| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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euphemism Endlösung, or Final Solution, for
mass murder. Dr. Magda V. was struck by Dorf’s similarity to Nazi doctors:
“He wasn't a monster — … none of them [the Nazi doctors] were,
you know” — but merely a fallible and corruptible human being.
Mengele was closest, but, she concluded, “I think they [Nazi doctors] were
all Dorfs.”
Recognizing Mengele and other Nazi doctors in this
believable fictional character also helped the metamorphosis from deity to
human; Mengele could have been seen as a man with talent for maneuver whose
ambition. had been fiercely aroused, and who sanitized the killing project he
so effectively served.
The revelations that emerged in 1985, at the
time of the discovery of his corpse, concerning Mengele’s postwar life in
Europe and especially South America change little in this evaluation.60
From the son who was born when Mengele worked in Auschwitz, and a few people
who lent him support or shelter, we gain a sense of a man increasingly on the
run: at first, effectively manipulative and successful in avoiding pursuit but,
over the years, more and more alone, despairing, frightened, fearful of being
hunted by “the Jews,” at times even suicidal. He no longer had his
Auschwitz stage. Rather than absolute control over others, he had virtually no
control over his own destiny. Not surprisingly, he remained a fanatical
ideologue; but as his diaries lapsed into rantings about science and religion,
he became increasingly an ideological caricature of a caricature. Yet he had
been capable of affection: toward his son, who at the age of twelve encountered
him briefly as the “nicest of uncles”; toward his brother’s
widow, who became Mengele’s second wife in what his son described as a
“love marriage”; much later toward a housekeeper whom he asked to
live with him but who refused because he would not marry her; and finally
toward a pack of mongrel dogs he enjoyed spending time with and providing with
medical and surgical treatment.
He was reported to have died in 1979 as
a result of a heart attack while swimming and to have been buried under the
name of another man in Brazil. The identification was made from a study of his
remains, especially bones and teeth; now it was his corpse that was being
dissected, rather than the corpses of his Auschwitz victims.
Yet that
resolution was psychologically unsatisfactory, especially for Auschwitz
survivors. The need was to capture him and put him on trial, to hear his
confession, to put him at their mercy. Failing that, many
survivors refused to believe that the remains in the Brazilian grave were
Mengele’s. Soon after that identification, a twin whom Mengele had studied
told me that she simply did not believe that the arrogant, overbearing figure
she had known in Auschwitz could have undergone a “change in
personality” and become the frightened hermit in Brazil. She was saying,
in effect, that she and others had not been provided with a psychological
experience of that “metamorphosis” from evil deity to evil human
being. But we do have a story of metamorphosis after all — that of a man
divested of his power for evil, gradually disintegrating in life, mentally and
physi- […cally] |
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