The freight train rumbled to an agonizing stop on
the rails inside of the Auschwitz compound. The human cargo that
was packed tightly into its bevy of cattle cars continued to groan
and clamor, suffering as they were from a four-day journey without
food, water, bathroom facilities, or even fresh air. The Jewish
prisoners were the latest victims of the Nazi campaign to
liquidate the Jewish population of Hungary, the last Jewish
community to remain intact during the war. Their final destination
was the violent, Dantesque nightmare of Auschwitz, the premier
Nazi death factory in southwestern Poland, the most efficient cog
in the wheel of the Nazi’s Endlosung, Final Solution, to the
so-called Jewish question.
The doors of each cattle car were violently thrown
open by Nazi SS soldiers carrying machine guns. "Raus,
raus!" ("Out, out!") they screamed at the frightened and
bewildered Jews, who hurried out the doors under a rain of cudgel
blows and past the snapping, barking jaws of the camp’s German
Shepherds. The air was thick with the deafening and confusing
sound of orders being screamed, dogs barking, and the stench of
burning flesh and hair that spewed from the smokestacks of the
camp’s 5 crematoria 24 hours a day. Families were separated
immediately, with the males forming one line and the females
forming another. Most victims were unaware that this was the last
time that they would see their loved ones alive, unaware of their
lost opportunity to say last good-byes.
The SS troops marched the doomed prisoners to the
head of the ramp onto which they had exited. They were led before
an SS officer who, in the midst of all the madness, agony and
death, seemed very out of place. His handsome face was set with a
kind smile, his uniform impeccably tailored, cleaned and pressed.
He was cheerfully whistling an opera tune, one of his favorites by
Wagner. His eyes betrayed nothing but a cursory interest in the
drama that was unfolding before him, the drama of which he alone
was the chief architect. He carried a riding crop, but rather than
using it to strike the prisoners as they passed before him, he
merely used it to indicate which direction he selected them to go
in, links oder rechts, left or right. Unbeknownst to the
prisoners, this charming and handsome officer with the innocuous
demeanor was engaging in his favorite activity at Auschwitz,
selecting which new arrivals were fit to work and which ones
should be sent immediately to the gas chambers and crematorium.
Those sent to the left, roughly 10 to 30 percent of all new
arrivals, had their lives spared, at least for the moment. Those
sent to the right, usually 70 to 90 percent of all new arrivals,
had been condemned to die without even a passing glance from their
judge and jury at Auschwitz. The handsome officer who held
omnipotent sway over the fate of all the camp’s prisoners was Dr.
Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.
 |
|
Josef Mengele at Auschwitz in
1943 |
Contents
The Mengeles of Gunzburg
Josef Mengele was
the eldest of three sons born to Karl and Walburga Mengele in the
Bavarian village of Gunzburg. Karl was a local industrialist who
owned a plant that manufactured farming equipment. He was known as
a stern but fair employer and a hard worker. It was his wife
Walburga, however, whom his employees feared the most. An immense
woman with a terrible temper, she was often known to storm onto
the floor of her husband’s factory and publicly chastise
individual employees for laziness and poor workmanship. Warnings
were hurriedly passed down the production line whenever Walburga
was seen approaching the factory, and workers scrambled to stay
clear of her wrath.
Walburga ruled her home with an equal amount of firmness,
demanding respect and obedience from her three sons, Josef, Alois,
and Karl, Jr. A devout Catholic, Walburga saw to it that her boys
strictly practiced the faith of the Church. She was equally as
cold and demanding in her relationship with her husband, Karl. One
afternoon, Karl arrived home in a new automobile he had purchased
in order to celebrate the growing success of his factory. However,
instead of thrilling and impressing his wife with this purchase,
Karl was greeted with spiteful admonishments for having so
foolishly spent money on something as frivolous as a car without
first consulting with her. It was a moment that exemplified the
extent to which Walburga sought total control over her household
and the lives of those who lived in it.
It is clear from his memoirs that his mother’s behavior and the
relationship she shared with Karl left a lasting impression on
young Josef. He describes his father as a cold man, distant and
preoccupied with his work at the factory. Walburga is described as
someone incapable of loving. While she may have indeed been able
to mold a disciplined, respectful son in Josef, her cold-hearted
methods may well have contributed to her son’s capacity for murder
and bloodlust as an SS doctor at Auschwitz.
 |
|
Josef as a
young man (Corbis) |
Despite
the lack of love and affection in his home, young Josef is
remembered as a bright, cheerful boy in Gunzburg. Peers and adults
alike greeted him as "Beppo," an affectionate nickname for the
handsome, engaging young child. While never the top student in his
classes, Josef nevertheless did well, and was recognized as a
bright, ambitious student. He was the model of a well-behaved
student, earning verbal compliments from his otherwise strict
teachers, and high marks for conduct and punctuality.
As Beppo matured into adolescence, he continued to refine his
social skills, becoming a strikingly handsome young man. Mengele
is remembered as someone who exuded a natural self-confidence, a
charming and articulate speaker who was much sought after by the
village’s young women. His perfectly-styled dark hair, the
carefree light in his eyes, and his winsome smile, combined with
his extraordinary social graces, imbued Mengele with a
Kennedyesque charisma. It was at this early age that Mengele
acquired the habit of dressing exclusively in hand-tailored
clothing and sporting what would become his trademark, white
cotton dress gloves, gloves that have been used by Auschwitz
survivors to distinguish him from other SS doctors.
It was during this period that Josef and his ambition came into
direct conflict with the wishes of his father, Karl. Josef’s
father wished for his eldest son to work for the family factory in
Gunzgburg, perhaps as an accountant. However, young Josef dreamt
of a career far beyond the confining realm of business, and far
beyond the boundaries of his provincial Bavarian home. Throughout
his youth Josef dreamt of leaving Gunzburg and pursuing a career
in science and anthropology. Making no secret of the scope of his
ambitions, Josef once prophetically boasted to a friend that his
name would one day appear in the encyclopedia. In 1930 Josef
graduated from the Gunzburg gymnasium, or high school, and
passed his Abitur, the preliminary college entry
examination. While his score was unremarkable, it was good enough
for him to be accepted to the University of Munich. Munich is the
Capital of Bavaria, and at the time was the heart of the growing
National Socialist movement, and led by a political revolutionary
named Adolf Hitler.
Contents
The Making of A Young Nazi
Josef Mengele
left Gunzburg for Munich in October of 1930 to begin his studies
at Munich University. He enrolled as a student of Philosophy and
Medicine, degrees that would ultimately lead his career path to
the Heart of Darkness, Auschwitz. At the same time that young
Mengele was beginning his studies, the City of Munich was in the
throes of an ideological revolution. In 1930 the Nazis were the
second-largest party in the German parliament. Adolf Hitler used
Munich as the primary stage from which he would achieve domination
over all of German society. His hateful, frenzied, nationalistic
speeches incited his Bavarian audiences, and intoxicated them with
visions of a new German Empire populated by the German
Super-Race.
Mengele had remained apolitical up until this point in his
life. He was satisfied in his pursuit of life’s leisure pleasures.
His quest for success and renown was confined to the realm of
anthropology and academia. However, he easily succumbed to the
contagious Nazi hysteria that swept up so many of his peers. In
his memoirs he wrote:
My political leanings were, I think for reasons of family
tradition, national conservative. I had not joined any political
organization. But in the long run it was impossible to stand aside
in these politically stirring times, should our Fatherland not
succumb to the Marxist-Bolshevik attack. This simple political
concept finally became the decisive factor in my life.
This "political concept" that Mengele wrote of became his
vehicle upon which he would seek to advance his career, his fame
as a researcher and scientist. Wasting no time, he joined a
nationalistic organization called the Stalhelm, or the
Steel Helmets, in 1931. The Stalhelm wore decorative German
uniforms and paraded to nationalist music during public events.
While they were not yet affiliated with the Nazi Party at this
time, they nonetheless shared the same rabid nationalistic
ideology as the Nazis.
As his political consciousness began to blossom, Mengele
commenced his studies, focusing on anthropology and paleontology,
as well as medicine. Medicine, or the art of healing, was truly a
secondary interest of Mengele’s; his growing passion was for
eugenics, the search for the keys to unlock the secret of genetics
and reveal the sources of human deformities and imperfections.
Mengele’s interest in this field of study arose at a time when a
number of prominent German academics and medical professionals
were espousing the theory of "unworthy life," a theory which
advanced the notion that some lives were simply not worthy of
living. It was here that Mengele began to strive in his efforts to
distinguish himself, to both gain renown and respect as a
scientific researcher and to advance the perfection of the German
race. However ambitious Mengele may have been in this regard, his
academic passion revealed little to nothing of the murderous zeal
that was to one day result from it. One of his university
colleagues, Professor Hans Grebe, has stated that "There was
nothing in his personality to suggest that he would do what he did
(as an SS doctor at Auschwitz)"
If Mengele himself became a cold-blooded monster at the height
of his Nazi career, he certainly learned at the feet of some of
Germany’s most diabolical minds. As a student Mengele attended the
lectures of Dr. Ernst Rudin, who posited not only that there were
some lives not worth living, but that doctors had a
responsibility to destroy such life and remove it from the general
population. His prominent views gained the attention of Hitler
himself, and Rudin was drafted to assist in composing the Law for
the Protection of Heredity Health, which passed in 1933, the same
year that the Nazis took complete control of the German
government. This unapologetic Social Darwinist contributed to the
Nazi decree that called for the sterilization of those
demonstrating the following flaws, lest they reproduce and further
contaminate the German gene pool: feeblemindedness; schizophrenia;
manic depression; epilepsy; hereditary blindness; deafness;
physical deformities; Huntington’s disease; and alcoholism.
In 1934, Hitler ordered the SA, or Brownshirts, to absorb the
Stalhelm organization, automatically making Mengele a member.
However, a kidney ailment which left him in a weakened condition,
forced him to resign from the organization. He was now free to
devote all of his time to his studies. Five years after entering
the University, Mengele was awarded a Ph.D. for his thesis
entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section
of Four Racial Groups." Through rather dry scientific prose
Mengele postulated that it was possible to detect and identify
different racial groups by studying the jaw. While devoid of any
racist (specifically anti-Semitic) overtones, Mengele’s argument
paralleled those made by others who claimed that physical
characteristics such as the jawbone or the shape of one’s nose
could be used to determine if someone was Jewish. In 1936 Mengele
passed his state medical examination and began working in Leipzig
at the university medical clinic.
The next year, 1937, proved to be a turning point for both
Mengele’s career and the history of the Holocaust itself. He was
recommended for and received a position as a research assistant
with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial
Purity at the University of Frankfort. He was assigned to work for
Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, one of the premier minds
in the field of genetics. Von Verschuer was a public supporter of
Hitler’s, praising him for "being the first statesman to recognize
hereditary biological and race hygiene." Mengele quickly applied
himself in his unabashed pursuit of von Verschuer’s praise and
approval, which he quickly acquired. In von Verschuer Mengele had
found the parental adulation and affirmation so sorely missing
from his childhood. As von Verschuer provided Mengele with that
for which he had longed for all his life, Mengele returned the
gesture with an unbending willingness to please his mentor.
The two streams of ambition that had come to define Mengele’s
life, becoming a renowned scientist and a genetic purifier, had
found unity within the Nazi movement. He became an official Party
member in 1937. In May of 1938 he applied for membership with and
was accepted into the Schutzstaffel, or SS. This was Hitler’s
elite corps of race guardians, those who demonstrated both the
purist Aryan racial background and adherence to Nazi ideology and
practices. By the age of 28, Mengele had climbed to a place of
prominence within the Nazi hierarchy and was positioned to wield
great power and influence.
 |
Mengele conducting "racial purity"
interviews
in 1940 with an elderly Polish couple
|
This same year, Frankfort University awarded Mengele his
medical degree. It was also in 1938 that he received his first
experience in military training, spending three months training
for combat with the Wehrmacht, or German Army. For the
rest of 1938 until 1940 Mengele remained with the Institute,
assisting von Verschuer and reviewing the work of other
researchers. In 1939 war broke out, and Mengele was electrified
with the hope of fighting for Father Germany. He was not
disappointed; although he had to wait until June of 1940 due to
his prior kidney ailment, he was accepted to the Waffen SS, elite
soldiers within the SS itself, and the most fanatical adherents to
Hitler’s call to preserve and protect the German race.
Mengele continued to distinguish himself, this time as a
soldier. As a lieutenant, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second
Class in June of 1941 on the Ukrainian Front. In January of 1942,
while serving with the SS Viking Division deep behind Soviet
lines, he pulled two German soldiers from a burning tank, and was
awarded the Iron Cross First Class, as well as the Black Badge for
the Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the German People.
Wounds he received during this second campaign prevented Mengele
from returning to combat. Instead, he was posted at the Race and
Resettlement Office in Berlin, where he was also promoted to the
rank of captain. By this time his mentor, Professor von Verschuer,
was also stationed in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Genetics. A prominent
Nazi scientist such as von Verschuer certainly had first-hand
knowledge of the Final Solution policy that had recently been
formalized in Berlin by the top members of the Nazi hierarchy. He
would have also correspondingly been aware of Nazi plans to
construct enormous concentration camps across Europe, and that
such camps held untold opportunities for in vivo
experiments, living genetic research to be conducted on human
subjects. Within a year after being posted to Berlin, Dr. Josef
Mengele received a new assignment. In May of 1943, Mengele
departed from Berlin for his next assignment: the Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland.
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|
Josef as a Waffen SS officer in
1942 |
Contents
Auschwitz
 |
|
The 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz |
The death factory at Auschwitz was a gruesome kingdom of human misery. Barracks and
their inhabitants were inundated with the foulest of sanitary conditions. Diseases such as
typhus and diarrhea were rampant, as were lice, vermin and fleas. It was over this kingdom
which Dr. Josef Mengele sought to preside. Mengele’s stated mission at Auschwitz was
to perform research on human genetics. His work was funded through a grant that Professor
von Verschuer had secured through the German Research Council in August of 1943. The goal
of Mengele’s work was to unlock the secrets of genetic engineering, and to devise
methods for eradicating inferior gene strands from the human population as a means to
creating a Germanic super-race. However, despite the scientific premise for his work,
Mengele’s accomplishments added volumes to the annals of human cruelty while
contributing nothing of value to the greater understanding of human genetics and genetic
engineering.
Mengele set out to immediately distinguish himself from the other SS doctors at
Auschwitz. He already stood apart as the only doctor in the camp to have been decorated
for his conduct in battle. Mengele made certain to festoon his impeccable SS uniform with
the medals he had been awarded. He often made reference to his experiences on the front,
and was obviously very proud and protective of his medals. But it was not merely his
military background which would come to distinguish Mengele from his colleagues, but his
obsessed devotion to his work at Auschwitz that established his reputation as a ruthless,
cold-blooded killer whose name inspired fear even in other SS officers. He immediately
demonstrated a deep capacity for wanton murder during a typhus epidemic that broke out in
the camp just days after he had arrived. He ordered a thousand Gypsy men and women who had
the disease to the gas chambers, while sparing the lives of German Gypsies. The
significance of this incident is twofold: Mengele adhered to the Nazi belief that Gypsies
were a subspecies of the human race, and therefore were "unworthy life".
However, the fact that he spared the lives of German Gypsies, at least in this instance,
may have resulted from the fact that Mengele himself had many Gypsy aspects to his own
physical appearance, from his tawny skin to his dark hair and eyes. He did not at all
resemble the ideal Nazi Aryan with blonde hair and blue eyes. At any rate, his willingness
to execute 1,000 innocent people in one moment may point to a psychological need to purge
the world of those things which he hated about his own self.
 |
|
Ovens in the crematorium of Auschwitz (Associated
Press) |
Whatever it was that inspired Mengele to commit this first act of murder, it continued
to fuel his ambition to be Auschwitz’s premier authority over matters of life and
death. Nowhere was this more apparent than during the selection process, which was
primarily held after trains carrying Jewish deportees had arrived at the camp. According
to Dr. Ella Lingens, an Austrian doctor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz for attempting to
hide some Jewish friends, Mengele relished his role as selector:
Some like Werner Rhode who hated his work, and Hans Konig who was deeply disgusted by
the job, had to get drunk before they appeared on the ramp. Only two doctors performed the
selections without any stimulants of any kind: Dr. Josef Mengele and Dr. Fritz Klein. Dr.
Mengele was particularly cold and cynical. He (Mengele) once told me that there are only
two gifted people in the world, Germans and Jews, and it’s a question of who will be
superior. So he decided that they had to be destroyed.
Mengele performed this task with relish, appearing at selections to which he had not
been officially assigned, always dressed in his best dress uniform. He carried himself
with grace and ease in his shiny black boots, his neatly pressed trousers and jacket, and
his white cotton gloves, while a sea of misery washed up at his feet in the form of
exhausted and starving prisoners. Dr. Olga Lengyel, another inmate-doctor, bitterly
recalls Mengele’s demeanor on the ramp:
How we despised his detached, haughty air, his continual whistling, his frigid cruelty.
Day after day he was at his post, watching the pitiful crowd of men and women and children
go struggling past, all in the last stages of exhaustion from the inhuman journey in the
cattle trucks. He would point with his cane at each person and direct them with one word:
"right" or "left." He seemed to enjoy his grisly task.
This "frigid cruelty" Dr. Lengyels spoke of would oftentimes give way to a
searing hot rage which Mengele would unleash without warning upon those who sought to
challenge the order he sought to establish in the camp. Inmate-doctor Gisella Perl recalls
an incident when Mengele caught a woman in her sixth attempt to escape from a truck
transporting victims to the gas chamber:
He grabbed her by the neck and proceeded to beat her head to a bloody pulp. He hit her,
slapped her, boxed her, always her head -- screaming at the top of his voice, "You
want to escape, don’t you. You can’t escape now. You are going to burn like the
others, you are going to croak, you dirty Jew." As I watched, I saw her two
beautiful, intelligent eyes disappear under a layer of blood. And in a few seconds, her
straight, pointed nose was a flat, broken, bleeding mass. Half an hour later,
Dr. Mengele returned to the hospital. He took a piece of perfumed soap out of his bag and,
whistling gaily with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face, he began to wash his hands.
Despite his demonstrated ability to be both frigid and detached as well as cruel and
brutal, Mengele also demonstrated a carefree, charming side which he used to disarm both
colleagues and victims alike. He acted in a caring, concerned manner when confronted with
exhausted women and their children on the ramp, only to send them to the gas chambers a
moment later. His movie star looks and his confident, authoritative manner made him
sexually desirable to the very women that he degraded, tortured and murdered. The totally
unpredictable nature of Mengele’s personality became his most powerful tool for
exerting control over both prisoners and prison personnel, for it instilled a deep-seated
primal fear into all those with whom he came into contact.
In addition to the selections and beatings, Mengele occupied his time with other
numerous acts of the most base cruelty, including the dissection of live infants; the
castration of boys and men without the use of an anesthetic; and the administering of
high-voltage electric shocks to women inmates under the auspices of testing their
endurance. On one occasion Mengele even sterilized a group of Polish nuns with an X-ray
machine, leaving the celibate women horribly burned. In 1981, the West German
Prosecutor’s Office drew up 78 different indictments against Mengele, charging him
with the most heinous and bestial crimes against humanity, including:
Having actively and decisively taken part in selections in the prisoners’ sick
blocks, of such prisoners who through hunger, deprivations, exhaustion, sickness, disease,
abuse or other reasons were unfit for work in the camp and whose speedy recovery was not
envisaged… Those selected were killed either through injections or firing squads or
by painful suffocation to death through prussic acid in the gas chambers in order to make
room in the camp for the "fit" prisoners, selected by him or other SS
doctors… The injections that killed were made with phenol, petrol,
Evipal,
chloroform, or air into the circulation, especially into the heart chamber, either with
his own hands or he ordered the SS sanitary worker to do it while he watched.
Mengele even introduced sexual degradation to the already dehumanizing process of
selection. Inmates from the various women’s barracks were paraded before him,
stripped totally nude. He often would make each woman stop and answer the basest questions
regarding the intimate details of their sexual lives. While he constantly referred to
Jewish woman as "dirty whores," it is impossible to escape the conclusion that
Mengele’s cruelty was at least in part rooted to a secret sexual longing for these
women whom the Reich had deemed as verboten, forbidden.
Mengele provided endless examples of his devotion to the Nazi order, and the cruel and
murderous lengths he was prepared to reach in order to preserve it. On one occasion a camp
Kapo, Jewish inmates who assisted the Nazi’s in driving inmates to the gas
chambers, attempted to retrieve some inmates from the gas chamber line and place them in
the labor line. Mengele was so furious that he murdered the Kapo with his own pistol. On
another occasion, when the crematoria became too full to accommodate the thousands of Jews
streaming into the camp, he had trenches dug, which were then filled with gasoline and set
ablaze. Both the dead and the living, adults as well as children and infants, were thrown
bodily into these pits to be destroyed under Mengele’s supervision.
While it is nearly impossible to distinguish among Mengele’s murderous acts as to
which ones were worse than others, perhaps one incident exemplifies the demonic nature of
the man perhaps better than most. A Russian inmate named Annani Silovich Pet’ko
witnessed a scene that defies description and comprehension:
After a while a large group of SS officers arrived on motorcycles, Mengele among them.
They drove into the yard and got off their motorcycles. Upon arriving they circled the
flames; it (sic) burned horizontally. We watched to see what would follow. After a while
trucks arrived, dump trucks, with children inside. There were about ten of these trucks.
After they had entered the yard an officer gave an order and the trucks backed up to the
fire and they started throwing those children right into the fire, into the pit. The
children started to scream; some of them managed to crawl out of the burning pit. An
officer walked around it with sticks and pushed back those who managed to get out. Hoess
(the Auschwitz commandant) and Mengele were present and were giving orders.
The body of evidence against Mengele is staggering in both its enormity and variety in
the acts of physical and emotional cruelty that he visited upon thousands of helpless
victims. His behavior practically escapes description, while his motives are virtually
beyond analysis. This is especially true in light of the fact that, for a man who so
relished his role as SS doctor and researcher, who adhered so harshly to the Nazi concept
of order and discipline, he consistently displayed not pleasure but detachment from the
torment and suffering he both caused and witnessed. One psychoanalyst, Dr. Tobias
Brocher,
has postulated that "He (Mengele) didn’t take pleasure in inflicting pain, but
in the power (emphasis added) he exerted by being the man who had to decide
between life and death within the ideology of a concentration camp doctor." While
Mengele practiced this ideology within the context of selector, he also practiced it with
equal fervor in the guise of researcher, the role for which he ostensibly been sent to
Auschwitz by his mentor, Professor von Verschuer.
Contents
Mengele's Research
Prior to his association with Mengele, Professor von Verschuer
had concentrated his research on the subject of twins. His work
had been limited to observing the behavior of twin subjects; he
was prohibited from experimenting on living subjects by the
ethical norms which had prevailed prior to the Nazi era. The Nazis
swept away such norms and in Auschwitz, von Verschuer saw
unlimited possibilities for his protégé, Josef Mengele, to conduct
the types of in vivo experiments he had longed to conduct for so
long. Mengele, ever anxious to please his mentor, arrived at
Auschwitz with a mission to plumb the depths of the human mystery,
and to extract the secrets of human genetics from the living twin
specimens at his disposal.
Mengele ordered the SS guards who assisted him in the selection
process to scour the lines of prisoners for twins. "Zwillinge,
zwillinge," "Twins, twins," the guards would bark harshly as
they marched up and down the ramp as trains transporting new
prisoners arrived. Surviving twins, such as Eva Mozes of Hungary,
remember the moment when they were removed from the line of the
condemned and delivered to Dr. Mengele:
 |
| Eva and Miriam Mozes |
When the doors to our cattle car opened, I heard SS soldiers
yelling, "Schnell! Schnell!" ("Faster! Faster!"), and ordering
everybody out. My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand. She
was always trying to protect us because we were the youngest.
Everything was moving very fast, and as I looked around, I noticed
my father and my two older sisters were gone. As I clutched my
mother’s hand, an SS man hurried by shouting, "Twins! Twins!" He
stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike. "Are
they twins?" he asked my mother. "Is that good?" she replied. He
nodded yes. "They are twins," she said.
While the twins were spared from outright execution, they were
delivered to a decidedly crueler fate. Mengele reserved a special
barracks for his twin subjects, as well as for dwarfs, cripples
and other "exotic specimens." The barracks was nicknamed the Zoo,
Mengele’s holding pen. The twins were his favorite subjects, and
they were afforded special treatment, such as being able to keep
their own hair and clothing, and receiving extra food rations. The
guards were under strict orders not to abuse the children, and
were to look after their well being lest one should fall ill and
die. Mengele became explosively irate if one of his beloved
specimens should happen to die. These twins were referred to as
"Mengele’s Children." It was here in the Zoo that the twins were
to learn of their parents’ true fate in the gas chambers, where
Mengele simultaneously became to them a figure of death and of
life, the man who had condemned their parents and family members
to annihilation, while at the same time sparing their own
lives.
 |
|
Ruins of the Infirmary at Auschwitz (Corbis) |
Mengele’s children were also spared from beatings, forced labor
and random selections in order to maintain their good health.
However, Mengele was not motivated by humanitarian urges, but by
his desire to keep his specimens healthy for experimentation.
Ironically, it was his very experiments that extracted the
heaviest physical toll on the children upon whom he lavished such
care and affection, and hundreds ended up dying as a result of his
gruesome deeds. As with other inmates at Auschwitz, Mengele’s
imagination knew no bounds when it came to devising physical
torments for his victims. Preliminary examinations of the twins
were routine enough. The children filled out a questionnaire, were
weighed and measured. However, a more gruesome fate awaited them
at Mengele’s hands. He took daily blood samples from his children,
and sent these to Professor von Verschuer in Berlin. He injected
blood samples from one twin into another twin of a different blood
type and recorded the reaction. This was invariably a searingly
painful headache and high fever that lasted for several days. In
order to determine if eye color could be genetically altered,
Mengele had dye injected into the eyes of several twin subjects.
This always resulted in painful infections, and sometimes even
blindness. If such twins died, Mengele would harvest their eyes
and pin them to the wall of his office, much like a biologist pins
insect samples to styrofoam. Young children were placed in
isolation cages, and subjected to a variety of stimuli to see how
they would react. Several twins were castrated or sterilized. Many
twins had limbs and organs removed in macabre surgical procedures
that Mengele performed without using an anesthetic. Other twins
were injected with infectious agents to see how long it would take
for them to succumb to various diseases.
It is clear that, despite the stated purpose for which he was
sent to Auschwitz, Mengele’s experimentation had absolutely
nothing to do with true scientific research, and was instead the
result of one man’s ambitious and zealous adherence to the Nazi
vision of Aryan supremacy. As surviving Mengele subject Alex Dekel
states:
I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed
he was doing serious work -- not from the slipshod way he went
about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a
butcher shop -- major surgeries were performed without
anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation -- Mengele was
removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic.
Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without
anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became
mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned
him -- why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The
patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the
name of science, but it was a madness on his
part.
Madness, indeed, on the part of a man who showered love and
attention on the very children he would sooner or later subject to
his cruel experiments, whom he would more likely than not murder
in pursuit of genetic information that did not exist except in the
imagination of an indoctrinated Nazi ideologue. Madness on the
part of a man whom more than one surviving twin would remember as
a gentle man who loved children! Whence does such madness spring,
how is it possible for two separate and diametrically-opposed
personages manifest themselves within the same individual?
Contents
At
Harmony With Evil
In the words of several Auschwitz eyewitnesses and survivors,
and of historians and psychologists, Dr. Josef Mengele was not
merely of Auschwitz. Dr. Josef Mengele was Auschwitz. Through his
actions and demeanor, Mengele was able to embody the unearthly
contradictions of a death camp where arriving prisoners were
serenaded with waltz music played by a prisoner orchestra, while a
few yards away hundreds of people were reduced to ash in the
crematoria; a camp where affection and comfort were lavished upon
the children living in the Zoo, only so as to keep them healthy
enough for twisted and pointless experimentation; a camp where
Mengele himself escorted his beloved "children" to the gas
chambers, referring to their walks as a game he called "on the way
to the chimney."
 |
|
The Buildings of Auschwitz (Associated
Press) |
It is never an easy task to imagine that any human being is
capable of committing acts of such wanton brutality and base
cruelty, acts that bespeak not merely the individual’s disregard
for the value of human life, but his endless desire to degrade and
destroy it. The Holocaust has presented history with an enigma,
with events and personalities that perhaps defy explanation and
meaning. Yet it is in our efforts to prevent such future tragedies
from occurring that we strive to understand what it is that
motivates such individuals to behave in this way.
Josef Mengele harbored a deep-seated ambition to achieve
greatness, and was internally driven from an early age to
distinguish himself as an adult. This is evident in the choices he
made throughout his career as a Nazi. He did not merely join the
army, he joined the SS; and he did not merely join the SS, he
joined the Waffen SS; and when posted at Auschwitz he did not
perform some selections, he seemed to be present at almost
all selections. In every way possible, Mengele sought to
advance his own interests by demonstrating that there was no one
else in the field who did things quite like he did, that there was
no one else with his sense of devotion or zeal.
But does this go far enough towards explaining the leap from
ambitious young scientist to murderous barbarian? Does this
explain the transformation of an affable young man named Beppo to
a cold-blooded, torturous demon? Author and professor Robert Jay
Lifton has posited that for one such as Mengele, such a duality
was possible because of a phenomena he refers to as
"doubling":
The key to understanding how Nazi doctors came to do the work
of Auschwitz is the psychological principle I call "doubling":
the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a
part-self acts as an entire self. An Auschwitz doctor could,
through doubling, not only kill and contribute to the killing,
but also organize silently, on behalf of that evil project, an
entire self-structure encompassing virtually all aspects of his
behavior. The individual Nazi doctor needed his Auschwitz self
to function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to
his previous ethical standards. At the same time, he needed his
prior self in order to continue to see himself as humane
physician, husband, and father. The Auschwitz self had to be
both autonomous and connected to the prior self that gave rise
to it.
While there is a certain logic to Lifton’s argument, that
doctors accustomed to adhering to the Hippocratic oath needed an
"Auschwitz self" to function in the death camp, he himself points
to Mengele’s especial affinity for work in this milieu. In other
words, it was not a great leap that Mengele was required to make
in order for the Auschwitz self to emerge from the prior self:
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Josef Mengele in 1956
(Associated Press) |
Mengele’s embrace of the Auschwitz self gave the impression
of a quick, adaptive affinity…Doubling was indeed required of a
man who befriended children and then drove some of them
personally to the gas chamber. Whatever his affinity for
Auschwitz, a man who could be pictured under ordinary conditions
as "a slightly sadistic German professor" had to form a new self
to become an energetic killer. The point about Mengele’s
doubling is that his prior self could be readily absorbed into
the Auschwitz self; and his continuing allegiance to the Nazi
ideology and project enabled his Auschwitz self, more than in
the case of other Nazi doctors, to remain active over the years
after the Second World War.
Perhaps that is the greatest mystery, not that the process of
doubling occurred within Mengele, but the fact that it occurred
without conscious effort on his part, the fact that the Auschwitz
self seemed to rise from within, rather than split off from, his
prior self. Why did Mengele slip into the role of the Auschwitz
self with such ease? What was it about his psychological makeup
that allowed him to convey the appearance of his prior self while
simultaneously behaving as the Auschwitz self? Because Mengele
himself died before he could be captured and interviewed, it is
possible that the last word may be that, at least in his case,
such behavior was possible because he was simply an embodiment of
evil, and there is no psychological way of explaining how he
became so.
Contents
Epilogue
Dr. Josef Mengele fled from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945, as
the Soviet army advanced across the crumbling German Reich towards
Berlin. During the first few years of the post-war era, Mengele
remained in hiding on farm near his native Gunzburg. He assumed a
fake identity, and worked as a farm hand, keeping informed of
events through secret contacts with old Gunzburg friends.
Incredibly, he at first aspired to continue his career as a
research scientist, but it became increasingly apparent that the
Allies were not going to let a notorious war criminal such as he
simply resume the life he had enjoyed prior to the war without
paying for the crimes he had committed during it. Mengele finally
decided that he was no longer safe in Europe and escaped through
Italy to an ocean liner bound for Argentina.
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|
Mengele in Paraguay, 1960 (Corbis) |
Mengele arrived in Argentina in 1949, a country that was ruled
by the popular dictator Juan Peron. The right-wing ruler had
already cultivated a friendly relationship with Nazis in Europe,
as well as with those who lived in the German expatriate community
in Argentina. Mengele was able to slip unnoticed into such a
setting with ease and had soon established a network of Nazi
devotees who were willing to help him assume a new identity in
South America.
 |
Photo for Mengele's false ID card
(Associated
Press) |
Mengele was to spend the next thirty years on the run from
international authorities. While he received aid and shelter from
the neo-Nazi network in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, Mengele
was also inadvertently assisted by a lack of commitment on the
part of the West German government to bring the Angel of Death to
justice, and a similar lack of commitment on the part of the
United States Justice Department. The Israeli government had no
such lack of commitment to his capture, trial and execution. In
fact, Israeli agents were close to seizing Mengele on a handful of
occasions in the early-to-mid 1960s. However, international uproar
over Israel’s kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from
Argentina in 1960, and pressing security issues involving hostile
Arab states, sidetracked Israeli efforts to pursue Mengele.
While Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal continued to press
for Mengele’s capture and execution, the notorious Nazi doctor
seemed to drop off the radar screen of most international
governments. Interest in his case was suddenly reinvigorated when,
on January 17, 1985, a group of Auschwitz survivors returned to
the death camp to memorialize friends and family who had perished
there. A week later, many of the same survivors gathered in
Jerusalem to try Mengele in absentia. The event was televised
around the globe, and for four consecutive nights, the airwaves
were filled with images of survivors recounting their gruesome,
barbaric treatment at the hands of Josef Mengele. Within less than
a month, both the United States Justice Department and the Israeli
government had announced that the case of Josef Mengele was
officially reopened and strategies were redrawn to bring the Nazi
doctor to justice.
 |
Josef Mengele, Nazi war criminal
(Associated Press) |
However, these fledgling efforts were stopped in their tracks
when, on May 31, 1985, West German police raided the home of Hans
Sedlmeier, a lifelong friend of Mengele’s, and his contact person
in Europe. The police seized several letters from Mengele and
other German expatriates living with him in Brazil, and Brazilian
authorities were immediately notified. Within a week Brazilian
police had identified the families that had harbored Mengele, and
through them were able to locate the grave where Mengele’s body
had been buried after a drowning accident in 1979. Forensic tests
on the skeletal remains confirmed that the body was indeed that of
Josef Mengele. Survivors of Mengele’s treatment who had longed all
of their post-war lives to confront this cruel and demonic man
denied that this could indeed be him. Many still live for the day
when they will be able to extract justice for their suffering from
the man who was responsible for so much of it, both during and
after the war. Alas, Mengele has escaped earthly judgment through
that act over which he sought to wield total control -- death
itself.
Contents
Bibliography
Astor, Gerald. The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele. Donald I. Fine, Inc.: New York, 1985.
Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele & the Untold Story of the
Twins of Auschwitz.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors. Basic Books: New York, 1986.
Posner, Gerald L. and John Ware. Mengele: The Complete Story. McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York, 1986.
For Further Reference:
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Kor, Eva Mozes. Echoes from Auschwitz. C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Publications: Terre Haute, IN, 1995.
Nyiszli, Dr. Miklos. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story of Survival. Fawcett Crest: New York, 1960.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Bantam Books: New York, 1982.
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About the Author
Douglas Lynott
Doug Lynott holds a BA in English from St. Norbert
College in De Pere, WI, as well as a Masters in Public
Administration and Urban Affairs from Michigan State University. A
native of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he currently lives in the
metropolitan Washington, D.C. area and works for the federal
government. His interests include running, writing, Irish folk
music and cooking. |
