racial hygiene

Racial hygiene was not merely a theory about health or inheritance in this account: it was an ideological framework that made the sorting and destruction of people appear to serve medicine and the state. At Auschwitz, that framework shaped Mengele’s selections and experiments, connected camp violence to academic research, and later furnished the language of his defense. The contrast between those claims and the actions described by physician and prisoner Miklós Nyiszli exposes how scientific status could be invoked to rationalize crimes rather than restrain them.

Ideology Put into Practice

At the Judenrampe, Mengele directed arriving deportees to one side, deciding who would be sent to forced labor and who would be sent to their deaths. Nyiszli’s account describes this selection as routine and connects it to Mengele’s belief that dispatching Jews to the gas chambers fulfilled a patriotic duty. In this setting, racial hygiene transformed a political judgment about whose lives counted into an apparently administrative task performed under the authority of medicine.

The same logic informed experiments in the camp’s barracks. Mengele ordered tests on twins and dwarves, including blood tests, spinal taps, and transfusions between twins. The procedures were imposed on living prisoners, and the research design required that twins die together so their conditions could be compared. The language of scientific evaluation thus depended on treating people as research material and subordinating their survival to the collection of results.

Research and Academic Connections

The work did not stop at the camp. Organs were sent by mail to the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem, Berlin, directed by Otmar von Verschuer. Packages were marked as urgent war material so that what researchers considered scientifically useful would be delivered promptly. This link places the camp’s experiments within a broader academic network: institutional research and the machinery of persecution were connected by the movement of specimens and findings.

Nyiszli also describes Mengele returning after selections to work in the dissection room and review files on the twins he had studied. Even in autumn 1944, as Germany’s defeat approached, Mengele remained absorbed in the dossiers and their careful upkeep. His irritation at a grease stain on a folder suggests the importance he attached to the orderly preservation of research records. The meticulous archive stood in stark contrast to the coercion and deaths on which the research depended.

Postwar Reversals and Defenses

Early in 1964, Mengele learned from Martha’s letter that the universities of Frankfurt and Munich had withdrawn his doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology. The stated grounds were his violation of the Hippocratic Oath and the murders he had committed at Auschwitz. He treated the loss as a repudiation of his professional identity and of the research he had once regarded as prestigious. The revocation made explicit the conflict between academic credentials and the actions those credentials had not prevented.

Mengele’s anger was sharpened by the postwar careers of former associates. Otmar von Verschuer, to whom material from Auschwitz had been sent, became a professor of human genetics at the University of Münster and later its dean, while running a major genetic research centre in West Germany. He destroyed correspondence and incriminating archives after the war and did not answer Mengele’s letters from Argentina. Neither von Verschuer nor Eugen Fischer was prosecuted. Their continued professional standing, set beside Mengele’s revoked degrees, reveals a disparity between the consequences faced by the fugitive and the reintegration of figures connected to the same racial and biological project.

When Rolf asked what he had done at Auschwitz, Mengele described his actions as military duty carried out for German science. He claimed that selection had saved those able to work and presented the killing of others as an unavoidable consequence of war and camp policy. He also said that he had obeyed orders, had not created the gas chambers or crematoria, and was only one cog in a larger system. These were his defenses, not a neutral account of events: they recast deliberate participation as duty and shifted responsibility onto institutions and orders.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The book uses racial hygiene to expose the distance between the authority claimed by scientific language and the treatment of prisoners it supposedly served. Selection, experimental records, mailed specimens, and postwar academic appointments form a chain connecting ideology to practice and then to attempts at professional continuity. Mengele’s defense preserves the same underlying premise—that the state’s biological aims could override individual lives—while the revocation of his degrees and Nyiszli’s testimony challenge the claim that this was legitimate medicine. The term therefore marks both a program of action and a language through which its perpetrators sought to make that action appear necessary, scientific, and patriotic.