When word reached the American press in 1985 that Dr. Joseph Mengele, “the angel of death at Auschwitz,” had died of drowning in San Paulo, Brazil, in 1978 there was a strong sense of disquiet. Those who just months before had claimed Mengele sightings in Paraguay and Argentina seemed to have been chasing only shadows. Those who had hoped for another Eichmann trial or another Nuremberg Nazi Doctors trial felt that a chance to bring the guilty to justice had escaped them. An opportunity to understand the crime of the physicians, the medical facilitators of mass murder, had been lost. Many ordinary people had a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs that justice had been denied. Mengele lived to the end of his days, eluding his would-be captors. I remember feeling that for Mengele to die outside of captivity, it should have been from cancer—long, painful, and slow. Where was God? Why such a quick death, why so painless?
Gerald L. Posner and John Ware’s Mengele: The Complete Story is a welcome addition to the study of the Holocaust. It presents in great detail the biography of Josef Mengele from birth to death and juxtaposes Mengele the myth with Mengele the man. Its return to print in this new edition offers us insight into one of the infamous perpetrators of the Holocaust, a figure of endless fascination to Nazi hunters and the general public alike.
Of course Mengele could not have been everywhere and done everything attributed to him. Mengele has become the embodiment of the medical officer who presided over selektions, who decided who shall live and who shall die with a wave of the hand, with a flick of the baton. Rudolf Vrba, one of the very few inmates to successfully escape Auschwitz, described those initial selektions at Birkenau. His testimony reads like poetry, brutal poetry. Speaking to Claude Lanzmann, he said:
There was a place called the ramp
where the trains with Jews were coming in.
These were coming in day and night, and
Sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day
from all sorts of places in the world.
I worked there from August 18, 1942 to June 7, 1943.
I saw those transports rolling one after another,
and I have seen at least two hundred of them in this position.
I have seen it so many times that it became routine.
Constantly people from the heart of Europe were disappearing,
And they were arriving at the same place with the same ignorance of the previous transport.
And the people in this mass . . .
I knew of course that within a couple of hours after they arrived there,
ninety percent would be gassed . . .
Presiding over that ramp were physicians who were able to decide on the spot a most ultimate question: “Who shall live and who shall die?” With one gesture—grand or pathetic—the old and the disabled, the very young, and women with children were sent to the gas chambers. When slave labor was needed, the young and the able-bodied were admitted into the camp. Their property confiscated, they were branded and sheared, their arms tattooed, the women’s hair shaved. They would again face selektions, the periodic cleansing of the work force of those unable to keep up. Although the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz I said Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you free), the reality of the slave labor camp at Auschwitz, Buna Monowitz, or Auschwitz III is that prisoners were worked until they had nothing left inside. Camp inmates had a word for such a fellow prisoner. They called them musselmanner, “Moslems” who were prostrate. They had given in to despair and were shunned by their fellow inmates, for such despair was infectious. The scent of death so all pervasive in the death camps could rob the few who remained alive of their will to live. Musselmen were sent to the gas chambers to die and then what was still of value in their bodies was recycled into the war economy. Gold teeth were removed from their mouths and sent to the Reichsbank and then further into Switzerland to finance the war. “The War Against the Jews” as Lucy Dawidowicz labeled the “final solution to the Jewish problem” became an ever more important means of financing World War II. Physicians would preside over such selektions, seemingly comfortable in making these life-and-death decisions.
Mengele: The Complete Story adds a very important detail. Mengele could perform this task sober. He had no need to deaden his senses or overcome his reservations. He took upon himself this unpleasant task as an act of duty. Few of his fellow physicians could. The scene was too overpowering, too discomforting, their role too compromising. But Mengele was different. Whereas others had to silence their conscience or overcome their role as physicians, Mengele performed his role with the discipline expected of an SS officer.
The devil is in the details, the very small details. The large story is known, but in the intimacy of a gesture or a deed, the character of a man is revealed. Thus, we read that as he hastily evacuated Auschwitz along with other German officers, Mengele collected his data, the carefully chronicled results of his work at Auschwitz. He thought that these experiments would be the key to his fame and prominence in the outside world. He kept this data with him even in hiding, even at a time when their revelations would have doomed him to a trial and near certain punishment by death. When he most feared capture, he entrusted this material briefly to a nurse with whom he had been intimate, but he sought to retrieve this material prior to his departure to Latin America even though the notes could betray him.
To the very end, he thought of himself as a scientist, whose studies of eugenics were legitimate science, appropriate to the medical profession, and he continued to believe in German racial supremacy and in the rules of his science. His dream was grand, the improvement of the human species, the dominance of the master race, skillfully improved by applied biology. Nazism attracted such men; it cultivated and promoted such scientists. It gave them the opportunity to practice such medicine, uninhibited by the normal constraints of accepted medical practice. Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D., had been trained by such a master, Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, whom he considered the first statesmen to recognize the true importance of hereditary biological and race hygiene. Von Verschuer was to head the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Genetics in Berlin. He was a mentor to the young physician, bringing him from the Russian front to Berlin to further his research and sending him to Auschwitz from Berlin because the research opportunities were greater there. The “science” practiced in Auschwitz was not restricted to the camps; Auschwitz and Berlin were linked tangibly, directly. Unlike many other physicians who accepted the assignment to Auschwitz to escape the dangers of the Russian front, Mengele had been at the Russian front; his choice was scientific, the opportunity to conduct research in a new way, unimpeded by the usual constraints.
Psychologists such as Robert Jay Lifton have sought to understand the Nazi Doctors, to probe what about the role of the physician led them to such practices. Historians of science such as my former colleague Robert Proctor have traced the scientific ethos of this world, how large numbers of scientists could be co-opted into this system. The Nazi regime eventually established thirty-three university and research institutions, eighteen university professorships, and four research divisions within the Reich Health Office dedicated to racial hygiene. These professorships were awarded to researchers who taught ambitious and disciplined students, who saw in this line of research a promising future for themselves. Mengele wanted to be not just a physician but a professor. Auschwitz was his fieldwork in anthropology and genetics. As such, its unpleasantness could be tolerated.
What Lifton and Proctor well understand is that the corruption of German science and of Nazi medicine started early on and it was not confined to Germany but could be found in American science, even in our racial laws as practiced in the South. Such science reached its culmination in the Nazi death camps, but it began much earlier. The transformation took time, and required a veneer of scientific justification. As early as 1895, a widely-used German medical textbook made a claim for “the right to death.” In 1920, a physician and a prominent jurist argued that destroying “life unworthy of life” is a therapeutic treatment and a compassionate act completely consistent with medical ethics. Even today, even at universities as great as Princeton, professors argue that parents should be given the right to “euthanize,” to take the life of severely disabled children in the first month of life.
In the first months of the war, Hitler ordered the murder of the handicapped. His order was backdated to September 1, 1939, the very day the war started to take on the appearance of a wartime measure. His instructions bearing his signature:
Reich leader Philip Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.
Within a few months, the T-4 program (named for Berlin Chancellory Tiergarten 4, which directed it) involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to “take executive measures against those defined as ‘life unworthy of living.’ ” Gas chambers were developed in the killing centers for those deemed “life unworthy of living,” as were cremetoria. Economic justifications were offered to justify this policy, but for geneticists the lure was the scientific dream of perfecting the human species. The killing centers became a préfiguration of the Holocaust, stationary killing centers supervised by physicians where killing could take place efficiently with minimum use of resources, far from the probing eyes of the public. And the physicians first trained there became the staff of other killing centers, moving from places where tens of thousands were killed to death camps where hundreds of thousands and, at Auschwitz, more than a million could be killed.
Mengele’s path to killing was somewhat different. He began with a hard science background. Not only was he a physician but a research scientist, an M.D./Ph.D., and thus even at Auschwitz he conducted himself accordingly. To perfect the master race he studied twins, Gypsy twins, and Jewish twins to see if the breeding of the German people could be improved and thus one pregnancy could yield two members of the master race. He studied dwarfs and other abnormalities, in his mind, to protect the German people and to improve the species. And while he was experimenting, he could be kind and generous to those who were specimens for his lab. But without even a moment’s notice he could turn on them, kill and torture as desired. He dreamed of scholarly prominence. He achieved notoriety, even infamy. The name Mengele is known. It will be remembered.
Mengele worked with a “scientific team” recruited among arriving physicians who faced the choice of selektion or working with him. Several of these inmate physicians have written memoirs and they are among the most important recollections of life inside Auschwitz. At one moment, Mengele could be gracious, but often not for long. He was unpredictable and thus, everyone around him lived in constant fear. Dr. Olga Lengyel revealed that Mengele supervised the birth of a child with meticulous care. Within an hour mother and child were sent to the gas chamber. Dr. Gisella Perl, a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist, described the aftermath of one brutal killing by Mengele: “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.” Vera Alexander described a brutal “scientific” experiment in which inmates were sewn back to back, wrist to wrist. And Dr. Miklos Nyiszli depicts the murder of fourteen twins in one night. CANDLES is an organization of those Mengele twins who survived. Each of these special victims could have been witnesses at his trial.
For those of us who felt that justice was denied because Mengele eluded capture and died a swift death, the research of Posner and Ware offers some small measure of consolation. He was a lonely man who lived his last years isolated and introverted, in fear of capture. He was divorced by each of his two wives. Mengele became a burden to his family and was scorned by his son, who described him as a broken man, a scared creature.
True, he was aided by the Mengele family, who prospered in postwar Germany. The name Mengele is proudly seen on farm equipment. It is a symbol of quality in Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the years the Mengele family funneled enough money to Josef to permit his survival, enough to elude capture, but not quite enough to achieve comfort. Mengele was forced to move from Argentina to Paraguay and later to Brazil, where he lived his final years in seclusion, perhaps even in loneliness. He met his only biological son Rolf Mengele on two occasions after the war, once when he was introduced as “Uncle Fritz” and the second time when his son sought to understand his father, to comprehend his deeds, to come to terms with his motivations. Rolf had rejected his father and his politics. Posner and Ware clearly received the cooperation of his son and this book may in part reflect his effort to confront his father posthumously. Frightful it is for a son to have such a father. How uncomfortable it must be for a father to be confronted by such a son.
Mengele was divorced from his first wife Irene. They grew apart by the postwar separation. When she visited him at Auschwitz, husband and wife adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, and Irene sought happiness elsewhere during the years of his hiding. Some German women welcomed their men home happily and warmly. In intimacy, the tales of the war years may have come forth either during the war years or afterward. Some received their men home with no questions asked. Silence was the best way to continue seemingly as before. And some—we don’t know how many—could not stay with such men. The silence between Josef and Irene hastened the demise of the marriage. We don’t know what might have happened if Josef was not forced into hiding by the nature of his crime and his prominence.
Yet, after his divorce he married his beautiful former sister-in-law Martha Mengele, the wife of his late brother Karl, in what seemed to be a merger to protect the family assets as well as a marriage. And he raised his nephew Karl Heinz, the son of his brother, as his stepson, as his surrogate son, achieving with his nephew a rapport that could not be achieved with his own offspring. Rolf may have rejected his father, but he was still envious of his father’s relationship with Karl Heinz.
Still, we are left with an uneasy feeling. So great was his crime. So mundane—dare I say banal—were the last thirty-five years of his life. I have never agreed with Hannah Arendt’s description of the banality of evil. The evil was anything but banal; it was demonic evil, absolute evil. But what of the evil-doer? Robbed of his stature and position, forced to flee, the evil one was banal, struggling for survival, a burden even to fellow travelers, friends, and family.
Why the uneasy feeling? Perhaps it points to the essential character of the Holocaust itself. As I finished reading Mengele: The Complete Story, I picked up a fine essay by Time journalist Roger Rosenblatt who wrote,
Lawrence Langer says it just right in his new book, Preempting the Holocaust: “Here injustice prevails.” Injustice wins. Thus the general feeling of emptiness, of absence of retribution at the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1962, and even at the Nuremberg trials, where “war crimes” were supposed to find a fitting punishment. . . . One might have hanged Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Hitler himself—hanged them in a row and left their corpses to rot in public view, and still all one would have a pitiless vacancy.
All moral thought is grounded in the possibility of correction. Yet here is a wrong that will never be set right, and people are left groping for something to take the place of the irreplaceable.
At the end Posner and Ware leave us groping. It is not their fault. It is rooted in the truth that they tell so well.
Michael Berenbaum