The sight that greeted Josef Mengele when his train drew near to Auschwitz was awesome. One landmark especially must have caught his eye, as it did for a fellow doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, when he first arrived:
. . . an immense square chimney built of red bricks tapering towards the summit. I was especially struck by the enormous tongues of flame rising between the lightning rods. . . . I tried to realize what hellish cooking would require such a tremendous fire. . . . A faint wind brought the smoke towards me. My nose, then my throat were filled with the nauseating odor of burning flesh and scorched hair.1
In high summer the sun scorched the earth and the stagnant, heavy, breezeless air pervaded every corner of the camp with its stench of burning flesh. In winter, Auschwitz was ravaged by ice storms sweeping in off the Vistula river. Most Poles considered this remote corner of their country too inhospitable to live in. Himmler considered it the perfect place for the largest extermination center in the Third Reich’s genocide program, as its commandant, Rudolf Hoess, guessed after the Reichsführer’s visit in March 1941, when he ordered a vast new expansion program:*
The numbers envisaged were at this time something entirely new in the history of concentration camps. At that time a camp containing 10,000 persons was considered exceptionally large. The insistence of the Reichsführer SS that the construction work must be pushed on regardless of all present or future difficulties, many of which were and would be well nigh insuperable, gave me much food for thought even then.2
By the time Mengele arrived in May 1943, Auschwitz was packed with almost 140,000 prisoners and stretched for miles in all directions. Dr. Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who served as an inmate pathologist under Mengele’s supervision, was overwhelmed when he discovered how large the camp was:
I returned to Barracks 12 just in time for Dr. Mengele’s arrival. He drove up and . . . sent for me and asked me to join him in his car . . . [and we] started off again along the bumpy road. For about twelve minutes we drove through the labyrinth of barbed wire and entered well-guarded gates, thus passing from one section to another. Only then did I realize how vast the KZ was. Few people had the possibility of verifying that because the majority died at the very place to which they were sent when they first arrived. Later I learned that Auschwitz KZ had at certain periods held more than 100,000 people within its enclosure of electrified barbed wire.3
This enormous camp, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by SS guard dogs, contained five crematoria and gas chambers. On a clear day, flame and black smoke could be seen for thirty miles, spewing from the chimneys of the crematoria that broke the flat marshland skyline around Auschwitz. According to Commandant Hoess, the highest total of Jews gassed in twenty-four hours was 9000:
This figure was attained in the summer of 1944 during the action against Hungary, using all the installations except number three. On that day, owing to delays on the line, five trains arrived instead of three as expected and in addition the carriages were more crowded than usual.4
Although, as Hoess said, Himmler ordered records to be burned, “after every large action,” the total number of Jews gassed at Auschwitz is now known to be between 1.1–1.3 million. According to Hoess, a figure of 2.5 million was supplied to him by Adolf Eichmann* shortly before Berlin was surrounded:
Eichmann and his permanent deputy, Gunther, were the only ones who possessed the necessary information on which to calculate the total numbers destroyed.5
Mass extermination, then, was the primary purpose of Auschwitz, but it was by no means its only important function. Auschwitz was also a slave labor camp, providing a pool of workers for German companies contributing to the war effort. The strongest of the new prisoners were selected to live solely because they could be made to work until they dropped dead. Those who collapsed were sometimes kicked and beaten to determine if they were still alive. Thirty-four companies—many of them still household names today, like Krupp, AEG Telefunken, Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben—made fortunes from the tortured labor of Jews, Russians, Poles, some Allied prisoners of war, and German prisoners of conscience. The biggest IG Farben factory was at Monowitz, a subcamp in Auschwitz that made synthetic rubber. In return for providing slave labor, Farben paid the SS a daily rate of 4 reichsmarks for a skilled laborer, 3 reichsmarks for an unskilled laborer, and 1½ reichsmarks for a child. In his evidence against Farben directors† in the postwar trials against German industrialists, Benjamin B. Ferencz, an American lawyer, told the court that Farben crowded 400 prisoners into a block intended for 162. Each wooden bunk, padded only with a thin layer of filthy straw, was shared by three prisoners. Dysentery and diarrhea added to their misery:
Inmates were literally being worked to death. They were forced to run while unloading heavy cement bags weighing more than one hundred pounds. Drinking water was contaminated, clothing was sparse and the food was totally inadequate. Many died of freezing or starvation. The conditions for all forced laborers were terrible. But by far the worst were the conditions of the Jews.6
In sharp contrast to the squalid conditions for inmates, life for the SS noncommissioned ranks who guarded the camp—participating in the gassings euphemistically known as “special actions/’ executions, and the rounding up of slave labor—was tolerably comfortable. Any “special action” work attracted extra rations: ten cigarettes a day, one-fifth of a liter of vodka, and four ounces of German sausage. But for SS officers, like Mengele, the rewards were even more generous. One of Mengele’s Auschwitz colleagues, Dr. Johann Kremer, kept a diary. While he devoted only a few sentences to his role in the “special actions,” he recalled in detail how he savored the good life, especially the food served up by chefs at the Waffen SS club. Five September days were particularly memorable:
Sept. 6: Today, an excellent Sunday dinner; tomato soup, one half of chicken with potatoes and red cabbage, and magnificent vanilla ice cream. . . . In the evening at 8:00 attended another special action outdoors.* Sept. 9: This morning I received most welcome news from my lawyer . . . that I was divorced from my wife from the 1st of the month. Later was present as the physician at the flogging of eight camp inmates and at one execution by shooting with a small calibre gun. Got soap flakes and 2 cakes of soap . . . Sept. 17: Have ordered a casual coat from Berlin. Sept. 20: This Sunday afternoon I listened from 3 p.m. ’till 6 p.m. to a concert of the prisoners’ band in glorious sunshine; the bandmaster was a conductor of the state opera in Warsaw. Eighty musicians. Roast pork for dinner . . . Sept. 23: This night was present at the 6th and 7th special actions.† At 8 o’clock in the evening, supper in the home of Grupenführer Pohl, a truly festive meal. We had baked pike, as much as we wanted, real coffee, excellent beer and sandwiches.7
Other trappings of a comfortable life were preserved by camp commandant Hoess, who lived with his wife and five children in a white stucco house surrounded by a white picket fence. The garden that circled the house was filled with red hedges and begonias in blue flower boxes. It was, as Hoess recalled, an idyllic setting for his camp home:
Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. . . . The children were . . . particularly fond of the ones [prisoners] who worked on the garden.
My whole family displayed an intense love of agriculture and particularly for animals of all sorts. Every Sunday, I had to walk them all across the fields and visit the stables, and we might never miss out on the kennels where the dogs were kept. Our two horses and the foal were especially beloved.
The children always kept animals in the garden, creatures the prisoners were forever bringing them. Tortoises, martens, cats, lizards: there was always something new and interesting to be seen there. In summer they splashed in the paddling pool in the garden or in the Sola [river]. But their greatest joy was when daddy bathed with them. He had, however, so little time for all these childish pleasures.8
It was this attempt to maintain a normal life in the midst of extraordinary cruelty and inhumanity that made Auschwitz a place out of Dante’s Inferno. At times Auschwitz resembled the theater of the absurd. There were even traffic regulations in the camp, and red and green traffic lights. Infractions brought an investigation by the SS traffic court, as Mengele himself discovered a month after his arrival when he hit an SS armaments truck while speeding on his motorcycle toward Birkenau.* Mengele was “injured† and parts of his uniform as well as the motorcycle were damaged,” but the court found that “the SS Hauptsturmführer’s guilt could not be established.”9
There were many other Dantesque aspects to life at Auschwitz. The camp had its own soccer stadium, library, photographic lab, theater, SS swimming pool, and symphony orchestra. There was even a brothel called “The Puff,” used by SS men and some favored prisoners.
When Mengele entered the nightmare world of Auschwitz, he immediately set himself apart from the other SS doctors. He was the only camp doctor to have served on the eastern front and to have been awarded the Iron Cross and other decorations. Dr. Hans Münch, an SS doctor who served in a bacteriological laboratory in a subcamp of Auschwitz and who became a close friend of Mengele’s, remembers that Mengele was enormously proud of his medals and wore them prominently displayed on his uniform. Mengele frequently referred to his combat experience, and he quickly developed a special aura in the camp because of his front-line fighting, which contrasted sharply with the desk careers of the other camp doctors.
Mengele coupled his combat status with workaholic devotion to his duties. While other Auschwitz doctors did no more than was required of them, Mengele was always undertaking new projects and extra responsibility. He flourished in Auschwitz—so much so that even today some survivors still mistakenly refer to him as the chief physician of the camp, a post in fact held by Dr. Eduard Wirths, who appointed Mengele senior doctor in the women’s camp in Birkenau.
Within days after his arrival, while Auschwitz was in the throes of one of its many typhoid epidemics, Mengele established a reputation for radical and ruthless efficiency. The nearby marshland made clean water difficult to obtain and posed a constant threat from mosquitoes.* Other SS doctors had failed in their efforts to curb typhus in the close quarters of the camp barracks. Mengele’s solution to the epidemic was set out in one of seventy-eight indictments drawn up in 1981 by the West German Prosecutor’s Office, when the authorities thought he was still alive. In terms of detailed evidence, this arrest warrant is the most damning and complete document that was ever compiled against him. According to the warrant, on May 25, 1943, “Mengele sent 507 Gypsies and 528 Gypsy women suspected of typhus to the gas chamber.” It also charged that on “May 25 or 26 he spared those Gypsies who were German while he sent approximately 600 others to be gassed.”10
Such contempt for these lives is explained by Mengele’s view that Gypsies were a subspecies. The irony was that Mengele himself was sometimes known to remark on his own distinctly un-Aryan looks, which more closely resembled those of a Gypsy than of a perfect Nordic specimen. Indeed, Mengele’s own racial classification by the SS had put him in the Dynarisch-Ostisch category, which meant that his predominant features were of “Eastern” origin.11 Since childhood he had been self-conscious about his slightly tawny skin, his penetrating brown-green eyes, and his dark brown hair. At school he had endured mild taunts from his classmates about his Gypsy looks. And in Bavaria, where Mengele grew up, the word for “Gypsy” had a derogatory meaning denoting an unstable and unsettled person. His home town of Giinzburg, especially, was full of folklore about Gypsies coming to kidnap children who misbehaved.
In late 1943 a severe outbreak of typhus struck the women’s camp in Birkenau, which was then under Mengele’s control. Out of some 20,000 half-starved women, about 7000 were seriously ill. According to Dr. Ella Lingens, an Austrian doctor sent to Auschwitz for trying to help some Jewish friends escape from Vienna, Mengele proposed another of his radical solutions:
He sent one entire Jewish block of 600 women to the gas chamber and cleared the block. He then had it disinfected from top to bottom. Then he put bathtubs between this block and the next, and the women from the next block came out to be disinfected and then transferred to the clean block. Here they were given a clean new nightshirt. The next block was cleaned in this way and so on until all the blocks were disinfected. End of typhus! The awful thing was that he could not put those first 600 somewhere.12
Mengele’s techniques for eradicating typhus were greatly admired by the garrison physician, Dr. Wirths. In February 1944, Wirths cited them as one of several reasons why Mengele should be awarded the Kreigsverdienstkreuz or War Service Medal, noting that “in combating a severe typhoid epidemic . . . he was infected himself with a very heavy typhus.”13 *
Mengele’s anti-typhus measures were but samples of the cynical disregard for life that he so quickly developed at Auschwitz. Toward the end of 1944 there was a shortage of food. There was not enough even to sustain the meager 700-calorie-a-day diet for the 40,000 women of C Camp, Birkenau. Mengele was heard to tell SS colleagues that he could no longer feed the debilitated prisoners. He would therefore have them liquidated. During the following ten nights, convoys of trucks carried the women, 4000 a day, to the gas chamber—“a horrible sight this caravan of trucks, their headlights stabbing the darkness, each bearing a human cargo of eighty women who either filled the air with their screams or sat mute, paralyzed with fear.”14
But it was at the railhead selections, when new arrivals stepped down from their squalid boxcars to meet their fate, that Mengele established his reputation, even among fellow SS doctors, as a ruthless cynic. According to an inmate doctor, Olga Lengyel, Mengele was “by far and away the chief provider for the gas chamber and the crematory ovens.”15 Two SS doctors were assigned duty at the railhead to examine each new transport. Their capricious powers of life and death as the prisoners filed obediently past were graphically described by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, who became Mengele’s pathologist:
Any person who had entered the gates of the KZ was a candidate for death. He whose destiny had directed him into the left-hand column was transformed by the gas chamber into a corpse within an hour. Less fortunate was he whom adversity had singled out for the right-hand column. He was still a candidate for death but with this difference—that for three months, or as long as he could endure, he had to submit to all the horrors that the KZ had to offer ’til he dropped from utter exhaustion.16
Most SS doctors considered the selections the most stressful of all their camp duties. Dr. Ella Lingens said:
Some like Werner Rhöde who hated his work, and Hans König 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.17
Klein’s impassive approach stemmed from the fact that he was a virulent anti-Semite. He had hated all Jews since one seduced his fiancée while they were undergraduates, and he was once overheard saying that he even “liked the smell of the crematoria.” In Mengele’s view the biggest threat to the superiority of the German race was posed by the Jews. “He once told me there are only two gifted people in the world, Germans and Jews, and it’s a question of who will be superior,” said Dr. Lingens. “So he decided that they had to be destroyed.”18
For tens of thousands of inmates Mengele was one of the first people they saw at Auschwitz. Many have testified to his immaculate and well-manicured appearance as he exercised his power of life and death. Some women, whom he was not adverse to humiliating by having them parade naked while he carried out his selections, found him a handsome man, though a gap between his upper two front teeth rather spoiled the effect. Survivors remarked on the impression made by his tight-fitting SS uniform with glistening black boots, white gloves, and polished cane as he surveyed his prey with a sure eye, smiling sometimes and whistling an operatic air. “How we hated this charlatan,” said Dr. Lengyel. “He profaned the very word ‘science.’ How we despised his detached, haughty air, his continual whistling, his absurd orders, his frigid cruelty.”19
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 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.20
Mengele’s sick-bay selections were notorious too, perversely playing on the emotions of prison doctors and their attempts by whatever means possible to save their patients from the gas chamber. Dr. Lingens said:
The cynical Dr. Mengele made things easy for himself. He ordered us, the prison doctors, to write out meticulous lists of our patients, complete with diagnoses and prognoses. We were to state an approximate date by which the patient would be fit for release from the hospital and for resumption of work.
It was difficult to refuse writing such a list, as we were told nothing of its purpose, although we guessed it only too well. If we put down that a patient had to remain in the hospital for over three or four weeks, she was condemned. If we put down a shorter term, the doctor would send for the patient and shout at us: “What, you say you’re a doctor and you mean to send this half-dead, wretched creature out of the hospital in under four weeks?” This made it seem as if we were ruthlessly cheating the patients of their due time for recovery. Or, if Dr. Mengele accepted the short-term prognosis, he would insist on the release of the patient at the stated date; in the case of those enfeebled women, a release was sometimes nothing short of murder. It was often impossible to find a way out.21
Out of sight of Aryan colleagues like Dr. Lingens who, unlike Jewish doctors, could risk challenging his excesses, Mengele resorted to a variety of cruel methods of execution. The West German indictment lists a monstrous catalogue:
Josef Mengele is accused of having actively and decisively taken part in selections in the prisoners’ sick blocks, of such prisoners who through hunger, deprivation, exhaustion, sickness, disease, abuse or other reasons were unfit for work in the camp and whose speedy recovery was not envisaged, and also of those who had contagious or singularly unsightly illnesses, such as a skin outbreak.
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 in the aforementioned fashion. 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. He is alleged also to have supervised, in cases of camp and hospital block selections, when SS sanitary workers threw granules of prussic acid formula Zyklon B into the inlet pipes of the rooms with people condemned to die hemmed together, or he threw it himself.22
In late August 1943, Mengele’s wife, Irene, traveled from Freiburg in Germany, where she had chosen to spend the war, to visit him at Auschwitz. Typhus quarantine restrictions nearly kept her there longer than she had planned. “What’s this stench?” Irene is reported to have asked her husband, looking skyward to the chimney and the smoke clouds beyond. “Don’t ask me about this,” Mengele is said to have casually replied. According to Mengele’s son, Rolf, his mother later told him this was the moment when she began to have her doubts, when the marriage first faltered before it finally died six years later. “Because of the war they never had a proper marriage,” said Rolf. “My mother was happy, cheerful, full of life, an emotional person.”23 Those of Mengele’s SS colleagues who got to know him well remark that he never discussed his personal life. They do not remember him even mentioning the birth of his son in 1944.24
There were times, however, when Mengele’s icy composure slipped, when he became agitated and excited. These occasions usually occurred when he was searching for twins from the rail transports that had just arrived. “ ‘Zwillinge, Zwillinge, Zwillinge, twins, twins, twins,’ was what he shouted,” said Horst von Glasenapp, the West German judge who took scores of affidavits during the 1970s from surviving Mengele victims. One, Irene Slotkin, who was five when she went to Auschwitz, recalled:
I remember the first time I saw him: he was wearing green, dark green. And I remember his boots; that was probably the level of my eyes. Black shiny boots.
He was asking for “Zwillinge, Zwillinge.” He sounded angry. I don’t know that I understood if it applied to me. We knew that whatever we had to do, we’d better do it fast and right.25
Her brother, René, remembered being saved by Mengele because he was a twin:
At one point toward the end of the war I was scheduled to go to the chambers. I knew I was going to lose my life. We were being loaded onto trucks when this car comes up. A convertible. That’s when I saw Mengele. We were taken off the truck. He stopped the whole procession because they were going to kill his twins.26
Another witness, Dr. Martina Puzyna, whom Mengele employed as his anthropologist to measure the external features of twins, once saw him “shrieking in a loud voice, ‘Twins, out, twins out,’ ” while running alongside a procession of Hungarian Jews as they streamed off the train: “There were women walking with the children, going away, and he was giving orders that they should stay behind and would be taken care of.”27
At other times Mengele would cynically adopt a more soothing tone, as this unnamed witness said in a deposition to the U.S. Army:
Several times we noticed the hypocritical manner in which the grim doctor Mengele treated women and children alighting from the train. “Madam, take care, your child will catch cold. . . . Madam, you are ill and tired after a long journey; give your child to this lady and you will find it later in the children’s nursery.” On these days he was in a good mood, treating in a friendly manner the people whom he sent to death and who were very often reduced to smoke five or six hours after their arrival.28
But whatever his demeanor, it was Mengele above all others, whom the survivors watching the selections most vividly recall. In the 1964 trial of twenty-two Auschwitz defendants, one witness, Arie Fuks, said that while he worked near the arrival ramps he constantly saw Mengele perform the selections. “But Mengele cannot have been there all of the time?” asked the incredulous judge. “In my opinion, always,” responded Fuks. “Night and day.”29
More than thirty years after the end of the war, Mengele defended the camp selections in nightlong arguments with his son during their meeting in Brazil. Rolf recalls his father’s “defense”:
He told me he did not “invent” Auschwitz and that he was not personally responsible for the incidents there. Auschwitz already existed. He wanted to help but that was very limited. He couldn’t help everyone. For instance, on the platforms, he asked me what was he to do when the half-dead and infected people arrived? It was beyond one’s imagination to describe the circumstances there. He said his job was to clarify only “able to work” and “unable to work.” He tried to grade the people as “able to work” as often as possible. He thinks he saved the lives of several thousand people in that way. He didn’t order the extermination and he was not responsible.
He said the twins owe their lives to him. He said he never harmed anybody personally, and he got very excited at this point. He asked me if I—his son—believe the lies in the newspapers.30
But Mengele’s “defense” is not supported by dozens of sworn statements from inmates as well as fellow doctors and SS men. Mengele did not grade people “able to work” for humanitarian reasons but rather because he viewed Auschwitz as the ultimate human laboratory with a limitless supply of material to pursue his research, which the war had inconveniently interrupted. So obsessed was he with finding vast numbers of twins that he attended railhead selections even when it was not his turn; he could be seen bargaining with the SS doctors on duty to set the twins aside for him.
Mengele’s claim that he “never harmed” anyone is also contradicted by the voluminous evidence of his experiments with twins. Mengele’s research gathered momentum in the spring of 1944, when the transports carrying Hungarian Jews began to arrive. The West German indictment against Mengele lists witnesses to at least thirty-nine separate selections that he is alleged to have performed between April and August, involving tens of thousands of Jews. The actual figure is probably twice that, since on many occasions no witnesses would have survived.
Although many of Mengele’s experiments covered a range of studies, from bacteriology to bone marrow transplants, their principal purpose seems to have been to unlock the secret of creating multiple births with genetically engineered Aryan features. As the West German indictment noted:
The research into twins occupied a large part of the pseudo experiments of the accused according to the Court’s preliminary investigations. This was especially interesting to the Nazi regime, in particular with regard to a desired increase in the birth rate through medically manipulated increase in the number of births of twins.31
But the challenge was not just how to improve the fertility of German women, though Mengele showed a passing interest in that with a series of weird sexual experiments. It was really about perfecting and preserving the best features of this mythical Aryan super-race, even down to blue eyes, blond hair, strong and healthy bodies. Quality could not be sacrificed in pursuit of quantity. There could be no weakening of the Aryan strain.
Various other experiments, notably sterilization, were already under way at Auschwitz when Mengele arrived. The purpose of these experiments was to unlock an efficient and easy means of mass sterilization for the recently conquered “inferior races.” In addition, Colonel Victor Brack, chief administrative officer at the Reich chancellory, had suggested to Himmler that instead of liquidating Jews it might be more productive to the war effort to put some of them to work, provided a fast and efficient method of birth control could be found. Dr. Horst Schumann and his staff had thus embarked on a series of experimental castrations by X-ray which proved to be extremely painful for the victims. One surviving record shows that Schumann and his doctors performed ninety castrations in one day.*
Women, too, were subjected to massive doses of radiation, and their ovaries were then removed to establish the exact dosage required for sterilization. Mengele’s ambition went far beyond finding a method of containing the reproductive capacity of the Jewish race. He was more concerned with guaranteeing the racial purity of future generations of Germans, a research program calculated to catch the imagination of the Nazi hierarchy in order to further his career. Mengele had already made it clear that he intended to pursue an academic career after the war, although Dr. Lingens had doubts about his ability. “I would say he was moderately gifted,” she said. “I saw two of his publications before the war and there was certainly nothing brilliant about them. I thought he might make a professor in about twenty years.” Dr. Hans Munch, who worked at the Hygiene Institute of the Military SS at Rajsko, an Auschwitz subcamp, and who came to know Mengele well, had no doubt about his motivation:
I saw him as a convinced National Socialist who never questioned how the Final Solution was administered in the camp. He was an opportunist. During that period ideology had a great influence. Himmler was one of the great Nazi mystics and it is conceivably possible that pseudo-scientific research was done with the purpose of pleasing Himmler. Certainly Mengele’s primary goal was to become a university professor after the war.32
The theory that Mengele’s blind ambition drove him, that his research was so important to him that any inhumanity paled into insignificance, is reinforced by the findings of the West German indictment:
The accused, Josef Mengele, is charged with having carried out medical experiments on living prisoners for scientific publication out of ambition and personal career progression. He fully intended the victim to die according to the manner of the experiment and valued their lives very cheaply. They often died merely to further his medical knowledge and academic education.33
Funds for his genetics research at Auschwitz had been authorized by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Research Council, in August 1943. It seems that Professor von Verschuer, then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Genetics, actually secured the grant from the Council. In a progress report to the Council, von Verschuer wrote:
My co-researcher in this research is my assistant the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving as Hauptsturmfuhrer and camp doctor in the concentration camp Auschwitz. With the permission of the Reichsführer SS [Himmler], anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camp and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation.34
This money was used to construct a special pathology laboratory that Mengele had built into Crematorium 2 at Birkenau, where newly gassed victims could be dissected. It was fitted with the most modern equipment available, its red concrete floor dominated by a dissecting table of polished marble with several sinks, one of them plumbed with nickel taps. The pathologist he chose to perform this task was the Hungarian Jewish doctor Miklos Nyiszli, who arrived at Auschwitz on May 29, 1944. That day Mengele went straight to the railhead and ordered all doctors to one side. A group of fifty gathered. Mengele asked those who had studied at German universities, had a thorough knowledge of pathology, and had practiced forensic medicine to step forward. “Be careful,” he warned them, “you must be equal to the task.” Dr. Nyiszli said:
His menacing gesture left little to the imagination. I glanced at my companions. Perhaps they were intimidated. What did it matter! My mind was already made up. I broke ranks and presented myself. Dr. Mengele questioned me at length, asking where I had studied, the names of my pathology professors, how I had acquired a knowledge of forensic medicine, how long I had practiced, etc. Apparently my answers were satisfactory, for he immediately separated me from the others and ordered my colleagues to return to their places. For the moment they were spared.35
Dr. Nyiszli’s first task was to pass an examination in dissection. Several corpses were brought to him for examination in the presence of SS and prison doctors:
I extracted all the organs, noted everything that was abnormal, and replied without hesitation to all the numerous questions they fired at me. Their faces showed that their curiosity had been satisfied, and from their approving nods and glances I surmised that I had passed the examination.36
Mengele had already made a bizarre start in his attempt to perfect the ideal German specimen by seeing if he could change the pigmentation of eyes by injecting different colored dyes. Thirty-six children from one barrack in Birkenau were used for the eye tests, which resulted in painful infections and sometimes blindness. After the tests the children served no further use, and so they were gassed. The results of this research, which began in the summer of 1943 and was supplemented with funds from the German Research Council in September of that year, were witnessed by a Jewish inmate doctor, Vexler Jancu:
In June 1943 I went to the Gypsy camp in Birkenau. I saw a wooden table. On it were samples of eyes. They each had a number and a letter. The eyes were very pale yellow to bright blue, green, and violet.37
Another witness, Vera Kriegel, said she saw a wall covered with eyes in one of Mengele’s laboratories. “They were pinned up like butterflies,” she said. “I thought I was dead and already living in hell.”38
The eyes were dispatched to Professor von Verschuer’s institute in Berlin. Coming across a report on eye pigmentation being drafted by one institute researcher toward the end of the war, the co-editor of a medical publication noted that one set of guinea pigs—“grandparents, parents and children—had died at the same time. One could assume they had been killed in the concentration camp.”39
In order to perfect a method of mass-producing suitable people to populate the new German territories and replace the depleted ranks of the army, Mengele set out to establish which attributes and disabilities were inherited genetically, as distinct from being acquired by lifestyle and environment. This is best achieved by the comparative study of twins, with one child in each pair used as a control. But such a comparison is valid only if a detailed life history is available. In Auschwitz, this was usually not possible. Mengele therefore used a system that was necessarily random and of dubious scientific worth. This raises a challenge to the assessment of some students of the Mengele phenomenon that, but for the corrupting influence of the times, he might have been a leader in the field of genetics and anthropology.
Twins destined for Mengele’s experiments were housed in Barrack 14 of Camp F in Birkenau, nicknamed “the Zoo.” There, on Mengele’s orders, they were given good food, comfortable beds, and hygienic living conditions to build up their health for the most important part of the experimental process, the comparative study of their anatomy and bodily functions.
The purpose of building up their strength was to prevent infections from interfering with the results of the study, other than those illnesses like typhus which were deliberately induced in order to monitor their effects. Many of the children adored Mengele, “Uncle Pepi,” as they called him. On some days he brought them sweets, as Vera Alexander, a survivor, explained:
He brought chocolate for them, the most beautiful clothes, white pants, even aprons, and the girls had ribbons in their hair. One day he shouted at me because one girl had one ribbon lower than the other. He told me, “How did you do it? They are not as I like them.”40
Following this preliminary health-building phase, the twins were moved to the hospital in Camp B2F for the “in vivo” stage. This involved experiments performed while the children were alive. Camp records show that transfers of Jewish children, together with twin children, adult twins, dwarfs, and cripples from the transports to the hospital began in July 1944. It is impossible to put a figure on the number of twins on whom Mengele experimented, although an idea of the scale was set out in the West German indictment: “At times it is alleged that 200 pairs of boy twins alone were held in readiness for the experiments of the accused Josef Mengele.”41
In the first step of the in vivo stage precise measurements were taken of their skulls, ears, noses, and other external features. For this process Mengele employed the services of Dr. Martina Puzyna, former assistant to the Polish anthropology professor Jan Czekanowski at the University of Lwów. Czekanowski had perfected a method of statistically measuring different external features in terms of racial groups. As a member of the Polish underground, Dr. Puzyna was sent to Auschwitz, and she soon contracted typhus. As Dr. Puzyna explained, it was while she was in hospital that Mengele discovered who she was and recruited her:
Mengele walked past me and I heard the Polish doctor tell him that I had been Professor Czekanowski’s assistant before the war. He was very excited about this and told the doctor that I should report to him the following day.
I was so weak that I had to be carried there. When I first saw him sitting there at his desk he struck me as being very young. And clean. He was always clean and smart. Mengele was sitting down with Dr. Konig. Mengele asked me what work I had been doing while in the camp and I told him, “Carrying stones.” For some reason he laughed and said, “Well, you’d better come and work for me.” My impression was that he was completely indifferent to what was going on around him.42
Dr. Puzyna was given her own bed in special hospital quarters and her food ration was doubled to speed her recovery. After she had regained her strength, Mengele took her to an office he had had assigned for her work. She was supplied with the latest Swiss precision measuring instruments and began work after the Hungarian Jews arrived, starting in April 1944. “We weren’t supposed to see the twins selections,” she said, “but my office was quite near the railway track and I remember seeing him walking up and down at selections, shouting. He looked quite mad sometimes.”
For the next six months, almost until Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Dr. Puzyna measured 250 pairs of twins, carefully noting down every detail—the distance from the nose to the ear, the distance between the ears, the circumference of the head, and so on. From time to time Mengele came to check her work. “He wasn’t very talkative. He just used to look at the charts that had been written up,” she said. “He never told me what he was applying this work to, but I had an idea. He wanted every detail, especially any difference in twins, and their eyes.”43
After the measurements the twins were taken to the men’s hospital, Block 15 in Camp B2F. There Mengele had the children strip, and he examined them for hours in the minutest detail. No part of their anatomy escaped his attention. When this examination was over, the real torture began.
Crude surgery and other painful tests were performed, often without anesthetics. There were needless amputations, lumbar punctures, typhus injections, and wounds deliberately infected to compare how each twin reacted. In the view of the West German indictment, all were devoid of “any recognizable knowledge being gained from them.” Scores of Mengele’s guinea pigs died at this stage, many of them from a particularly bizarre experiment in which the blood supplies of different pairs of twins were interchanged. The results of one of these experiments were graphically described by a witness, Vera Alexander:
One day Mengele brought chocolate and special clothes. The next day, SS men came and took two children away. They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino. One of them was a hunchback. Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state. They had been cut. The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too. There was a terrible smell of gangrene. The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.44
One survivor subjected to this kind of experiment with her sister and a group of several other female twins recalled:
Each woman was given a blood transfusion from another set of twins so that Mengele could observe the reaction. We two each received 350 cc of blood from a pair of male twins, which brought on a reaction of severe headache and high fever.45
Mengele also forced the two sisters to have sex with other twins, apparently to discover if twins would reproduce twins:
For this reason he wouldn’t release us to work and tried to find suitable partners for us. When we objected that such an experiment was impermissible he told us that we were prisoners and that we had no say in the matter.46
Irene Slotkin and her twin brother, René, survived this in vivo stage of Mengele’s work. She said that “somewhere in my head I had a good impression . . . you know, a doctor is a doctor, and so he’s not going to hurt me. But of course he did.”
These in vivo tests furnished Mengele only with superficial and incomplete information. In his passion to learn everything about the similarities and differences in twins, it was the next and final stage of his experiments that was the most important: the dissection of their bodies so that their organs and general development could be compared. For this simultaneous evaluation of anomalies, Mengele’s twins, his most treasured specimens whom he had cosseted and fed, had to die at the same time. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, who performed the dissections for Mengele, elaborated:
Where under normal circumstances can one find twin[s] who die at the same place and at the same time? For twins like everyone else are separated by life’s varying circumstances. One may die at ten, the other at fifty. In the Auschwitz camp, however, there were several hundred sets of twins and therefore as many possibilities of dissection.47
An explanation for Mengele’s behavior—demonstrating sincere affection for small children whom he planned to kill and dissect—has been advanced by Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:
People who make experiments on mice or apes or rats can do it because they do not identify with the objects of their experiments. If you make experiments on white rats, you know, white rats can be quite nice. So some of these doctors establish a relationship: this is a nice animal, I have to kill it, but while it is still alive, we have some kind of relationship. That is the kind of relationship that is established between the murderers and their victims.48
Among the first child guinea pigs that Mengele delivered to Dr. Nyiszli, who was waiting to perform the autopsy at his newly built laboratory, was a pair of two-year-old twins:
I opened the file and glanced through it. Very detailed clinical examinations, accompanied by X-rays, descriptions and artists’ drawings indicated from the scientific viewpoint the different aspects of these two little beings’ twinhood. Only the pathology report was missing. It was my job to supply it. The twins had died at the same time and were now lying beside each other on the big dissection table. It was they who had to—or whose tiny bodies had to—resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race.49
Among the forty pages of the West German indictment are nine separate allegations involving the deaths of 153 children whom Mengele is alleged to have killed “in order to undertake dissections.” One charge alleges that Mengele had 100 children shot in the back of the head for his autopsies. He is also said to have lured some of the more unwilling children to the crematorium from the experimental block by offering them sweets and then shooting them on the way. One of his most common methods of ensuring simultaneous death was to inject chloroform into their hearts, coagulating the blood and causing heart failure. According to an affidavit by Dr. Nyiszli, Mengele once killed fourteen Gypsy twins himself in this way:
In the work room next to the dissecting room, fourteen Gypsy twins were waiting and crying bitterly. Dr. Mengele didn’t say a single word to us, and prepared a 10 cc and 5 cc syringe. From a box he took Evipal and from another box he took chloroform, which was in 20 cc glass containers, and put these on the operating table. After that the first twin was brought in . . . a fourteen-year-old girl. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress the girl and put her head on the dissecting table. Then he injected the Evipal into her right arm intravenously. After the child had fallen asleep, he felt for the left ventricle of the heart and injected 10 cc of chloroform. After one little twitch the child was dead, whereupon Dr. Mengele had her taken into the corpse chamber. In this manner all fourteen twins were killed during the night.50
This method was first noticed by Dr. Nyiszli on a set of four pairs of twins, all under ten years old, who had attracted Mengele’s attention because three of the pairs each had different-colored eyes. The eyes and other organs were removed and dispatched to Professor von Verschuer’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, marked “War Materials—Urgent.” Dr. Nyiszli, knowing the children had been murdered by chloroform injection, left the “cause of death” section of his dissection report blank. Since medical experiments carried a high security classification, the facade that all Mengele’s guinea pigs had died of “natural causes” had to be maintained and he ordered Dr. Nyiszli to fill it in:
The choice of causes was left to my own judgment and discretion. The only stipulation was that each cause be different.51
One of Mengele’s common techniques was to infect twins to compare how the illness affected them, first while they were alive, then, for more probing results, after they were dead. An inmate doctor, Joahann Cespiva, said:
During my work at the Gypsy camp I came across Mengele and watched his activities. I personally observed him infecting Gypsy twins with typhus, in order to observe whether the twins reacted differently or in the same way. Shortly after they had been infected they were gassed.52
This comparative technique became commonplace; if one twin died of natural causes, “the other twin was killed for comparison.” If the slightest difference in ability was discerned, otherwise healthy twins were likely to be permanently disabled by Mengele’s curiosity. On one occasion the Reichenbergs, two brothers who greatly resembled each other, were mistakenly selected as twins by one of Mengele’s colleagues. They did not object when they were placed in the right-hand column at the ramp, unaware that Mengele and the experimental block awaited them. Ephraim Reichenberg said that his brother had “a beautiful voice and sang once for the Germans.” But his own voice was very poor and Mengele wanted to know why one “twin” had a melodious voice while the other did not. He conducted crude surgery on the vocal cords of both children that impaired their speech. Eventually Ephraim lost all use of his vocal cords. Not until late 1984 did his speech return, after a special microphone was installed in his neck just below his jaw, making his voice sound as though it came from a computer. “Until I bought this wonderful device I couldn’t speak at all,” he said. “This too was invented by the Germans—and that is a pity.”
Mengele displayed an extraordinary fascination for anything connected with race. After spotting a hunchbacked father standing next to his fifteen-year-old son, who had a deformed right foot, he was impatient to learn if there were further common abnormalities. He selected them from the ramp and gave them a last meal, which they ate ravenously, unaware that they were soon to die. Dr. Nyiszli was ordered to examine them “with exact clinical methods before they died” and then to perform the dissections. Nyiszli felt himself “suddenly spinning close to the edge of madness.” Half an hour later, Mengele had them shot and ordered their skeletons to be prepared by boiling their bodies in water so the flesh could be easily stripped from the bones. The skeletons were then immersed in a bath of petrol to make them dry, odorless, and white. Dr. Nyiszli said:
Dr. Mengele was highly pleased. He had brought several fellow officers with him. They pompously examined parts of the skeletons and launched into high-sounding scientific terms, talking as if the two victims represented an extremely rare medical phenomenon. They abandoned themselves completely to their pseudoscience.53
The skeletons were wrapped in strong paper and again forwarded to Professor von Verschuer’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. After the war von Verschuer claimed that he was unaware of Mengele’s activities and at one stage even denied that Mengele had been his assistant. Just how much he did know about Mengele’s experiments will probably never be proved, since he destroyed all his correspondence with Mengele. What is certain is that Mengele visited von Verschuer in Berlin at least once while he was at Auschwitz, and it seems inconceivable that the two men did not discuss the nature and the results of his experiments. According to von Verschuer’s wife, Mengele confided at a dinner party on one of his Berlin visits that he found great difficulty in carrying out his work at Auschwitz. “It’s horrific,” she claims he said, “I can’t talk about it.” Von Verschuer’s daughter recalls that her father thought Mengele was clinically depressed and possibly suicidal.54 Depressed he may have been, but his enthusiasm for his work never flagged. Many inmate doctors recall Mengele as a man who had as much compassion and feeling for the prisoners at Auschwitz as a research scientist has for laboratory rats. “This was where he spent all his spare time,” said Dr. Nyiszli about Mengele’s custom-built dissection laboratory, “here in this man-made hell. . . . Here within these bloodstained walls, Dr. Mengele sat hunched for hours at a time poring over his microscope.”55
To Mengele’s colleagues he came across as a friendly but obsessive man. Dr. Hans Münch got to know him after Mengele sought his advice on how best to preserve specimens for dispatch to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Dr. Münch was the only Auschwitz doctor acquitted by the Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków in December 1947 at a trial of SS men and claims that he knew nothing of the details of Mengele’s experiments. In his view, it was the combination of the madness of Auschwitz and Mengele’s driving ambition for academic recognition that explained his behavior:
In comparison to other doctors in the camp he stood out. He did not fit the normal pattern of SS men and colleagues who he thought drank too much.
In my view he was a gifted scientist, but a combination of scientific knowledge, opportunism and ambition, which Mengele had, can lead to anything.56
Obsessive Mengele certainly was. His appetite for experiments was insatiable. He had a habit of suddenly appearing at a barracks if he was short of “human material.” Olga Lengyel, an inmate doctor, said he called at “any hour, day or night. During the inspection all the exits in the barracks were closed. He arrived when we least expected him. Sometimes he’d come in whistling operatic airs.”57 Eva Kor, a twin, remembered the sheer terror that gripped the barracks after morning roll call:
It wasn’t because his face was terrifying. His face could look very pleasant. But the atmosphere in the barracks before he came and all the preparation by the supervisors was creating that atmosphere of terror and horror that Mengele was coming. So everybody had to stand still. He would, for example, notice on one of the bunk beds that a twin was dead. He would yell and scream, “What happened? How is it possible that this twin died?” But, of course, I understand it today. An experiment had been spoiled.58
There are those like Dr. Münch who, based on their knowledge of the man as a scientist, believe that although Mengele had no thought for the suffering of his victims or justification for his experiments, “there might have been valid short-term results that might be observed.” Whatever the merits of this argument in purely scientific terms, Mengele’s main aim, as interpreted by Dr. Puzyna, the inmate anthropologist, was wholly unscientific:
I found Mengele a picture of what can only be described as a maniac. He turned the truth on its head. He believed you could create a new super-race as though you were breeding horses. He thought it was possible to gain absolute control over a whole race. Man is so infinitely complex that the kind of strict control over such a vast population could never exist. He was a racist and a Nazi. He was ambitious up to the point of being completely inhuman. He was mad about genetic engineering. I believe he thought that when he’d finished with the Jewish race he’d start on the Poles, and when he finished with them, he’d start on someone else. Above all, I believe that he was doing this for himself, for his career. In the end, I believed that he would have killed his own mother if it would have helped him.59
Apart from twins, Mengele engaged in a wide variety of other experiments. Ernest Michel worked as an orderly in the Auschwitz infirmary and recalled taking eight women into an experimental room:
I saw Mengele standing there in his uniform, surrounded by three or four others. There was electrical machinery the likes of which I had never seen. As we brought in each girl, an officer would strap her down. We left quickly because we didn’t want to be around Mengele very long. After a while the screaming inside stopped. When we took them out, two of the eight were dead, five were in a coma, one was strapped to the cot. Mengele was standing there, discussing it very casually. The only word I could hear was experiment.60
According to the West German indictment, the purpose of these electrical experiments, conducted both in Birkenau and in the slave labor camp at Monowitz, was to test the patient’s endurance:
A considerable number of prisoners from Birkenau died in these experiments. . . . From a total of seventy to eighty prisoners on whom the accused carried out such experiments in the spring of 1944, twenty to thirty prisoners are said to have died as a result [in Monowitz].61
The indictment said Mengele had a permanent supply “in the summer of 1944 [of] about fifty young women, held in preparation for him in the prisoners’ sick block of the women’s camp in Birkenau.” Many of them died from blood “transfusions and extractions”; he is alleged to have subjected a group of Polish nuns “to extreme X-rays for research purposes from which they suffered severe burns”; he is alleged to have conducted bone marrow transplants with the result that one victim had to have her right leg amputated from the knee because it got infected. She was spared from the gas chamber only “due to the proximity of the Red Army and impending evacuation of the camp”; he is alleged to have operated on the sex organs of male prisoners “supposedly to castrate or sterilize them”; he is said to have had “a number of women prisoners . . . taken to the ‘Black Wall’ between Blocks 10 and 11 of the main camp and shot. Their breasts were cut off and the muscles from the thigh were kept as cultivating material for experiments in Mengele’s hygienic laboratory”; he is said to have forced a mother, Ruth Eliaz, to cover her breasts with tape “to see how long the baby could live without food.” As the child grew weaker, she mercy-killed it after a compassionate nurse gave her some morphine and a syringe. He is said to have stood on pregnant women’s stomachs until the fetuses were expelled; he is even said to have dissected a one-year-old while the child was still alive.
At such times it might seem that Mengele was motivated by sheer sadism, although most witnesses have remarked not at his pleasure at watching or inflicting suffering but at his total detachment from it. Etched in Dr. Puzyna’s memory is a moment when she saw Mengele transfixed by music which an orchestra was playing while a work gang filed past, carrying the day’s dead. She said:
Every day people died at work because they were so weak. Mengele was standing there, saying nothing, his head in his hand, eyes down, just listening. He was completely rooted to the spot, utterly oblivious of this march of the dead right next to him. There were bodies and there was Mengele, just enraptured by the music. I remember it happened in the hospital too. The orchestra, a very fine orchestra, Hungarian Jews, just turned up to play and there were people terribly ill all round us, just skeletons. Mengele didn’t even look at them.62
Dr. Tobias Brocher, a Menninger Foundation psychoanalyst who practiced near Mengele’s home town of Günzburg and has studied his behavior, said it exhibited the “narcissistic component of sadism” but not sadism itself:
He didn’t take pleasure in inflicting pain, but in the power he exerted by being the man who had to decide between life and death within the ideology of a concentration camp doctor. Mengele had the narcissistic pattern of the professional. In the subculture of medicine as a whole, there is a split between what you have to do and any emotion you might have; between doctors who take a strictly scientific approach and the medical doctor who cares for patients. In Germany this split was evident in the euthanasia program for mental patients, which preceded the concentration camps. Doctors in the euthanasia program rationalized that the persons they condemned to death were “better off now” or that they “would die anyway.”63
Mengele’s personal acts of cruelty, examples of which abound in the West German indictment, were usually provoked by fits of wild and uncontrollable temper. He is said to have “taken the newborn child of a Russian woman, grabbed it by the head and [thrown] it onto a pile of corpses”; he is said to have become “so furious at a camp selection when the Kapo of a work detail allowed those prisoners already chosen to die to rejoin those fit for work that he shot him with his own pistol”; there is the case of an old man “selected for the gas chamber who wanted to go over to his son who was in the work group, but Mengele hit him over the head with an iron bar so that his skull split open and he fell to the ground dead”; he is said “to have thrown a newborn baby boy onto a stove, angered at the mother’s pregnancy which the selection doctors had failed to spot and which would have normally qualified her for the gas chamber”; he is said “to have shot with his service pistol at least one prisoner of unknown nationality because he stopped on the street without being authorized to”; he is said to have shot a sixteen-year-old girl “who had fled onto a roof out of mortal fear of the gas chamber.”
Perhaps most gruesome of all is the allegation that Mengele had 300 children burned alive in an open fire, an event witnessed by several inmates including a Russian named Annani Silovich Pet’ko:
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 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 and Mengele were present and were giving orders.
The first group of children were from Dnepropetrovsk. I was told by the zone commanders that it was difficult to poison the children in the gas chambers, therefore they were burned in the pit. They were all under five years old. I heard that they had brought either an entire kindergarten or an orphanage from Dnepropetrovsk. Later I was told that some of these children that were brought and burned were actually taken from their mothers.64
Although some inmates who knew Mengele have testified that they never saw him commit an act of violence, there are witnesses to corroborate every one of these extraordinary allegations listed in the West German indictment. In view of the fact that Mengele was never brought to trial, these statements will never be tested under rigorous cross-examination. But they would not have been included in the indictment had they not been judged to have stood a good chance of surviving courtroom scrutiny. Dr. Gisella Perl, who worked under Mengele as a prison doctor in Birkenau, recalled two examples of his explosive temper. In the first, a woman prisoner named Ibi was found by Mengele after she had escaped gas chamber selections six times. She somehow managed to gather enough strength each time to jump off the truck taking the victims to their deaths. Mengele was enraged:
“You are still here?” Dr. Mengele left the head of the column, and with a few easy strides caught up with her. 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 her at the top of his voice, “You want to escape, don’t you. You can’t escape now. This is not a truck, you can’t jump. You are going to burn like the others, you are going to croak, you dirty Jew,” and he went on hitting the poor unprotected head. As I watched, I saw her two beautiful, intelligent eyes disappear under a layer of blood. Her ears weren’t there any longer, maybe he had torn them off. And in a few seconds, her straight, pointed nose was a flat, broken, bleeding mass. I closed my eyes, unable to bear it any longer, and when I opened them up again, Dr. Mengele had stopped hitting her. But instead of a human head, Ibi’s tall, thin body carried a round, blood-red object on its bony shoulders, an unrecognizable object, too horrible to look at; he pushed her back into line. 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.65
Dr. Perl’s account of the second incident in which Mengele violently lost his temper shows a highly volatile, unpredictable man—and omnipotent, as the senior doctor in the women’s camp. It happened when he made an unexpected visit to the women’s hospital, where Mengele found Dr. Perl and her colleagues stoking a fire in order to cook some potatoes which they had stolen:
The silence lasted only a second; the storm, when it broke, was all the more terrible. He ran around like a wild beast, smashing everything in his way. He kicked over the stove, stomped on our potatoes, overturned the operating table, screaming, shouting incessantly: “Yes, this is how I imagined a Jewish hospital. You dirty whores, you unspeakable Jew swine.” Suddenly I conceived a desperate plan. I got up from the floor, went to the shelf, and took down a jar containing a fetus and approached Dr. Mengele. “Herr Hauptsturmführer may be interested in this specimen,” I stammered. “Only ra ely is it possible to bring it out in one piece.” He stopped raving and grabbed the jar out of my hand. His face, which the moment before had looked like the face of a raving maniac, assumed a cruel, satisfied smile. “Good, beautiful, take it to crematory number 2 tomorrow. We are sending it to Berlin.” And as if he had forgotten what went on, he turned around and left the hospital.66
These displays of violent mood change and such total lack of remorse suggest a man in the grip of a complex psychopathic personality disorder. Somehow the ethical side of Mengele’s professional personality never developed. Perhaps it was because the horror of the Russian front and Auschwitz came so soon after he qualified as a doctor. In any event, there is little question that Mengele never suffered feelings of guilt at any stage of his life after Auschwitz: “There are no judges, only revenge seekers,” he told his son when they met in Sao Paulo in 1977, two years before he died. Rolf said his father was quite unrepentant and felt no shame. Only rarely did he display his personal feelings. Once it occurred when Dr. Lingens confronted him by comparing the prisoners at Auschwitz to his own family in Bavaria. She challenged Mengele to consider that any one of a group of dying women he was refusing to treat might, like his own mother, have a son whom she wanted to see again. Caught off guard, Mengele responded meekly: “I don’t know if I’ll see my mother again.”
Such sensitivity was notably absent in one of Mengele’s more notorious decisions: to send hundreds of entire families to the gas chamber. At Mengele’s insistence the entire Gypsy family camp was liquidated between July 31 and August 2, 1944. A total of 2987 Gypsies were dispatched to the crematorium, the remaining 1408 sent on to Buchenwald. While he was carrying out the selections, a four-year-old girl pleaded with Mengele not to be sent away, calling him “Uncle Doctor.” With a “wave of his hand,” Mengele is alleged to have signaled to a German Kapo to deal with her. The West German indictment says the Kapo “flung her against the wheel of a lorry so that her skull was shattered.” During roll call two boys hid, and the count therefore did not tally. When they were discovered, Mengele is said to have “driven them to the crematorium in his car.”
There are several examples of Mengele showing kindness to children, only to have them killed.67 This confusing duality of affection and cruelty is a process that Robert Jay Lifton, the distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at the City University of New York, calls “doubling.” Lifton says that there were two parts in Mengele operating at Auschwitz—the Auschwitz self and the prior self:
With the Auschwitz self, Mengele’s potential for evil became actual, even as he maintained elements of his prior self that included affection towards children. In this process, each self part behaved as a functioning whole: the Auschwitz self enabling him to function in that murderous environment and to exploit its human resources with considerable efficiency; the prior self enabling him to maintain a sense of decency. His powerful commitment to Nazi ideology served as a bridge, a necessary connection between the two.68
A good example of Mengele’s “doubling” involved a group of Jewish children who were suffering from very painful mouth ulcers, a condition known as noma disease, which causes an extreme form of oral decay. Mengele embarked on a series of experimental cures, soothing the children, anxious to relieve their pain. That was the prior self operating. It was only after he succeeded in finding a cure that the Auschwitz self asserted itself. After some of the children had recovered he sent them to the gas chambers. To Mengele the sole importance of the exercise was that he succeeded, not that he had relieved the children’s misery. Once cured, the children, as had the Gypsies, posed a threat to the purity of the Aryan race and his ideology directed they be destroyed.
Another example of “doubling” was witnessed by Dr. Olga Lengyel. She remembered Mengele supervising a birth, adhering fastidiously to every medical precaution and procedure for a Jewish mother and baby. Within an hour he had sent them both to the gas chamber. He displayed the same perverse duality by calming anxious children condemned to die. Mengele turned their last walk into a game which he called “on the way to the chimney.” Then he waited with great anticipation for his pathologist’s report. Surviving child guinea pigs who had their health built up for the in vivo stage of his experiments remember Mengele giving them sweets. He even used to play with them in a kindergarten he had built. But every time it was the calculating act of a man whose overriding interest was to get the most out of his “material.”
Children for whom Mengele had no use—because they were neither twins, unusual, nor otherwise of interest—lived in dread of him. A witness named Kleinmann said at the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 that he would never forget the day Mengele arrived at a parade ground where 2000 boys had been ordered to gather. It was the eve of Yom Kippur:
All of a sudden a tremble passed through the parade ground like an electric current. Dr. Mengele appeared on his bicycle. He put his hands behind his back; his lips as usual were tightly closed. He went to the center of the parade ground, lifted his head so he could survey the whole scene, and then his eyes landed on a little boy around fifteen years old, perhaps only fourteen years old. I remember his face very well. He was blond, very thin and very sunburnt. His face had freckles. He was standing in the first line when Mengele approached him and asked him, “How old are you?” The boy shook and said, “I’m eighteen years old.” I saw immediately that Dr. Mengele was furious and he started shouting, “I’ll show you. Get me a hammer and some nails and a plank.” A deathly silence prevailed on the parade ground. . . . Mengele approached a tall boy . . . in the first row. He put the boy near the goalpost and gave orders to nail the plank above the boy’s head so that it was like the letter “L” only in reverse. Then he ordered the first group to pass under the board. The first group of boys started going in single file. . . . We had no explanations. We understood that the little ones who did not reach the board, who were not tall enough, would be taken to their death.
Attorney General: Did he tell you what would happen to you after passing the measure?
Kleinmann: No, but it could have had no other meaning. It was one hundred percent clear to everyone what the purpose of the game was. We all began stretching. Everyone wanted to get another half inch, another centimeter. I also stretched as much as I could but I despaired. I saw that even taller boys than myself did not attain the necessary height. . . . I thought, this is the end of my life, and all of a sudden my brother whispered to me, “You want to live? Do something . . .” All of a sudden I saw some stones near me. . . . I bent down without being noticed; I picked up a few small rocks; I opened my shoelaces and started stuffing my shoes with little stones. I stuffed them with stones under my heel and this added about an inch to my height.
Presiding Judge: Let us hear how you passed this test.
Kleinmann: I stood there for about ten minutes with these shoes full of stones and rags. . . . Then after about ten minutes all the boys would be passing under the board. Two would make it and two wouldn’t. I stood there and finally my brother kept looking at me and said, “No, it’s not enough yet.” . . . I started looking for another device: to escape and hide among all those tall boys who had already gone under the board and passed the selection. I tried to infiltrate into the groups of the big boys [who had passed the test]. But then another boy tried to infiltrate and Dr. Mengele noticed that and he started shouting at the guard men and Kapos, “What are you doing? This is sabotage.” And he ordered the entire group to be taken and again passed under the board.69
On the second time around Kleinmann again escaped to a group of taller boys, but they had not yet gone under Mengele’s board. On the third time around he escaped into a group who had passed the test. But 1000 boys did not make the grade and two days later were gassed.
Some researchers attach much significance to the fact that after the war Mengele was never known to denigrate the Jewish race to his South American hosts. There is also a view among some psychologists who have attempted to study his immense capacity for barbarism that his intellect was too sharp for him to believe, as other Nazis did, that Jews were actually an inferior race. However, this view is not shared by those who drew up the West German indictment against him. The indictment refers to Mengele’s “contempt” for Jews, which “manifested itself in particular when he made selections on their religious festivals, which was especially painful for them.” The charge goes on:
Thus it is alleged that he selected Jewish children on the Friday before the Jewish New Year festival 1944 from camp section B2D in Birkenau; he sent 328 children to their death in the gas chambers on the Jewish New Year festival 1944 from camp section B2D in Birkenau; on Jewish Yom Kippur 1944 in camp B2E in Birkenau he hung a batten between the goalposts of a football pitch and those approximately 1000 children who were not the required height were sent to the gas chamber.70
Mengele’s combination of anti-Semitism and sadism is probably the explanation for this desecration of Jewish holidays with his games of death. Mengele’s son remembers that in the 1977 meeting with his father, Mengele attempted to convince him that some races, including Jews, were different or inferior when compared with Aryans. Rolf recalls:
He alleged he had evidence that Jews were different or abnormal. But he couldn’t furnish any convincing proof of it. Most of his arguments were sociological, historical, or political.71
But one did not have to be Jewish to fear Mengele’s arrival in the camp. For those acquainted with Mengele’s reputation as a doctor who relished selections as a game of Russian roulette, the first hint of his presence was a spine-chilling moment. One inmate, Dr. Alfred Fiederkiewicz, gave this account of the trauma suffered by a group of patients awaiting their fate:
When the patients, having taken off their shirts, were standing two deep, he [Dr. Thilo, another SS doctor] surveyed them and asked for particulars. Before he had inspected not more than a few patients there arrived SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr. Mengele. We got frightened because he was an officer of higher rank than Thilo. We knew that Mengele was the greatest killer in the camp, that he had experimented on children and grown-up prisoners, whom he not long ago had sent to die in the gas chambers. And a few days ago he had ordered the whole Gypsy camp to be annihilated. He was a man of strong physique, of medium height, fair haired—when talking with Thilo he smiled slyly and looked with gimlet eyes at the ranks of my patients. In a certain moment I heard the question, “What illness do these skeletons suffer from?” When Thilo answered that it was tuberculosis, Mengele winked and with a movement of his head pointed to the chimneys of the crematoria. The sinister wink was noticed not only by me but also by the patients.72
Sixteen months after Mengele arrived at Auschwitz his work was evaluated by the Chief Doctor’s Office. On August 19, 1944, his garrison commander produced a report in which Mengele’s mental state was described as “outstanding.” It also referred in glowing terms to his record of sending people to the gas chamber and to his experiments on twins. The report was written in the coded language that the SS coyly reserved for its more bestial acts. Thus was Mengele’s decision to exterminate thousands of Gypsies and women suffering from typhus applauded:
During his employment as camp physician at the concentration camp Auschwitz he has put his knowledge to practical and theoretical use while fighting serious epidemics. With prudence, perseverance, and energy, he has carried out all tasks given him, often under very difficult conditions, to the complete satisfaction of his superiors and has shown himself able to cope with every situation.
The same coded language commended his “scientific” work for the Fatherland:
In addition to that, he, as an anthropologist, has most zealously used his little off-time duty to educate himself further and, utilizing the scientific material at his disposal due to his official position, has made a valuable contribution in his work to anthropological science. Therefore, his performance can be called outstanding.
The report went on to lavish praise on Mengele’s leadership qualities:
In his attitude toward his superiors he shows the impeccable demeanor of an SS officer: the very best military deportment, tact, and reserve. His character makes him a favorite with his comrades. Toward his subordinates he knows how to hold his own with absolute justice and the required strictness, but is at the same time popular and respected.73
This picture of a hard but fair man is certainly at odds with Mengele’s reputation among noncommissioned SS men. According to Dr. Nyiszli, they trembled at the mention of Mengele’s name, as he discovered when he was challenged by an SS soldier for being in F camp, away from his zone:
I answered him in a quiet voice: “I am here because Dr. Mengele sent me.” The name “Mengele” worked like magic. My noncom grew tame in less time than it takes to tell. In an almost fawning manner he asked me how long I intended to stay inside the camp.74
The garrison commander’s report recommended Mengele for promotion, saying that he had demonstrated “to all an absolute firmness and fitness for the job.” Still in coded reference to his experimental work, it said:
In addition to his medical knowledge, Dr. Mengele is especially knowledgeable in anthropology. He appears entirely suitable for every other employment, also for employment in the next highest rank.75
Since Himmler’s authorization was required for medical experiments at concentration camps, and since he took a close personal interest in racial research, it is quite likely that Mengele’s desired ambition of being brought to the Reichsführer SS’s attention was achieved. To ensure that this was so, Mengele set up a sideshow of his most treasured set of dwarfs, all seven of them, before an audience of one visiting senior bureaucrat and 2000 SS men. The dwarfs belonged to a Romanian Jewish circus family, the Moskowitzes. When Mengele first set eyes on two of them, a pair of twins named Elizabeth and Perla, he exclaimed with delight that he had “work for twenty years.” Mengele stripped the family naked and triumphantly paraded them on stage, complete with a family tree to illustrate his point that they were the offspring of “degenerate” Jewish forebears. The Nazi VIP watched the performance from the front row, spellbound, capturing it on his own hand-held movie camera.*
Hopes of promotion and a glittering postwar academic career faded as autumn came to Auschwitz in 1944. Dr. Lingens said that Mengele appreciated sooner than most that Auschwitz would be liberated by the advancing Red Army and that the Germans would lose the war. “I remember that in about September he was saying that it was a pity all his work would fall in the hands of the Russians,” she said. “He knew the war was coming to an end while most others still thought Hitler would win.”
In the closing months of 1944 Mengele grew sullen and despondent. His wife, Irene, remembers that his correspondence became increasingly melancholy. She decided to make her second trip to Auschwitz during the fall of 1944, with the intent of cheering him. Irene’s trip and her impressions are vividly recorded in her diary from that time. She left five-month-old Rolf with her in-laws and then departed from Freiburg on August 8, 1944. She traveled by train, via Katowice, Poland, and arrived on August 10 in Auschwitz, where she settled into the SS barracks situated just outside the main camp, a place she described as “a dreary, desolate area with lodgings that are primitive.”
According to her diary, Irene’s first three weeks with Josef were idyllic. They had servants in their house—“Jehovah Witnesses in striped prison garb”—and their days were spent bathing in the Sola River and picking blackberries, from which she made jam. Although her diary shows that she was aware of the selections (“the incoming trains were clearly visible”), she shows no indication of knowing about the gruesome experiments and conditions inside the camp. She merely thought of Auschwitz as a large camp for political and wartime prisoners. In the diary she noted that the entire area was enclosed in barbed wire, that there were many guards, that movement without proper identity cards was prohibited, and that “sweet stench” she encountered on her first trip in the summer of 1943 was still everywhere. It seems unthinkable that Josef had not given her an explanation for the smell, and Irene’s claim of ignorance should, perhaps, be judged in that light.
On September 1, 1944, Irene’s diary describes a scientific conference at Auschwitz to commemorate the opening of a new military hospital. The main speaker was Josef Mengele, and the subject was “Examples of the Work in Anthropological and Hereditary Biology in the Concentration Camp.” Irene’s words reflect only pride in her husband’s work and in his leading role in the conference.
However, although she enjoyed her stay in Auschwitz, she noted in numerous diary entries that her husband seemed depressed. When she tried to talk to him about his work he refused. He told her, “I often wonder who is responsible for all of this.” According to her account, all Mengele told her was that service in Auschwitz was the equivalent of service on the front line, and therefore he regarded his work as his “duty, to be practiced in soldierlike obedience.” Irene recalls:
I loved him very much. He was my first great love. He was always charming, funny, very sociable—vain too, and bothered because in his opinion he was too short. But in Auschwitz I knew he was downhearted and depressed although he didn’t betray it.76
Irene believed that Mengele was depressed because he was a man trapped between the orders he was given and his inner dissatisfaction with his work. Irene concludes, “His fate was that he was too conscious of his duty, too obedient, and had too much the spirit of the subordinate.” However, those who worked with Mengele give a different version. Dr. Hans Munch believes Mengele’s depression resulted not from his Auschwitz duties, but rather from his fear that the Nazis were losing the war and that his days as a free man were numbered. In any case, he never revealed to Irene the cause of his growing anxiety in the autumn of 1944.
Irene was set to leave Auschwitz, after a one-month stay, on September 11. Just before her departure, however, she contracted diphtheria, and within days she had the complicating symptom of an inflamed heart muscle. She remained in the camp hospital for more than a month, much of the time delirious from a high fever. Mengele visited her three times daily, reading to her from Balzac’s Le Diamant. Over the next few weeks, Irene was shuffled from hospital to hospital as air raid warnings sounded. On September 13, 1944, Irene heard the camp’s air raid sirens blast for the first time: she was dragged from her bed to an air raid shelter, but no bombs hit the camp. On September 17 she was moved to a smaller hospital that was considered safer in the event of further bombing raids. On October 7 the sirens again screamed across the camp, and this time antiaircraft artillery answered. On October 13 another swarm of Allied planes passed nearby and a couple of stray bombs actually fell into the camp itself.*
Although the Allied bombings had no substantive effect on Auschwitz, there was a psychological effect: they reminded everyone that the war was going badly for Germany and might soon be over. Irene decided to make the best of those hectic last days with her husband. When released from the hospital on October 18, she moved into a new flat in the doctors’ barracks, equipped with both a kitchen and a bath. She remarked in her diary that she felt “once again like a newlywed.” As Auschwitz packed the gas chambers with ever-increasing numbers of people from the Hungarian convoys, Irene and Josef Mengele enjoyed a second honeymoon. On October 30 they left Auschwitz together, Mengele having obtained special permission for a leave. They arrived in Giinzburg on November 1. Mengele visited his parents for only a day, and then they proceeded to nearby Freiburg where he saw his nearly eight-month-old baby, Rolf, for the first time. He stayed nearly a week, and then on November 6 he left to return to Auschwitz.
The war that Irene had felt firsthand in Auschwitz followed her back to Freiburg. Heavy Allied bombing forced her to move with Rolf on November 23 to Mengele’s parents’ home in Giinzburg. Allied bombs would eventually drop in the garden of the Mengele home, but family members remained unscathed. As for Josef Mengele, upon his return to Auschwitz he became increasingly depressed and anxious over the deteriorating Nazi battle position. Near the end of 1944 he was sometimes seen pacing up and down the SS doctors’ office, silent, morose, head in hands, although he continued with his research almost to the end. He is recorded as having taken sixteen female dwarfs from the hospital camp to the women’s camp on December 5 and “experimented on them” three days later. Five survived, but it was assumed that the remaining eleven died as “a direct result of the experiments administered by SS Dr. Mengele.”77 Mengele, meanwhile, moved quickly to cover up the fact that experiments had taken place because they were still classified as a “secret Reich matter” even though they were known to a vast number of inmates. He arrived at the Jewish doctors’ quarters for the last time to announce that Auschwitz would be destroyed, and ordered that everything movable was to be packed. Even his marble dissecting table was removed and replaced by concrete slabs.
One of the last inmates to see Mengele was Marc Berkowitz, a twelve-year-old whom Mengele had appointed as his special messenger because he was intrigued by his Aryan looks. Berkowitz said he “tended to him personally, to his meals, to cleaning his special kitchen and his boots. I picked his Brussels sprouts. . . .” That Christmas Eve, a light snow was falling and Berkowitz was in a washroom when Mengele passed by. Pausing at the door, he summoned Berkowitz outside. “Mengele was wearing a leather coat with a soft cap,” said Berkowitz. “His face was reddish, his eyes sort of tired, as if he was sad. He put his hand on my head and said ‘Adieu. You were a good boy.’ And then he was gone.”
On the night of January 17 Mengele left Auschwitz, salvaging what records he could from his experiments on twins, cripples, and dwarfs. The SS already had orders to destroy sickness reports, temperature charts, and all other evidence of experiments and genocide by blowing up the crematoria and shooting patients too feeble to march. Mengele also paid a last call to his anthropologist Dr. Puzyna, at her office, where the twins had been measured before succumbing to his knife. “He came into my office without a word,” she said. “He took all my papers, put them into two boxes, and had them taken outside to a waiting car.”
With the sound of the Red Army’s artillery echoing ever closer in his ears, Josef Mengele fled the madness of Auschwitz. From that night on, he never stopped running.
* Himmler had chosen the right man for the job in appointing Hoess. He was convicted of murder before the war.
* Adolf Eichmann was Obersturmbannführer, lieutenant colonel, in charge of Department IV-B-4, the section of the Reich Central Security Office in Berlin responsible for deporting Jews. He was hanged in Israel on May 31, 1962.
† The IG Farben directors, who regularly visited the camp and received monthly reports on its operation, later testified in their defense at the Nuremberg military tribunal that they never noticed anything was wrong and moreover that they were only doing what was “necessary” and that they were “carrying out orders.”
* That day 981 Jews were brought from the camp at Drancy, France, to Auschwitz. Out of this number, 16 men and 38 women were admitted to the camp as prisoners. The rest were gassed.
† Two transports of Jews from Slovakia and Drancy, France, were gassed after selections at the railhead.
* Auschwitz was originally a military barracks for the Polish army. Himmler built another camp nearby at Birkenau in 1941. Thereafter it was known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
† During the forensic examination in Brazil in June 1985, the doctors determined that the skeleton had suffered a hip fracture which was compatible with the type of fracture that could result from a motorcycle accident. Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, speculated that Mengele’s Auschwitz accident might have caused a broken hip. The SS files, normally meticulous in reporting details of accidents, omit any mention of this. Irene Mengele does not recall her husband ever talking about a broken hip. The injury discovered in the 1985 examination must therefore have resulted from a postwar accident which none of Mengele’s friends know about.
* Mengele himself contracted malaria in June 1943.
* Mengele’s illness was so severe that he temporarily left Auschwitz to convalesce.
* Like several other Nazi doctors, Schumann was given the benefit of the doubt when in 1970 his lawyers claimed he was too ill to stand trial. The “terminally ill” Schumann survived a further thirteen years in an affluent Hamburg suburb, never having spent a day in jail for his crimes.
* The two sisters believed the visitor was Himmler but they are mistaken. His last recorded visit to Auschwitz was in 1942.
* The Allied planes were involved in reconnaissance and limited bombing missions against some of the industrial installations outside Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Allies have never satisfactorily answered why they failed to bomb the camp, even though by late 1944 they had conclusive proof of what was going on there and they could easily have used the bright flames from the crematoria as their target sites. Not only could hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved during the final months of the war, but casualties to inmates, who were housed far away from the crematoria, would have been negligible. The Allies never even attempted to bomb the railway lines leading to the camp, which would have cut off the means of bringing inmates to the murdering machine.