Chapter 6 Exceptions to the Rule

Chapter 6

Exceptions to the Rule

Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Mengele

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and it is believed that he was directly responsible for implementing the Jewish Holocaust.

Himmler was credited with setting up and organizing all the Nazi concentration camps and he was also credited with overseeing the hated and feared Gestapo, the secret police who terrorized whole nations under Hitler’s command. He allocated which camps were to be used for extermination purposes and estimates of the number of people who were actually murdered in these camps run as high as fourteen million. This figure includes approximately six million Jews.

The clues to his temperament type come from reports that without Hitler’s knowledge, Himmler attempted to initiate peace talks with the Western Allies. Unlike choleric Rudolf Hess who took daring action hoping that Hitler would approve, Himmler tried to gain peace in secret, but instead of being welcomed by the British military, he was arrested as a war criminal. As a result of his arrest Himmler committed suicide. Himmler the cowardly peacemaker had a phlegmatic temperament and although it is unusual for a phlegmatic person to be so involved in acts of brutality it is definitely not impossible.

People who knew Himmler personally, described him as being an insignificant looking, romantic idealist. He was shy, harmless, colorless but reasonably friendly. In his earlier years Himmler was not self-assured, he made no impression on anyone and he tried to make himself inconspicuous. He was generally considered by others to be a non-entity but one of his most endearing qualities was that he was loyal to a fault to Adolf Hitler. Of the four temperament types, the Phlegmatics have the greatest capacity to be extremely loyal to their spouses, their friends and their leaders.

As he gained power Himmler’s good qualities began to disappear and he emerged as a sneaky, disloyal traitor who tried to desert the sinking ship in order to save his own skin. These are the descriptions of a phlegmatic man who had once tasted power and found out that he liked it.

As a young boy, Himmler was described by his classmates as polite, shy, awkward and suffering from ill health. He had severe digestive disorders and there are reports that as an adult he felt so squeamish after viewing the execution by firing squad of approximately one hundred Jews, that he gave the orders to build gas chambers where the pesticide Zyklon B could be used to murder the victims in a less visual manner. 

It was not a secret that Himmler was an Anti-Semite and he was convinced that he could be the architect for creating a pure Nordic race using the science of eugenics. Himmler wanted to create a race of blue-eyed blonds even though he himself fell far short of the ideal. He was the one who encouraged the kidnapping of Aryan looking children from the Eastern Slavic countries, children who were placed in what were considered to be good German homes, to be raised as Germans.

To his disappointment, Himmler’s plan to make all of his SS men marry and produce lots of children was a failure. As a college student, Himmler had studied agronomy, the science of plant genetics, and he was convinced that within only a few generations, he could use his knowledge of genetics to produce a Nordic looking nation. It must have escaped his mind that as a decidedly non Nordic looking, middle aged man himself, he would be dead and buried long before any such experiment could come to fruition but this is the ideal that drove him on.

For his plan to work Himmler had to eliminate other alien looking races. In order to produce this master race, the science of eugenics demanded that reproduction by people who were viewed to have undesired traits must be reduced, and reproduction by people with desired traits must be increased.

Jews were not the only people who were slated for elimination. Himmler had a plan to eliminate about twenty million Slavs as well. The Slavs of the Baltic States, Poland, Western Ukraine and Byelorussia were to be driven from the land, expelled eastwards where hopefully they would starve to death. He also went as far as forbidding sexual relationships between Germans and foreigners in order to prevent children with mixed blood from being born.

As the war progressed Himmler was given military duties to perform and he failed miserably. Himmler was lazy and liked to take a nap every day and he was also useless when it came to military tactics. When he was trying to negotiate some kind of peace with a delegate of the Swedish Red Cross, he lied extensively about the death camps but he was not a believable liar and his attempts to save himself were fruitless.

In the beginning, Himmler was viewed by Hitler as the most loyal of all his henchmen. He was a soft spoken Phlegmatic, he liked to be unobtrusive and in actual fact he deeply valued himself as a great peacemaker. His temperament was that of a quiet man, cool, calm and collected but he was a pathetic liar and he was a non-descript individual who, by some quirk of fate, ended up getting permission to mass murder millions of people, a Holocaust that went down in human history as the most evil happening of the twentieth century. When Himmler committed suicide it was by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Within Hitler’s tight circle, cyanide poisoning was the favorite way to die because death was quick, it was easy and it was a certainty.  

Heinrich Himmler was a snob and the prize that he sought after was elevation to a higher rank in society. He is quoted as saying, “I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess.” It must have escaped his mind that mass murderers always end up at the bottom of society not at the top.

      

Josef Mengele (1911-1979)

Josef Mengele was a physician and a German officer who created a torture chamber for the purpose of medical experimentation. He was a true Anti-Semite and was working on ways to create blond, blue-eyed Nordics for the German racial plan of Aryan domination around the world.

Mengele performed gruesome experiments on female prisoners in his search for a way to perform mass sterilizations on those who were deemed to be racially inferior people. He was determined to find the secret of how to induce pregnant women to give birth to twins, thereby speeding up the birth of so-called genetically superior children.

 Josef Mengele was a member of the SS and he actually volunteered to be transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp. Auschwitz was actually a collection of German death camps located in Poland, where millions of people were murdered and where Mengele was allowed to perform his horrifying medical experiments. He was the most reviled man that ever came out of Nazi Germany.

These experiments of his were bestial and brutal and thanks to the stories told by some of his victims who survived the horror, together with many photographs showing the result of his atrocities, Mengele became the most sought after criminal in the world and unfortunately he was never captured.

This nightmarish doctor was especially fond of experimenting with twins so he asked to be appointed as one of the doctors who selected which prisoners were to be kept alive for slave labor, and who  were to be sent immediately to the gas chambers. He was actually on the lookout for twins to be used for his foul experiments.

It can be determined from looking at old photographs and from listening to descriptions of his character and behavioral traits, that Josef Mengele was a Sanguine; he was one of the smiley friendly people of the world. It is instinctive for Sanguines to keep a smile on their faces. They tend to have broad cheerful grins and the corners of their mouths seem to turn into a half smile even while engaging in normal conversation.

Mengele’s wide toothy grin is his ticket to analysis of his temperament type. One of the captive doctors who worked in the camp alongside Mengele remembered Mengele confiding in him that he only joined the SS unit because he liked the look of the SS uniform. Mengele was vain and he was shallow.

Mass murderers, foul torturers and disgusting despots usually come from the ranks of the Melancholics and the Cholerics but this is another exception to the rule because rules are never set in stone, there are always variations. Mengele would never have been involved with the death camps if he had not developed an obsession for finding clues about reproduction.

     This Angel of Death was described by those around him as ambitious, flamboyant, cheerful and easy to talk to. His superiors described him as reliable and upright but it has been reported that on occasion Mengele would give a child some sweets, have a friendly little chat and the next day he would give the order for the same child to be sent to die in the gas chamber. This is what he would do when a child was no longer useful to him.

     Grisly photos survive of the horror that took place under Mengele’s care. Limbs were amputated off of live victims without the use of anesthesia, limbs that were wanted for medical research. Blue dye was injected into children’s eyeballs in an attempt to turn their brown eyes blue. Legs were sliced open and then Mengele or one of his assistants would inject lethal bacteria into the bone marrow in order to simulate wartime wounds. Mengele hoped to discover a better method of treating the wounds of German soldiers in the field.

One experiment was described as an attempt to create a pair of conjoined twins. The backs of the twins were sewn together but the twins eventually died from gangrene. Mengele even prevented mothers from feeding their babies just to see how long it would take for the babies to starve to death. Not all pregnant women were sent immediately to the gas chambers, some were needed for experimentation purposes.

     This good looking sanguine man wanted to make a name for himself in the fields of Eugenics and Genetics, and he felt justified in doing what he did because he was sure that he could contribute to advancing medical knowledge.

     Because of ineptitude on the part of his British captors and because there were seventeen German soldiers named Josef Mengele, and because he did not sport the usual SS tattoo under his arm like every other member of the SS, ‘Doctor Death’ managed to escape to South America.

In order to escape capture, Mengele constantly moved from country to country, but he mostly took up residence in Argentina, Paraguay or Brazil. Josef Mengele, forever the optimist, was brazen enough to revisit Germany for a vacation and to meet up with his family, a family that had supported him financially after he escaped to South America. He avoided capture and died in 1979 after suffering a massive stroke while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. Six years later, DNA testing performed on the body proved that the unearthed corpse was indeed the body of the reviled Josef Mengele.

     Josef Mengele was the eldest of three sons born to a Bavarian industrialist. His mother was known to be an angry tyrant but despite his mother’s constant rage, Mengele was generally viewed as being a pleasant child. His teachers remembered him as a very good student and the irony is that some of his child victims who survived the camp also remembered him as a nice, friendly, father figure who gave them sweets.

     Mengele’s sought after reward was career advancement and a top place in history as a medical pioneer. He wrote in his diary, “Eugenics has not succeeded in the short run. I must find a solution.” He is quoted as saying, “There can’t be two smart peoples in the world. We’re going to win the war, so only the Aryan race will stand.”  The belief in the existence of a superior Aryan race was like believing so strongly in a myth that the myth takes on a life of its own. The myth becomes a religion.

The Nazis created a new religion for themselves. It was just like many of the world’s established religions with their belief in the superiority of their own true believers. Most established religions teach that their true believers will one day rule the world and the unbelievers will surely be wiped off the face of the earth. We humans truly are like little Gods sitting on our own thrones of judgment.

Hippocrates

Hippocrates, a renowned Greek physician believed to have been born circa 460 BCE seems to have been the first person to have recorded his observations on the four temperament types. His nomenclature has survived to this day although he did err in his belief about the sources of the four human temperament types.

The medical discoveries of Hippocrates formed the basis for the establishment of our current, modern medical system. He was viewed as a genius and most likely knew himself to be a Melancholic.

Although it is unknown who actually wrote, ‘The Hippocratic Oath,’ it is aptly named to support the veracity that Hippocrates contributed much to medicine in the fifth century BCE. He was a genius who contributed to the growth of human knowledge, not a killer or a murderer like Josef Mengele.

As far as we know Hippocrates was educated, self sufficient and he had a genuine interest in helping those around him who were suffering from various diseases and injuries. However, Hippocrates did not have an easy time of it as he spent twenty years in prison for the crime of disputing the authoritarian view that illness and disease came from the Gods and were punishments for wrongdoings.

It is unknown who actually wrote the Hippocratic Oath but it is aptly named after a great man.

Hippocratic Oath (Modern version)

·         I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant.

·         I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

·         I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

·         I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

·         I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

·         I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

·         I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

·         I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

·         I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

·         If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today. 

In the United States approximately 400 suicides are committed every year by physicians. They have a higher risk of dying from suicide than from any other disease, and suicide is also the second most common cause of death among medical students.

Medscape: Physician Suicide; Louise B Andrew, MD, JD; Chief Editor; Barry E. Brenner, MD, PhD, FACP.

They do not remember that according to the Hippocratic Oath a physician must not play God. Physicians do not have the authority over life and death even when the life and death are their own, because suicide is an affront to the memories of those millions of people who were murdered and who wanted the chance to live. Assisted suicide in cases of unbearable pain and incurable disease may be an exception to the rule. 

What was it that persuaded these men, together with a whole nation, to worship and adore Adolf Hitler? It wasn’t one thing alone, and it wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s great personality. It wasn’t vain promises of power and glory nor was it a promise of total world domination; it was all of these things combined. Germans wanted a show of strength and raging, screaming, aggressive Adolf Hitler fitted the bill as a leader who would give them all of that.

All the economic circumstances in Germany worked together to allow Hitler ascend to power. Circumstances also worked together to bring competent men into his inner circle, men on whom he could rely, men who had the kind of abilities that a power hungry despot needed and most of all, they were men who were fierce Anti-Semites. 

Circumstances also worked together to give Hitler the power to wage war. Germans are a proud people and they were suffering the humiliation of being blamed for starting World War I. The masses were living in poverty because of the iron fists of the conquering nations and the Germans had developed a deep rooted hatred of those affluent Jews around them. It had escaped their notice that many Jewish people were poor like themselves. Hatred of the Jews had always existed; they are the scapegoats of the world.

But the most decisive decision that Hitler made was to play into human irrational emotions. He unearthed their deepest fears and desires. The lost sheep of Germany were sold a bill of goods and they paid dearly for their deep human desire to rise up and take revenge. Hitler managed to trigger that age old desire to murder those people who were a hateful nuisance to the proud Germans.

But the German people were not the only humans with the desire to kill; the killer instinct is alive and well in all of us. Abortion is just a euphemism for killing fetuses and right or wrong, millions of men and women from all nations have killed fetuses for the sole reason that the fetuses were a nuisance.    

A dysfunctional world is just like a dysfunctional family; it needs a scapegoat to blame for all the ills of society and the scapegoat was and has been for two thousand years the nation of Israel.

Some question beg to be asked; What if there had never been any mass murders, few if any abortions and zero plagues, famines or wars, would the earth be able to sustain the ensuing masses? The population of planet earth in the year 2015 is approximately seven billion and it is estimated that in the next thirty five years the population will double. Is it instinctive in the deep recesses of the human mind to know that it is time for another world war and is it instinctive among us to determine that it is time to thin out the human population again, as long as it won’t be ourselves who are killed?

Will the predictions set forth in the book of Revelation come true? i.e. Armageddon, the next world war that is supposed to start with the never ending conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, and if this war does happen, how was the author of the book of Revelation that was written around 70 AD, able to predict this war. It hasn’t been proven yet whether the Apostle John was a true prophet or not.

Around 70 AD after Judea was sacked by the Romans, the tribes of Israel were scattered around the word in an event called the ‘Great Diaspora.’ But some Biblical prophets of the Old Testament, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Zephaniah were all able to predict that the Jews would eventually return once again to take up residence in the land of Israel, the place where the plains of Armageddon are located.  Are we just puppets on a string and if we are, who are the puppeteers who are pulling those strings to make everything happen as predicted and isn’t there an easier way to do this? The new nation of Israel was declared in 1945