Josef Mengele was Evil

[Nessa]

Survivor guilt" is the term used to describe the feelings of those who, fortunately, emerge from a disaster which mortally engulfs others. On an irrational level, these individuals wince at their privileged escape from death's clutches. From a psychodynamic viewpoint, the Holocaust survivor's guilt may reflect constraints against the expression of rage toward the perpetrators of his misfortune, toward the Nazis and their collaborators, and toward parents who failed to provide protection from those torturous events. Instead of expressing rage outwardly, the survivor turns it upon himself. Guilt is the embodiment of anger directed toward the self.
Survivor guilt may also motivate an individual to bear witness and to remember those who were murdered. The call to memory which many survivors answer has the salutary effect of educating others about the Holocaust and ensuring its victims are commemorated. However, survivor guilt also has the potential to compel an individual to remain mired in his past, to the relative exclusion of his present or future. Guilt is the penance one pays for the gift of survival.
Survivor guilt is an integral aspect of the sketches of Holocaust survivors of many social scientists (Harel, Kahana and Kahana, 1984). However, I did not find this phenomenon to be quite so widespread as we have been led to believe. Perhaps I would have found a greater incidence of the phenomenon if I had met these survivors soon after the end of the war. It is terribly difficult to maintain an awareness of guilt feelings for such a protracted period, particularly when one is so motivated to move forward with one's life. Approximately one-half of those I interviewed articulated an uneasiness about their reprieve. The reasons for this discomfort varied.

--from:Aaron Hass* ,California State University, Dominguez Hills, California

Great post!

[MsDiva]

Mengele was such a twisted man and his death was too easy, it should have been something much worse. I only hope that every pair of hands of every soul he harmed was there to hold him down as he drown.

[Jack-O-Lantern]

read the books by simon wiesenthal, they are gut wrenching, insightful, and mind boggling. when i hear people say it never happened i can hardly believe it. thank god there are those of us old enuff to have known the survivors, and heard the stories. keep the memories going, don't let the memories die. we owe it to the six million...and their descendants.

The TV mini-series Holocaust (starring Meryl Streep and James Woods) from the '70s was just released on DVD; we've been watching it for the last three nights. I was stunned when I saw it on TV then--and I'm equally stunned by it now as an adult.

Many schools and universities still use this film as part of their curricula...and rightly so. Highly recommended--an unforgettable, gut-wrenching experience.

http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Tom-...2523183&sr=1-1

You're right kitty, we owe it to the six million to never forget--and even more importantly, to never let it happen again.

[stacebabe]

I think it would be so awesome for your family to meet with a curator and donate them. The world needs to never, ever forget what happened to these people.

I think it's something that we can never understand, because we never experienced it. I think it's something that would be with you every second of the rest of your life.

Have you ever found a report on the Auschwitz liberation? I found the one for Dachau, and it was very informative and extremely disturbing. If you'd like to read it, I can PM you the link. It is far, far worse than what I could have imagined.

I cannot imagine the strength and courage it took to go on living after having survived one of the death camps, or the Holocaust in general. I would not have made it, I don't think.

My family and I have often thought of giving copies of the photos we have to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League or the Holocaust museum, they have never been seen by anyone other than family and very close friends. They're a part of history and should be seen by others. However, we're not there yet, I don't think. They're very personal, and they're kind of, to me at least, a piece of my grandpa that we can hold onto. He died when I was ten, so my memories of him aren't terribly detailed. I wish I had known him better and got the chance to talk about these things with him.

[Alanwench]

There were some pictures recently discovered showing Mengele and some of his cohorts at a Nazi 'retreat' near Auschwitz...smiling, relaxed, seemingly "normal." (Sorry I'm having trouble remembering where I saw them and, as such, can't post them here until I remember)!

I think the term "the banality of evil" has never been more appropriate than when looking at those pictures. There are no physical markers, even though a lot of us expect them...these guys looked like anybody else taking a break from work. That's what's scary--they looked just like you and me.

I saw the same program, and for the life of me, I can't remember if it was on the Discovery or History Channel. There was a photo album a woman found in her father's things. While the attrocities were going on in the camps, there were parties with officers and their wives (I think children as well). Some pics had trite captions saying that so-and-so looked sad because there were no more blueberries when prisoners were suffering horribly nearby.

[stacebabe]

I've always been interested in the Holocaust, but it was only recently I got re-interested again. I have been watching old episodes of the Twilight Zone, and I watched an episode called Deaths Head Revisited, and it was about an unrepentant Nazi SS captain who returned to Dachau and faced a "trial" by the ghosts of the people he killed, and his punishment was he was rendered insane, and had to feel all the torment he inflicted on others, but only in his mind.

If only that could be done. Mengele got off WAY too easy.

[Alanwench]

here is a newsreel from April 1945 of Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley touring Auschwitz - you can see the sick look on Eisenhower's face. Patton, the no nonsense general, got physically ill and lost his lunch as reported in Eisenhower's bio.

check at around 3:15 - you can see a German officer being forced to go inside the killing chambers.

American prisoners of war were bascically starved to death. Eisenhower insisted on this film as a record of the atrocities. GRAPHIC !!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNPnoiDKhWo

When I was a senior in high school, the history teachers got us assembled in one room and this film, or one very, very similar was shown. Little did I know that I would meet someone who survived the concentratiion camps and had escaped three times.
My parents divorced when I was 21 and my mom found a job as the secretary of a local roofing company. The owner had the equivalent of a fifth grade education, but he was a successful businessman in Columbus, Ohio.
A few years before he died, he consented to his son's request to get his story on videotape. George (his birth name was Gerzshon) was born in Poland. When the Nazis invaded his village, they shot and killed his parents and beat his younger brother's head against a telegraph pole until he died because he was crying. George witnessed all of this at the age of 12 or 13.
He had to help dig pits for mass burials. A couple of German soldiers decided to kill everyone gathered at the pit one day. George survived because the adults fell on top of him, protecting him from bullets. Waiting until very late at night, he climbed out of the pit, stepping over or on the dead and hid in the forest.
George lived on whatever animals he could catch and kill until he was captured and sent to a concentration camp. He and a few others escaped and again lived in the woods until they were re-captured.
This time, their punishment was worse. They went to Auschwitz. Since George was young and healthy, he worked hard and survived. He was sent on to another camp eventually, and escaped there twice. By war's end, he wound up in the same camp where Anne and Margot Frank died.
I will always remember this point in the tape. He looks into the camera, his voice strong. When the camp was liberated, he was weak but he had one mission in mind. He was going back to Poland to find the neighbor who directed the Nazis to his family's home.
"We broke bread with them and they did this to us." He stole a motorcycle and a gun somehow and reached his destination only to learn that his neighbors had been killed by the Nazis, too. George was going to kill the man who got his family destroyed.
The numbers on his arm were very dark, even after all the time that had passed. He had a distant relative in Cleveland, Ohio, and wound up in the United States after sailing on a ship. He took trains to reach Ohio.
About ten years ago, he died from Pancreatic Cancer, having had the Whipple Procedure twice. Most people don't survive this surgery once. He was tough to say the least! He was kind of like an extra grandparent and I learned a great deal from him.

[STRAIGHT]

He surely was a sick and twisted bastard for sure, alot of them were. They gave germany a bad name.

[Pops24]

Not long ago I read "Les Bienveillantes" (The Kindly Ones, in English) by Jonathan Littell. It was kind of shocking: I think everyone's used to read about WWII from the victims perspective, Nazis are bad, Nazis are evil, they must have all been crazy etc. Now this is the tale of a SS officer, explaining everything from a Nazi point of view. It's scary and shocking because you do feel the crazed and cruelty permeating their activities, but you do witness their "normality". I don't remember the exact words but there's one spot in the text where he says that he is a man like the others, and well, I think that might be true. All Nazis were "normal" people, they had families, were loving fathers/husbands/sons whatever (this applies to nazi women, too, who were far from being innocent). The nazi ideology itself allowed people to bring out the hidden and scariest parts of them. The crave for power, the impossibility to escape from orders of high officers, the fact of having people's lives in their own hands, that's what made them crazily cruel. We all have a dark side, but our conscience and our mental health make sure it never prevails over our bright side. Nazis "empire" had become too powerful and gone too far, and people started to feel like gods. As for Mengele, he had some live dummies for his experiments, what more could he wish for? He was uselessly cruel but again that all came from Nazis ideas that only arian people were to be considered humans. The life of others was of no importance. That's the lesson everybody should learn from WWII: the respect for humanity regardless of religion, ethnicity and whatever. Shame this isn't widely recognized

[Pops24]

He surely was a sick and twisted bastard for sure, alot of them were. They gave germany a bad name.

Yes, they did. I have a few german friends and they're still ashamed of what happened, and they fight with all their efforts to make sure people know the good of how currently Germany is, instead of focusing only on the past. I think they learnt from their ancestors' mistakes, and this is a good thing.

[Lisamarie]

I have read many book...one is the forgotten soldier that follows this Guy named Guy journy through the Hitler youth all the way up to when he was on the front lines..but it gives a very good description of what these men and women were like and also a lesson that normal people , cultured...versed in music and poetry...can be seduced by power...not excusing at all...but rather it goes to show how Hitler took these kids ..gave them power told them you are the future......you are the master race...you are better than everyone else..and they bought it...and turned into monsters...it scary.

[Skeletor]

My daughter and I visited Auschwitz this sunday just past. The attached picture I took is the block where Mengele conducted his medical experiments but it is all closed up although I don't know why.

[Gabby]

My daughter is doing a research paper on Mengele right now for history. She chose to do hers on him it wasnt assigned since she wants to be a doctor. It's just bizarre how these people thought of other people as not really people. not having feelings or family or a place in this life except to be examined to justify an idea that the germans were a superior race to all others. so very bizarre it's like a mental illness that was contagious.

[jerryvr]

FROM WIKIPEDIA: "Josef Mengele's grandson, artist Christian Mengele, is the one of the few family members still publicly using the family name."

I googled "Christian Mengele" and its really freaky when you look at his eyes (and his morbid art pieces). I wonder if he's just a hack or he's really related to the Death Doctor.

The Mengele family factory still produces their farm equipment under their own name..
I have visited Auschwitz and when I was there there were some survivors acting as guides. Hearing their memories of what happened there mad you feel sick at times. Not to mention the fact that while walking around the camp you could still feel the evil that went on there. I try to visit Treblinka and Bergen Belsen every year because I have lost family members there, but I will never go back to Auschwitz.

[Leasie]

My father was a Master Sargent in WW2 and I remember him speaking briefly of Mengele, I was young so....he did not say a lot. I have no words to describe how I feel about this evil bastard.

[JimC]

Not for the faint of heart:

[RiotBoots]

crunchy

[Maxster]

Those photos would have been great recruitment tools for the Allies.

[ichabodius]

Those photos would have been great recruitment tools for the Allies. And for dispelling twinges of conscience about acts like firebombing Hamburg until it was engulfed in a man-made whirlwind of fire.

I find the sentiment disregarding the lives of hundreds of thousands German civilians (including Dresden and disregarding Zionist revisionist enumerations) and reducing the victims of Mengele to political propoganda to be disturbing.

[cindyt]

Ich, he has a right to his opinion. Rule 4

[JimC]

Not trying to be a smart ass; but that was just an opinion too.

[Maxster]

I find the sentiment disregarding the lives of hundreds of thousands German civilians (including Dresden and disregarding Zionist revisionist enumerations) and reducing the victims of Mengele to political propoganda to be disturbing.

The air war against German played an important role in defeating the Reich, forcing them to divert their air power away from the critical battles on the Eastern Front at a time when the Red Army was struggling. Eventually, two thirds of the German air force came to be deployed in the West; as Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments said, the Western Allies had opened up a second front long before the Normandy invasion.

And, of course, it was the Germans who were the first to carpet-bomb helpless civilian areas, pounding Warsaw into rubble in September 1939, and burning Rotterdam (of neutral Holland) to the ground the next May. However, it wouldn't be so easy going on: not only could the British fight back, inflicting heavy losses on the German attackers, they began to return the favor, many-fold.

As for ordinary Germans, it was they who enabled monsters like Mengele by serving in the armed forces occupying and invading foreign countries, and working in the factories churning out the armaments that made those adventures feasible. They were part of the war effort, like it or not, as as such were liable to be targeted.

Regarding the comment, I thought better of it and retracted it, but you'd already quoted it.

[ichabodius]

The air war against German played an important role in defeating the Reich, forcing them to divert their air power away from the critical battles on the Eastern Front at a time when the Red Army was struggling. Eventually, two thirds of the German air force came to be deployed in the West; as Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments said, the Western Allies had opened up a second front long before the Normandy invasion.

And, of course, it was the Germans who were the first to carpet-bomb helpless civilian areas, pounding Warsaw into rubble in September 1939, and burning Rotterdam (of neutral Holland) to the ground the next May. However, it wouldn't be so easy going on: not only could the British fight back, inflicting heavy losses on the German attackers, they began to return the favor, many-fold.

As for ordinary Germans, it was they who enabled monsters like Mengele by serving in the armed forces occupying and invading foreign countries, and working in the factories churning out the armaments that made those adventures feasible. They were part of the war effort, like it or not, as as such were liable to be targeted.

Regarding the comment, I thought better of it and retracted it, but you'd already quoted it.

Sorry bout that. Thanks for the explanation though.

[cleanskull]

I can not remember if I had posted this on another thread but I had, we have lost touch , a friend who was of German Jewish descent. She has no Uncles, no aunts, no cousins and no Grandparents. Her parents were survivors of the camps. They had the tattoos on their arms. Her family photo album was very small. I don't know why but this always hit me hard. I mean compared to other stories and horrible pictures. My wife and I did not talk to much about extended family. At that time she also owned the gym we went to and so we saw her a lot.

[atomicbettie]

I dealt with Christian Mengele on another message board about 5-6 years ago. He is a weirdo. Really strange stuff. He was always starting these romances with posters on the board, always had this other drama going on, and to be quite honest seemed like a homosexual who scammed women through romance to me. When I just googled him the pictures look the same as well. We didn't know if that was his real name or if he was just paying some kind of sick tribute to Josef Mengele. Weirdo.

[findadeathaddict]

His paintings are creepy as hell: http://www.christianmengele.com/pain...007/index.html

[atomicbettie]

Yeah, those are creepy. I am also creeped out that it was really him I was dealing with on that board. I know now because not only did he post pictures (we still thought he was just using the name) he posted videos and it was very obviously the same guy who is pictured on that official website. Bleh. He was really a creepy Casanova.

[babyblujems]

Another German concentration camp doctor rarely mentioned is Carl Clauberg, he did his work in Auschwitz. Clauberg spent his time trying to find the cheapest way to sterilize women, including by injecting formaldehyde into the women's uteruses without the use of any anesthetic. Several women died from this. A really good book about World War II is Dancing with the Enemy:My Family's Holocaust Secret by Paul Glaser. It's a story of a man who finds out he is Jewish and decides to tell his surviving aunt's story. It shed some harsh light on how the Jewish population was treated after the war by the Dutch.

[Poo Bah MCGee]

The taint of the Nazis and the people who gave them enough power to create their vision of Germany, have stained that country for eternity. This is especially sad in the light of such men as Beethoven and other giants of music, art, and design. Yet when we try to speak of German achievement, this un-eradicible stain bleeds through, and likely always will.

[cricket]

Not for the faint of heart:

Thanks for the link.

[JimC]

Thanks for the link.

I'd say enjoy; but...