I went to Poland last summer with a group led by thiswoman. She, along with her deceased twin sister, were survivors of Dr. Mengele’s horrific obsession with twins.
We also got to meet a middle aged man by the name of Micheal Worle. Micheal is the grandson of a man named Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Mengele was a student under Vershuer and became his assistent. Verschuer, supposedly, was the reason Mengele became fascinated with twins in the first place.
Do you think that if Mengele had never met Verschuer, that he would have still turned out as evil and despicable as he did?
Could have, for the most part yes. Tough to say, maybe if Mengele was not fascinated with twins, he would have been a murderer for the Nazis. Lot’s of people are fascinated with stuff, some do good with it, others evil. So I doubt twins drove Mengele to becoming a killer.
Now reading about Verschuer, seems he was a bad guy also, and was aware of what Joseph Mengele was doing.
He may not have been obsessed with twins. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been just as despicable, and murdered just as many people. From what I’ve read of Mengele, the primary motivation was never scientific discovery - that was a bonus. He loved having complete power over people, loved hurting them; Auschwitz was an extraordinarily rare environment in which his desires could be fully acted upon.
It’s certainly possible. It could have been the war; it could have been the time he spent in Munich as a student, the headquarters of the Nazi Party; it could have been a professor. What it comes down to is the old nature vs nurture debate - did certain aspects of Mengele’s life cause him to be such a maniac, or was something inherently wrong with him? My WAG is that it was a bit of both. In another time, another country, he might have lived a normal life, but the ideology he exposed to and the near-limitless power he was given brought out the worst in him. But I have to make myself believe that his “worst” was worse than the general population’s. If any flip was switched, I can only hope that it’s a switch that doesn’t exist in most people.
But who knows? Look at the Milgram experiment. People haven’t changed in any significant way since 1945. We’re kept in check by societal norms. When society changes, who knows what your next door neighbor could do?
Unless you can argue that his studying under Verschuer somehow flipped an ethical switch in his brain, the only question we’re really arguing is whether he’d have experimented on other groups of people in place of twins and who those other people would have been. Heck, even that might not be the case. He had already committed to the medical field before meeting Verschuer. He joined the Nazi party independent of Verschuer. And when he was in Auschwitz he experimented on and killed many many other people besides twins.
A better question than this is that age-old cliched one about whether there’d be a Holocaust if Hitler had gotten into art school. At least there you could argue Hitler might have refocused his energies and he certainly wouldn’t have been in power to affect the change he did. Here though? There’s nothing I see that would indicate Mengele wouldn’t have just chosen another specialty (maybe gays, maybe Down Syndrome) and tortured them for the sake of science.
BUT, he might not have even gone to Auschwitz in the first place if it wasn’t for Verschuer.
Verschuer told Mengele about all the “genetic material” in the camps and Mengele wasted no time in going to “use” it. So, no Verschuer=(maybe) no Auschwitz.