Otmar von Verscheur
Otto von Verscheur was professor at the Kaiser William Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, who was part of the development of Nazi race and biological ideology.
German science
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he recommended, in 1927 the forced sterilization of the “mentally and morally subnormal.” He had belonged to a nationalist paramilitary Freikorps unit of World War I veterans, and believed in academia contributing to German “national regeneration”.[1]
He had an interest in twins, to determine if undesirable traits were inherited; this was a major focus of Mengele's experiments.
In ---, he wrote a history of the discontinued Institute.
Josef Mengele
He was one of Josef Mengele's teachers and directed his experiments and Auschwitz Concentration Camp.[2] According to Prof. Hans Grebe, who started an assistantship for von Verscheur in 1938, Mengele was "our chief's favorite student." Grebe denied his professor was antisemitic. [3]
Von Verschuer called Mengele as “my assistant” in paperwork throughout the war. Most of Mengele’s findings were supported and received by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. “The directors of the Berlin-Dahlem Institute always warmly thanked Dr. Mengele for this rare and precious material".[4]
References
- ↑ Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
- ↑ Rebecca Erbelding (28 April 2008), The Historiography of Josef Mengele: Home, George Mason University
- ↑ Benno Müller-Hill (1997), Murderous science: elimination by scientific selection of Jews, Gypsies, and others in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, Cold Spring Laboratory Press, ISBN 978-087969531, pp. 163-167
- ↑ Muller-Hill, p. 20, quoted by Elberding