There's actually some people out there who have good things to say about Dr. Josef Mengele. "Oh, he was just a man in a bad time." "He did good work in a bad way." "If you'd been there, you'd understand."
There's a word for these kinds of people: Nazi Sympathizing !@#$nozzles.
Well, okay, that's three words. But if we did it in German we could probably mash it down into one. German's good for that sort of thing.
German's also good for coming up with all kinds of sick rationalizations for inhuman medical testing, for which the name "Mengele," the "White Angel" of Auschwitz, is almost synonymous.
If you don't know why by now, then you missed a very important chapter in the history of the War. If certain accidents of fate hadn't kept him on a different front, he probably would have been in Berlin for the Night of the Black Pill, and a part of ABWEHR. As it was, he ducked out of the Third Reich as quickly as his cowardly legs would take him, set up shop in South America on the ODESSA bill, and apparently avoided mingling for too long with his former colleagues when they came around for help.
No honor amongst thieves? Maybe. Or maybe he had a good thing going as "Jose" and didn't want to get tarred by exposure to his old atrocity buddies, which probably rankled them to no end.
(Which is why they say he was probably murdered in 1979, and not merely a drowning victim. Either that or HAGANAH got him, which suits me just fine. More on them another time, though.)
But as twisted and morally bankrupt as that twin-vivisecting, no-anesthetic, life-or-death deciding, genocidal !@#$ was, he didn't spontaneously combust with evil one day out of the blue while eating schnitzel and reading the paper. He had help.
Help for Mengele, as near as we can tell, came from a man who's been largely forgotten by history. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Let's call him Dr. V for short.
Dr. V was what you might call an interesting character. It was his own research into twins that lit the fascination fire under Mengele's sick !@#$, and the Third Reich just gave him the ability to get away with things that no scientist ever should. Like collecting the off-color eyes of twins who came through the camps, and sending them off to Berlin for further study.
Yes, son, you read that right. They took their !@#$ eyes right out of their skulls on arrival. Then they send them off to the gas chambers, still bleeding and in shock from the surgery. They were sat down on the filthy floor, told "wait here," as if help was on the way, and then locked in so the Zyklon-B could do its work.
The one who told them "Wait here" was another interesting case. Mengele is often called the Angel of Death, as he was the one who got to decide who lived or died when they got off the trains. But he was also called the White Angel, as he'd stand there in his white coat in a sea of black, dark gray, and brown, illuminated by chance rays of light poking out between the smoke and the gloom.
And he was not the only White Angel there, at Auschwitz. There was another.
She was Dr. V's favorite, apparently. Also his lover, or so they say. She might have had it off with Mengele between atrocities, too, for all we know. Or maybe her !@#$ was as cold as ice and she got off on the whole tease-und-deny thing.
(There was a lot of that going around. Ask Ilsa, if you can find her.)
Who was this darling angel in white? Who helped decide if people lived or died? Who held down twins with unusual eyes for the removal process, and assisted with other gruesome medical procedures that ended in death, dismemberment, mutilation, or a lifetime of nightmares for the rare survivors?
That would be Gerde Hoffstatler. Twin sister of Gertrude Hoffstatler, now Dr. Geri Yesterday. She of the 3.5 Einstein units, and the real brains of the Yesterday family.
She was just 25 in 1944, when Dr. V went to Auschwitz and rejoined his former student at the front lines of evil experimentation on the Reich's victims. 25 years old and already the most evil little !@#$ you ever met.
But maybe she was doomed from the beginning.
You see, when Getrude and Gerde were born, back in 1919, it was quite a showstopper. They were conjoined along the back, one head up and one down. The lucky thing was that they hadn't been born with shared organs or a fused spinal column. Luckier still that the doctor in their small town had the sense to ring up what was left of Berlin after the war and get someone who knew what the !@#$ they were doing to separate them.
That doctor brought along a bright-eyed, young assistant to assist and observe. That fellow was, of course, Dr. V. And he took one look at Gerde and, slicing her away from her sister, decided he'd keep an eye on this one.
Bad seed? Stockholm Syndrome? Pygmalion? Call it what you will. Gertrude applied her 3.5 into hard physical sciences and, in spite of working for the wrong team during the war, turned out alright for a Nazi rocket scientist with a knack for extraterrestrial technology.
Gerde? Well, you can guess what happened. An unseen hand guided her late adolescence and early adulthood. Doors opened up for her in prestigious medical schools, in spite of her gender, and she got all the hands-on she wanted. Opportunities wash over her like a maelstrom and she stands there, smiling wide, the better to take it in as gray science turns black, and then red.
Then out walks Dr. V, smiling and evil. "I have such sights to show you, my child," he purrs. She takes his hand, and then it's on to Auschwitz.
After the war, Dr. V got away pretty much scot-free. A surprising lack of evidence (no eyes means no witnesses) meant that they could only charge him with being a "fellow traveler," fine him 600 Marks and send him on his way. He got denied some things, sure, but once everyone got sick of dealing with each other's past they eventually let him return to prominence as a genetic researcher at U of Munster.
Shame about the automobile accident in 69, though. They say he just lost control of the vehicle. And the strange thing was that, when they pulled him from the wreck, his eyes were missing.
(That was HAGANAH, incidentally. Do not !@#$ with Israel's strategic talents. ABWEHR found that out the hard way a few times.)
But Gerde? She vanished after the war, just like an angel after the miracle's been seen and remarked upon.
Geri never tried to look for her. As far as she was concerned, she hadn't had a sister since they were in their teens. She once told me she'd hoped she'd been killed during the fighting, which was a terrible thing to say, but her sister was more terrible still.
Terrible indeed.
(SPYGOD is listening to Fly on the Windscreen {final} (Depeche Mode) and having some Chateau Adolf)
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