[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.At twenty, Mengele displayed more ambition than ever before, as the influence of his hard-driving father-and self denying mother-increasingly revealed itself.At the university, Mengele was discovering an outlet for his burning need to succeed.His university records suggest that he worked very hard and carried a heavy course load compared to his peers.Friends from the period also recall how diligent Mengele was.Whenever they dropped in to see him at his apartment, he would greet them with a book in hand.Indeed, the ideas Mengele was so anxiously absorbing in his studies were precisely the ones that would propel him down the road to Auschwitz.HIS apprenticeship as a mass murderer formally began not on the selection lines of the concentration camp but in the classrooms of the University of Munich.As his autobiographical writings indicate, Mengele was beguiled by the notion of creating a superior race; it was the catalyst for his decision to become a eugenic scientist, in addition to obtaining a medical degree.To improve his credentials as a racial doctor, he sought a Ph.D.in anthropology, and wrote a lengthy dissertation.The possibility of molding a perfect breed of Aryan gods struck a responsive chord in the boy from Bavaria with the aristocratic pretensions.The vanity and sense of superiority had always been there, even in the genial Beppo of Gunzburg.What the villagers and the workers at his father’s factory had seen as friendliness and bonhomie were cut from the same cloth as the deceptively charming demeanor Mengele would maintain throughout his life, right up to his apotheosis as the“Angel” of Death.Early on in his studies, Mengele had been introduced to the work of the social Darwinists, who nearly a half-century earlier, in Victorian England, had argued that “biology is destiny.” The social Darwinists had believed that nearly all personal and social problems were inherited.Alcoholism, insanity, even poverty and left-handedness, were the result of bad genes.The social Darwinists espoused a program of active intervention to ensure that only the “best” people survived.They wanted to encourage the genetically fit to have more children, while those of questionable stock would remain childless.The theories of the social Darwinists evolved and gained credence, so that by the 1920s several countries, including Germany and the United States, were fostering a eugenics movement.In Washington, for instance, as Congress was considering new immigration laws, several members advocated the need to limit entry of Eastern European refugees on the grounds they would “contaminate American blood.”While arguing for passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, some lawmakers maintained that Latin Americans, Slavs, and even the Irish were “mentally and morally inferior to” There was an idealistic component to the eugenics movement, which flourished in Germany long before Hitler.German scientists were not that diflerent from their American and English counterparts in promoting their programs of “racial hygiene.”Eugenicists everywhere saw themselves as visionaries, idealists working for a better world through the human gene.They were to create a Utopia, a world free of poverty, illness, and all other physical and mental handicaps.The Germans, however, carried racial science further than did theorists of other nations, and their eugenics movement was above all else distinguished by its extreme antiSemitic component.The messianic quality of social Darwinism seems to have appealed to the young Mengele.His writings suggest that he was especially struck by their use of the phrase “the fate of mankind.” From his youthful encounter with their distorted ideals, to his old age, a weary and broken exile, Mengele would continue to feel a personal allegiance to the social Darwinists.At the university, the question of the “biological quality of mankind” may have been esoteric to most of Mengele’s classmates.But for him, it was apparently a clarion call.His account of that period suggests he was deeply upset by the fact that the lower classes were having many children, while those of impeccable genetic stock were too busy even to marry.In 1935, the year Mengele prepared to graduate, the Nazis laid down the cornerstone of their racial program, the Nuremberg Laws [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]