Mengele's letters

[Rose Siding]

JERUSALEM - In previously unseen post-World War II letters, notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele describes a banal existence as a fugitive in South America, complaining about his lazy Brazilian housekeeper and documenting his weekly trips to town to eat strudel at a German bakery — one of "the small pleasures I very much enjoy."
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The Mengele letters, some handwritten and some typed, came from files of Brazil's federal police which investigated Mengele after his death in 1979.
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At Auschwitz, Mengele was responsible for what came to be known as "selection," choosing who was fit for slave labor and who was to die in the gas chambers. He was also fascinated by twins on whom he experimented.

"He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him 'uncle,' 'uncle Mengele' and sometimes give them a sweet — and in the same tone of voice that he said 'I'm uncle Mengele,' he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection," Martha Weiss, a survivor of his experimental ward, told the Associated Press recently.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=721&e=7&u=/ap/20050128/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_mengele_letters

[Turbineguy]

1. Yes, and Uncle Mengele

can look forward someday to meeting some new friends....

who in life were members of this Bush administration

[Minstrel Boy]

2. Fascinating.

There's an engrossing biography of Mengele, called "The 'Last' Nazi," that details his life in South America.

In a letter to his son Rolf, he defended his actions as in defense of "indisputable traditional values."

[pantouflard]

3. Did anyone hear "On Point's" interview with some women who

were experimented on by Mengele as children at Auschwitz? If you're interested, the WBUR site has archives. Very sad, but these women are a testament to strength and character.

[seemslikeadream]

4. American corp. philanthropies found & fund eugenics of Hitler & Mengele

How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."

In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.

Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.

http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/


Against the mongrelization of the submerged tenth, the eugenicists posed the purity of the Nordic races. Peoples of the north, they held, had forged their superiority over generations through the struggle to survive in severe environments. The weaker members had long been eliminated by natural selection. This was set out in texts like The Passing of a Great Race by American eugenicist Madison Grant, which Hitler read while imprisoned in the mid '20s for inciting mob violence. (The German translation was published by Hitler's co-conspirator Julius Lehman; Hitler even wrote Grant a fan letter declaring the book his "Bible.")

There can be no doubt, given the extensive documentation Black presents, that American eugenicists and their supporters were at least willing fellow travelers if not out-and-out collaborators in the German pursuit of racial purity. Rockefeller money was still going to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics and other Nazi research centers up to the eve of the invasion of Poland. The Eugenical News, official journal of the American Eugenics Research Association, openly praised Nazi Jewish policies even as blitzkrieg raged.

Lest anyone think it an isolated moment in American history, Black proposes that eugenics lives on in new forms. Instead of the term eugenics, with its incendiary associations, the preferred label is now the more neutral "human genetics." However, remnants of the eugenic philosophy can be discerned in practices like premarital blood testing, IQ and other standardized tests, and so-called free market solutions to social welfare. James Watson, co-discover of the DNA double helix and current head of the laboratory complex formerly occupied by Charles Davenport, has been quoted as saying 10 percent of the world's population suffers from irreversible genetic defects. The genetic code of the entire population of Iceland resides on an Internet database managed by IBM under the heading "Life Services--Nordic."
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/w/war-against-the-weak.shtml