Dr Kurtz

January 12, 1944 – Dachau The air is thick with the stench of burning flesh. A man died in front of me today—one of many. His body had lasted four hours and twelve minutes in subzero water before his heart ceased function. The previous record was three hours and fifty-eight minutes. The guards laughed about it over cigarettes. I only wrote down the numbers. There is no sadness here. No suffering. There is only data. A number is a number. A body is a machine. A machine must be studied, tested, and improved. Our work at Dachau progresses well. Dr. Rascher believes he can make a man immune to cold. I disagree. The human body is weak. It is frail. If we are to make something better, it must not be human at all. The others call me cold. I call them sentimental. --- April 3, 1944 – Ravensbrück Today, I opened the skull of a prisoner without anesthesia. The objective: observe neurological activity in real-time during extreme pain stimuli. It was… fascinating. When the bone was removed, the human brain shone beneath the gaslight, pink and glistening, pulsing like a living organism separate from the body itself. The subject screamed for thirty-six minutes before his voice gave out. Pain is a function of the limbic system. If it can be suppressed, so can fear. So can hesitation. I am close to understanding. The brain is not sacred. It is tissue. It is wires and chemicals. If we can change the function, we can change the man. We can create something beyond man. --- September 9, 1944 – Buchenwald The camp is a factory. The prisoners enter as men and leave as statistics. Dr. Gebhardt has allowed me to experiment with sensory deprivation on Soviet prisoners. Locked in total darkness, cut off from sound, light, and human contact, their minds begin to dissolve within days. The strongest lasted eleven days. The weakest went mad within seventy-two hours. The lesson? Man is fragile. His sense of self is dependent on external validation. Remove it, and he crumbles. But what if I could rebuild him after breaking him? That is the real experiment. Not pain. Not death. But transformation. --- December 24, 1944 – Auschwitz Christmas Eve. The guards drink. The camp smells like burnt hair and charred fat. The chimneys never stop smoking. A Jewish doctor begged for his life today. Offered to work for me. Said he had a family once. Said he was like me. I told him: I am not like you. He was useful for precisely seven more hours before I replaced him. Sentimentality is the death of science. --- April 29, 1945 – Berlin Bunker The Reich is collapsing. Hitler raves in his bunker like a wounded animal. The city is burning. The Soviets are closing in. The SS has already executed dozens of our own scientists to prevent them from being taken. Tomorrow, I am supposed to be shot. I will not be. I have seen what happens to men like me. The Americans will come. They will take the engineers, the biologists, the weapons specialists. And I? I have something they need even more. I have knowledge. I know how to break men. I know how to build something stronger in their place. I know how to turn fear into control, pain into evolution. The Americans are no different than we were. They will come looking for a monster. They will find an asset instead. I will shake their hands and build them a new kind of soldier. A soldier without fear. A soldier without hesitation. A soldier without humanity. And when they see what I can do, they will call me a genius instead of a war criminal.