Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Josef Mengele & The Nazi Doctors
Aired: 2023-04-18
Duration: 01:03:19


=== Brutalization of the Army (14:59) ===

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[00:00:06]  It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
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[00:00:34]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[00:00:36]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[00:00:40]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[00:00:43]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[00:00:46]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[00:00:49]  And now he's in prison.
[00:00:51]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[00:00:58]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
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[00:01:05]  I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte?
[00:01:09]  In 1998, my life was forever changed when I took on the role of Charlotte York on a new show called Sex in the City.
[00:01:17]  Now I get to sit down with some of my favorite people and relive all of the incredible moments this show brought us on and off the screen.
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[00:01:35]  What oh boy, yeah, you know what?
[00:01:43]  That might have been over the line.
[00:01:45]  That might have been over the line.
[00:01:46]  Robert.
[00:01:47]  Yeah.
[00:01:47]  Oh my God.
[00:01:49]  I feel like there's some government agency we need to report me to for saying that now.
[00:01:54]  I didn't know.
[00:01:56]  Yeah, man.
[00:01:57]  Robert Garbert, go to hell.
[00:01:59]  I'm leaving.
[00:02:00]  That was a step too far, huh?
[00:02:02]  Well, Robert, I forgot to use that language ever for five fucking years.
[00:02:08]  What's wrong with you?
[00:02:09]  We'll edit that all out, and you at home can imagine what horrible thing I said.
[00:02:15]  What cancelable thing I said that'll get leaked seven years from now.
[00:02:19]  Please replace it with, you know.
[00:02:22]  He's embarrassing.
[00:02:23]  Yeah.
[00:02:26]  Oh, well, this is back, baby.
[00:02:29]  Charger's back.
[00:02:30]  Matt Leap got a fresh haircut.
[00:02:32]  It's going to be a good day.
[00:02:34]  It's going to be a good day talking about Joseph Mengela.
[00:02:38]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:39]  JK, JK.
[00:02:41]  You're going to ruin the vibe as usual, Robert.
[00:02:45]  I forgot.
[00:02:45]  But once again, we are talking about something that's going to make everyone sad.
[00:02:51]  And I like to think that as, you know, a guest of this podcast, I'm here to, you know, try to lighten the mood.
[00:02:58]  So along with Jarger, I brought this.
[00:03:02]  Excuse me.
[00:03:04]  I don't want to talk about Maynard no more.
[00:03:09]  I just want to talk about happy things.
[00:03:13]  Just happy things.
[00:03:17]  All right.
[00:03:18]  I'm going to bust that out every time.
[00:03:20]  That was so little dicky.
[00:03:21]  Wow.
[00:03:23]  Wow.
[00:03:25]  Yeah.
[00:03:26]  It's like little Dickie did like a Tommy style concept album, but about Joseph Mengele.
[00:03:34]  I love it.
[00:03:35]  Oh, fuck me.
[00:03:36]  We're so in twins together.
[00:03:40]  Oh, dear God.
[00:03:42]  I'm sorry.
[00:03:42]  Wow.
[00:03:44]  Oh, boy.
[00:03:45]  Oh, you're about to be.
[00:03:51]  Like, grievously offended.
[00:03:52]  Yeah.
[00:03:53]  Yes.
[00:03:54]  And that was for them.
[00:03:56]  Yeah.
[00:03:57]  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's hurtful to people who were born out of wedlock.
[00:04:08]  Well, yes, people don't use that word that more anymore.
[00:04:11]  Like, that's just not a thing that we do.
[00:04:13]  When I hear someone say bastards, I don't think, ah, yes, this is someone referring to a person born outside the bounds of holy matrimony.
[00:04:21]  Right.
[00:04:21]  This is, you know, I feel like language evolves as a thing.
[00:04:25]  Robert, I raise your people being offended over the word bastards to the Coco Chanel apologists in my DMs.
[00:04:34]  Like, boy, howdy, if you did that, I saw it.
[00:04:40]  I hope by now the Liver King episodes will be dropping.
[00:04:43]  So I hope you've got Liver King apologists in there too being like, look, man, a lot of people take $15,000 in steroids every single month.
[00:04:51]  Yeah, no, what's wrong with that?
[00:04:52]  I look forward to hearing from you, definitely, gentlemen.
[00:04:59]  100% dudes.
[00:05:01]  Speaking of a dude, Joseph Mengele definitely was a dude.
[00:05:07]  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.
[00:05:16]  World War II, you know, starts, and Joseph is over the moon about it.
[00:05:20]  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.
[00:05:33]  God damn it.
[00:05:34]  Yeah, he buys into it, you know.
[00:05:37]  He's all full-throated.
[00:05:39]  Now, because he's got some health issues, it's not until 1941 and the start of Operation Barbarossa that Mengela actually sees combat in Ukraine.
[00:05:48]  His posting is the infamous SS Viking Division, which is spelled Wiking, and I'm going to call it Viking because that makes them sound silly, and they are terrible war criminals.
[00:05:56]  So let's where we, where we scale, where we scare we Vikings.
[00:06:05]  So the Viking division is made up of Germanic peoples, mostly from outside of Germany.
[00:06:10]  There is like a German battalion or whatever in there, but a lot of them are from Belgium, Norway.
[00:06:14]  A lot of them are Norwegian, people from Denmark, from France, from Holland.
[00:06:18]  They're basically like Aryans from all the places the Germans have conquered.
[00:06:22]  And the actions of the Viking Division are, you would call them controversial to this day.
[00:06:27]  The unit fought exclusively in the East during the worst atrocities of the Second World War, and they participated in several of those atrocities.
[00:06:34]  But because the membership is largely foreign, there has been a lot of effort dedicated to minimizing the culpability of the volunteers.
[00:06:42]  A good example would be this ABC Australia article about a Finnish government report that concluded the 14 or so Finnish volunteers in the unit likely committed war crimes.
[00:06:52]  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.
[00:06:59]  But check out how they word this.
[00:07:01]  Reluctantly, Finns complied and covertly recruited the first group of 400 SS volunteers to be sent for training.
[00:07:07]  The vast majority of them had no ideological sympathies with the Nazi regime, the report said.
[00:07:13]  Finns were, above all, interested in fighting against the Soviet Union due to their brutal experiences in the Winter War.
[00:07:19]  In this way, the starting point for Finns' involvement was different compared to most other countries joining SS foreign volunteer units.
[00:07:28]  No, they didn't have a choice, you know?
[00:07:31]  Just wound up in that SS unit on accident.
[00:07:34]  Just, you know how you're stumbling home from the bar, you had a couple rounds, and then you wind up in the SS.
[00:07:39]  It happens to all of us.
[00:07:41]  You find a friend where you got a mutual hatred of this other dude, and he happens to also hate every Jew who's ever lived.
[00:07:48]  And you're like, well, you know, you take the good with the bad.
[00:07:52]  Yeah.
[00:07:52]  And it's one of those, like, there's a movie coming out right now that's about like some Finnish guy murdering Nazis.
[00:07:59]  Uh, and it there's a concern some people have is like, are they just gonna kind of whitewash the fact that an awful lot of Finns were completely on board with the Nazis?
[00:08:09]  Yes, they will.
[00:08:10]  No, 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.
[00:08:20]  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.
[00:08:29]  Early in the morning of July 2nd, SS Stendartenführer Wackerl, the beloved commander of the division's Westland Regiment, was shot and killed by a sniper near the village of Sloitka.
[00:08:38]  In the days that followed Wackerel's death, members of the Viking Division carried out acts of extreme violence, claiming an estimated several thousand Jews as victims.
[00:08:46]  Struve presents evidence from the records of various German army units in the area, quoting, for example, the diary of a Lieutenant Kaysberg with the 295th Engineers Battalion.
[00:08:55]  Firing everywhere.
[00:08:56]  It crackles.
[00:08:57]  The SS bumps off anyone they get their hands on.
[00:09:00]  It is horrific.
[00:09:01]  The chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps observed that individual members of the Viking Division were seen hunting for Jews.
[00:09:07]  The war diary of a unit in the area noted that the SS was indiscriminately shooting Russian soldiers and civilians in large numbers.
[00:09:14]  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 Wackerel 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.
[00:09:28]  Otto described an order that was read to his unit after Wackerel's death.
[00:09:32]  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.
[00:09:39]  So this is who Mengela serves with when he does his combat tours.
[00:09:43]  Great.
[00:09:44]  Good influences.
[00:09:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:46]  It seems like that's going to moderate his natural shittiness a lot.
[00:09:51]  Now, we unfortunately know very little about the specific details of what Mengele did with the Viking Division.
[00:09:57]  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.
[00:10:04]  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?
[00:10:14]  On do we massacre this village or not, right?
[00:10:17]  You know, that's a pretty good chance he was involved in this sort of thing.
[00:10:20]  But they would just like wheel Mengela out to look at every villager and just be like, point out which ones you think are the most Jewish.
[00:10:28]  And you'd be like, oh, that's my favorite thing to do.
[00:10:32]  That's what they do.
[00:10:34]  So the first massacre by the Viking Division was carried out at a prison in a town called Zolosev, where the retreating Soviet army had massacred about 650 prisoners on their way out.
[00:10:46]  When the SS discovered the bodies, they and their Ukrainian allies slaughtered more than a thousand Jews in the area.
[00:10:52]  One survivor later recalled, The SS people stood around the pit, and from time to time they ordered someone, especially men with beards and side locks, to come out and kneel in front of them.
[00:11:01]  With sadistic pleasure, they hit their victim until he lay unconscious on the ground and they kicked them back into the pit.
[00:11:06]  Sometimes family members tried to help the poor people, but then they often made their fate even worse.
[00:11:11]  Some were taken out of the grave and beaten to death with unimaginable brutality.
[00:11:16]  Yeah.
[00:11:17]  Joey Mengs, everybody.
[00:11:21]  This is his baptism of fire.
[00:11:22]  This is kind of known as seen by historians who study him as like, this is what takes us from the Joseph Mengela, who's like doing science that's kind of racist, but is relatively mid for its day to the Joseph Mengela, who is capable of doing the things he's going to do at Auschwitz, right?
[00:11:40]  There's a process of brutalization.
[00:11:42]  You can't get a more brutalizing environment than being part of this SS division.
[00:11:46]  Yeah, part of the Nazi or the Jew hunting battalion.
[00:11:51]  One of the in the entire Nazi army, one of the worst units in terms of war crimes.
[00:11:57]  Yeah, I mean, I don't like them.
[00:11:59]  No, I don't, they don't sound nice to me.
[00:12:01]  I'm not a fan.
[00:12:02]  No, in a single week, the SS Viking division was responsible for between 4,000 and 7,000 murders of Jewish Ukrainians.
[00:12:10]  They're often just kind of killing every person they can in a city or a town that they wind up billeted in.
[00:12:15]  It's possible that Mengela participated directly in at least some of the killing.
[00:12:19]  We simply don't know.
[00:12:20]  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.
[00:12:32]  Mengele provided field medicine through a number of heavy combat actions.
[00:12:36]  In the first five months in the field, his division lost 20% of its manpower, which is heavy.
[00:12:41]  That's an intense rate of casualties.
[00:12:43]  Good.
[00:12:43]  I hope it made him sad.
[00:12:44]  Yeah, I hope they all suffered intensely.
[00:12:48]  Yeah.
[00:12:49]  Now, Mengelo was praised by his superior officers, even as the tide of war turned gradually against the Nazi forces.
[00:12:55]  At the end of November 1942, he was nearly killed in an aerial attack.
[00:13:00]  A comrade described in his unit log, vigorous air activity again.
[00:13:04]  Dr. Mengela buried.
[00:13:05]  Bomb explodes next to foxhole and buried him.
[00:13:08]  They got him out, alas.
[00:13:11]  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.
[00:13:20]  And then they surround the German Sixth Army and, you know, massacre it.
[00:13:25]  Joseph Mengele 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.
[00:13:34]  No one's really sure why he gets evacuated.
[00:13:36]  He doesn't seem to have been injured, which would have been a normal reason to like pull an officer out from the front.
[00:13:41]  There's a pretty good chance it's just because he's a doctor.
[00:13:44]  He's seen as having high value as a racial hygienist.
[00:13:48]  The war in the East is failing, but the Nazi regime's race war, they felt, was still winnable, and they needed Mengela on another battlefront, a place called Auschwitz.
[00:13:59]  So we're going to Auschwitz.
[00:14:00]  Only episode three, dog.
[00:14:02]  Only episode three.
[00:14:04]  Yeah, it's mostly going to be Auschwitz today.
[00:14:06]  This is going to be this week is all Auschwitz.
[00:14:09]  Oops, all Auschwitz.
[00:14:11]  Oops.
[00:14:12]  All Auschwitz.
[00:14:15]  Oh, boy.
[00:14:16]  This isn't going to be fun.
[00:14:19]  It is not.
[00:14:20]  So he gets.
[00:14:22]  Listen, it's either what to say.
[00:14:24]  Or I just fucking start throwing SSRIs in my mouth.
[00:14:29]  This is the only way to talk about Joey Mengs is with a lot of reverb.
[00:14:36]  So he gets evacuated.
[00:14:37]  He's in Berlin for a little while before he gets his next assignment.
[00:14:41]  And he gets in touch with his old boss, Otmar von Verschur.
[00:14:45]  And Otmar is now running the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology.
[00:14:50]  So he makes Mengele a guest scholar there, you know, on his as he's recovering from being at the war front.
[00:14:55]  And Mengele continues to aid Verschur in his work on an ad hoc basis.

=== Doctors in Death Camps (14:09) ===

[00:15:00]  Von Verschur had taken over for the previous Nazi in charge, Eugene Fischer, 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 determine with scientific precision to what extent those traits were caused by heredity or by environment.
[00:15:24]  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.
[00:15:31]  In his book on Mengele, Marwell quotes historian Hans Walter Schmuel.
[00:15:36]  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.
[00:15:50]  Thus, Mendelian genetics was giving way, in the words of the day, to higher Mendelism, which presumed much more complicated mechanisms of heredity.
[00:15:58]  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.
[00:16:07]  You have to consider the Nazis considered criminality a trait, and their definition of a criminal was kind of broad.
[00:16:13]  Right.
[00:16:14]  Yeah.
[00:16:15]  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.
[00:16:25]  Yeah.
[00:16:25]  So you can see how they would be confused that all of their calculations aren't adding up here.
[00:16:30]  And also, what's a crime?
[00:16:31]  Because they would also like anything gay was a crime.
[00:16:34]  Oh, for sure.
[00:16:35]  Exactly.
[00:16:36]  Anything genderqueer was a crime.
[00:16:38]  So criminality, quite broad as well.
[00:16:41]  Broad term for the Nazis.
[00:16:42]  Now, there were, and they were asking, because these guys are scientists, and some of what they're asking are legitimate at the time scientific questions about heredity.
[00:16:51]  They were not just trying to do stuff that was nonsense race science.
[00:16:55]  They were trying to answer real questions that scientists all over the world were kind of grappling with.
[00:17:02]  The pseudoscience here, though, is pretty complex and not worth kind of delving into in much more detail.
[00:17:08]  So we will continue to focus more on the personalities.
[00:17:11]  Vershur and Fischer, both highly regarded race scientists, were obsessed with unraveling the mystery of heredity.
[00:17:18]  So they made an agreement and Verschur gets made the head of the institute because he's really good at getting funding and support from the Nazi state.
[00:17:26]  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.
[00:17:33]  In pursuit of this new paradigm, argues Weiss, a combination of experimental research on animals and humans was necessary.
[00:17:40]  She writes that Dahlem 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.
[00:17:50]  Mengele's four-month association with the Institute in the winter and spring of 1943 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.
[00:18:05]  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.
[00:18:13]  And that kind of study is going to involve dissection.
[00:18:16]  It's going to involve autopsies.
[00:18:18]  It's going to involve finding people who have rare different kinds of genetic disabilities and studying their bodies after they die.
[00:18:25]  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 at the rate at which these Nazis want to do it.
[00:18:37]  They're going to need a supply of human material.
[00:18:41]  And that is where Joseph Mengele is going to be useful to them.
[00:18:45]  Oh, God, it's so fucking depressing, bro.
[00:18:50]  This is, I mean, these are the Mengele episodes.
[00:18:53]  Yeah, these are.
[00:18:55]  Yep, they sure.
[00:18:57]  List of people going to die.
[00:18:58]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[00:18:59]  You can cut that one.
[00:19:00]  How about this one instead?
[00:19:01]  Misa Bustin.
[00:19:02]  It's Charger saying Misa Bustin.
[00:19:04]  That's always nice.
[00:19:05]  It's nice to remember the finer parts of life as we delve into this darkness.
[00:19:11]  So Joey Mengs gets assigned to work at Auschwitz in the May of 1943.
[00:19:17]  And we don't exactly know why because they get rid of a lot of their documentation around Auschwitz shortly after this period.
[00:19:24]  It is likely, and Mengele's son would later say that von Verschur basically pulled strings to get him appointed at Auschwitz.
[00:19:31]  It is worth noting, doctors were never forced to work at death camps.
[00:19:36]  Not one of the SS doctors who worked at any of the death camps was there on pain that they would be punished.
[00:19:41]  You didn't even suffer career consequences for refusing to work at a death camp.
[00:19:46]  It was entirely sure if you did this work.
[00:19:48]  Formal empathy was like, oh, no, I'd rather not.
[00:19:52]  Yeah, I get it, bro.
[00:19:53]  It's dark out there.
[00:19:54]  It's fucked up.
[00:19:56]  It's fucked up, bro.
[00:19:58]  Me neither.
[00:20:00]  It is often errantly stated that Mengele was the chief medical officer at Auschwitz, but this is inaccurate.
[00:20:06]  His direct supervisor was the chief medical director at the camp, and Mengele is more accurately viewed as basically the number two man in terms of like the medical system at Auschwitz.
[00:20:15]  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.
[00:20:23]  Mengele 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.
[00:20:34]  Mengele coupled his combat status with a workaholic devotion to his duties.
[00:20:38]  While other Auschwitz doctors did no more than was required of them, Mengele was always undertaking new projects and extra responsibility.
[00:20:46]  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.
[00:20:54]  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.
[00:21:04]  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.
[00:21:11]  Auschwitz, I think the most people it ever killed in a day was 9,000.
[00:21:16]  And there were days where more than that arrived.
[00:21:18]  And thus, yeah, I mean, it was a factory for producing death.
[00:21:24]  And so sometimes when they had too many people arrive, communities would be kept intact until they could be exterminated.
[00:21:31]  And when you stick large numbers of people in tiny, poorly made barracks with no insulation in the middle of a European winter, and you feed them maybe 700 calories a day and you deprive them of clean water, illness is going to spread.
[00:21:45]  And sure enough, typhoid epidemics were rampant.
[00:21:47]  At the time, with the technology available, it was basically impossible to stop typhus from spreading once it had become endemic in something like a crowded barracks.
[00:21:56]  This had been an intractable problem for the camp administration prior to Mengele's arrival.
[00:22:01]  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.
[00:22:08]  You know, the SS can get typhoid from the prisoners at the barracks, right?
[00:22:12]  So you have to.
[00:22:13]  Typhoid can't even tell who's Jewish or not.
[00:22:16]  It's really messed up.
[00:22:18]  It's like we're all the same species.
[00:22:20]  I don't understand it.
[00:22:22]  We're going to have to do more science.
[00:22:24]  Unfortunately, yeah.
[00:22:26]  So something has to be done, and Joseph Mengele is going to be the guy to do it.
[00:22:31]  And I'm going to quote now from a memoir by a Jewish doctor educated in Germany named Miklos Nies named Miklos Niesli.
[00:22:40]  Miklos is interned at Auschwitz with his family and forced to work as a medical officer there by Dr. Mengele.
[00:22:46]  And here are his recollections of how Joseph fought the typhoid outbreak.
[00:22:51]  The quarantine camp, C Camp, D camp, and the F section were terribly overcrowded, despite the quotas which were filled daily for shipment to more distant camps.
[00:22:59]  In the Czech camp, both the children and the aged had been greatly weakened by their two-year ordeal.
[00:23:04]  The children's bodies were mere skin and bones, and the elderly prisoners were so weak they could scarcely walk.
[00:23:09]  Both had to relinquish their places to new arrivals who were still strong enough to work.
[00:23:13]  During the preceding weeks, their situation had steadily worsened.
[00:23:17]  When the first Hungarian convoys began arriving, their rations had been sharply reduced.
[00:23:21]  Then a few weeks later, when the stream of new deportees had swelled to flood proportions, the camp authorities had found themselves faced with a serious shortage of food.
[00:23:29]  As usual, their remedy had been both drastic and efficient.
[00:23:33]  They had practically suppressed the Czech camp's rations altogether.
[00:23:36]  Hunger had reduced the prisoners to raving, moaning maniacs.
[00:23:39]  Within a few days, their already weakened organisms had disintegrated entirely.
[00:23:44]  Diarrhea, dysentery, and typhus had begun their deadly work.
[00:23:47]  50 or 60 deaths a day was normal.
[00:23:49]  Their last days were spent in indescribable suffering, till at last a death came and set them free.
[00:23:54]  The closing of all barracks was ordered early in the morning.
[00:23:57]  Several hundred SS soldiers surrounded the Czech area and ordered the inmates to assemble.
[00:24:01]  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.
[00:24:10]  Liquidation Day found some 12,000 prisoners left in the Czech camp.
[00:24:14]  From among that number, 1,500 able-bodied men and women were chosen, along with eight physicians.
[00:24:19]  The rest were sent to number two and number three crematoriums.
[00:24:22]  On the following day, the Czech camp was silent and deserted.
[00:24:25]  I saw a truck loaded with ashes leave the crematorium and head towards the Vistula.
[00:24:29]  It's a river.
[00:24:30]  Thus, the Auschwitz muster rolls were reduced by more than 12,000 units, and one more bloody page was added to the Auschwitz archives.
[00:24:37]  That page contained only the following brief inscription: The Czech section of the Auschwitz concentration camp was liquidated this date due to a prevalence of typhus among the prisoners.
[00:24:47]  Signed, Dr. Mengele, Hauptstumführer.
[00:24:53]  Yeah.
[00:24:54]  Yeah.
[00:24:55]  I uh this is exactly like forcing people to get vaxed.
[00:25:01]  You know, it's the same thing.
[00:25:04]  Same thing, bro.
[00:25:05]  It does.
[00:25:06]  I'm trying to punch an anti-vaxxer in the face.
[00:25:07]  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 vaccine, because they're like, I don't need a vaccine.
[00:25:26]  I just want all 32 flavors.
[00:25:29]  I don't punch him in the fucking mouth.
[00:25:32]  I think it is justified to do violence to people who compare like and it's not even you're not even being forced by the state to get a vaccine.
[00:25:40]  You're being told like, yeah, man, if you want to work in a high school cafeteria, you have to get a COVID vaccine.
[00:25:45]  What is this?
[00:25:46]  Is this a Nazi Germany?
[00:25:48]  No, it super isn't.
[00:25:49]  It's totally not.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, it's it's it's one of those things, like everybody knows Auschwitz, like horrible, right?
[00:25:59]  Like that's not, we're not, we're not like blowing any minds with the fact that this was a bad place.
[00:26:03]  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 Niesli's um memoir, Auschwitz, a doctor's eyewitness account, is short.
[00:26:18]  You can finish it in an afternoon.
[00:26:20]  It's not a long book, and it's fucking harrowing.
[00:26:24]  Um, like, just absolutely some of the some of the worst things that you can possibly hear.
[00:26:30]  That was just one passage you read, and I already need a nap.
[00:26:35]  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.
[00:26:45]  Um, cool, yeah, you're going to need a lot of jar jar, buddy.
[00:26:49]  That smells stinky with absolutely, Jesus.
[00:26:53]  Um, 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.
[00:27:01]  Auschwitz and the death camp system in general could not function without doctors.
[00:27:06]  They were the key linchpin that held the entire thing together.
[00:27:10]  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.
[00:27:21]  In January of 1942, a group of Nazi functionaries under friend of the pod Reinhard Heydrich sat down in a suburb of Verlin called Vonse to plan out technical details of the Holocaust.
[00:27:32]  Prior to this moment, the genocidal violence of the Nazis had been a mix of deportations, mass shootings, restrictive laws, and random beatings and murders.
[00:27:40]  After Von Say, the death camp sprung up to full production with a goal of cleansing Europe from undesirable races.
[00:27:46]  As we've discussed throughout these episodes, this was seen as a medical task.
[00:27:51]  Doctors like von Verschur were key advocates throughout the escalating process of preparing the German state to carry out genocide.
[00:27:57]  And I'm going to quote from the book Racial Hygiene here.
[00:28:01]  Otmar von Verschur described in his textbook the need for a complete solution of the Jewish question.
[00:28:07]  On March 27th to 28th, 1941, at opening ceremonies for the Institute for Research of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, Eugene Fisher and Hans F.K. Gunther were guests of honor at a meeting where possible solutions to the Jewish question were discussed.
[00:28:21]  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.
[00:28:35]  So that's Mengele's job.
[00:28:37]  That's why these doctors are there, right?
[00:28:39]  They are seeing through the future health of the race by exterminating people, and that's very much how they see their role.
[00:28:46]  Mengele's first job and the first job of all SS doctors at Auschwitz was to sort new arrivals to the camp.
[00:28:53]  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.
[00:29:05]  They would be marched out and sorted by a man like Mengele.

=== Economic Thriving and Recovery (02:46) ===

[00:29:09]  And we're going to talk more about that, but what?
[00:29:14]  Ads.
[00:29:18]  I hope you enjoy this commercial break.
[00:29:22]  There we go.
[00:29:23]  That's got everybody in a good mood, ready for capitalism.
[00:29:26]  Somehow that was in a minor key.
[00:29:28]  I don't even know.
[00:29:29]  It's on auto-tune.
[00:29:30]  And even the auto-tune is depressed.
[00:29:32]  Little, little miracles.
[00:29:38]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:29:42]  Hi, Dad.
[00:29:43]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:29:50]  This is badass convict.
[00:29:53]  Right.
[00:29:53]  Just finished five years.
[00:29:55]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:29:57]  Come on.
[00:29:59]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:30:07]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:30:16]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:30:24]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:30:26]  And without this probe, I'm going to die.
[00:30:30]  Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
[00:30:39]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:30:44]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:30:52]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:31:01]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:31:06]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:31:09]  They believe everything.
[00:31:10]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:31:13]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:31:17]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:31:21]  And what I mean by fellas, they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:31:23]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:31:24]  They do not have homes.
[00:31:25]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:31:29]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:31:38]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:31:46]  Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:31:51]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
[00:31:54]  He's the writer director.

=== The Sonder Commando's Duty (14:57) ===

[00:31:56]  Who do you think he is?
[00:31:57]  I don't know.
[00:31:58]  You meet the like the president?
[00:32:00]  You think he goes to president?
[00:32:01]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:32:03]  You think China has a president?
[00:32:04]  Lazois Cruzette.
[00:32:07]  God, I love that thing.
[00:32:08]  I use it all the time.
[00:32:10]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it like it's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:32:18]  Yep.
[00:32:18]  It was a good one.
[00:32:19]  I like that saying.
[00:32:20]  It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
[00:32:23]  Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[00:32:26]  Yes.
[00:32:27]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:32:29]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:32:30]  I got that wrong.
[00:32:31]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:41]  Oh, we're back.
[00:32:43]  Oh, I'm back.
[00:32:44]  I just took 3,000 Prozac and I am ready to rock.
[00:32:50]  There we go.
[00:32:50]  There we go.
[00:32:51]  So, speaking of Prozac, Mengele and the other doctors that are there, yeah, their job is, you know, selecting these people.
[00:33:02]  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.
[00:33:09]  Miklos Niesli arrived at Auschwitz in May of 1944, less than a year into Dr. Mengele's time there, and he met the man himself immediately on arrival.
[00:33:19]  We jumped to the ground, then turned over to take our wives and children in our arms and help them down.
[00:33:24]  For the level of the cars was over four and a half feet from the ground.
[00:33:27]  The guards had us line up along the tracks.
[00:33:29]  Before us stood a young SS officer, impeccable in his uniform, a gold rosette gracing his lapel, his boots smartly polished.
[00:33:36]  Though unfamiliar with the various SS ranks, I surmised from his armband that he was a doctor.
[00:33:41]  Later, I learned that he was the head of the SS group, that his name was Dr. Mengele, and that he was the chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[00:33:49]  As the medical selector for the camp, he was present at the arrival of every train.
[00:33:54]  Now, obviously, you know, Miklos has imperfect recall, like all eyewitnesses.
[00:33:58]  Mengele was not the chief physician, and he was not present for the arrival of every single train.
[00:34:03]  This was a duty that doctors switched off on taking.
[00:34:06]  And there's not documented evidence that Mengele did more than his share of shifts, which still means that he personally sent potentially several hundred thousand people to their annihilation.
[00:34:17]  We just don't know if he, you know, worked over time.
[00:34:20]  Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's evidence that he did.
[00:34:23]  We'll talk a little bit more about why Miklos has some of these kind of beliefs about what Mengele did at the camp that don't line up with the documentation because he's not the only one.
[00:34:35]  This is not like a personal flaw.
[00:34:36]  For one thing, talk to people who have been present at like a mass shooting and you'll get different accounts of what happens and when.
[00:34:44]  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.
[00:34:53]  So yeah, your memory is going to have a couple of errors.
[00:34:57]  It doesn't mean anything about the overall trustworthiness of his account.
[00:35:00]  It's just that you get little details like that wrong.
[00:35:04]  It is worth noting that the evidence suggests Mengele was unusually well suited to the mental task of selection.
[00:35:10]  Dr. Ella Lingens, who was also interned at Auschwitz, later noted that Joseph handled the duty with less stress than his colleagues.
[00:35:17]  Quote, some, like Werner Rode, who hated his work, and Hans Koenig, who was deeply disgusted by the job, had to get drunk before they appeared on the ramp.
[00:35:26]  Only two doctors performed the selections without any stimulants of any kind, Dr. Joseph Mengele and Dr. Fritz Klein.
[00:35:32]  Dr. Mengele was particularly cold and cynical.
[00:35:36]  And Klein, who definitely deserves to be remembered in the same breath as a piece of shit like Mengele, had hated Jewish people with a passion ever since a Jewish guy stole his fiancée when they were undergrads.
[00:35:48]  That was that's his Holocaust.
[00:35:52]  Because that's my assumption for most Nazis.
[00:35:55]  No, that is absolutely what happened.
[00:35:58]  Some tall, handsome Jew, such as myself, you know, like, you know, maybe dated their ex-girlfriend who broke their heart.
[00:36:05]  And now it's like, we must kill them all.
[00:36:08]  That is perfect faces and nice penises.
[00:36:14]  That is definitely, that is definitely the case for Dr. Fritz Insel Klein.
[00:36:20]  Klein was known to brag that he liked the smell of the crematoria.
[00:36:25]  Lingens talked to Mengele 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.
[00:36:34]  There are a lot of these folks.
[00:36:35]  Lingens talked to Mengele 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.
[00:36:46]  So he decided that they had to be destroyed.
[00:36:49]  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,
[00:37:15]  Ziet's so smart and so funny, and all the girls likes him.
[00:37:20]  And I mean, and me, I'm just so nice to all the girls.
[00:37:24]  I'm too nice.
[00:37:25]  I need to be mean.
[00:37:26]  And then they, you know, they read Jordan Peterson.
[00:37:29]  They start cleaning their room.
[00:37:30]  They start doing racial hygiene.
[00:37:32]  And then Bob's your own.
[00:37:33]  Yeah, that's the way it goes.
[00:37:37]  Yeah.
[00:37:40]  God almighty.
[00:37:41]  So it's one thing to kind of give an overview of how the selection process worked, which is harrowing enough.
[00:37:48]  But I think I'd be doing it a service if I didn't give you an account of meeting Joseph Mengele as a prisoner approaching selection.
[00:37:55]  This one comes from our buddy Miklos, who does survive the camp.
[00:37:59]  We'll talk a little bit about how later, because by God, it's a story.
[00:38:03]  Quote, to start, the SS quickly divided us according to sex, leaving all children under 14 with their mothers.
[00:38:09]  So our once united group was straight away split in two.
[00:38:12]  A feeling of dread overwhelmed us, but the guards replied to our anxious questions in a paternal, almost good-natured manner.
[00:38:19]  It was nothing to be concerned about.
[00:38:21]  They were being taken off for a bath and to be disinfected, as was the custom.
[00:38:25]  Afterwards, we would all be reunited with our families.
[00:38:27]  While they sorted us out for transportation, I had a chance to look around.
[00:38:31]  In the light of the dying sun, the image glimpsed earlier through the crack in the boxcar seemed to have changed, grown more eerie and menacing.
[00:38:38]  One object immediately caught my eye, an immense square chimney built of red bricks, tapering towards the summit.
[00:38:44]  It towered above a two-story building and looked like a strange factory chimney.
[00:38:49]  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.
[00:38:56]  I tried to imagine what hellish cooking would require such tremendous fire.
[00:39:00]  Suddenly, I realized that we were in Germany, the land of the crematory ovens.
[00:39:05]  I had spent 10 years in this country, first as a student, later as a doctor, and I knew that even the smallest city had its crematorium.
[00:39:13]  Oof.
[00:39:14]  Yeah.
[00:39:16]  Before you were like, I feel like it would be a disservice to the Felice, feel free to disserve me.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:23]  You know, I don't need that.
[00:39:24]  I need to hear it all.
[00:39:25]  Sorry.
[00:39:28]  It's like, yeah, I think one of the stories that's kind of worth telling about Mengela 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.
[00:39:43]  And he's like, I'm not willing to do this.
[00:39:46]  You know, I don't want to go through this shit.
[00:39:49]  This is like not what doctors do.
[00:39:51]  I feel like it's immoral for me to be here.
[00:39:55]  And so he says that he's going to like leave and like tries to get his way out of Auschwitz.
[00:40:04]  This guy, oh, yeah, so I found it here.
[00:40:06]  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's he tries to transfer out of it.
[00:40:16]  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.
[00:40:31]  And as he's like trying to leave the camp, he asks Mengele these questions that he's been asking himself.
[00:40:36]  And Mengela responds, It was precisely from this reservoir of people that the Jews drew new power and refreshed their blood.
[00:40:43]  Without the poor, but supposedly harmless Eastern Jews, the civilized Western European Jews would not be capable of survival.
[00:40:49]  Therefore, it was necessary to kill all Jews.
[00:40:53]  And one of the things that Mengela 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.
[00:41:07]  So he's convinces him.
[00:41:09]  Yeah, yeah, he talks him into it.
[00:41:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:13]  Weak-minded bitches, dude.
[00:41:15]  Yeah, I mean, they're Nazis.
[00:41:17]  Just like, you know, it's like he gets close to like feeling something close to human fucking sympathy.
[00:41:26]  To recognize the dimensions of the horror that he's been complicit in.
[00:41:30]  And Mengele is like, nah, nah, bro, you're good.
[00:41:33]  Like, let me walk you through why we need to be doing this.
[00:41:37]  Jesus Christ.
[00:41:39]  So our friend Miklos, who we've been talking about, is lucky by the standards of Auschwitz.
[00:41:44]  His daughter is old enough to work, and so she and his wife are sent to the right.
[00:41:49]  So they don't get murdered immediately.
[00:41:52]  Meanwhile, he gets pulled out of the mass of prisoners along with several other doctors among the crowd by Joseph Mengele.
[00:41:59]  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.
[00:42:08]  Miklos and the other doctors who suited Mengela's need became part of what was known as the Sonder Commando.
[00:42:14]  These special units, to translate their name literally, were used to handle most of the dirty work of actually executing the Holocaust.
[00:42:21]  They would drag bodies out of the gas chamber and incinerate them.
[00:42:25]  They would sort out things like gold fillings and take other possessions from the dead.
[00:42:29]  It's one of the worst things imaginable that you could be forced to do.
[00:42:33]  Now, to keep the commando functional, the SS allowed them to take things like canned or preserved food from the dead and often alcohol.
[00:42:41]  The commando also found it easy to acquire gold and jewelry, which they were able to use sometimes to bribe guards for things like newspapers.
[00:42:49]  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.
[00:42:58]  And this and alcohol are pretty much the only thing that kept these people functional.
[00:43:03]  Miklos basically says every night we kind of drank ourselves into, you know, sleep.
[00:43:08]  Into a stupor?
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  Well, how well, how else do you do this job, right?
[00:43:11]  Right.
[00:43:12]  Well, I mean, fucking Mengela is going completely sober, just like whistling.
[00:43:17]  He's not bothered by this, is kind of the thing about Mengela.
[00:43:20]  Most of the SS are also drunk, right?
[00:43:22]  The other doctors are hammered.
[00:43:24]  Like everyone working this, Miklos writes a lot about this one specific SS guy who's like the trigger man.
[00:43:30]  Like whenever they need people shot, this guy, I think he's a captain, will like just go and shoot them in the head.
[00:43:35]  And he does this all day.
[00:43:36]  And he's like, he's one of the nicer Nazis to Miklos.
[00:43:40]  And he's clearly just like drinking himself to death while he's doing this job.
[00:43:46]  But not Mengele.
[00:43:48]  Mengele, for Mengela, this is like an unparalleled career opportunity.
[00:43:52]  Right.
[00:43:53]  And that's how he treats it.
[00:43:56]  Yeah.
[00:43:57]  So each of these Sonder Commando units, obviously, you can't do this job for very long, right?
[00:44:04]  Like for one thing, your brain won't handle it.
[00:44:06]  And for another, the SS doesn't want these people because they have extra privileges.
[00:44:12]  They don't want them around long enough to potentially execute, as they eventually will, some sort of sabotage.
[00:44:19]  So every Sonder Commando was wiped out every four months.
[00:44:22]  And the next commando unit's first duty was disposing of the corpses.
[00:44:26]  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.
[00:44:33]  That said, he occupied a special position.
[00:44:36]  Like other slave doctors, he would help to care for workers who took ill and keep track of things like the outbreak of typhus.
[00:44:42]  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 Mengela pays attention to everyone admitted to the camp hospital.
[00:44:55]  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?
[00:45:00]  Like, so they have to, they have to be extremely careful.
[00:45:03]  A big part of what the Sonder 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 barracks.
[00:45:23]  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.
[00:45:37]  It's it's it's it's bleak.
[00:45:40]  Quite so yeah, Mengela needed Miklos in particular because he was a skilled human dissectionist, right?
[00:45:46]  He is a doctor who has pathological experience.
[00:45:50]  Like he is trained to do medical pathology labs and stuff.
[00:45:54]  And Mengele is not a very good doctor, right?
[00:45:57]  And that's the same reason like whenever the SS guys.
[00:46:02]  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.
[00:46:14]  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 got yourself the fucking clap or whatever, you know?
[00:46:22]  I need, I need to get in for a minute.
[00:46:25]  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 SS men, they're letting this Untermensch doctor touch their bodies.
[00:46:38]  But like, again, they don't have the SS doctors are poor physicians often.
[00:46:44]  And Joseph hates providing medical care in a clinical setting.
[00:46:47]  He's also not competent.
[00:46:49]  The job of a doctor?
[00:46:50]  The job of a doctor.
[00:46:51]  It's normal doctoring.

=== Doing Fucked Up Shit (04:31) ===

[00:46:53]  Yeah.
[00:46:53]  He's also.
[00:46:54]  It's this whole thing where I have to, you know, like, I have to do the thing with the knee, make the knee move, like take their vitals.
[00:47:02]  I like the part of doctoring where we just do fucked up shit.
[00:47:05]  That's that's really, that's really what I'm into.
[00:47:08]  I got into this to sew people together and now everyone wants me to fucking just put band-aids on people.
[00:47:15]  What is this shit?
[00:47:17]  You know what this shit isn't?
[00:47:19]  What?
[00:47:21]  The ads that support our podcast.
[00:47:23]  That's true.
[00:47:25]  It isn't that.
[00:47:26]  It couldn't be any less that.
[00:47:28]  Yep.
[00:47:32]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:47:36]  I said, hi, dad.
[00:47:37]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:47:45]  This is badass convict me.
[00:47:48]  Just finished five years.
[00:47:50]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:47:51]  Yeah, mom.
[00:47:54]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:48:02]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:48:10]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:48:18]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:48:21]  Without this progress.
[00:48:24]  Open your free iHeart radio app.
[00:48:26]  Search the Ceno Show.
[00:48:28]  And listen now.
[00:48:33]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:48:38]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:48:46]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:48:55]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:49:00]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:49:03]  They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:49:08]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:49:11]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:49:15]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:49:18]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:49:18]  They do not have homes.
[00:49:20]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:49:23]  Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:49:32]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:49:41]  Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:49:45]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
[00:49:48]  He's the writer director.
[00:49:50]  Who do you think he is?
[00:49:51]  I don't know.
[00:49:53]  You meet the like the president?
[00:49:54]  You think everyone's the president?
[00:49:56]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:49:57]  You think China has a president?
[00:49:58]  Lesla proves that.
[00:50:01]  God, I love that thing.
[00:50:03]  I use it all the time.
[00:50:04]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:50:08]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:50:12]  Yep.
[00:50:12]  It was a good one.
[00:50:13]  I like that saying.
[00:50:14]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:50:16]  It is an actual Polish.
[00:50:17]  It's a better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[00:50:20]  Yes.
[00:50:21]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:50:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:50:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:50:26]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:35]  Ah, we're back.
[00:50:38]  Everybody's having a good time.
[00:50:39]  Everyone's having fun.
[00:50:41]  Yeah.
[00:50:42]  This is like, I forgot that we always get to this point in the podcast where everything is just so sad that I want to die.
[00:50:49]  Yeah.
[00:50:50]  So sometimes I'm just going to be doing my taxes.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:54]  Just letting you know.
[00:50:56]  And I'll occasionally respond with, oh, you don't say.
[00:51:00]  That way you'll think I'm paying attention.
[00:51:02]  See, I should probably get to my taxes as well.
[00:51:05]  Bro, it's just, it's weighing on my mind.
[00:51:07]  Yeah.
[00:51:10]  It's coming up very quickly.
[00:51:12]  It'll be tax time by the time these episodes drop.
[00:51:15]  Happy tax day, everybody.
[00:51:17]  See, that's the nice thing about studying Joseph Mangala: it makes the taxes seem a lot less unpleasant.
[00:51:23]  Honestly, it really does.

=== Evil as a Technology (09:42) ===

[00:51:24]  I was thinking that exact same thing.
[00:51:26]  I was like, you know, I'm like stressing out about this.
[00:51:29]  There's so many other worse things in the world.
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:33]  Getting all my documents together.
[00:51:35]  See, that's the one solid that Joseph Mengele did, all of us.
[00:51:38]  Yeah.
[00:51:38]  Thank you, Joey Mengs.
[00:51:40]  Thank you.
[00:51:44]  Flies around a broomstick.
[00:51:46]  So Miklos takes this job that's offered to him and he kind of nods as well.
[00:51:51]  Mengela 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.
[00:51:58]  And this is like, you have to, you have to think about what an impossible fucking position Miklos is in because he has no idea if his wife and daughter are still alive.
[00:52:07]  Like they've been immediately separated.
[00:52:09]  He has no contact with them.
[00:52:11]  He's quickly told when he meets with the other Sonder commander, they're like, yeah, man, they're going to kill us all in like three months.
[00:52:16]  Like that's just what they do every couple of months, have some fucking gin, you know, get through the night.
[00:52:23]  So yeah, he goes for like weeks.
[00:52:25]  He has no answer to the question of what's happened to his family.
[00:52:28]  And he's just being handed bodies to dissect by Dr. Mengela.
[00:52:32]  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.
[00:52:38]  The work of carrying out selections and ordering the massacre of typhoid patients was, of course, enough to qualify him as a bastard.
[00:52:45]  We've already met the bastard threshold.
[00:52:47]  Yeah, the bastard threshold has been far surpassed, in my opinion.
[00:52:52]  We hit that at the latest during the Operation Barbarossa.
[00:52:56]  Yeah, I mean, I thought I have a pretty low bar for bastards.
[00:53:00]  So yeah, he been a bastard, though.
[00:53:03]  Yeah, he leapt right over that low bar.
[00:53:07]  So let's talk about what he was doing here.
[00:53:09]  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.
[00:53:16]  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.
[00:53:25]  In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to specific medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism.
[00:53:34]  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.
[00:53:43]  The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toe prints were taken.
[00:53:48]  As soon as the examinations of a particular pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengela ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy.
[00:54:01]  Although gynecology was not his specialty, Mengele conducted experiments on pregnant women.
[00:54:06]  He had them infected with typhoid in order to determine whether or not the children would be born with the infection too.
[00:54:11]  Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Theresenstadt to Auschwitz.
[00:54:16]  She said, I delivered a big, beautiful blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, we can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food.
[00:54:25]  After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female Czech doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's agony.
[00:54:35]  Yeah.
[00:54:37]  I'm going to go hug my baby real quick.
[00:54:41]  There's a lot of that.
[00:54:42]  Some of the most unsettling stories about Mengele are the things that make it clear that like he's not this like unhinged, unchecked like vehicle of maliciousness.
[00:54:55]  Evil is for him, it's a technology.
[00:54:57]  It's a tool.
[00:54:58]  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.
[00:55:10]  And it's yeah.
[00:55:13]  So fucked up because it's like we like to imagine, especially someone as you know, twisted as this fucking guy being jigsaw.
[00:55:22]  Yeah.
[00:55:23]  But he's like, he's like if Jigsaw were fucking boring.
[00:55:28]  He's like if Jigsaw were in, you know, fucking marketing.
[00:55:33]  If Jigsaw were a middle manager at a firm that produced murdered people.
[00:55:37]  Right.
[00:55:38]  And he is doing some bad stuff, but he's doing some bad stuff at like the administrative, like, like middle manager level.
[00:55:45]  Right.
[00:55:45]  Like, that's, that is, that is the thing kind of that he is doing.
[00:55:49]  And often he is, he does kill people.
[00:55:51]  He does do some of these like, he'll inject chloroform into people's hearts so that they can be killed and autopsied.
[00:55:57]  But a lot of the killing and a lot of the butchery is just other doctors who are better that he has as slaves that he makes them do the work for him, right?
[00:56:06]  Like he's delegating a lot of this.
[00:56:09]  And these doctors, by the way, like absolutely no mortal judgment on them.
[00:56:14]  They are participating and helping him carry out fucked up experiments so that they can save as many people as possible through the crack.
[00:56:22]  And they are saving lives.
[00:56:23]  It's an incredibly, it's literally the worst position a human being could be put in.
[00:56:28]  Like they're doing their doing this podcast.
[00:56:31]  Yeah.
[00:56:31]  Other than doing this podcast.
[00:56:35]  So a lot of Miklos's work at Auschwitz involved autopsying dozens of twin pairs of children who had been killed by the Nazis.
[00:56:43]  Popular accounts, as we've talked about a little bit of Mengele's butchery, go wider than this.
[00:56:47]  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.
[00:56:56]  And this is where we get to the stuff about Mengele that's not entirely accurate.
[00:57:02]  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.
[00:57:09]  Mind you, all of this is bad science, but the work that Mengele did at Auschwitz was not considered unhinged or disconnected from the work of the broader German medical establishment.
[00:57:20]  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.
[00:57:34]  And we are going to talk about that and a lot more, but I feel like we've hit our limit for this episode.
[00:57:45]  I've hit my limit for the next 15 years.
[00:57:51]  Yeah.
[00:57:51]  This is too much for me.
[00:57:52]  No, I'm fine.
[00:57:53]  Yeah.
[00:57:54]  I'm good.
[00:57:55]  We'll for the next for the next time we have you on Matt.
[00:57:57]  We'll find some guy who like, I don't know, convinced people to drink horse piss so they'd grow muscles.
[00:58:02]  That's my favorite.
[00:58:03]  Yeah.
[00:58:03]  We'll get one of those guys in here.
[00:58:05]  Do an episode on Mr. Hands.
[00:58:07]  Have you done him?
[00:58:08]  Oh, no, no, that's a good one.
[00:58:09]  Yeah.
[00:58:09]  Shocked to death by a horse.
[00:58:11]  That's heroes of the old internet.
[00:58:13]  Yes.
[00:58:14]  No, this is, so obviously, I think we started by talking about this, but like people keep asking for Mengele over and over.
[00:58:22]  Of course, number one, as we've said, it's not responsible to just do Mengela because that's kind of falling into this great man of history.
[00:58:29]  Like, oh, he was this one terrible guy who happened to get a job where he could hurt people.
[00:58:33]  No, no, no.
[00:58:34]  He was part of a massive engine of medical tyranny that was created by the Nazis as part of like their racial plans.
[00:58:41]  And he was tied in directly to mainstream medical, like the mainstream medical establishment of his time.
[00:58:49]  And that's an important part of his story.
[00:58:52]  But also, like, this is just so much worse than most of our episodes.
[00:58:56]  There's not like, there's not like these, you know, moments where he does.
[00:59:00]  He's never silly.
[00:59:01]  Like, he's never ridiculous.
[00:59:04]  He's like.
[00:59:04]  Which only makes him more evil.
[00:59:06]  Yeah, no, he's, he's a quiet, competent monster.
[00:59:09]  Yeah.
[00:59:10]  It's the worst kind of evil because, you know, he's not even occasionally stepping on a rake and hitting his face.
[00:59:17]  You know, Donald Trump is evil, but you get those moments of beautiful comedy where he gets arrested or something.
[00:59:24]  Yes, yes.
[00:59:25]  And this guy is just, yeah, he's the worst type of evil.
[00:59:29]  He's the type of evil that makes me want to do my taxes.
[00:59:34]  Yeah.
[00:59:34]  Yeah.
[00:59:35]  That's real evil.
[00:59:37]  This episode has been sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS.
[00:59:41]  We don't seem so bad now, do we?
[00:59:46]  Oh, yes.
[00:59:47]  The IRS, who has, you know, at this point, my endorsement.
[00:59:52]  I'm a big fan of the way you make me think about other things.
[00:59:55]  So pay your taxes on time.
[01:00:00]  Yeah.
[01:00:01]  I think, you know, I think it's time to end those 13 years of sobriety I have, guys.
[01:00:08]  JK, I'm the just playing.
[01:00:11]  Yeah.
[01:00:12]  I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to just kind of sit and stare at the wall for several minutes.
[01:00:18]  I'm going to hug my child.
[01:00:21]  And I'm going to remind you that if you like podcasts, I do the wire rewatch podcast.
[01:00:30]  Pod yourself a gun.
[01:00:31]  We do the Sopranos, and now we're doing the wire.
[01:00:35]  It's a lot of fun.
[01:00:37]  And it's a good time.
[01:00:40]  Everyone have fun.
[01:00:42]  Yeah.
[01:00:42]  Listen to that.
[01:00:43]  I'll be on your wire podcast soon.
[01:00:46]  Yes, you will.
[01:00:47]  Yeah.
[01:00:48]  We'll lighten the load a little bit.
[01:00:50]  Absolutely.
[01:00:52]  And, you know, it's got its depressing moments, but not so much.
[01:00:58]  Yeah, man, none compared to this shit.
[01:01:01]  Yup, yup, yup, yup.
[01:01:03]  All right.
[01:01:04]  Bazumba.

=== Lightening the Load (02:12) ===

[01:01:07]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:01:10]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:20]  Hello, gorgeous.
[01:01:21]  It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
[01:01:24]  My days of filling up cups of sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
[01:01:28]  Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
[01:01:37]  It's unruly, it's unafraid, it's untraditionally Lala.
[01:01:41]  Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:50]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[01:01:52]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[01:01:55]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[01:01:58]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[01:02:01]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[01:02:05]  And now he's in prison.
[01:02:07]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[01:02:13]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
[01:02:17]  Brought to you by Nitza and the Ad Council.
[01:02:20]  Now, everybody over here?
[01:02:21]  Oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
[01:02:23]  The Twilight Gazebo.
[01:02:25]  Sunset Gardens.
[01:02:27]  Twilight Gazebo.
[01:02:30]  What's next?
[01:02:31]  Dead Man's Grove?
[01:02:32]  Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
[01:02:37]  From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
[01:02:46]  This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
[01:02:56]  Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nici Nash Betts.
[01:03:00]  Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Pea Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
[01:03:10]  Go to audible.com slash Big Age series to start listening today.
[01:03:16]  This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human.