Angel of Death: Josef Mengele and the Mechanism of Doubling

In the quest to build a utopian society and advance the cult of science, humans throughout history have often forfeited their consciences for the illusory power of absolute knowledge and world dominance. The ends-justify-the-means calculus has been the central ideological principle of a number of genocidal sociologic movements of the last century, Nazi Germany being one key example.

The architects of the Third Reich employed physicians as instruments to conflate racist fantasies with scientific ideas and rationalize genocide as a medical imperative to save Germany, and this decision stands alongside the murderous legacies of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Communist China. Dr. Josef Mengele is a prototypical case study of all health professionals engaged in medi-

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calized torture and killing in the name of science, national security, and the maintenance of grandiose group purification projects.

The Faustian bargain—or the mechanism of doubling, to use Robert Jay Lifton’s term for a dialectically charged alternate identify formation—was at the core of Mengele’s psychopathological ability to commit atrocities against the prisoners of Auschwitz (Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 1986). An assessment of Mengele’s psychobiography can shed light on our own doubling self-processes and those of today’s medical professionals who compromise the Hippocratic Oath by serving as “enhanced interrogation” facilitators (accessories to torture/ homicide) for the U.S. military industry.

A Product of German Childrearing

Like other Nazi doctors who actively participated in Hitler’s “Final Solution,” Mengele was a product of brutal German childrearing of the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries. In fact, psychohistories have gathered sufficient evidence to implicate German childrearing modes of the 18^th and 19^th centuries as playing central—even causal—roles in the outbreaks of two worldwide wars and the Holocaust. To quote Lloyd deMause, “If German childrearing around 1900 is recognized as a nightmare of murder, neglect, battering and torture of innocent, helpless human beings, then the restaging of this nightmare four decades later in the Holocaust and World War II can at last be understood” (The Emotional Life of Nations, 2002).

Although details of Mengele’s childhood are sketchy, the information that is available supports the assertion that most violent and fanatical Nazi party members and supporters came from authoritarian, middle-class homes, not from poverty or low-income families. Mengele was born in 1911, the second of three male siblings, into a financially well-off Catholic family in Günsburg, Germany. His father was an owner of a machine factory and a veteran of World War I, while his mother, like his father, was domineering and controlling in the treatment of her children. Mengele described his mother as “very strict; she treated us severely. She was a woman of strong character” (Gerald Astor, The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Joseph Mengele, 1965). With the information that is available on German childrearing modes of this period (that includes high rates of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse), it

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can be assumed, within the limits of statistical certainty, that Mengele underwent some form of neuropsychically damaging treatment by both his mother and father.

Further compounding Mengele’s childhood traumatization was his frail physical health. During his formative years, Mengele was afflicted by a host of illnesses that kept him in bed and housebound. Hence, his physical ailments placed him in greater dependence on his controlling mother and consequently facilitated maternal engulfment anxieties (the thwarting of individuation and development of a cohesive self).

The absence of his father during World War I also has to be considered in Mengele’s developmental conflicts, which he later sought to repair and restage through heinous crimes against prisoners in Auschwitz. Drawing from his childhood confinement and isolation from other children during bouts of illness and subjugation by authoritarian parents, the unconscious motives of the Nazi doctor, who delighted in choosing the fate—life or death—of concentration camp prisoners, become readily apparent.

Crimes against Humanity

Mengele escaped from Auschwitz as the Soviet army was closing in (January 27, 1945) and eventually fled to Brazil where his grave was discovered in Embu (June 6, 1985). Information about his crimes, like those of all notorious figures in history, has been the subject of much speculation and distortion in the popular culture. His story has been examined through scholarly research and spawned a number of film and novel adaptations as well.

Robert Jay Lifton’s analysis of Mengele’s case history is among the finest in the field of social science. According to Lifton’s research and interviews of former Nazi doctors and Auschwitz survivors, Mengele had an obsession with validating Nazi theories of racial hierarchies, where the Aryan race was theorized to be above all other races in bio evolutionary development. For Mengele, Auschwitz provided an ideal environment and population (helpless, imprisoned test subjects upon which to commit crimes without moral or legal constraints) for conducting medical experiments. Mengele was most obsessed with genetic configurations of identical twins and committed a litany of crimes against them under

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the guise of medical procedures aimed at advancing scientific and racial theory.

In The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1988), Lifton examines the confluence of historical, cultural, ideological, individual, and group dynamics that transformed Mengele and other Nazi doctors into methodical “researcher-killers.” Among the psychological dynamics that Lifton traces in his monumental work is the doubling mechanism involved in the structuring of the alternate self, turning “healers into killers.”

Mechanisms of Doubling

Lifton identifies five characteristics of doubling that enabled Nazi doctors to commit atrocities while maintaining the intrapsychic and social facade of being healers of humanity.

First, in a manner similar to psychic splitting/dissociation or multiple personality organizations, doubling involves a process between the physician’s “prior self” (like a medical professional who adheres to the Hippocratic Oath and is a loving father and family man) and the “Auschwitz self,” the Nazi doctor who murdered innocent people as part of a larger genocidal project.

Second, doubling is a mechanism of assimilation into a death-dominated milieu. In Auschwitz, for example, all activities/ stimuli that Nazi doctors internalized through the psychic-sensory systems were rationalized as being integral components of a greater Nazi vision of purging the world of Jews and other delegated subhuman peoples.

Third, according to Lifton, doubling is most readily embraced by the human organism in extreme situations where immersion in death imagery is unavoidable. It is a psychic survival response of human beings that shapes the mindset that killing others is necessary for the preservation of the self.

Fourth, doubling is a defense against feelings of guilt experienced by people who are involved in acts that grossly violate internalized social norms and mores that comprise the structures of the “good prior self” (morally and ethically sound self-process of people before they committed premeditated murder). The Auschwitz self that was involved in genocide, as an example, was a con-

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tainer of the Nazi doctor’s guilt. It was the “evil self” that did the killing and not the “good doctor.”

Finally, there is an unconscious dimension to doubling. Much of doubling takes place outside of conscious awareness of the participants of all group enterprises.

Mengele, according to Lifton, with all of his sadistic, self absorbed, and destructive psychological traits acquired through childhood trauma, cannot be understood in isolation from the Nazi ideology or “biomedical vision.” Mengele, more singularly than any other SS doctor, internalized the fantasy of being a “biological revolutionary” who was on a mission to remake the German people and the very genetic makeup of mankind (Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 1986). In Auschwitz’s torture and death-immersed environment, Mengele found an ideal ensemble of opportunities to give unrestrained expression to his murderous impulses, specifically his need to project his death and annihilation anxieties onto delegated scapegoats.

Lifton’s study of Nazi doctors and the psychology of genocide illuminates the dark and mercurial machinations of the group unconscious. One of the core elements Lifton’s work demonstrates is the disturbing perspective that all humans are susceptible to doubling in the service of evil mass murder. Mengele and other Nazi doctors who actively engaged in the Holocaust were not uniquely diabolical in this regard.

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