Hippocratic Oath

The Hippocratic Oath is the professional standard against which the book frames the revocation of Josef Mengele’s academic degrees. Its significance lies in the contrast between medicine as a professional calling and Mengele’s use of medical authority at Auschwitz: experiments were imposed on prisoners, and he later defended his work as service to German science rather than acknowledging the harm he had caused.

The Oath and the Revocation of His Degrees

In early 1964, Mengele learned through a letter from Martha Mengele that the universities of Frankfurt and Munich had withdrawn his doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology. The stated grounds were that he had violated the Hippocratic Oath and committed murders at Auschwitz. The revocation made professional status part of the postwar reckoning: the qualifications he prized could no longer be separated from the acts performed under his medical authority.

Mengele experienced the decision as an attack on his identity and achievement. He regarded his diplomas as the culmination of years of effort and sacrifice, and had imagined himself a respected surgeon and a promising figure in genetic research. Rather than accept the universities’ judgment, he treated it as an unjust repudiation of his work. He burned Martha’s letter, left the plantation, and went into the jungle with his dogs, turning professional censure into another grievance against Germany.

Medical Research at Auschwitz

The evidence behind the book’s invocation of the Oath includes Mengele’s experiments on twins and dwarves in the camp’s experimental barracks. The procedures were conducted on living prisoners without consent; the account describes them as painful and exhausting. To compare findings, the twins were made to die at the same time. The research therefore did not merely disregard the welfare of its subjects: it treated their lives as instruments of an inquiry controlled by Mengele.

The work also had an institutional dimension. Organs were sent to the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem, Berlin, directed by Otmar von Verschuer, and packages of material were marked as urgent war material. That connection places Mengele’s camp research within a wider scientific network, while the language of scientific urgency obscures the violence and coercion on which the research depended.

Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor forced to assist Mengele, records the persistence of this research activity even in autumn 1944, when Germany had already lost the war. Mengele continued to examine the files of the twins and attend to their presentation, treating a grease stain on a dossier cover as a serious lapse. The detail underscores the imbalance at the heart of this medical practice: meticulous care for records coexisted with disregard for the people those records described.

Mengele’s Defense and the Ethical Conflict

Mengele’s postwar explanations recast his actions as obligations. In conversation with Rolf, he called his work a military duty undertaken in the name of German science, claiming that selection saved the greatest possible number of people able to work and that the twins owed their lives to his research. He compared the camp’s decisions to triage in a military hospital and presented mass killing as an inevitable consequence of the laws of life. These claims do not resolve the conflict with the Oath; they show how he substituted state, military, and scientific language for responsibility to individual patients.

His earlier account to Willem Sassen and Hans-Ulrich Rudel follows the same pattern. Mengele described himself as a doctor who had protected the supposed master race and community of fighters, and represented his actions against prisoners as a moral duty to preserve racial purity. In these explanations, medical authority becomes an instrument of ideology: the people under his control are classified as threats or research material rather than recognized as persons owed care.

When Rolf pressed him about the children, women, and older people sent to their deaths, Mengele rejected compassion as a valid obligation and described conscience as an impediment to action. He also denied having harmed anyone and invoked the obedience and honor expected of a soldier. The oath’s importance in the narrative rests on this opposition between professional responsibility and Mengele’s repeated claims of duty to science, nation, and race.

The Oath as a Measure of the Narrative

The book does not reproduce the Oath’s wording or set out its provisions. Instead, it makes the oath legible through the distance between the medical title Mengele claimed and the conduct attributed to him: coerced experimentation, research bound to prisoners’ deaths, and the transfer of human material to an academic institute. The universities’ decision in 1964 gives that distance a concrete consequence by withdrawing the degrees through which he had understood himself.

The Oath thus functions less as a topic of abstract medical doctrine than as a standard that exposes the limits of Mengele’s self-defense. His insistence that he acted legally and morally within a larger mission cannot erase the acts described by Nyiszli or turn forced subjects into willing participants. The contrast between his professional pride and the revocation of his credentials makes the book’s central ethical point specific: scientific language and institutional affiliation did not absolve a physician of responsibility for what he did to those placed in his care.