Fauci, Mengele and the desperate need for Holocaust education
In recent years, there have been some alarming studies about young Americans’ lack of Holocaust knowledge. Reinforcing those findings, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recently discovered in an informal survey of 700 secondary school teachers across the U.S. that 37% report their students have no familiarity with the Holocaust and another 20% report that students primarily learned about the Holocaust through social media. Compounding this, 15% indicated that Holocaust denial and distortion were barriers to teaching about the Holocaust. Fifteen percent said that when they teach about the Holocaust one of their goals is to ensure students understand it was a real event.
One person who knows it was a real event and knows basic facts about the Holocaust is journalist Lara Logan. She knows that it was an event of exceptional human evil and depravity as Nazi Germany and its collaborators set out to murder every Jew in Europe, and succeeded in killing six million — two out of every three. Not only does she know it, but she exploits it to advance an agenda. It was not enough to invoke the Holocaust or the Nazis, as so many influential people today unfortunately do, despite repeated pleas from Holocaust survivors to refrain from misusing their personal tragedy and unspeakable loss. She invoked an individual whose name is synonymous with the specific nature of that evil — Josef Mengele.
Lara Logan knows exactly what Mengele did, as most reading this undoubtedly do. But what are the uninformed or deliberately misinformed youth of America to make of cavalier exploitations of such immense human suffering?
Mengele joined the Nazi Party as he was finishing his studies. As a medical officer with the SS holding advanced degrees in physical anthropology and genetic medicine, he was a “true believer” in Nazi racial theories of Aryan superiority. After being promoted to an SS Captain, he was transferred to Auschwitz on May 30, 1943. By that time, over four million Jews had already been killed through mass shootings, gassings, slave labor and maltreatment in ghettos and camps. But for Mengele, there was still much work to do and benefits to be had.
At Auschwitz, he could pursue his scientific interests without any moral restraints. With the freedom to torture or kill his subjects whom he defined as “subhuman,” he performed a broad range of agonizing experiments, often on children. He began as the medical officer for Birkenau’s “Gypsy” (Roma) Camp, and after its liquidation became chief camp physician of Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Like other doctors at Birkenau, he was stationed at the infamous ramp, where trainload after trainload of Jewish men, women and children were dumped at the end of a brutal deportation, which was its own kind of hell. Mengele was among those who decided whether new arrivals would be allowed to live for the moment or be immediately gassed. And he was always on the lookout for twins to advance his research.
Among his research interests was the eye, and he collected the eyes of his murdered victims to send to a colleague as “research material.” Another area of interest was a form of gangrene whose awful progress he carefully documented rather than treated. He worked to demonstrate the “degeneration” of Jewish and Roma blood and harvested tissue samples and body parts. Many of his subjects died horribly painful deaths; others he ordered murdered in order to facilitate his desire to conduct post-mortem examinations.
Renate and Rene Guttmann were Jewish twins, whose parents had fled Nazi Germany for Prague. They were later arrested and interned in the Theresienstadt Camp/Ghetto, and just before the twins turned 6, their family was deported to Auschwitz. Renate was separated from her family and became prisoner #70917. She was subjected to horrific medical experiments by Mengele, including cuttings and injections, and at one point became so sick she was designated to be killed. Miraculously, she was saved by a caring nurse.
To Mengele, Renate Guttmann was not even a name. Just a number. She was not even a human. Just “human material” to be studied, used, exploited and destroyed. In spite of how too many people of influence today exploit the suffering of Renate and the millions of other innocent victims, to us at America’s national Holocaust memorial, Renate is not #70917. Renate Guttmann was a real person swept up in a cataclysmic real event.
In the context of a dangerous rise today in Holocaust denial, distortion and antisemitism, irresponsible analogies are more egregious than ever. Renate was a victim of the Nazis. We will never educate the young people of America if we turn Renate into something else — a victim of our own political disagreements. That would be a second crime. Not only will Holocaust memory suffer. So will we.