Free Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl Page B

enough, nobody called you a liar. They didn’t even call you lewd. They’d say you had dementia and blame the behavior on declining faculties.
    I heard a talk show doctor say they’d found an Alzheimer’s gene. If Mengele had it, he was hanging tough. Or maybe he’d spotted the senility gene in full bloom in his own ninety-seven-year-old DNA and somehow deleted it, breeding it off the Master Race roster altogether.
    To me it was pretty clear: Mengele was demented. But he didn’t have dementia.
     
     
     

Chapter

8
     
     
Dr. Death
     
     
    In a perfect world, I would have gone back to the crime scene. (The hit-and-run in L.A., not the death camp in Poland.) Interviewed witnesses. Unearthed the facts about the woman he ran down, seen if perpetrator and perpetrated had a connection; found out where Ullman/Mengele lived and who he’d spoken to after the bumper party.
    Any crackpot with TiVo, Google skills or a library card could dig enough death-camp trivia to pass himself off as an OG from Auschwitz.
    I dove into the rest of Zell’s Mengele info pack. A dozen smudged carbon copies detailed the doctor’s varied and disturbing intended-to-save-the-race procedures. At Auschwitz-Birkenau he had sewn twins together. He reasoned that if they were fused, the resulting megatwin could do twice the work for half the feed. He experimented with hydrochloric acid douches and scrotal radiation by way of low-cost sterilization.
    Zell had unearthed a handful of Mengele diary pages. The random sample I picked reeked with stilted self-regard. Mengele wrote like a man giving himself medals.
“There are two ways to save the race: by eliminating lesser races, and enhancing the superior one. This is the duty of a scientist of the Reich—a duty that I, Mengele, fulfilled!”
    Searching for ways to build a better Aryan, he got big into eyeball transplants: replacing lowly brown eyes with blue ones. Unable to connect optic nerves, the doctor left his victims bleeding and blind.
    Of his eye transplant techniques:
“Had the wretches been able to see, for but one moment, they would have thanked me for the glorious cerulean blue gracing their faces.”
He tried dyes after that, but the end result was that they remained brown and blind.
    These notes went on and on. His biggest passion was twins. Twins held the secrets of fertility and genetic control. His next loves, after
die Zwillinge,
were the deformed, and then dwarves. In his capacity as Selektor, he procured specimens from the trains. Had the Nazis won, this was the Mengele who would appear on his own stamp: the dapper
Hauptsturmführer
standing on the ramp, deciding who lives and who dies. Tallies varied. Mengele ordered the death of either a hundred thousand or half a million. The horror, for the Jews, was that it was Jews who were being exterminated. The rest of the world—including America—was more or less okay with it. Until the very end. In 1939, the United States turned away the SS
Louisa,
full of Jewish refugees. President Roosevelt was concerned about the political fallout from helping Jews. (
“New Deal—not Jew Deal!”
) The ship returned to Hamburg, where passengers were promptly dispatched to the camps. The State Department set up a Jewish settlement in Sosua, in the Dominican Republic. The DR’s president, Trujillo, believed his countrymen were too black. He wanted some whites to move in and improve the racial ratio. I wouldn’t say I was a history buff, but I was an insomniac, and Nazis were a perennial fave on the late-night Discovery, History, Biography and Military Channel menu. Arcane details just lodge in the mind.
     
     
    The possible presence of the man himself infused the facts (selections, experiments, perfumed scarves) with new juice. I kept reading.
    His twin prose degenerated from grandiose to floral: “With what luster doth the womb of a single woman bloom forth with two, three, four identical flowers?” Other times he sounded like a transcribed