Josef Mengele had a ten-day start ahead of the Red Army when he joined the growing exodus of German soldiers heading west. By the time the first Russian scouts entered the gates of Auschwitz and Birkenau at 3 p.m. on January 27—and discovered corpses of the 650 prisoners killed by looting SS men—Mengele had arrived at another concentration camp two hundred miles to the northwest. This was Gross Rosen, in Silesia, where bacteriological warfare experiments on Soviet prisoners had been conducted since the beginning of 1942.1* But Mengele’s stay was short-lived. By February 18 he was on the run again to avoid the advancing Russians, who liberated the camp eight days later.
As Mengele fled Gross Rosen, the man who had secured his posting to Auschwitz moved quickly to cover his own tracks. Professor von Verschuer shipped out two truckloads of documents from his research institute in Berlin, taking care to destroy all of his correspondence with the Auschwitz doctor.2
Meanwhile, Mengele fled westward, where he joined a retreating unit of Wehrmacht soldiers. He stayed with them for the next two months, exchanging his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht officer’s. Mengele and his newfound unit remained in central Czechoslovakia, hoping that the tide might turn against the Russian onslaught.
But the Red Army was unstoppable. They advanced at such a pace that once more Mengele and his unit began moving farther west. By May 2, Mengele had advanced to Saaz, in the Sudetenland, where he found a motorized German field hospital, Kriegslazarett 2/591. To his surprise, Mengele discovered that one of the chief medical officers attached to the Kriegslazarett was a prewar friend, Dr. Hans Otto Kahler.
Kahler had been involved in legitimate twin research before the war at Professor von Verschuer’s institute in Frankfurt. Kahler, who had a Jewish great-grandparent, was not a Nazi party member. But von Verschuer so respected his work that he resisted considerable pressure from the Nazi hierarchy to remove him from his staff. It was at Verschuer’s institute that Mengele and Kahler had forged their close friendship, one that now became a key factor to Mengele’s escape from the Allies.
Although Kahler immediately recognized Mengele and knew he was in the SS, he did not comment on his newfound Wehrmacht officer’s uniform. Kahler places Mengele’s arrival at the field hospital as the same day that Hitler’s suicide was announced on the radio: May 2, 1945. He remembers the event clearly because “Mengele made quite a fuss, refusing to believe the report that Hitler was dead.” That evening, Mengele approached Kahler and asked him if he could join the field hospital, pleading that he could be useful in the unit’s specialty, internal medicine. Kahler went to the unit’s commanding officer and vouched for his friend, and as a result of his efforts, Mengele was allowed to stay.
While stationed with his new unit, Mengele struck up an intimate relationship with a young German nurse. Her name is not known and Mengele does not provide it in his autobiography. He trusted her so completely that when the unit started to move west once again and Mengele feared capture by the Allies, he gave her custody of his precious research notes from Auschwitz. The notes, which his Auschwitz anthropologist, Dr. Puzyna, had seen him gather on the eve of his departure from the camp, would immediately betray him as a concentration camp doctor. Giving the notes to the nurse was prudent for several reasons. First, nurses were registered and almost immediately released when captured by Allied forces. Second, even if her eventual captors should take the time to translate a set of scribbled notes, she could always claim they belonged to someone else, thereby not identifying Mengele as the owner. In that case, Mengele would lose only his notes, and not his life before an Allied court.
After several days, the unit began to move farther northwest, by way of Carlsbad, in order to stay ahead of the advancing Russians. On the night of May 8, 1945, the date Field Marshall Keitel signed the unconditional surrender, Mengele crossed the frontier from Czechoslovakia into Saxony, in what is now East Germany,3 as he recalled in his autobiography:
On the night of the armistice the Americans stopped our advance, but the Russians pursued us for the time being. This way we were in a kind of no-man’s-land. As long as we had provisions we were tortured only by the uncertainty of to whom this area would be allocated.4
Mengele and his unit had settled into the narrow strip in central Europe where the Americans and Russians both informally agreed not to enter—less than twenty-five miles separated the two Allied powers. In the Russian and American pincer, some 15,000 German soldiers had become trapped. In the confusion of moving from Czechoslovakia into the no-man’s-land, Mengele’s motorized hospital unit split into several sections. When he finally settled in the surrounding forest, Mengele realized he was separated from his friend Dr. Kahler. In this new section, without the support of Kahler, Mengele feared his SS identity would be discovered. One senior physician in the unit, Colonel Fritz Ulmann, suspected that Mengele was an SS man in disguise. Ulmann, who would later become the key to Mengele’s postwar freedom, found his behavior in the no-man’s-land to be almost comical. Ulmann recalls that every day at roll call Mengele gave a different name: “He evidently couldn’t remember what name he had given the day before, so he must have used four or five additional names. He was secretive and I knew he had to be SS.”
Somehow Mengele sustained the charade for six weeks while his unit was stuck in the forest. On June 15, American forces entered the area and took some 10,000 German prisoners. Mengele was not among them; together with his unit, he made a run for freedom, and it was temporarily successful. Mengele remembered the breakout in his autobiography:
In the end there was less and less food and the rumors that the Russians would occupy this area became more numerous. So then we decided to act. With several vehicles and a sanitation unit we formed a column, and with some deception we succeeded in passing through the Americans. We bypassed their subsequent roadblocks and reached Bavarian territory.5
His freedom was short-lived. American forces were thick on the ground, and according to Mengele’s own account, within days his unit was captured:
In the vicinity of the first large town, Weiden, we were stopped and brought to an American camp for prisoners. This way we had reached our goal, precisely when the stock of petrol was finished. The Americans then took us from one camp to another in which the very small rations became even smaller and our hopelessness grew.6
At the first American camp, Mengele was rejoined with Hans Kahler, who had been captured in the same vicinity the same day. And, just as he had hoped, Mengele’s nurse friend was released within hours of her capture, his Auschwitz research notes safely in her custody. At this point, Dr. Kahler and Dr. Ulmann have different recollections of what name Mengele used to register in the camp. Dr. Ulmann says he checked in under his real name. Dr. Kahler says he checked in as “Memling,” the name of a famous Bavarian artist. However, Kahler claims he told Mengele it was dishonorable to use an alias, and for that reason Mengele subsequently told the American camp authorities his real name. What is indisputable is that within several days of his arrival, the Americans had him in their custody, listed under his true name.
Yet although they knew his name, they did not know he was an SS member, a detail that would have subjected him to a more rigorous interrogation and a cross-check of his name with lists of wanted Nazi criminals. For that, Mengele had his vanity to thank. It was Mengele’s decision not to have his blood group tattooed on his chest or arm when he joined the SS in 1938 that clinched his freedom. He had managed to convince the SS that the tattoo was unnecessary and that any competent surgeon would make a crossmatch of blood types and not rely solely on the tattoo before administering a transfusion. According to Irene, the real reason had more to do with Mengele’s self-worship. He had a habit of standing before a full-length mirror and preening himself, admiring the smoothness of his skin. And it was his skin that he had not wanted to mark.7
The failure to have the blood-type tattoo meant that the Americans had no way of knowing that Mengele was a member of the SS. Although American authorities required prisoners to fill out questionnaires and to show their pay book, which listed the unit of service, they never learned about his SS service. Not only did Mengele lie on the questionnaire, but he failed to produce any documents that identified his SS affiliation.
At the time, Mengele had no idea of just how lucky he was. By April 1945, two months before the Americans arrested him, Josef Mengele had been identified as a principal war criminal.8 Those fortunate enough to survive his bloody knife had begun making statements to the Poles, French, Yugoslavs, British, and Czechs. By May, “Dr. Joseph Mengele, Lagerartz, Oswiecim KL” was already listed by the United Nations War Crimes Commission as wanted for “mass murder and other crimes.” His name had also been added to the first Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS) list compiled by the Allied High Command in Paris for circulation to detention camps throughout Europe. Finally, the U.S. Judge Advocate General’s Office had independently gathered evidence against him. Notwithstanding his high profile as a wanted war criminal, a combination of factors helped Mengele, among them the inefficiency and lack of coordination among various arms of the U.S. occupying forces, the near impossibility of weeding war criminals out of millions of detainees, and above all, his own vanity about the tattoo.
During the immediate aftermath of the war, Allied administration was so chaotic that some “wanted” lists did not filter into the detention camps throughout the summer of 1945. The key question is whether either the UN or CROWCASS wanted lists were ever in the hands of the camp authorities holding Mengele. We may never know the answer. The U.S. Office of Special Investigations was unable to find one despite its very detailed 1985 examination. If the authorities did have the lists, they were palpably negligent. But there is a strong possibility the lists never arrived. Moreover, Mengele was fortunate that the Americans had adopted a policy of processing prisoners as rapidly as possible, due to the enormous numbers swamping the detention camps, as well as a desire to get as many able-bodied people into the cities and fields to rebuild Germany. Although there is no evidence of collusion between the American authorities and Mengele, the fact remains that this notorious war criminal was held for two months and never identified as the “principal war criminal” on the “wanted” list.
Mengele, however, was convinced that it was only a matter of time before he was unmasked as the Auschwitz doctor. He was so worried that he became clinically depressed. His friend Dr. Kahler asked Dr. Ulmann, a neurologist, to examine Mengele and to treat his depression. Ulmann consented, and Mengele soon confided to him the source of his anxiety: the possible discovery of his Auschwitz work. Ulmann not only kept Mengele’s secret, but he helped obtain a second identification for him, sensing that the Auschwitz doctor would probably need an alias to survive in postwar Germany. Ulmann was uniquely placed to help Mengele. The Americans had assigned him to the prison staff of the main camp administrative office, where release papers were processed. When Ulmann was eventually released from the camp he was able to obtain a second set of release papers in his name. He gave one set to Mengele. Ulmann’s plan was for Mengele to leave the camp using the papers issued to Mengele in his real name. Once outside, where Mengele risked being questioned by Allied troops at any time, he could revert to using Fritz Ulmann’s name by showing his fake papers.
Ulmann and Mengele were set to be freed after six weeks, near the end of July 1945. But there was a last-minute hitch. The Americans transported prisoners by truck to their postwar homes, but before the trucks heading for Mengele’s section of Bavaria left, the camp was closed and dismantled. As a result, Mengele was moved to a second American camp several kilometers away, and again registered under his real name. There he sat for more than two weeks, until the beginning of September. Finally he was again released and was transported to the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt.
Somehow Mengele’s luck just kept running.* As soon as he was dropped off, courtesy of the U.S. Army, Mengele decided to walk to the nearby town of Donauwörth, in the hope of finding sanctuary at the home of a prewar school friend, veterinarian Albert Miller. As he strolled toward Donauwörth, he came across a farmer walking two bicycles along the roadway. They struck up a conversation and the farmer, who would be passing through Donauwörth, asked Mengele if he wanted to ride one of the bicycles. Mengele readily agreed. However, he feared he might be stopped by an American patrol and he did not want to be found with two sets of conflicting identification papers, one in his name and one in the name of his friend, Fritz Ulmann. So he hid the Mengele papers inside the hollow handlebar of the bicycle, and he placed the Ulmann papers in his breast pocket. When Mengele reached Donauwörth, he thanked the farmer and the farmer left with both bicycles. Only later did Mengele realize that he had forgotten his Mengele release papers in the handlebar of the bicycle. He had no idea how to reach the farmer. From that moment on, Josef Mengele had no choice but to live only as Fritz Ulmann.†
Mengele went straight to the house of his friend, Dr. Miller. Miller’s wife remembers the day he knocked at the door:
I answered the door and I saw a soldier standing in front of me. He said, “Good day, my name is Mengele.” Later my husband came home and we had dinner. I remember him saying, “Don’t believe everything you hear about me. It’s not true.”9
Mengele asked Dr. Miller to contact his family in Günzburg and his wife in Autenreid to tell them he was safe. Even though he professed his innocence, Mengele told Dr. Miller he could not risk capture by Allied forces. But before Miller could do anything, he was arrested by American troops on the very evening that Mengele had arrived at his house. As Miller was driven away for questioning about his wartime role in the Nazi party, Mengele hid in a back room of the house.
Miller’s arrest scared Mengele. He left Donauwörth in the middle of the night, determined to make the hazardous journey into the Russian zone in order to locate his nurse friend who was holding his research specimens and notes from Auschwitz. His concentration camp work was so important to him that he was willing to risk capture by the Russians from whom he could expect no mercy. As Mengele later wrote, “It was a crazy undertaking to cross the guarded border. It seems an incredible journey. . . .”
The journey to Gera, now in East Germany, took Mengele more than three weeks. Meanwhile Mrs. Miller contacted Karl Mengele, Jr., in Günzburg, to tell him that the doctor was safe. Karl then told Irene and the rest of the family,
Mengele was fortunate to have chosen the Millers as his first contact in the Günzburg area. Not only did they inform his family of his safety, but they also kept his return a secret from the American authorities. The Millers’ readiness to help reflected an attitude prevalent in the Günzburg area. There was a widespread readiness to believe that the allegations against Mengele were false. The town had driven out its 309 resident Jews after the Nazis came to power. And broadcasts across Germany by the overseas service of the BBC, claiming that the SS had engaged in monstrous acts of carnage, were viewed as Allied victory propaganda. The Mengele family was more hostile toward the Allies than most local residents since their factory had been damaged by an American bombing raid in January 1945, aimed at a nearby plant suspected of producing nose components for the new Messerschmitt 262 jet bomber.10
For Irene Mengele, the good news from the Millers broke months of anxious waiting. Irene had not heard from her husband all year and assumed he was “one of the millions now moving as prisoners or dead.” And if she really had not known what he was doing in Auschwitz when she twice visited him there, she certainly did by now. Irene noted in her diary that on May 3, 1945, Allied radio reports listed the war crimes charges against her husband. A month later, on June 11, three American military policemen arrived on her doorstep at Autenreid to ask her where he could be found, ironically while Mengele was languishing in no-man’s-land in Saxony, caught between American and Soviet troops. Irene told the Americans that she thought her husband was probably dead.
As for the rest of the Mengele family, the American authorities applied no pressure throughout 1945, although Josef’s father and brother were subject to interrogation under the denazification proceedings. During the rest of the year, the Americans accepted Irene’s doorstep denial as a satisfactory answer in their hunt for a principal war criminal.
While the Americans were floundering in their search for Mengele, he was returning from the Russian zone, having retrieved his treasured Auschwitz specimens and research notes. This time he went to Munich, to the apartment of trusted friends. The husband, a pharmacist, was an ethnic German from Romania who had served with Mengele in 1942 in the Viking division on the eastern front. This couple is still alive, friendly with Irene Mengele, and provided the following story to her son, Rolf, on the condition that they would not be publicly identified.*
At the end of September 1945, the pharmacist answered a knock at the door and found a tired and drawn Josef Mengele standing before him. During the next four weeks the pharmacist and his wife tended to Mengele, restored his strength, and counseled him on the best course for his continued safety. The couple remember Mengele vigorously defending himself:
I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent of what they could say against me. I am building the facts for my defense. I want to turn myself in and be cleared at a trial.11
The pharmacist and his wife thought Mengele was not rational. They were also friends of Dr. Victor Capesius, the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz, and from Capesius they knew what had transpired at the camp.* The pharmacist told Mengele:
You are crazy. It’s impossible. You will never get a fair trial. If you turn yourself in, you will either be shot on the spot or you will get a trial and then be hanged. Forget this nonsense about proving your innocence. We must find a place to hide you.12
During the next several weeks, as Mengele recuperated in the safety of his Munich friends’ home, the opportunity for safe haven appeared in the form of Dr. Fritz Ulmann’s brother-in-law, who happened to also be a friend of the pharmacist. In his autobiography, Mengele code-named Ulmann’s brother-in-law “Vieland” and his wife as “Annalise.” Both were medical doctors, and they lived in the small Bavarian town of Riedering. Vieland and Annalise met Mengele for the first time during a visit to the pharmacist in Munich. They took an immediate liking to him and offered their help in hiding him. The plan was a simple one. The agricultural zones of Germany were desperate for farm employees, many families having lost young men during the war. Vieland proposed that he accompany Mengele to one such area, south of the city of Rosenheim, and help him find a job as a farmhand on an isolated farm with a quiet and simple family. Vieland convinced Mengele that American troops would never undertake a farm-by-farm search throughout Germany for him, and that the farm family never need know his true identity since he still had a good-conduct pass from the Americans in the name of Fritz Ulmann. Mengele readily agreed.
However, Mengele decided to take a further precaution. He made a copy of the release papers and carefully altered the name to “Fritz Hollmann,” changing the “U” to an “H,” squeezing an “o” between the “U” and the “l,” and placing another “l” between the “l” and the “m.” Mengele knew that once he settled into a new area, he would have to register his American release card with the local German authorities. He did not want to register under the name “Ulmann” in case American authorities ever started to check the names of prisoners who had been held with him in detention. The authorities would never tie “Hollmann” to Mengele.
The decision to hide Mengele under a cover name was a wise one. It was clear that rehabilitation into postwar life was going to be impossible. Professor von Verschuer, Mengele’s mentor, was dismissed from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in June 1945. There was no respite in the stream of allegations of genocide, and in August 1945 the London Agreement between Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union announced that charges would be brought against twenty-four Nazi leaders before an international military tribunal at Nuremberg. Whatever sympathy the citizens of Germany, like Vieland, had to offer Mengele, for the moment at least, the outside world was not going to allow him to bury the past.
Vieland became the key to Mengele’s early postwar freedom. In his autobiography Mengele recalled:
When I first met Vieland, he did not one moment hesitate to take me with him to Riedering, from where he sent me to look out for work and a living. Vieland brought me into the Rosenheim area. This friend [Vieland] brought me through all difficulties here.
Vieland became Mengele’s main contact and protector for his next few years in Germany. He acted as Mengele’s primary source of information about the outside world. In his autobiography, Mengele’s sole discussion regarding the concentration camps takes place in the form of fictional and rhetorical conversations with Vieland. Only in this disguised manner was Mengele even able to discuss the death camps in his writings.
It is significant that Vieland was not a Nazi. Mengele described him in the autobiography as:
[a]n honest man who did not lack civic courage. He was no member of the Nazi party and had a clean political record. This was the reason why he was given the duty as general practitioner in Riedering. The postwar authorities had forbidden the previous doctor to continue his work since he had been screened as a member of the Nazi party, and he was forced to perform simple manual work.13
Vieland was representative of many people in postwar Germany who, although unsympathetic to the Nazis, still refused to believe the horror of the war crimes stories and viewed them instead as Allied propaganda. Vieland, while politically opposed to his philosophy, nevertheless became the central figure in Mengele’s early fugitive existence.
Vieland’s first task was to find Mengele a job. Together they approached several farms in the area around Mangolding, a farming community within the county of Riedering. It is one of southern Germany’s lush agricultural areas, nestled at the foot of the Alps, dotted with beautiful marsh lakes.
The first two farms Mengele approached did not need helpers, but the third, owned by Georg and Maria Fischer,* needed another worker. On October 30, 1945, “Fritz Hollmann” signed on at the Fischer farm for ten marks a week. The farm, dubbed Lechnerhof after the original owner, Lechner, was over twenty acres in size. The Fischers grew potatoes and wheat and stocked the farm with a dozen milk-producing cows. It was a typical Bavarian farm, alpine styled, extremely well cared for, and prettily adorned with flower boxes full of geraniums. Mengele slept in a spartan room, ten by fifteen feet, furnished with only a cupboard and a bed. Georg Fischer died of stomach cancer in 1959, but his wife, Maria, now seventy-six years old, and Georg’s brother, Alois, seventy-nine, who sometimes shared a room with Mengele, recall the young man and the decision to hire him.
Maria Fischer remembers that when Mengele, or “Fritz Hollmann,” as they knew him, first arrived, he told them he was a refugee soldier from Görlitz and that his wife was still in the Russian zone. Alois Fischer has never forgotten the day when Mengele first joined the family for a meal to discuss working for them:
Hollmann had a tremendous appetite. He ate everything put on the table without ever commenting on whether he liked it or not. He drank milk daily by the liter. I’ve never before seen a man who drank so much milk. The first time he joined us for a meal he ate as though he didn’t get much to eat during the war. He didn’t say a word—he just ate an enormous amount of food. My brother told him, “If you work as much as you eat, then you are my man. We will try you.”14
Mengele probably worked harder during his years with the Fischers than at any other time in his life. Maria Fischer remembers the routine:
He had to get up at 6:30 in the morning. First thing was to clean out the stable. At 7:00 we would always have breakfast together. He was very strong and able. Only he didn’t know how to milk. He didn’t handle the animals at all, that the farmer would always do himself. Fritz also worked a lot in the fields; he would pull out the potatoes, sort them and carry them to the courtyard, and he worked in our forests, sowing and cutting the trees, and cleaning the trunks. He also cut and loaded hay—in fact he did everything. He was very obliging, never started a fight and was always in a good mood.15
Sometimes after supper at 7:00 P.M., he stayed up to play a card game called “Schafkopfen.” But he usually was so tired that he just went up to his room to sleep.
The Fischers may have been simple country folk, but they soon guessed that their lodger had a past to hide. Nothing would disguise the educated Bavarian accent, the smooth hands, totally unused to hard labor. Alois Fischer guessed he was a wanted Nazi:
He was only looking for a place to hide after the war. He evidently had to hide. He had dirt to hide. He must have been a Nazi, and we thought he must have been high brass. [When] he came he had only one gray flannel suit which he wore, not bad quality, but not good either. Apart from that he had nothing.
Not even things to wash himself. When he came he had very fine hands. He had never worked before, certainly not on a farm. He didn’t know how to milk a cow. . . . But he never talked much. About his person, his past or the war, he said nothing at all. He also didn’t want us to ask him questions about it—that was very clear to everybody. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but always very controlled and disciplined.
Hollmann looked very strong, like a male cat. He was also intelligent. He spoke with a slight Bavarian accent, always very quietly and briefly. He evidently came from an upper-class family. He never had visitors, and he didn’t leave the house, especially in the beginning.16
But “Fritz’s” past was of no concern to the Fischers. After only two weeks on the farm, when Georg Fischer was certain that Hollmann was a good employee, he told him, “Let’s go register your war papers with the Bürgermeister. I am satisfied with you and your work.” Fischer took Mengele to a neighboring farm owned by the local magistrate, to whom Mengele presented his forged document with the name “Hollmann.” Duly impressed the Bürgermeister signed for Mengele, who noted with contempt how much respect German officials had “for a piece of paper written in English with a U.S. Army stamp on it.”17 Mengele kept his original “Ulmann” papers, which he had used to forge the “Hollmann” copy, hidden in his room at the Fischer farm.
The suspicion that Mengele was a Nazi did not stop the Fischers from growing fond of him. They were only too willing to help a young German who earned his daily pay. And as he grew to trust them more, he became less secretive. Maria Fischer remembers:
At home he began to talk and laugh a lot. Once on St. Nicholas’s Day he acted as Santa. He had made a beard and the Santa hat and then he teased us; and then to all of us, at that time we were seven, he chided us. It was very funny and we laughed until the tears were in our eyes.18
Alois Fischer said he “felt sorry for the young man who had fought for Germany.” Indeed, the Fischers were a most accommodating group. While Mengele was there they gave shelter to two other Germans, one a woman with a dubious background, who was anxious not to fall into Allied hands, and the other a soldier from the east who had lost his family—and for whom Mengele showed distinctly more compassion than he ever had for similarly bereaved inmates at Auschwitz: “He lost everything, his wife has been evacuated to the middle of Germany and he has been looking for her and can’t find her.”19
While the Fischers were willing to overlook Mengele’s past because they were satisfied with his work, unknown to them, he hated it. He found this first phase of his fugitive life very difficult. Outwardly Mengele may have seemed more relaxed, but inside he was a deeply unhappy man. The evidence for this comes from Mengele’s autobiography, which he wrote when he was in South America. Mengele said he “feels sorry for himself but not for anyone else,” that farm work “is quite a lesson” to him, and that he is “even getting used to the potato harvest.” He stayed mentally alert by “talking to myself.” They are the words of a man embittered by the fortunes of war, of an unrepentant Nazi who has yet to come to terms with being on the losing side. “It is probably hate that dries [my] tears,” he wrote, dismissing Auschwitz, with a gloss acquired over nearly thirty years of skulking around South America, as an episode to which “there is nothing to be added. It is natural and understandable that the camps were suffering very bad hunger after all the problems and therefore what I saw was to be expected.”
Mengele was also resentful that while he, a medical doctor, was forced to work on a farm picking potatoes, the occupying American troops “plundered” Germany. “The Crusaders,” as he called them, “had an unbelievable conscience.”
While Mengele worked on the Fischer farm, his bitterness was always simmering. Alois Fischer recalls an incident in which Mengele’s frustration boiled to the surface:
There was only once a small dispute. He, who was supposed to work as a laborer, gave me an order that I should take the hay down from the threshing fork. I told him he should do it himself. Then he got very angry, only for a short moment, but very much so. He looked at me with great fury. I actually thought he would attack me. But then he completely controlled himself again and such a thing never happened again.20
Mengele took his mind off matters by playing mental games. In a menacing echo from the past, he revealed in his autobiography how he used to perform “scientific selection” on the potato crop:
One had to take a scientific approach to sort out the edible, fodder, and seed potatoes. The frequency of the various sizes followed the binomial distribution according to the Gauss Diagram. The medium sizes therefore are the most plentiful, and the very small ones and the very big ones are much less frequent. But since they [the Fischers] wanted more medium-sized potatoes I moved the border of the selection for the potatoes for consumption accordingly and in this way I obtained more potatoes for consumption than usual. In this way my mind was kept active.21
The “great selector” of Auschwitz had been reduced to selecting potatoes. Although degrading for the high-minded Mengele, this low profile helped him to stay free. His role as a farmhand avoided attracting any attention. Throughout this time, Mengele’s morale was sustained by visits to his doctor friend, Vieland, who lived in nearby Riedering. On his day off, Mengele brought wild flowers for Vieland’s wife and received any medical treatment he required from Vieland himself. And Mengele’s family, convinced of his innocence, made trips to Rosenheim to bolster his morale. Maria Fischer does not remember any visitors to the farm, but she does remember that Mengele took short walks, with increasing frequency over the years, to “visit his girlfriend.”
Irene realized that trips to Rosenheim were fraught with danger—since Mengele was a wanted fugitive she might be tailed—but she weighed the risks in favor of the visits. She concluded that her husband’s morale might be very low if he had access to any of the local newspapers and saw what they printed about him. For instance, in her diary entry of October 7, 1945, she wrote:
In the local newspaper there appears his name, and it said, “With animal-like lust he saw people die.” One would like to laugh. . . . What shall he think if he sees such writings.22
Irene’s early visits to Rosenheim were cloak-and-dagger affairs. She made her first trip in the summer of 1946, but only after a test run had been taken by Karl Jr. in order to ensure that American authorities were not following Mengele family members. Once Karl told Irene the trip could be made safely, she left Rolf with Mengele’s parents in Günzburg and took the train to Rosenheim. Mengele, informed by Vieland of her arrival time, walked toward the train station as she walked toward Mangolding. They met near a popular Bavarian holiday resort, the Sinssee Lake. They walked past each other without so much as a nod and kept walking for several hundred extra yards to make sure they were not followed. Once they were convinced that there was no danger of being caught, they met and spent their time at a local inn.
By the end of 1946 Mengele was convinced the Americans had forgotten him, and he became so brazen that he made two one-week trips to Autenreid to visit Rolf and Irene. Vieland was furious with Mengele for using the “Fritz Ulmann” identity card on the two trips to Autenreid. He thought it was too great a gamble. Vieland reprimanded Mengele: “You are being very risky with my brother-in-law’s identification.” Mengele exploded in a rage. He took the “Ulmann” papers out of his pocket and ripped them up in front of Vieland. “There, are you satisfied? I don’t need them,” he yelled. But Mengele’s temper had cost him dearly. Without a set of genuine release papers, he was forced to rely on the forged set for the remainder of his time in Germany. It added danger to his already precarious situation. It stopped his travels from Rosenheim and left Irene’s visits as Mengele’s only contact with his family.
Although Irene intended her trips to serve as a calming influence on her husband, they had almost the opposite effect. The visits served as a reminder that their marriage was under a terrible strain. Rolf believes the marriage had suffered even before the end of the war:
My parents never really had a real marriage. Mother was a happy, joyous person, full of life and very sensitive. . . . Her pretty head was filled with thoughts that really didn’t fit with her life in the bourgeois village of Günzburg.23
Irene was fast losing faith in her marriage. To compensate for the absence of her husband, she sought male companions. Rolf says, “Not affairs, but she was on friendly terms with several men. That also was necessary, since there was no man in the family and she needed some protection and help.” But when Mengele learned of these friendships, he was furious. According to Rolf, their secret meetings deteriorated into bitter fights.
Father was insanely jealous. During their short meetings in the forest, he made scenes that embittered her. She should separate from her acquaintances, he said, and not see her friends. She shouldn’t leave the house. He did not appreciate the danger she undertook every time she visited him.24
It was clear that to Irene the man she married before the war and the fugitive who emerged after it were two different people:
I knew Josef Mengele as an absolutely honorable, decent, conscientious, very charming, elegant, and fun-loving person, otherwise I would not have married him. I came from a good, wealthy family and I had plenty of opportunities to get married. I think his ambition finally became his undoing.25
Notwithstanding the tension and deepening rift, Irene visited Mengele almost every two months. Mengele, meanwhile, had patched up his differences with Vieland and Annalise. He complained increasingly to Vieland about the growing “war crimes hysteria” and the focus on his service at Auschwitz. But any hopes Mengele may have entertained of war crimes retribution being limited to the twenty-two Nazi principals at Nuremberg was short-lived. In December 1945 the Allies announced that other war criminals would also be brought to trial by the governments of those countries that Hitler had ravaged. In early 1946 Mengele asked Fischer to subscribe to the regional daily Rosenheimer Anzeiger. Between that local newspaper and updates from Vieland, Mengele stayed abreast of the war crimes trials and the growing indictments, with keen interest, but an anxious eye.
In April 1946 Mengele learned that he had been publicly named in court for the first time.* Rudolf Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz, had gone on the stand at Nuremberg to give evidence as chief witness in defense of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who, as chief of the Reich Main Security Office, had been responsible for administering concentration camps and the program for the extermination of the Jews. Since Hoess himself had dutifully implemented his part of that policy at Auschwitz by personally being responsible for the deaths of some 2.5 million Jews, he seemed a strange choice for Kaltenbrunner’s defense. It soon became clear that the purpose was to shift much of the responsibility onto Hoess, since he made a virtue of his compulsion to follow orders, having been brought up to believe that anti-Semitism was a form of pest control.26 A third of the way through Hoess’s evidence, Kaltenbrunner’s counsel, Dr. Kauffmann, asked him:
What became known to you about so-called medical experiments on living internees?
Hoess: Medical experiments were carried out in several camps. For instance in Auschwitz there were experiments on sterilization carried out by Professor Klaubert and Dr. Schumann; also experiments on twins by SS medical officer Dr. Mengele.27
Meanwhile, according to Rolf, Mengele noticed that a cult of silence had enveloped National Socialist involvement in “medical research.” The chief architects like Professor von Verschuer had to perform some fairly smart footwork as the clamor grew, from the Allies in general and the occupied countries in particular, to prosecute those involved in those heinous crimes. The German academic world split into two camps: those who had been tainted by Nazism but whose excuse was that their involvement was purely academic; and those who were unrepentant and beyond the pale. Von Verschuer skillfully maneuvered himself into the former camp, urging a colleague in 1946: “Let us stay silent about the horror. It is behind us.”28 The final rehabilitation for a man who so enthusiastically secured funds for Mengele’s futile work and apprised its nonsensical results came in 1949 when a commission of fellow professors judged him fit to resume his teaching career:
It would be Pharisaical for us to regard in hindsight isolated incidents in the life of an otherwise honorable and brave man, who has had a difficult life and frequently displayed his nobility of character, as an unpardonable moral stain.29
Just how deeply these learned men probed is open to question, since they even tried to pull an academic veil over Mengele, saying that “from the available evidence it is not clear how much Dr. Mengele himself knew during the times in question.” No attempt by the West German authorities was ever made to prosecute von Verschuer.*
Von Verschuer went on to become a distinguished professor of genetics at Münster University, but he never again discussed his involvement with experiments, although his son Helmut raised the issue once or twice:
I tried to put my point of view to him, but it was clear that politically we were very different. My own impression is that my father only got to know what was going on very late in the day. But he never responded when defamatory statements were made against him.30
Unlike von Verschuer, Mengele could not count on the academic establishment to rewrite history and rally ’round. Most alarming of all to Mengele, as he lay low on his Bavarian farm, was the spate of trials against Nazi doctors held by the Americans, British, Russians, and Poles. In his autobiography, Mengele showed his bitterness about the trials in a fictional conversation with Vieland. In this passage, Mengele referred to himself as “Andreas,” a pseudonym he adopted to hide his identity in case the papers were ever discovered.
Vieland: Did you already hear the last of the news stories from Nuremberg?
Andreas: In the course of the re-education, the German, who is already pathetic as a result of so much deprivation and hunger, hears only about war crimes which he has allegedly done, of the forced laborers, and about the concentration camps and so on and so on. One must realize that this limelight is only intended to make hundreds of thousands of Germans, including mothers of German soldiers as well as little farmer women who lost two boys to hunger in a Russian POW camp, accuse the “Nazis” of these supposed crimes.
Although Mengele viewed the trials as nothing more than Allied propaganda, his earlier jaunty confidence that he could convince their courts of his innocence vanished with the news of death sentences against three Auschwitz colleagues: Dr. Fritz Klein, with whom he shared the distinction of being the only doctor able to carry out the ghastly railhead selections without a drink; Dr. Werner Rhode; and Dr. Eduard Wirths, chief camp physician. Wirths committed suicide before he could be hanged.
The future looked bleaker still when in December 1946 at Nuremberg, the Americans brought twenty-three leading SS physicians and scientists to court in the so-called Doctors Trial. The indictment specified four charges: conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in criminal organizations. The accused were alleged to have been responsible for experiments on inmates involving exposure to high altitudes and low temperatures, and ingestion of seawater; experiments with typhus and infectious jaundice; experiments with sulpha drugs, bone grafting, and mustard gas; the collection of skulls of Jews; euthanasia of undesirable racial groups; and mass sterilization.31
Mengele followed the proceedings with consuming interest, especially when the seven death and five life-imprisonment sentences were handed down. Among those hanged was Karl Gebhardt, who directed sulpha experiments on women at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Wounds were deliberately inflicted on victims and then stuffed with wood shavings and gauze strips impregnated with bacteria to simulate battlefield conditions; then the effectiveness of sulfanilamide was studied. During an inspection by Reich Physician SS Ernst Grawitz,* Gebhardt was asked how many deaths had occurred as a result of the sulpha experiments. When told that the answer was none, Grawitz said the conditions did not “conform to battlefield conditions.” A new series of experiments were then carried out on twenty-four Polish women, in which the circulation of the blood through their muscles was interrupted at the area of infection by tying off the muscles on either end. Very serious infections resulted, and several women died in terrible pain.32 In May 1943, the Congress of Reich Physicians and the German Orthopedic Society had presented Gebhardt with its highest accolade for his grotesque experiments at Ravensbrück. (Gebhardt was president of the German Red Cross and doctor to much of Germany’s prewar social elite. His father was Himmler’s personal physician.)
In the dock with Gebhardt was the doctor who actually prepared the wounds, Fritz Fischer. He got only a life sentence. Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, who also oversaw the euthanasia program, was sentenced to death. At Nuremberg he attempted to minimize the use of human guinea pigs:
Quite independently of what actually happened, the human being has always been used in some form for experimental purposes. . . . The jump from animal experiments to human experiments was for practical reasons actually needed.33
The only female defendant, Dr. Herta Oberheuser, was given twenty years for injecting prisoners with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice.
The significance to Mengele of the verdicts against Fischer, Oberheuser, and Gebhardt was that he too had conducted sulpha experiments, had injected many twins, mostly children, with typhus, and held absolutely to Brandt’s view that experiments on humans were an article of faith. And there was no more forceful advocate of euthanasia and the concept of “worthless life” than Josef Mengele, as his postwar autobiography shows. One passage justifying to Vieland the existence of concentration camps is especially revealing:
It is necessary for each country to have an institution in case of war, where it can keep elements who are of any danger to the country, foreigners who are assumed to be saboteurs, worthless people, willing to do espionage, prostitutes, Gypsies and people who are criminals by profession.
They [Jews] belonged to the group of possible enemies of the country who one had to be assured of . . . because of their internationality, their worldwide organization, their connection even to enemy countries and their intelligence service. . . . This fact alone would be enough to take the measure like the konzentration.
When the top leaders of this international organization, the Jewish World Congress, officially declares war on the Deutsches Reich, then there is no need to discuss the right to collect and keep the Jews in camps. . . . Hitler warned Jews in his speech in 1939 not to stir up the people with war against Germany, that it could end up badly for them.34
In another of his fictional autobiographical conversations with Vieland, Mengele (as “Andreas”) even defended the conditions discovered in the concentration camp at the end of the war:
Vieland: Recently I saw in Munich a film about the concentration camps. It seems that there were terrible conditions there. Even if one disregards the scenes which are not authentic and may have come from newsreels from mass Allied bombings of German towns, the movie shows nevertheless, without leaving any doubts, that people lived and also died there under catastrophic conditions of malnutrition.
Andreas: Yes, that was probably the case. [Andreas really doesn’t want to say anything more about the subject but he finally asks Doctor Vieland,] When do you believe these movies were made?
Vieland: I assume after the occupation of the camp by the Allies.
Andreas: Certainly not earlier. And thus you get only information about the conditions that existed at the time the movie was made, or maybe several weeks or months before that, during which the last throes of the war were being staged. Every person who lived through this catastrophe knows the insurmountable difficulties in providing provisions which were prevalent during the last months of the war. The camps necessarily suffered to an extremely great degree under the chaos of the debacle of the collapse. And it was that that led to the conditions as they were shown in this movie.
Although Mengele attempted to justify the imprisonment of Jews and the conditions in the camps, other members of the Mengele family were more realistic, and they knew that his capture would mean certain execution. Faced with the prospect of Josef joining his Auschwitz colleagues on the gallows, his father and his wife, among others, tried to dupe the American authorities into believing that Josef Mengele was dead. Their efforts, combined with a lack of initiative and a general inefficiency on the part of the American occupation forces, ensured Mengele’s freedom in postwar Germany.
Mengele’s father, Karl, had moved from an early date to bury his son’s tracks. As the former Kreiswirtschaftsbrater, or economic advisor, to the regional Nazi party covering the Günzburg area, Karl was placed in custody in March 1946, awaiting Allied denazification hearings. The purpose of Entnazifizierung was to grade party members into categories so that appropriate action could be taken, ranging from criminal charges to police surveillance or even acquittal, for those who could prove they had resisted Hitler’s tyranny. Twice Karl Sr. told the Americans that his son was missing in action. On the third occasion he told them he knew he was dead.
While Karl maintained that facade in Günzburg, Irene did the same in nearby Autenreid. When military police visited Irene in June 1945 she told them her husband was missing in the Russian zone, presumed dead. At that time, that is what she genuinely believed. But even after she knew he was alive and safe, Irene maintained the game with her friends and acquaintances in Autenreid and Günzburg. Afraid that one of them might be an informer to the occupying Americans, she insisted to all that Mengele was missing and probably dead. Letters from Irene to friends at the time state her “firm belief I shall never see my husband alive.” She even turned up at the local Catholic church, dressed in black, and asked the priest to pray for the repose of the soul of her deceased husband.
For one important section of the American postwar administration, the Chief Counsel’s Office for War Crimes, the efforts of Karl Sr. and Irene contributed to the acceptance of Mengele’s death. It certainly explains why no attempts were made to expand the investigation or even to follow Irene or other family members in order to locate the missing camp doctor.
One person who believed Mengele was still alive and desperately wanted him tried was Dr. Gisella Perl, an inmate gynecologist who had worked for Mengele at Auschwitz. She witnessed, firsthand, some of his worst excesses. In January 1947, Dr. Perl wrote to the American authorities offering to give evidence against Mengele after she had read an article in a New York newspaper that claimed he had been captured. The report turned out to be false, and her letter was lost in the bureaucracy and went unanswered. Then in October 1947, she tried again by writing to the War Crimes Branch of the Civil Affairs Division in Washington, saying that Mengele was “the greatest mass murderer” and that she had “many important things to tell . . . to awaken the conscience of the world.”35 The response to Dr. Perl is indicative of the general confusion, disorganization, and lack of cooperation among the various arms of the American occupation forces seeking to bring Nazis to justice. This time, instead of ignoring Dr. Perl, the Americans mistakenly assumed that Mengele was among the forty SS men, including some doctors, then standing trial before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków. They replied to Dr. Perl that they had asked Brigadier General Telford Taylor, U.S. Chief of Counsel for War Crimes at Nuremberg, to ascertain the status of the trial from the Polish government representative there.36 Meanwhile, an official in the Locator and Apprehension Branch in Nuremberg came across an indication in a file to the effect that Mengele was dead. Without cross-checking with any other U.S. government division, Mengele’s death was assumed to be established. On January 19, 1948, Telford Taylor replied to Washington: “We wish to advise our records show Dr. Mengerle [sic] is dead as of October 1946.”37
Telford Taylor’s response appears to have been based on the results of Karl Mengele’s ability to convince his interrogators that his son was dead, as well as Irene’s deception in Autenreid. The fact that Taylor responded to Washington by misspelling Mengele’s name is indicative of the postwar chaos engulfing a war crimes section understaffed, overworked, and unable to make the kind of double-checks that might reasonably have been expected in the case of such a monstrous criminal as Mengele. In any event, on February 12,1948, Dr. Perl was informed of “Dr. Mengerle’s death” and thanked for her offer to appear as a witness.38 There the matter rested until the West Germans issued an arrest warrant almost twelve years later.
While Telford Taylor’s staff at Nuremberg believed Mengele was dead, another branch of the American administration in Europe thought he was alive.
On April 29, 1947, Special Agent Benjamin J. Gorby of the 970th Counter-Intelligence Corps received information that Mengele had been arrested. His source was one of the many different newspapers circulating at displaced persons camps for refugees. As early as December 1946, press reports indicated that Mengele had been captured by Allied forces. They had begun with reports from Vienna, in the Jewish political prisoners paper.*
Gorby heard that the arrest was reported in a Vienna newspaper and assumed Mengele had been arrested there. Since the 430th Counter-Intelligence Corps detachment was responsible for the Vienna area, Gorby cabled the 430th CIC in Vienna, asking them to question Mengele “with regard to the fate of a group of approximately 20 Jewish children who were alleged to have been removed by him from the Auschwitz camp in November 1944 and taken to an unknown place.” Gorby added:
The fact of the removal of the Jewish children from Auschwitz by Dr. Mengele was confirmed to this office by the father of one of the children who lives in [illegible]. Other parents of the children among the group are still alive and most eager to have news from or about their children.39
There is no evidence that Mengele was arrested in Vienna, according to an inquiry conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI). Almost certainly, Gorby was acting in good faith on the DP camp’s erroneous newspaper story, but he made several assumptions without checking the facts. Mengele’s diaries mention no arrest. Irene says her husband was not arrested again after his initial detention in mid-1945. Nevertheless, the public disclosure of the Gorby document in January 1985 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles had an explosive effect even though the document itself had been available since August 1983.* The result was a series of Senate subcommittee hearings which led to a directive that the OSI spearhead a special effort to find Mengele. The Army was also urged to inquire as to whether Mengele had ever been in their custody after the war. It was the largest investigation of its kind ever undertaken by the United States government.40
Special Agent Gorby was not the only person who believed Mengele had been captured by American forces during 1946 or 1947. French government documents, obtained in October 1985, state unequivocally that Mengele had been captured by the Americans in late 1946. According to the French, Mengele was detained, was known to be the “notorious camp doctor from Auschwitz,” and was released, without explanation, by the Americans on November 29, 1946. The French claimed that American authorities confirmed the Mengele arrest and release on February 20, 1947. Again, although the documents are superficially impressive, they are unsupported by any evidence in any government file. The French claim that Americans confirmed a 1946 arrest and release. No American detention records reflect such an event. There is no denial that Mengele continued to reside quietly on the farm at Mangolding until the middle of 1948. If he had been captured by the Americans at the end of 1946, he is unlikely to have returned to the U.S. zone of Germany for the next eighteen months. Although the source of the French documents is not known, they are mistaken.
American confusion was a match for the French. While Telford Taylor’s War Crimes Branch in Nuremberg believed Mengele was dead, his name continued to appear for most of the postwar 1940s on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), a list meant to be distributed quarterly to detention camps. Again, this is evidence of the ineptitude that characterized the postwar efforts to find missing Nazis. The CROWCASS system was paralyzed by inefficiency. Since May 1946, CROWCASS had been little more than a mailing center in Berlin, the whole operation having moved from its British-run headquarters in Paris following a revolt by the American staff, inept logistical arrangements, and a boycott by the Russians. Few names, if any, were added to the lists sent after the move to Berlin. The fact that Mengele’s name remained on them so long after Telford Taylor believed him to be dead is unfortunately typical of the CROWCASS efforts after the war.
While Mengele resided quietly in Mangolding, the American efforts to find him were halfhearted and ineffective. Mengele’s deep cover as a farmhand may well have been unnecessary. It is incontestable that after the American authorities mistakenly released Mengele from custody in mid-1945, they never came close to finding him, even though he lived in the U.S. occupation zone for another four years.
The closest authorities came to finding Mengele was not the result of American efforts, but rather a chance inspection by two German policemen in 1946. In his autobiography, Mengele recalled the moment he had his first face-to-face confrontation with authorities since his release from the American detention camp:
Two German police came to the farm on a motorbike and a sidecar and asked to talk to the released prisoner of war. Andreas [Mengele] said, “I’m the ex-POW” and was ordered to produce his American release card. Andreas retrieved his card from his room and gave it to one of the control policemen. As they reviewed it, Andreas’s alarm abated. After a short look the policeman handed back the card. Again one thought how at that time any German official had the greatest respect for any document that was written in English and stamped by the U.S. Army.
With the exception of that one intrusion by the German police, Mengele’s stay on the Fischer farm was uneventful. His major preoccupation was not avoiding his pursuers, but keeping himself entertained.
* Mengele had been transferred to Gross Rosen together with several other Auschwitz doctors, including his friend Dr. Münch. Even during the final spasms of the war, the SS hierarchy attempted to keep its killing machines operating and fully staffed.
* In February 1985, Walter Kempthorne, an ex-Army private, claimed he had seen a doctor named Mengele at the American Idar Oberstein camp, about 200 miles from where Mengele was known to have been held. Kempthorne said that fellow soldiers told him they were “getting him in shape to get hung. This here is Mengele, the bastard who sterilized 3000 women in Auschwitz.” Also in February 1985 Richard Schwarz, a retired Washington, D.C. labor lawyer who was also an Army private at Idar Oberstein in 1945, claimed he had “exercised to exhaustion” a German doctor who greatly resembled Mengele. Thomas Berchtold, a former SS man, remembers a “Mengele from Bavaria” in a British POW camp in Schleswig-Holstein, about 400 miles from the site of Mengele’s actual capture. Mengele was not in any of these camps. Each soldier most likely confused another concentration camp doctor with Mengele.
† The release papers in his own name have never been found, even though the United States government conducted a search through hundreds of old bicycles in Bavaria as late as 1985.
* The Munich couple are the only people, outside of a small circle of family conspirators, who knew Mengele was dead prior to the public discovery in 1985. Irene had confided the death to the pharmacist and his wife and, true to their old comrade, they kept the secret.
* Capesius was subsequently charged with complicity in joint murder on at least four separate occasions of 2000 deaths each. He was sentenced to nine years at hard labor.
* During the late 1950s and early ’60s in Paraguay, Mengele used the name “Fischer” as one of his aliases.
* The year had already begun badly for him with the death of his mother in January.
* Von Verschuer died in August 1969 after lying in a coma since September 1968, when he was knocked down by a vehicle while crossing a road in the rain.
* Ernst Grawitz, a boyhood friend of Himmler’s, blew up himself and his family with several hand grenades at the end of the war.
* The source for the report was an Auschwitz survivor, Mordka Danielski. When contacted in 1985, Danielski could not recall ever hearing that Mengele was captured. He had no idea how he was listed in documents as the source of the wrong information.
* The documents were declassified to the authors in response to a Freedom of Information Act request following an administrative appeal to the Department of the Army on August 31, 1983. Gerald Posner was called before the Senate to testify on the documents and the question of whether Mengele had been held by American forces.