Dr. Josef Mengele: Nazi Propaganda Monster

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Introduction and background Just like any living organism can become infected with a virus, society is plagued with monsters in its midst. These monsters feed off of every good and beautiful thing in the world; by the Oxford dictionary, they are defined as “inhumanly cruel and wicked.” Just like a disease, they eat at society at every angle until it is destroyed and they achieve their ambitions. A man named Dr. Josef Mengele comes to mind when the word monster is spoken. Working as head physician in Auschwitz during World War II, he selected gas chamber victims with delight and performed torturous experiments on the prisoners at the concentration camps in hopes of learning how to create a perfect Aryan race. At the hands of Nazi propaganda …show more content…

Being the eldest of three, he was often ignored and extremely lonely. His parents were often gone due to their successful farming machine business (Josef Mengele, 1998). Being in solitude as a child can sometimes damage brain development of important social skills and deprived them of values and morals. He still, although, grew to be a polite, kind, and handsome young boy (Josef Mengele, 1998). His innocence and kind personality as a child makes it hard to believe the monster he became. Once he completed high school he went to Munich University to study medicine. He focused mainly on anthropology, “the study of the origin, development, and behavior of humankind” (Josef Mengele, 1998). During his time in college, Nazi propaganda started to arise and strongly influence him through his college years. The education system was fully controlled by the Nazis at that time and taught obedience to Hitler and the belief that there was a need for a perfect Aryan race. That is all he came to know and after joining the SS, he started his work at the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, he saw his opportunity to fulfill the Nazi “mission” using the prisoners as an unlimited supply of subjects. Survivors and those who were forced to work for him noticed he never felt anything when conducting horrible experiments or determining who would be gassed to death by the flick of his hand (Auschwitz Survivors Recall Horror of Nazi Experiments, …show more content…

The answer is that the Nazis instilled these thoughts as soon as a child was born. First, when parents registered their child, they had to prove that they were of complete Aryan descent. Then they could only name their child from a list of pre-decided names. As the child grew, they read storybooks like "The Poisonous Mushroom" that instilled hatred against the weak; Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and the crippled or disabled (Nazi Propaganda, 2015). The hero in the books was obviously Hitler. They only heard what the government wanted them to hear and were only allowed to say and do what the government enforced. Boys were put through military training until they were old enough to join the army. The propaganda and brainwashing that surrounded them instilled a strong belief that they were doing what was right for mankind. This is how Josef Mengele was brought up. Everything he was exposed to told of the German struggle to "rescue" mankind and eradicate the wicked and the weak (Ziemer, 1943). Subsequently, he trusted that it was appropriate to torture the prisoners because, from what he was told, they were not humans. His environment destroyed the once innocent child. Hitler had gained just another toy for him to

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