The Surgeon Of Birkenau
Aug 31, 2016 Immaculately dressed, it was Josef Mengele who greeted doomed arrivals at the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, in occupied Poland. With a flick of his gloved hands, the supreme arbiter of life and death would consign terrified prisoners either to work or to death in the gas chambers.
The basis for the 2010 Hollywood remake, this is an intelligent and clever spy thriller, with interesting moral overtones. However, as rarely happens I personally slightly preferred the re- make. I don't know if it was the acting, the writing or the directorial style, but for whatever reason I found myself both more moved and more chilled by the re-make. To be fair, that could be because I saw the re-make first, so knew the story, but this isn't really based on shocking twists, so I think the newer film simply worked better for me. In particular I found Helen Mirren more affecting than her Israeli counterpart, Gila Almagor. That said, this is still a strong film, and there are a couple of very powerful scenes between the agents and their Nazi prey that beat out their counterparts in the re-make.
Worth seeing if you're into films enough that seeing two different versions of a good story is fun, not a chore.
Wikimedia CommonsJosef Mengele lacks a terrible backstory to which one can point a finger when attempting to explain his vile acts. In fact, Mengele was a popular and witty rich kid whose father ran a successful business in Germany at a time when the national economy was cratering.Everybody at school seemed to like him and he got excellent grades. Upon graduating, it seemed natural that he would go on to university and that he would succeed at anything he put his mind to.Mengele earned his first doctorate in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. He did his post-doctoral work at Frankfurt under Dr.
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was a fully indoctrinated Nazi eugenicist. National Socialism always held that individuals were the product of their heredity, and von Verschuer was one of the Nazi-aligned scientists whose work seemed to legitimize that assertion.Von Verschuer’s work revolved around hereditary influences on congenital defects such as cleft palate. Mengele was an enthusiastic assistant to von Verschuer, and he left the lab in 1938 with both a glowing recommendation and a second doctorate in medicine. For his dissertation topic, Mengele wrote about racial influences on the formation of the lower jaw. Honorable Military Service On The Eastern Front. Wikimedia CommonsJosef Mengele had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, at the age of 26, while working under his mentor in Frankfurt. In 1938, he joined the SS and a reserve unit of the Wehrmacht.
His unit was called up in 1940, and he seems to have served willingly, even volunteering for the Waffen-SS medical service.Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, Mengele practiced eugenics in Poland by evaluating Polish nationals for potential “Germanization,” or race-based citizenship in the Reich.In 1941, his unit was deployed to Ukraine in a combat role. Josef Mengele – the rich, popular kid and outstanding student – distinguished himself again at the front for bravery bordering on heroics. He was decorated several times, once for dragging wounded men out of a burning tank, and repeatedly commended for his dedication to service.In January 1943, a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. That summer, another German army was eviscerated at Kursk. Between the two battles, during the meatgrinder offensive at Rostov, Mengele was severely wounded and rendered unfit for further action.He was shipped back home to Germany, where he again connected with his old mentor von Verschuer and received a wound badge, a promotion to captain, and the assignment of a lifetime: In May 1943, Mengele reported for duty to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Josef Mengele At Auschwitz.
Evoland 2 revdl. Evoland 2 is an unique RPG, with its graphic style and gameplay changing as you progress through a deep storyline based on time travel.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Yad Vashem Auschwitz.Mengele got to Auschwitz during a transitional period. Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele’s prisoners to be used for twin research at Auschwitz.The experiments he devised were ghoulish beyond belief. Motivated and energized by the seemingly bottomless pool of condemned human beings placed at his disposal, Mengele continued the work he had started at Frankfurt by studying the influence of heredity on various physical traits.Identical twins are useful for this kind of genetics research because they, of course, have identical genes. Any differences between them, therefore, must be the result of environmental factors. This makes sets of twins perfect for isolating genetic factors by comparing and contrasting their bodies and behavior.Mengele assembled hundreds of pairs of twins and sometimes spent hours measuring various parts of their bodies and taking careful notes. He often injected one twin with mysterious substances and monitored the illness that ensued.
He applied painful clamps to children’s limbs to induce gangrene, injected dye into their eyes – which were then shipped back to a pathology lab in Germany – and gave them spinal taps.When the test subject died, the child’s twin would be immediately killed with an injection of chloroform to the heart and both would be dissected for comparison. On one occasion, Josef Mengele killed 14 pairs of twins this way and spent a sleepless night performing autopsies on his victims.