| Dr. Auschwitz" Josef Mengele
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[physi…] cally, and then rapidly and visibly as a
corpse. That metamorphosis will inevitably over time take hold in the minds of
survivors and others.
Mengele’s many-sidedness in Auschwitz was
both part of his legend and a source of his desacralization. In the camp he
could be a visionary ideologue, an efficiently murderous functionary, a
“scientist” and even a “professor,” an innovator in several
areas, a diligent careerist (like Dorf), and, above all, a physician who became
a murderer. He reveals himself as a man and not a demon, a man whose
multifaceted harmony with Auschwitz can give us insight into — and make us
pause before the human capacity to convert healing into killing. |
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