October 14, 1977, São Paulo: It was hot for springtime. By midday the temperature had climbed to the high seventies. Josef Mengele’s son, Rolf, was soaked in perspiration. Months of planning for this secret mission to visit his fugitive father had frayed his nerves. Now he was about to embark on the final and most tension-filled stage of all.
Rolf Mengele’s political outlook had long been stabilized “diametrically from my father’s, at the left-of-center mark.” Just turned thirty-three, a product of the sixties, an era of campus unrest and anti-establishment attitudes, Rolf, a law graduate, had emerged as the black sheep of a formidable family dynasty. The wealth and power of his cousins, aunts, and uncles, whose engineering factory had dominated the small town of Günzburg since the First World War, never much appealed to Rolf. For him the Mengeles of Günzburg personified the unacceptable face of capitalism: they were affluent, yet they were bourgeois, petty, and mean; they enjoyed local patronage, yet they took their power for granted. The suspicion and mistrust was mutual. The Günzburgers, as Rolf called them, at one time viewed him as a left-wing radical.
Politics aside, Rolf and the rest of the Mengele clan shared one common indestructible bond: all were blood relatives of the most hated and sought-after man in the world. Rolf was his only son; the Günzburgers were his nieces and nephews. Nothing could ever change that fact. On this subject, the two Mengele factions found common cause. Rolf despised what his father had done, but he could never bring himself to betray his own flesh and blood: “In the end he was my father.” The Gunzburgers were rather more ambivalent about Josef’s wartime record. They were then, and remain today, skeptical of many of the allegations against him.
Ever since these allegations first surfaced forty years ago, an impenetrable wall of silence had surrounded Josef Mengele’s movements. Even Rolf was not informed of all of them. But now, on this warm October day, Rolf wanted to know everything. And he wanted to hear it directly from his father. “I was fed up with the written arguments. I wanted to confront him.”
Twenty-one years had passed since Rolf had first met his father, in the Swiss Alps. Then twelve years old, the boy had been introduced to his long lost “Uncle Fritz,” who was visiting the family from South America. Little Rolf was spellbound as his uncle regaled him with tales about daring wartime exploits. Four years later Rolf learned who “Uncle Fritz” really was.
Josef Mengele had become the surviving symbol of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the incarnation of its monstrosity—cool, detached, and always immaculately prepared for the long-drawn-out rituals of death, the hellish selections which the young SS doctor so regularly attended during his twenty-one months at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death’s Head SS cap tilted rakishly to one side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to the right. Four hundred thousand souls—babies, small children, young girls, mothers, fathers, and grandparents—are said to have been casually waved to the lefthand side with a flick of the cane clasped in a gloved hand. Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers and their crematoria. “He had a look that said ‘I am the power,’ ” said one survivor. At the time, Mengele was only thirty-two years old.
There were moments when his death mask gave way to a more animated expression, when Mengele came alive. There was excitement in his eyes, a tender touch in his hands. This was the moment when Josef Mengele, the geneticist, found a pair of twins.
Under Mengele’s strict care, twins were housed in special quarters, cosseted, and treated as priceless objects. To him they were valuable. Within their bodies lay a secret that Mengele had determined Auschwitz would unlock. He would differentiate the replica features of each pair of twins from those that showed some variation. The features that were identical he assumed were inherited; the rest developed and acquired by time and the environment. Thus, he reasoned, could Europe’s population be controlled and genetically engineered to perfection. Aryan perfection. In his Auschwitz laboratory, Mengele conducted some of the most heinous experiments of the war. Children, strapped to slabs of marble, had their spines, eyes, and inner organs probed, injected, and cut, often with unknown chemicals and without anesthetic.
To some children Mengele gave comfort and sweets. At these times he is said to have been gentle and soothing, going out of his way not to inflict pain. But often the mask would slip. There were violent rages, summary executions, when his strict disciplinary code was offended. Life at the Dantesque court of Dr. Mengele hung on a whim.
This behavior defies rational explanation, and Mengele acquired a reputation as a kind of demon. But to his son, Rolf, the monster was his father, the man who surely could have been the neighborhood doctor. And yet, could he really have been? Lurking there in the darker dungeons of his mind, might there not have been a severe psychological disorder? This was the mystery that tortured Rolf most of all. On the one hand, his family had spoken of his father’s genius before the war, his ambition to become a great scientist. They admired his formidable intellect, his fun-loving ways. He was a ladies’ man, erudite and polished, whose mind may have been temporarily corrupted by a political system. On the other hand, the horror of his father’s crimes went far beyond anything Rolf had ever read about before.
As the rickety bus carrying Rolf Mengele turned into the pot-holed and dusty street where his father lived, one thing became abundantly clear. However omnipotent Josef Mengele might once have been, his last days were being lived out among the poor and lowly. The bus drew near to a seedy yellow stucco building, more a hut than a house. A swirl of dust blew past to reveal an old man, his gray hair carefully combed, stooped by age, broken by half a lifetime on the run. At that moment Rolf Mengele resolved to explore every stage of the rise and fall of his father, Josef.
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, the eldest of three sons of Karl and Walburga Mengele, whose first child had been stillborn. The family lived in Günzburg, a small arid picturesque town that resembled a fifteenth-century hamlet, nestled on the banks of the river Danube. Josef grew up in a devoutly Catholic home that accumulated considerable wealth in a short time. When Josef was born, his father, an engineer, had just become sole owner of a foundry that manufactured farm equipment for milling, wood sawing, and straw cutting. In 1907 he had gone into partnership repairing farm machinery with a mechanic named Andreas Eisenlauer. That year the foundry burned down, the first of several fires over the next few decades that destroyed the premises. With the insurance proceeds, Karl bought a piece of land just outside the town, where he rebuilt the business from scratch. Two years later, Eisenlauer withdrew from the partnership because of ill health and left Karl in charge, with seven men on the payroll.1
The company, “Karl Mengele,” prospered. By the time Josef was born, Karl could afford his first Benz motor car. He soon acquired a reputation as a shirt-sleeve boss, prepared to work long hours on the foundry floor and to sell his products by driving from farm to farm in his gleaming new car. When war broke out in 1914, the work force was thirty strong.
As a child, Josef saw little of his father, and not much more of his mother. While Karl went off to fight in the war, Walburga Mengele was left in charge of building up the business. She succeeded by establishing herself as a fearsome disciplinarian, in contrast to her husband’s less formal style. Under Walburga’s command, the firm procured a lucrative contract with the Kaiser to produce a special army vehicle called the Fouragewagen.
At the end of the war, “Karl Mengele” returned to peacetime production of farm machinery. By the 1920s it had become the third largest threshing production company in Germany, Karl having taken full advantage of the country’s postwar revival program. The name Mengele has dominated Günzburg ever since, as the town’s largest employer and its most powerful family. The mayor has invariably been the family notary. Günzburg, as a German judge once said, is the Mengele family.2
That dominance survives today, with the name “Mengele” prominently displayed in ten-foot letters on the front of the factory. Karl Mengele Strasse is one of the main thoroughfares. An enormous memorial stone in honor of Karl and Walburga and their two younger sons, Alois and Karl Jr., is adorned with fresh flowers each day. There is a playschool named after Ruth, Alois’s wife. Josef’s nephew, Dieter Mengele, who has a more than a 
3 million stake in the firm now named “Karl Mengele & Sons,” has the most palatial home in town. In all this patronage, there is only one name conspicuous by its absence—“Josef.”
With such luxury and power behind him, young Josef was fully expected to play his part in perpetuating the Mengele family dynasty. As the eldest son, he was destined to succeed his father. But Josef’s horizons extended far beyond the small-power politics of Günzburg and a seat in the factory boardroom. From an early age he seemed possessed of a searing ambition. As Julius Diesbach, a school friend, recalled:
Josef was a very ambitious young man with a great need to succeed. He wanted to establish his own fame separate from that already established by his family. He did not want just to succeed but to stand out from the crowd. It was his passion for fame. He once told me that one day I would read his name in the encyclopedia.3
Josef was especially anxious to do better than his two brothers, Karl and Alois—particularly Karl, for whom he admits to having nurtured a jealous streak. They were born only sixteen months apart and their rivalry thrived in a house not noted for its warmth or family affection. “Respect rather than affection seems to have ruled the household,” said Norman Stone, historian and Oxford professor who reviewed Mengele’s personal papers after his death was disclosed in June 1985.4
The relationship between his parents did not improve the emotional austerity of the Mengele home. They were known as a quarrelsome pair. Josef wrote bitterly of his father as “a cold figure” and of his mother as “not much better at loving,” although he came to admire her energy and decisive nature. For the early part of his life, a nanny called Monika fulfilled the dominant maternal role, coaxing and at times intimidating Josef into holding fast the Catholic faith. For this parental legacy at least, Mengele was grateful. In his autobiography he wrote:
One could feel flattered that the family tradition going back generations was continued with the name of the Father of Christ, “Josef.”5
Despite the sibling rivalry that Josef felt for Karl, the three Mengele boys gradually grew closer. Josef is remembered as a “sunny and fun-loving child.” His favorite treat was a ride on horseback, pulling the company transports back from the railway sidings near Gunzburg after delivering newly machined army wagons destined for the front. His autobiography, however, reveals that this genial disposition may have masked a deep-seated “inner suffering,” a dissatisfaction with life, although he does not reveal the cause.6
To his family and close friends, young Josef was known as “Beppo”—a gifted child, brighter than his two younger brothers, always near the top of his class but never actually at the top. At school Josef developed a great interest in music and art; as a teenager he wrote a play called “Travels to Lichtenstein,” a fairy tale performed for the benefit of a children’s home. But it was his high-school teacher, Uri, who, he wrote, “created in me excitement for natural sciences.” His favorite subjects were biology, zoology, physics, and natural philosophy. But most “exciting of all for me,” he recorded, was “anthropology.”
The strictness of his Catholic upbringing produced in the teenage Josef a cynical contempt for the church and its religious festivals, which he viewed as an opportunity merely to fill its coffers. Nevertheless he displayed an active community spirit by joining the Red Cross and the Grossdeutscher Jugendbund, a patriotic youth group.
As a child he also had his share of narrow escapes from illnesses and accidents. At the age of six he fell into a deep rainwater barrel while playing, and nearly drowned. He also once suffered from a bad bout of blood poisoning. In 1926 the family doctor diagnosed osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone marrow. This disease can cripple in severe cases, but there was no significant incapacitation, as demonstrated by the fact that Mengele went on to become an accomplished skier.7*
In April 1930 he passed his Abitur, the high-school exams, with a promising but unexceptional grade. His father had counseled him that what counted was “what one achieved, not what one set out to achieve.” Initially Josef considered becoming a dentist, since he was convinced it would be very profitable as “there was not even one dentist in my native town.” But after discussions with his school friend Julius Diesbach, young Mengele decided dentistry was too specialized. He opted instead for medicine with an emphasis on “anthropology and human genetics, so I could study the whole range of medicine.” Thus Josef pursued his desire for recognition in the encyclopedias of the world. “My family will be very impressed when I become the first Mengele scientist,” he boasted to his friend Diesbach with a flourish of adolescent pride. That same year his younger brother, Alois, then sixteen, joined the family firm. The middle brother, Karl, like Josef a more bookish personality, went on to study law.
In October 1930, a confident and ambitious young man with no evidence of interest in Germany’s fast-changing political times, Josef Mengele left the family home and traveled east to the Bavarian capital of Munich. The city was rapidly becoming intoxicated with the racist doctrines of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. It was in Munich, with its smoky beer halls, that Hitler found such adulation when he blamed “corrupt” Jewish politicians in Berlin for accepting Germany’s humiliating surrender in World War I at Versailles. He fanned the flames of ultra-nationalism, held out the dream of a vast new German empire, and implored the Nazi party to deal with “Jewish vermin” by “exterminating it, root and branch.” It was in this hotbed of Nazism, the city that gave birth to the Führer’s demonic ambition for a German super-race, that young Josef Mengele took the first steps toward the pseudo-scientific pursuit of that goal. He enrolled as a student in the philosophy and medicine faculties of Munich University.
By the time Mengele joined the university student body, the Nazis had become the second largest party in the German parliament. Like many young men he soon found it difficult to “stand aside during these politically stirring times.” In his autobiography Mengele recalls his impressions of the Nazi movement and the strong attraction it held for him:
The students of the university, those who had already reached the voting age, had contributed to this [Nazi] success. I was not then old enough to vote. My political leanings then were, I think for reasons of family tradition, national conservative. . . . I had not joined any political organization. Though indeed I was strongly attracted by the program and the whole organization of the National Socialists. But for the time being I remained an unorganized private person. 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.
By March 1931 the impressionable Mengele had joined the youth wing of the Stahlhelm, an ex-servicemen’s organization whose members marched in field uniforms at public events. Young Josef admired the pomp and circumstance of their paramilitary style. Though fiercely nationalistic and right wing, the Stahlhelm was not yet affiliated with the Nazi party, for which Mengele showed growing admiration.
While Josef did not join the Nazi party for another six years, his father had decided by 1931 that membership in the party would be a profitable move. With an eye to the future, Karl Mengele, Sr., had for some time been a drinking companion of Georg Deisenhofer, the Kreisleiter, or regional party chief, and a virulent anti-Semite who complained after Günzburg’s 300 Jews were driven out that there were “none left that I can insult.”8 Shortly after Hitler was swept to power, Karl paid Deisenhofer a sum of money in exchange for a seat on the Günzburg town council. Karl had prepared the way just the previous year by playing host to Hitler himself when he gave a speech on farming at the Mengele factory.* His corruption paid dividends: by 1936 the factory had an annual revenue of more than 1 million reichsmarks and 350 people were on the payroll.9
In Munich, meanwhile, Josef was taking courses in anthropology and paleontology as well as medicine. He soon showed himself to be more interested in the cultural origins and development of man than in curing his disabilities. Medicine at German universities was in any case more complementary to Mengele’s real interest in evolution, since it was taught in accordance with the guidelines of the social Darwinist theories that Hitler and a growing number of German academics found so attractive.
Precisely what corrupted Mengele’s eager young mind is hard to pin down. Probably it was a combination of the political climate and that his real interest in genetics and evolution happened to coincide with the developing concept that some human beings afflicted by disorders were unfit to reproduce, even to live. Perhaps the real catalyst in this lethal brew was that Mengele, first at Munich and later at Frankfurt, studied under the leading exponents of this “unworthy life” theory. His consummate ambition was to succeed in this fashionable new field of evolutionary research. The notion that some lives were not worth living, soon to become academically respectable, may explain why ten years later Mengele experimented on concentration camp inmates as though they were laboratory rats. What none of these influences explain is how Mengele became capable of personal acts of quite unrivaled savagery, for which he later showed not the slightest remorse. “There was nothing in his personality to suggest that he would do what he did,” said Professor Hans Grebe, a contemporary of Mengele’s in the 1930s.10
One of the earliest influences on the student doctor was Dr. Ernst Rudin, whose lectures Mengele regularly attended. Together with some of the leading members of the medical profession, such as Dr. Alfred Hioche and Dr. Karl Bindong, Rudin was a leading proponent of the theory that doctors should destroy “life devoid of value.” Rudin himself was one of the architects of Hitler’s compulsory sterilization laws, which were enacted in July 1933, seven months after he came to power.
The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health established the mental and physical conditions that qualified for compulsory sterilization: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, hereditary blindness, deafness, physical deformities, Huntington’s disease, and alcoholism. Rudin and others had crafted their measures to improve the “quality” of the German race.11 In fact, they were the start of a series of escalating genocidal programs: first, euthanasia or “mercy” killing for the incurably insane; then the mass killings of people the Nazis judged to be biologically inferior, such as Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews; finally Die Endlösung, the Final Solution, Hitler’s cover name for his plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe.
By early 1934, Mengele’s time was increasingly consumed by his studies. Other students never regarded him as a formidable intellect. He distinguished himself more by hard work than anything else. “He was essentially more industrious and ambitious than others,” said a fellow student and friend, Dr. Kurt Lambertz. “The more he became involved with the study of anthropology, genetics, heredity and such things, the more his interests grew.”
Mengele’s searing ambition had driven him to work for a doctorate in anthropology while at the same time striving to qualify as a doctor in medicine. In October that year, his part-time paramilitary activities came to a halt when a kidney ailment forced him to leave the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts, ruffians whose job it was to “protect” Nazi mass rallies. Mengele had been automatically transferred to the Brownshirts in January 1934, after Hitler ordered them to absorb the Stahlhelm.12 His illness left him weak, and he decided to devote all his energy to studying.
The man who gave Mengele his first real leg up the academic ladder was Professor T. Mollinson of Munich University. His expertise in the field of heredity and “racial hygiene” led Mollinson to claim that he could tell if a person had Jewish forebears simply by looking at a photograph. In 1935 Mollinson awarded Mengele a PhD for his thesis entitled “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.” It was a dry but meticulously illustrated dissertation, and concluded that it was possible to detect different racial groups by studying the jaw. In contrast to Mollinson’s unscientific assertions, Mengele’s report was cogently argued and contained no anti-Semitic or racist overtones. In the summer of 1936 Mengele took his state medical examination in Munich. He passed and was soon working in his first paid job, in Leipzig at the university’s medical clinic.*
For four months he was one of the resident junior doctors, a compulsory period of hospital work required for his full medical practitioner’s degree. The work was hard and his stay uneventful, with the notable exception that it was in Leipzig that he met a university professor’s daughter, Irene Schoenbein, who became his first wife.
Irene was Mengele’s first and only real love. She was just nineteen, dividing her time between the handsome young academic and studying art history in Florence. Mengele was so smitten that he soon cast aside a Norwegian girl named Almuth. As Mengele later told his son, Rolf, Irene was so devoted that even the thought of her suitor having had a previous affair made her angry “even though she had won my heart.”13
They made a dashing young pair—Irene tall, blonde, and good looking, Mengele handsome in a Mediterranean way, dapper, with a passion for fast cars. He boasted he could drive from Günzburg to Frankfurt in three hours in his 1936 Opel, a special-issue model produced to commemorate the Berlin Olympics.
Away from the high life, Mengele’s spell as a young hospital doctor, with its exhausting hours and endless ward rounds, seems not to have suited him. He was anxious to return to his studies in genetics. On January 1, 1937, after a recommendation from Professor Mollinson, Mengele was appointed a research assistant at the prestigious Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. The appointment would change Mengele’s life. He joined the staff of one of Europe’s foremost geneticists, Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was devoting much of his time to twin research.
Von Verschuer was an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, paying tribute to him publicly for “being the first statesman to recognize hereditary biological and race hygiene.” Two years earlier von Verschuer had defined the Institute’s role as being “responsible for ensuring that the care of genes and race, which Germany is leading worldwide, has such a strong basis that it will withstand any attacks from outside.”14
Mengele became the professor’s favorite student; the two men developed a strong mutual respect. Von Verschuer almost certainly influenced Mengele’s subsequent appointment to Auschwitz; and later, as wartime director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Genetics in Berlin, he secured funds for Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. (This was the Institute where Mengele sent the results of his barbaric and largely worthless research.)
Mengele was now at the epicenter of Nazi philosophical and scientific thinking, which held that it was possible to select, engineer, refine, and ultimately “purify” their race. From this concept to Hitler’s policy of genocide was a short but tragic step.
For Mengele, indoctrinated with Nazi race theories, membership in the Nazi party itself was now a simple formality. In May 1937 he submitted his application and was duly issued membership number 5574974.* As a paid-up party member, and with the support of Baron von Verschuer, a rapid rise within the Nazi academic hierarchy was now assured.
Before long Mengele and von Verschuer were working together, writing judicial reports for specially convened courts which sat in judgment over Jews caught cohabiting with German Aryans. Under the Nuremberg Race Law, passed in September 1935, it was an offense for Germans to marry Jews, the purpose of the law being to prevent racial interbreeding. Proven cases of sexual intercourse in this Rassenschande, or race defilement process, carried a jail sentence. In one case advice was sought from both von Verschuer and Mengele when a man whose father was Jewish was charged with having an affair with a German woman. The defendant tried to convince the court that although his mother was married to a Jew, he was in fact born as a result of a liaison she had had with a Christian and therefore had no Jewish blood. Giving evidence for the prosecutor’s office, Mengele and von Verschuer, having examined the unfortunate man’s family history, ears, nose, and other facial features, pronounced that his father was Jewish. The court did not agree, and the two anthropologists lodged a complaint at the verdict, claiming their expertise had been overlooked.15
It was against this background at the Frankfurt Institute that Mengele first embraced the idea that through appropriate selection, the heritage of a race could be “improved.” Before long the concept was applied in a much starker way, on the ramps at Auschwitz where SS doctors, Mengele especially, selected able-bodied inmates for work and the frailer ones for death. Mengele showed no qualms about being drawn further into this pseudo-scientific mire. Helmut von Verschuer, son of Mengele’s Frankfurt mentor, recalled that his father’s young disciple was “a man of happy disposition, known by the secretaries at my father’s office as ‘Father Mengele’ because he liked the girls.” Certainly Professor von Verschuer thought highly of Mengele; he soon appointed him as one of his assistant physicians. This appointment effectively qualified him as a doctor even though he had yet to receive his degree.16 Von Verschuer later wrote of his protégé:
He had a keen interest in medical research and surgery. He was also intelligent and cultured. I remember he was a lover of music, including Bach, Verdi, and of course Strauss and Wagner.17
By the time Mengele got to Auschwitz he had developed a love of Puccini, too, as survivors—who heard him casually whistling a few bars while carrying out gas chamber selections—grimly recall.
Mengele was only twenty-seven years old, but he had made powerful contacts with some of the foremost doctors and ideologues of the Third Reich. It was inevitable, therefore, that he should apply to join an organization seen as the guardian of the nation’s racial purity; the SS, or Schutzstaffel. At this time he also joined the NS Arztebund, the physicians’ association, an imperative for any aspiring Nazi doctor. In May 1938, after the ritual trawl back through four generations to ensure that the Mengele family was free of Jewish or other non-Aryan blood, he was admitted to the SS.* Vanity prevented him from having his blood group tattooed on his skin, however, as all new SS recruits were obliged to do.
Membership in an elite seems to have been important to Mengele: he chose an academic career in preference to conventional medical practice, he joined the Third Reich Institute and later the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, both leaders in the exclusive field of eugenics, and he went on to join the Waffen SS, an elite within the SS elite itself.
In July 1938 Frankfurt University awarded Mengele his medical degree. Thus he became a licensed practitioner of medicine. As the war clouds gathered over Europe, Mengele was anxious not to be left out of what he perceived would be an inevitable but glorious battle. Determined to be accepted by an SS unit, that October he began three months of basic training with the Wehrmacht, the German regular army, a prerequisite for joining the elite fighting force. To his delight, his first posting, to the Snalfedon-Tirol mountain region, called on his skiing skills. When the training was over, Mengele returned to the Frankfurt Institute to continue his research under Professor von Verschuer. Apart from a short spell at the University Clinic in Bonn, where he also attended indoctrination classes for the SS in his spare time, Mengele stayed at the Institute until June 1940, when he joined the army.18
During his stay at Frankfurt, Mengele published a research paper on the inheritance of ear fistules, the tiny folds in the ear for which he claimed to have found a hereditary link with indentations of the chin. Experts who have read the paper found it “dull but scientific,” and like his previous paper on the racial identification of the lower jaw, devoid of racist innuendo. However, several reviews written by Mengele at Frankfurt on academic books about race and heredity tell a different story. His comments, in 1940, about one book entitled Fundamentals in Genetics and Race Care, emphasize his total conviction of the supremacy of the German race.
The last chapter explains . . . the biological dangers that threaten the German people . . . when discussing the races it would have been desirable if a clearer analysis of the merits and unfavorable features of all European races had been made. I also missed an adequate description of the relationship between the principal races that are to be found in Germany and the cultural achievements of the German people. Also there could have been more sense in explaining the contents rather than the procedural aspects of the laws for prevention of hereditary-diseased offspring and the protection of the hereditary health of the German nation.19
Another review of a book discussing the inheritance of congenital heart defects and their detection by X-ray is an ominous hint of things to come at Auschwitz: “Unfortunately the author did not use subjects where the diagnosis could be verified by an autopsy.”20
By now Mengele had totally identified with the influence of National Socialism on human genetics as taught in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. Nazi racial doctrines and earlier ideas of social Darwinism had fused into one homogeneous concept that stayed with Mengele for the rest of his life. “He was convinced he served a great cause, an attempt by Hitler to prevent mankind from self-destructing,” said Professor Andreas Hillgruber, the West German historian who has read Mengele’s autobiographical writings on race. “He became the incarnation of Nazism in its extreme.”21
In July 1939 Mengele married Irene, then almost twenty-two years old, at Oberstdorf. The wedding itself took place after a hitch that at one stage threatened to damage his career. In Mengele’s submission to the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptampt, the Central Office for Race and Resettlement, to satisfy the SS that there was no trace of Jewish blood in Irene’s family, doubts were raised about her grandfather, who was thought to be illegitimate. An exhaustive check back through her ancestors began after papers relating to her great-grandfather, Harry Lyons Dumler, an American diplomat, could not be found. In the absence of proof that Dumler was the father of his wife’s son, the suspicion remained that the real father might be Jewish. Thus Irene might have inherited Jewish blood. A search by the German consul in the United States failed to resolve the crisis. But photographs of Irene and her ancestors and glowing testimonials from friends of her “very Nordic ways” finally won the day, and so the marriage was allowed. Yet since Mengele was unable to provide clinching proof that Irene had “pure Aryan blood,” much to his chagrin he failed to qualify for the ultimate accolade of racial purity—a place in the hallowed Sippenbuch, or Kinship Book, for those who had been able to prove, chapter and verse, that their ancestors were pure Aryan at least since 1750. Thus was the arch-disciple of racial “hygiene” himself deprived of a certificate that his wife and future children would be racially “clean.” Irony and ignominy apart, there was also the loss of the coveted Sippenbuch mementos—swords and silver spoons from Himmler himself on the birth of each “pure” child.
Five weeks after the wedding, the war broke out. According to Mengele’s son, Rolf, his father was “pleased about it. He couldn’t wait to be called up.” To Mengele, as he later wrote, the war represented the “last desperate fight of the German nation for its endangered existence.” But his kidney ailment meant he had to wait until the summer of 1940 for his first posting, as a medical officer in a regular army unit at Kassel. It lasted just one month. In August, with the rank of Untersturmführer, sub-lieutenant, he joined the Waffen SS, which enjoyed a reputation as Hitler’s most fanatical combat troops. Nonetheless, Mengele did not experience battlefield conditions until June 1941, when he was posted to the Ukraine, where within a few days he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. His wife wrote to a friend:
Now he finally has his desired call-up. He is stationed in the Ukraine, I assume in that heat. He received the EK2 [Iron Cross Second Class] already in the first days. The stress must be tremendous. Still their enthusiasm has not yet found an end, now that they are finally in battle and . . . facing the “archenemy.” Best regards and Heil Hitler . . .22
The months before the Ukraine posting were spent in occupied Poland, attached to the Genealogical Section of the Race and Resettlement Office. Under direct orders from Himmler, teams of SS doctors were assigned to examine the racial suitability of those who would inhabit the newly conquered territories. Himmler’s four-point program, in which Mengele played an active role, was as follows:
(1) The annexed territories were to be thoroughly cleansed of non-Germans; (2) persons claiming any German blood would be classified according to documentary evidence first, and lacking that, by racial examination; those in doubtful categories as well as “renegade” [anti-Nazi or “Polish minded”] Germans would be segregated and subjected to special conditions to ensure “reeducation and good behavior”; (3) persons exhibiting Germanic features would also undergo racial examinations to determine if their ancestors had been “Polanized”; positive cases would be removed from Poland for better re-Germanization in the Reich proper; (4) similar procedures would be carried out upon orphans from Polish orphanages as well as children coming under public care.23
In January 1942 Mengele joined the medical corps of the Waffen SS’s Viking division. It eventually penetrated farther into Soviet territory than any other German unit deployed after the Russian offensive launched the previous June. Most of Mengele’s time was spent back of the front line in a defensive position, perhaps fighting partisans. In July the Viking division moved up to the front to engage in the battle for Rostow and Bataisk, a battle lasting five bloody days. It was during this period that Mengele won his Iron Cross First Class. Irene recalls, “He got his Iron Cross because he rescued two wounded soldiers out of a burning tank under enemy fire on the battlefield and gave them medical first aid.” A senior officer later wrote that Mengele had “proved himself splendidly in front of the enemy,” and the Viking divisional medical officer wrote at the time that he was “a specially talented medical officer.” He was also awarded the Black Badge for the Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the German People.24*
Toward the end of 1942 Mengele was posted back to the Race and Resettlement Office, this time at its headquarters in Berlin. The fact that Mengele worked under the aegis of the SS and the Police Doctor’s Office, which had a medical supervisory role in the extermination camps, suggests that he was entrusted with the secret of the Final Solution at quite an early stage. Although Hitler had decided in the summer of 1941 to press ahead with the Final Solution, the decision to adopt it as official policy had been taken only the past January, by fifteen high-ranking bureaucrats before sitting down to lunch in a secret conclave in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. It is possible that as a result of discovering the vast amount of “human material” available for experiments at Auschwitz, Mengele, once in Berlin, did all he could to secure a posting there. It seems equally likely that he sought this job in collaboration with his former tutor, Professor von Verschuer, whose guiding hand was certainly behind his transfer from the Russian front to Berlin.
By the summer of 1942 von Verschuer was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, overseeing research programs into racial purity. In June 1942, while Mengele was still serving with the Viking division at the Russian front, von Verschuer told a colleague that he planned “to take with me my co-workers, initially Schade and Grebe, later Mengele and Fromme.”25 In January 1943, von Verschuer wrote to another colleague that “my assistant Mengele has been transferred to a post in Berlin so that in his free time he can work at the Institute.”26
Dr. Benno Müller-Hill, of Cologne University, who has had access to von Verschuer’s private papers, is in little doubt that von Verschuer finally persuaded Mengele to take this next and, for him, disastrous step in his life. “I would almost bet it was von Verschuer who talked him into going to Auschwitz,” Müller-Hill said. “He would have said, ‘There’s a big opportunity for science there. Many races there, many people. Why don’t you go? It’s in the interest of science.’ ”
After Mengele’s transfer to Berlin, he was promoted to the rank of Haupsturmführer, captain. In May 1943 the posting came. By the end of the month he arrived at a vast barbed-wire enclosure in a swampy valley an hour out of Kraków in southern Poland. This was Auschwitz, or to the Germans, who love to abbreviate everything, “the KZ,” shorthand for Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp.
* During the June 1985 forensic examination of the bones unearthed in Embu, Brazil, no evidence of osteomyelitis was found. Some skeptics elevated this minor inconsistency to a degree disproportionate to the weight of other consistent evidence in favor of the skeleton being that of Josef Mengele. Leading forensics experts concluded that a mild case of osteomyelitis in a fifteen-year-old child would not be evident in the skeleton more than fifty years later.
* This was Hitler’s second visit to Günzburg, the first having taken place in 1930. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS and a former chicken farmer, also visited the town in 1930 and gave a speech on farming.
* It was the recommendation of doctors from the Leipzig clinic that a baby born blind, “an idiot—at least it seemed to be an idiot,” with a leg and part of an arm missing, should be killed that finally persuaded Hitler to sign a decree legalizing euthanasia on September 1, 1939.
* This was the first opportunity for Mengele to join the NSDAP after Hitler lifted his four-year embargo on party membership. The embargo had been intended to counter Hitler’s fear that the rush to join the National Socialist Party following its 1933 election victory would swing the party’s power base in favor of a more liberal regime.
* SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who organized the development and production of the mobile gas vans estimated to have killed 97,000 Jews and Russians, at first failed the SS heredity test because his fiancee had been married to a Jewish lawyer. Eventually Himmler’s office accepted her submission that her first marriage had been “an oversight” due to the fact that she had “not studied racial biology . . . and was unaware of the consequences of this marriage.” Rauff died of lung cancer in Santiago, Chile, in May 1983 after several attempts to secure his extradition had failed.
* The official volumes of the Fifth SS Panzer Division, “Viking,” lists the names of officers and field doctors, with only one exception: Josef Mengele. His name was evidently omitted because of the postwar notoriety attached to it.