The good doctor and the evil doctor

Iwas not surprised to learn that Fox News personality Lara Logan had compared Anthony Fauci, the famed longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. After all, Fauci is not the first person at the forefront of the fight against the COVID virus to be so defamed; indeed, one could argue that he is in good company. Among the other leaders battling COVID and maligned by the Mengele comparison have been Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, who was the subject of a front-page article in a right-wing Greek paper likening him to the Auschwitz doctor, and Christian Drosten, a prominent German virologist who was similarly slandered.

These comparisons are nothing new. When I first started to research my recent book about Mengele in early 2016, I set up a Google alert to notify me when his name appeared somewhere on the internet. At the beginning, I would receive perhaps a dozen alerts per week; since the pandemic, the alerts have skyrocketed, sometimes numbering a dozen or more per day. A good many of these post-pandemic postings invoked Mengele as a benchmark for evil and suggested that some present-day physician or scientist was walking in his footsteps.

An informed comparison between Fauci and Mengele finds similarity only as far as their shared status as physicians, and even here it is misleading, since Mengele’s medical degree was rescinded in the 1960s in light of his wartime activity.

It might be useful to briefly review Mengele’s activities at Auschwitz. He was one of between 20 and 30 physicians assigned to camp. Chief among his duties was service on the “ramp,” where Mengele and his colleagues were responsible for assessing the innocent, disoriented Jews who were unloaded from rail cars that had taken them to Auschwitz from all over Europe. This work involved the wrenching apart of families and the binary judgment of life or death — death within a few hours or, in a postponement of death, life for as long as the person was deemed useful.

Mengele and his cohorts stood at the edge of a vast sea of displaced humanity and with a flick of the wrist, separated it into two rivers — one flowing to the gas chambers and the other into the camp, where names were replaced by tattooed numbers and futures were dependent on utility. Similar “selections” were routinely carried out on the camp population to cull out the weak and sick and make room for new arrivals.

During his sessions on the ramp, Mengele would carry out another kind of selection. This one involved the search for suitable subjects for his experiments as well as qualified medical and anthropological experts who could assist him in his “scientific” work. Although very little is known about the actual experiments Mengele conducted in Auschwitz — almost none of the records describing them has been found — we know with certainty that none of his subjects received even rudimentary protection. Like lab animals, they were granted no choice and often perished as a result of Mengele’s resolute pursuit of his “scientific” ambitions.

Sanitary and nutritional conditions at Auschwitz would lead from time to time to epidemics which would threaten not only the prisoner population but also the SS guards and camp administration. How did Mengele respond to such epidemics? In 1943, he gained the admiration of his colleagues and superiors at the camp by his brutal and systematic approach to an epidemic in one of the sections of camp. His first step was to empty one of the barracks in the infected section and send all its inhabitants to their deaths.

That barracks was then fumigated and cleaned and became home for the inmates of an adjacent barracks who had been deloused and decontaminated. The barracks they vacated was then cleaned and disinfected in turn to become home for the inmates of the barracks next door, and so on until the entire camp section had been rid of the disease. Mengele’s murderously efficient solution cost the lives of the 1,500 residents of the first barrack.

I need not point out the vast contrasts to Fauci’s extraordinary career, which has been marked by a stunning commitment to science and public health. Ironically, Fauci’s medical education and the context in which he has practiced medicine have been significantly influenced by the reaction to the barbarous activity of Mengele and his colleagues, whose examples helped to shape postwar medical ethics. Those who would smear Fauci to score political points might want to examine their own ethical standards.

Historical analogies are a tricky business even when drawn by well-meaning people with pure motives. In the case of the perverse Fauci-Mengele construct employed by pundits like Logan, we learn nothing about Dr. Fauci but a great deal about the person making the comparison.