriage, as the Nazis considerate. So you have a bunch of cases where people will say like, I'm not

Jewish or whatever. Um, so it's cool for me to stay married, and you have to determine whether or not they meet the legal definition of a Jew under the Nuremberg race laws. Yeah, it's super fun. Yeah. So they're known as me having dinner with my Jewish side of the family and I'm just being like, well, you're not really Jewish shure. Yeah. So it's a long line, yeah, long line of that. So in the Nazi version of this, you can't just like, it's not as clear as just

like looking at the law. To determine whether or not someone counts as Jewish in this, you have to have like was probably like, come on, I just looked at him. I can tell no, I mean that is actually me, Matt, you joke. That is actually the standard is having a doc be like yeah, it looks like a Jew to may So most of the it's one of those things where like this guy von Brochure. One of the things he does is he's helping the courts determine who isn't

isn't Jewish. He has a bunch of his assistants helping. Most of them are just like Mollissa, and they're like, yeah, it looks like a Jew to may or Nah, that guy doesn't. In the jew Mangola is develops a reputation for being obsessive about this where he's doing all the genealogy. He's like spending hours looking at pictures of their jaws from different angles. And it's actually as a result of

this his judgments are often beneficial to the person being tried. Overall, he found that they were not a full Jew two thirds of the time. This is not due to a lack of racism, but more to the fact that he was weirdly obsessed with jaws. There was one odd case in July of nineteen thirty seven that biographers were all will often bring up, when Mangola was asked to analyze a man with an Aryan mother and a legally Jewish father who claimed that his real dad had in an

Aryan and had had an affair with his mother. So this guy, on paper his dad is Jewish, but he's like, no, it's not my real dad. My mom was sleeping around, so it's cool for me to be married. So this

is kind of a thorny case. And Mangola decided that the man was a full Jew, but the court disagreed because they were like, well, based on just like the report you wrote, you say, there's actually a pretty good chance that this guy's claims you're true, and if that's the case, we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt, which points to kind of the fact that these Nazi race courts are a lot more inconsistent and messy than you might think, right, because this hierarchy they're

trying to develop is not based on rigorous silence, right, it's all weirdos speculating about jaws and ears and shit. I'm gonna quote though from Mangola, people doing the look at him test and then yeah, look at him arguing amongst each other. That's gonna be a fucking annoying, boring life to just be the person who's just like trying to you know, like always over the dinner table. You're

just arguing with people over pictures of various possible Jews. No, he has a Bohemian elope, Yeah, a Roman nose, God damage, he's a Laplander. Can't you tell a good old timey racism? So he did. Yeah, I'm gonna quote now from Mangola unmasking the Angel of Death. Mangola's examination included, where possible, a comparison of twelve different areas, including blood type, in factors,

eyes and eyebrows, as well as finger and footprints. He determined that there was nothing to rule out the paternity of Alexander's legal father, that some areas of similarity made the paternity probable, and that there was no pronounced similarity between the photograph of the alleged biological father and the son.

So it's a it's a peculiar situation to try and analyze the decisions of a Nazi court wherein both sides are Nazis, but one side saying, nah, this guy's not a Jew, he could stay married, and Mangola saying, oh, he's definitely a Jew. He should, you know, be arrested. I don't know, I don't know what father this guy is, just like everyone agrees, I'm a cuck. At least that's fun.

So this guy, Vershure. When the court rules against Mangela, Vershure is angry, saying that their decision undermined the Nuremberg Laws by turning a Jew into a half Jew. David Marwell continues. Doctor Walter Gross of the Racial Policy Office of the Nazi Party responded to Vershure by criticizing Mangola for the lack of clear and precise information and his racial determination, and for his fickle testimony at trial. He concluded, I do not think that the court would have ignored

a totally clear position of the assistant Mangola. Mangela must have learned from his mistake. Wiss noted, since she was unable to find any other instances where the court questioned a racial certificate that he issued. So you know he learns from this. That's good, little hero's journey there for our race scientist friend, Joseph Mangla. That's good. That's good. An't that good? Yeah? That's nice? You know what else is nice? Matt? What what's nice? Great? Mmmm? Products and services?

That's right? You know. While Nazi race science was often arbitrary and a scientific the science that our advertisers used to target you with. The perfect ad is flawless. So don't question it, don't ask anything, don't think. Just give them, give them your money. You know. Uh, we're all back, We're all feeling good. So the inconsistency and arbitrariness of most Nazi racial designations came with some minor consequences from

Mangela himself. As he'd risen to work at von Verschuer's side, he'd made the decision to join the SS while he should. Stoffle had started as a simple bodyguard unit for Hitler back in the old street fighting days under Heinrich Himler's leadership, at it to grow into a state within a state dedicated to cultivating and breeding a Nazi racial elite. As such, it was a natural place for an ambitious young race

scientist like Mingle It to join. Doctors actually joined the SS in greater numbers than members of any other vocation. Did you know that? I did not know that, But that makes a lot of sense and makes me sad and angry. Do you want to know how I hate doctors? Do you want to guess how much more likely doctors were to be in the SS than normal employed German males. I couldn't possibly know the answer to that. It is

seven times seven times likelier than any Yeah. So an underdiscuss story from Nazi Germany is that not only did doctors love the SS, Germany has at the time the Nazis come to power the most advanced and progressive medical system in the world. Fully half of all doctors in Germany joined the Nazi Party. Physicians joined the Nazi Party at a rate higher than members of any other profession. By comparison, only about twenty percent German teachers joined the party. Um,

doctors in Germany cannot get enough of the Nazis. Uh. You know what? Hitler actually was kind of the original podcaster or matt the Adolf Hitler experience talking about mushrooms are good. He was the first politician in at least in Europe to really make great use of the radio and of microphones. Can you pull up that clip? Yeah, Hitler and his buddy that the fucking Brazilian jiu jitsu expert talking about vaccines. Good stuff. So Michael CHIPS's Everybody

God podcast, Hitler actually makes a ton of sense sense. Yeah, No, that that is absolutely what he would have been doing today. Um, that's not even a question in my mind. He's brought you by me. Undy's well the only like a specific kind for a best erries berries. Get yourself a bouquet of white chocolate berries. They are very happy today to be hosting some ads from ze Washington State Hya Patrol. Not quite the organization I've handsome to be yet, but soon,

very soon. So one of the few things that separated Mangala from his fellow as sas men was that, so in the SS, when you join, you have to have your blood group tattooed on your arm. Right, Sorry, is this American Reich? Look yeah, my whole face is purple. Yeah. Look, I love Dan Carlin, but I'm fighting to stop myself from doing a meme worth the two hands meeting in the middle, and it's like Hitler and Dan Carmen sixteen hour podcasts on World War One. Very different sixteen hour

podcast let's be clear, extremely different, extremely different. You're not at all coming from the same place, but no, no, but similar in length probably, Yeah. Yeah. So one of the few things that's again, so in the SS, you got to get this blood group tattoo on your arm. It's like it's actually after the war. One of the things that makes it easy to tell who's been in the SS because a lot of them like put on normal army uniforms to try to escape. Mangela does not

get this tattoo. Um, and it's his ex wife. Would leader say it's because he had a habit, his like hobby was staring at his shirtless body in the mirror, Like after he gets healthy and starts to bulk up, he just like looking at himself naked and he can't stand the thought of marring his skin with a tattoo. That is absolutely the most like just default Nazi setting is just looking in the mirror and going on, I'm so fucking strong. It's just you know, see Andrew Tate, Yeah, exactly,

very very taty. So joining Himmler's racial elite came with extra hoops to jump through if you wanted to do something like getting married. For one thing, his fiance Irene had to pass a series of tests to become the wife of an SS man. Now I know what you're all wondering, Could I be an SS wife? You know, ladies, ladies at home, if you want to know, do you have what it takes to marry an SS man. That's

what we're talking about right now. So you show on Bravo the Real Housewives of the Yeah oh boy, that is a fucking so. The first thing she hasked to do she had to get two recommendations from men who knew her, and both of those men had to fill out questionnaires to prove that she had what it took to be an SS wife. She was rated by them as being very reliable, very fond of children, com radley, and not domineering and efficient. Irene also had to undergo

a body type analysis. I'm gonna yeah, boy OUTI here's ears Marwell again. One section of the form called for an inventory of ten physical characteristics with a list of associated values in descending order of desirability. For instance, for body type, the physician could choose muscular, athletic, plump, slim, or puny, with the first clearly being the most positive. For eye color, the following choices were available blue, gray, greenish,

light brown, and dark brown. These physical attributes, thought to be expressions of the racial mixture that the person represented, were observed and noted. In Irene's case, doctor Shorzweller awarded her nine out of ten of the attributes with the highest value, and only one hair form as the second highest sleek, which was one step stepped down from straight, but better than wavy, curly or crinkly. I love that. It's like there's you're almost perfect. There's a little jew

in your hair. Yeah, I'm gonna have to dark you a little bit for the jew and that hairs. Yeah, but don't we have a straight iron cross that we will use to straighten that little jew out. Let's get the kinks out, so to speak. So the combination of these features led Swartzweller to conclude that Irene was primarily of the Nordic race, with some Dinaric influences. She was found to be an excellent health and perhaps of key significance, likely to be able to bear children. Noting her wide pelvis,

you have white pelvis. You have a very nice feat. They relate little Binaric. But you know that's that's a race for Nazis. No, don't worry about that, as we know about that. Honestly, Irene, I have a searching for a term, but then I pulled up my Nazi thesaurus, and so of categorizations we've done here. Wow, we've want words. So even with even all of this was not enough for the SS. Irene also needed to prove that she was racially pure, free of any Jewish influence for the

sake of SS paperwork. This meant providing information about her family line that dated back to the Peace piece of Westphalia in sixteen forty eight. This was the end of the Thirty Years War, which killed millions of German people and set in motion kind of want like one of the more direct things that set in motion the series of events that leads to the creation of the German States.

So that's why they pick it. The problem for Irene came with the fact that in eighteen eighty six, her grandfather had been born out of wedlock and his father his father could not be verified. Now there was no evidence of direct taint, so Irene was approved to Mary Mangola, but because her ancestry could not be sufficiently confirmed, she and Joseph were unable to add their names to the Sippin book. Dare ss Honestly, that's unfair. I know it's fucked.

I gonna go out and say big yikes to that. Yeah, so a Sippin' book if you guys aren't, aren't like me and Matt because we're big sippin book guys. Yeah, it's a book, a genealogical clan book that lists your ancestry. Every SS member was supposed to carry one, but there's a grand Sippin' book for the entire organization that lists all of the family lines. Because Himler was kind of

planning on breeding a new nightly nobility more or less. Um. Yeah, So this is like the highest honor in the SS, and Mengola just doesn't quite meet the bar um, which is sad, sad, honestly, it's just it's one of the bigger, bigger tragedies of the era. Oh for sure. Absolutely. So the good news is that Mangola had little time to dwell on this because the nineteen thirties were coming to

an end. In events in the whider world. We're about to turn him from a simple, bigoted piece of shit into one of the greatest mass killers in medical history. Yeah all right, so you're telling me this podcast is gonna get worse. Oh yeah, Oh, it's about to get a lot worse. So July of Nining is people to die. I'm sorry, I know, no more Jarjar. I just I know that the jar jar is coming to an end. Sure, I'm trying to get Wow, there's gotta be like us.

I mean, it's probably pornographic, but there's gotta be jar jar ss like art out there, dev and art account out there. Yeah, I don't know why people are man at me. Yeah. And it's both horny but also shows like an unsettling degree of understanding of like minutia of SS daily life. They've got their little sipping books on jar Jar's got his blood group tattooed on a fucking bicep. So In July of nineteen thirty eight, Frankfurt University awards

mangle A a full medical degree. He was now a licensed MD as well as a PhD. He had a promising career ahead of him in the field of being a racist with a lab coat, but his ambition would not let him simply continue to work as a research scientist while his nation went to war. So he decided to join the Waffen or Weapons SS. Now this is the because the SS is a bunch of things, right, But the Waffen SS is like the SS that also

fights alongside the Wehrmacht. Right there, they're a military organization. This would become one of the war crimest units of the war crimest army ever to war crime, and Mengelo was dedicated to being a part of it. At the end of nineteen thirty eight, he did three months of basic training with the Wehrmacht to prepare himself for the riggers ahead. He's spent about a year or so serving

as basically a National guardsman. And while he's kind of doing this, he's continuing to work with Van Verschure on publishing studies about ear lobe differences between the races and the like. Just before the invasion of Poland, he wrote a review for a book on detecting congenital heart defects. In this review he lamented quote unfortunately the author did not use subjects where the diagnosis could be verified by

an autopsy. He's been a lot of time talking about how unfortunate is there weren't enough corpses to study to like fully prove this guy's claims about congenital heart defects and alas, he was about to have all of the autopsy subjects he could ever want, but that it's going to be. In Part three, Oh Boy, Part three. Yeah, then just two more after this. Yeah, we're good. Oh you know, it's just a breezy five hours. Yeah, you know this is We're not that different from Dan Carlin podcast.

Here are we? We're getting increasingly similar. Um hey, you know what, I'm gonna be honest, Hitler probably would have done a behind the bastard style podcast with a very different definition of bastards. Yeah. Well yeah, Kissinger still would have been there, but for different reasons. They'll come back to my six pots series on this jew who was winning the train with me and took a chair that I wanted to sit in. This next series is all about different arts teachers who said I was made. Yeah,

it turns out they're made. For the next four weeks, me and my guest Joe Rogan are going to talk about Zivian Academy of Fine Arts. Chapter three. This next one is a short story from New Yorker. Now, look, it's a little horny, so Hitler. It's about and other fetish women being stuck in zidryam. Oh boy, Matt what Matt Matt Matt Man, Matt Matt What was the what was the what was the first baffling Internet fetish pornography. You ever learned about quicksand porn? Oh yeah, that's a

good one. Yeah yeah. I discovered that accidentally on YouTube. I don't know how how I got there, but it was just a video of a lady slowly sinking. Hell yeah. And I was like, this is so weird. And then after a while I was like, oh no, I'm horny and uh so you know I'm in therapy. Now that's good. That's good for me. About the quick stamp art is there's not you know, there doesn't even need to be titties.

It's just the sinking. Yeah, yeah it is. It is something else, um there is For me, it was there's actually a similarity here. It was Roy Orbison clean rap fetish point. It was like fetish stories about Roy Orbison to your careers, because I think you can still find the Roy Orbison clean rap fetish pornography online people, It's not it's not Nazi sofie soly Roy Orberson. I never

got a good answer on that one. Can't you just be cling wrapped and be any uh yeah yeah, don't yuck their yum Matt, you know that's I would never yuck a yum. Look, some people you know, sometimes you feel like masturbating too orbits and wrapped in claim rap, and sometimes you don't. I have so many plugibles. Check out this American right coming to you. Listen to my TV rewatch podcast, pot yourself a gun. We did The Sopranos and now we are just ending season two of

The Wire. Uh and it is a lot of fun, a lot great guests and uh, you know, even if you haven't seen the show, it's fun. But mostly give us five stars in review and say something about jar Jar the Wire. Hitler would not have liked it. No, you would not have m h ah. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.