Doctor Mephisto of Auschwitz Helena Kubica
A
lot has been written since the War on Dr Mengele, the Angel of Death or Dr Mephisto of Auschwitz, as some prisoners used to call him. In most accounts he usually figures as an exceptionally monstrous murderer
who loved sending thousands to their deaths, killing children, twins, dwarfs, etc.
Yet this picture gives a false impression of him as particularly notorious, stand‑ ing out among all the other Nazi German physicians, and that his contribution to the genocide came from his specific personal traits. That opinion fails to take into account the most important point—an examination of the system in which Mengele operated.1 How did it happen that this young physician, and an ambitious scientist with excellent prospects in genetics, was capable of sending thousands to their deaths and killing for scientific purposes without so much as blinking, and despite the Hippocratic Oath he had taken, which firmly lays down the fundamental rule for the medical profession—primum non nocere (first, do not harm)?
1
About the author: Helena Kubica is a historian and worked at the research centre of the Auschwitz ‑Birkenau State Museum from 1977 to 2018. She is the author of numerous publications concerning topics such as the youngest prisoners of Auschwitz‑Birkenau concentration camp, Josef Mengele’s pseudo‑medical experiments, the murder of Poles displaced from the Zamość Region and from the insurrectionary Warsaw in Auschwitz, and the subcamps of Auschwitz‑Birkenau. Seidelman, 1169-1172.