A man lived once. This man was technically a doctor. A Nazi doctor. He conducted research on humans. I considered air quoting research, to insinuate that what he did was not real research, but it was. It absolutely was. The nature of the physical is such that you can learn things about it by forsaking morality entirely.
Mengele was only technically a doctor, because no real doctor can forget about “first, do no harm”. And he did. He definitely did. He completely banished the notion from his mind. Or perhaps he thought he was doing no harm, as he regarded his subjects as nothing more than bacteria, pathogens on the body of the “glorious” Aryan race, as Nazi doctrine taught.
He was interested in twins. He would befriend his subjects, introducing himself as Uncle Mengele, and offer them candy. This to the same children he would later kill “via lethal injection, shootings, beatings, and his deadly experiments.” An Auschwitz survivor described the situation as follows:
He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that, ... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay.
The usage of “anomaly” in that quote being an Olympic level euphemism. On one occasion “Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night by injecting their hearts with chloroform.” He experimented on pregnant women. He would perform vivisection without anesthesia. Once, he sewed a pair of twins together, in an attempt to artificially create conjoined twins. These did not even get a mercy kill, as they died of gangrene after several days of agony.
Fourteen twins in one night. I have two little girl cousins. I have loved playing with them. When I try to imagine killing one of them via lethal injection to the heart, I just blank out. It’s not a thought I can actually think.
But Mengele thought it. He more than thought it, he acted on it. Fourteen times. In one night.
I would call Mengele a “monster”, but that word is as insignificant as a candle next to the sun when applied to Mengele and his evil.
And it is in this that we see how Mengele broke reality.
The consensus view of reality these days is naturalism or physicalism. The view that only the natural or physical exists. From a metaphysical standpoint, this is flat earthery: an entire dimension of reality has been denied. In the flat plane of naturalism, only two dimensional developments occur. Reaching the bottom of the Marianas Trench, building a skyscraper, landing on the Moon: all purely horizontal developments. There is no depth to such things, at least, not on their own.
But then we come to Josef Mengele, and in him we see something that does not quite fit in the flatland of naturalism. How to describe his evil in naturalistic language? He caused suffering, but in naturalism, suffering is just an excitation of neurons, and anyway, his evil goes deeper than just causing suffering. He tormented and murdered children, not because he was following some dim, deranged passion, like a serial killer, but because he wanted to know things and believed with a genuine faith that his subjects were less than human, and naturalistic language just can’t convey what is so wrong about that.
Calling his acts monstrous or evil are just rhetoric that gets in the way of seeing clearly the underlying ‘truth’ that all that happened is that some atoms changed position, and that whatever horror we feel is just an evolutionarily selected for instinct to protect the young. That is the dispassionate, flat vision of naturalism.
But stepping out of that frame, we see in Mengele something beyond the human, a yank from beneath the plane of the natural. Mengele showed there is depth behind what we call reality, that to even begin to properly describe his acts it is necessary to resort to such concepts like metaphysical evil or even demonhood, because his acts are not something time can erase, like it will erase nature. They are beyond the natural. He pierced reality and showed that there is a way down and it is long, long, long.
What does Mengele teach of metaphysical evil? The Tao Te Ching says:
A baby’s body is soft and gentle.
A corpse is hard and stiff.
Plants and trees are tender and full of sap.
Dead leaves are brittle and dry.
If you are rigid and unyielding, you might as well be dead.
If you are soft and flexible, you are truly alive.
Jesus said:
Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
And Heraclitus:
Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s.
In his Space Trilogy, C. S. Lewis called God Maleldil the Young, and he was right to do so, because the chaos and the joy and the inspiration of children makes them the ultimate imago dei. To harm a child is the most nihilistic act there is, the ultimate affirmation of the assertion that we are nothing but dust or animals, and it is that that inspires the horror at Mengele’s acts, not some brute striving of evolution that we should protect the young.
He perpetrated the murder of God and in doing so he showed that there is a God to kill in the first place, that the natural does not exhaust reality. In doing so, he showed evil is a direction, and not a horizontal one, but one that intersects the plane of the natural from another angle.
Mengele was the dark savior of our ignorant age, the one signal from the beyond that could really pierce through the fog of our delusion.
We were not ready for another metaphysical moon landing, there was no talk therapy for us, only electroconvulsive therapy, that’s how far gone we were and are, that only the most savage of inputs could wake us up.
And even that failed, as the Nazis did not lead us into manifesting their opposite, but into them becoming a foil for yet more us versus them dynamics.
I have said we should forgive Hitler, and intellectually, I think we should forgive Mengele, but I have a much, much harder time with him than with Hitler. Mengele actually did the deeds, and it is one of those pesky metaphysical truths that the man who pulls the trigger is guiltier, far guiltier, than the man who gives the order. Though it is true Hitler provided the context for Mengele to exist as the Angel of Death: it seems quite likely that with no Nazism, Mengele would not have hurt anyone. It’s not like he went on to be a serial killer in his fairly long life in South America.
Words can do so much.
Can we speak words that produce a man that is the opposite of Mengele? Have we attempted to imagine that? Can Jesus be said to be the opposite of him? Was there ever an attempt to deliberately make Jesus happen again? Jesus did something to become the Son of God: it’s what seems to me the likeliest explanation of him starting his ministry in his early 30s. That’s a lot of unaccounted for time.
Maybe we can speak those impossible words. Maybe we can’t. But until we do, until we learn something from this Chicxulub of evil, something that can somehow do for children the opposite of what Mengele did to them, of the scales remain tipped in the direction of Mengele, reminding us of the vertical, and of the ascent we all must attempt.
The ascent into the Everything.
Strangely enough, good things that are as good as the worst bad things are bad always seem to depend on badness for their effect. They always involve self-sacrifice in the face of evil, persecution and death: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' That's why the Cross - a combination torture/execution device - is the most powerful symbol of love we have.