The Transmutations of Dr. Mengele
Artist's Comment
Mengele used for his pseudoscientific experiments human guinea pigs, infants, young twins and dwarfs. Some of the experiments consisted of their genital organs and a variety of harmful injections into the veins, or directly into the heart. Most of the children died a cruel death.
After the Shoah he found asylum in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay were he according to one version drowned in December 1978.
Docent Guide
Dr. Josef Mengele was known in Auschwitz as "The Angel of Death" because of his lethal experiments, primarily on twins. As member of the NS-Institute for "Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene" ("Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene") he joined the "Waffen-SS" voluntarily and worked as medical officer in France and the Soviet Union, where he received high distinctions before he was declared unsuitable for military at the front after an injury. In 1943, he went to Auschwitz - again voluntarily - in order to conduct medical and anthropological examinations and was therefore supported by the "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft".
Priority of his "research" was a fanatically pursued "Research on twins". Obviously he wanted to verify the hereditary influences on people. Each twin-couple could be observed under the same life conditions and sent to death in best health - an ideal assumption for post-mortal research. Other fields of his "research" were the examinations of Lilliputians as example of the "Abnormal" and the "Noma" - illness of cheeks which were caused by physical and psychical exhaustion. Until shortly before the evacuation of Auschwitz, he worked there before he returned to GŸnzburg, where he was not prevented from building up the firm of Carl Mengele and Sons again. It was not until the mid-50ies, when the author Ernst Schnabel made Mengele an object of public discussion with his publication about Anne Frank. Mengele had been going to South America already. He was never sent to Germany and presumably died in Brazil in 1979 in a drowning accident.
In the painting, Hirschberger uses inversions of Biblical themes. Instead of climbing a ladder to heaven, Mengele is depicted as a "secular angel of death," destroying children and having them descend a ladder into a fiery hell. Mengele's passion for experiments raises the question of the perpetrators: ordinary people or demonic beings? Mengele represented, like many other members of the SS, those in higher education. Medical doctors in particular embraced the Nazi Party.