‘Here the Jews enter through the door and leave through the chimney’.
Dr Josef Mengele
THE SMALL RESORT of Bertioga lies some 25 miles south of São Paolo, Brazil. There, on the local beach around 4.30pm on the afternoon of 7 February 1979, Dr Josef Mengele cheated justice for eternity. Suffering a stroke, the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ was no more.
Josef Mengele was born in the small Bavarian town of Günzburg on 16 March 1911, the eldest of three brothers, to factory owner Karl Mengele and his wife Walpurga. The First World War ensured lucrative contracts as the Mengele factory, previously a producer of farm equipment, began to manufacture hardware for the armed forces. After the war the factory once again manufactured agricultural machinery and the family prospered.
The Mengeles were a well-respected, close-knit and religious family. Walpurga, obese and dowdy, doted on her boys; having suffered a miscarriage three years before Josef was born, she was particularly close to him. Known for her volatile temper, gargantuan gluttony and stern appearance, the Josef alone appeared to make her smile and was closer to Walpurga than his father, who seemed continually absorbed in the factory.
At home, Josef always gave the impression of being happy, a little quiet and eager to please. At school he was a mediocre pupil, struggling to keep up with his peers. Matters deteriorated further when, at 15, he suffered from the severe bone marrow disease osteomyelitis, an illness that often proved fatal in those days. A systemic infection and nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys, followed and he remained ill and off school for six months. Indeed, it looked as if he would always struggle academically. Nevertheless, Josef had self-discipline, was well-behaved and very popular with teachers and pupils alike. Gradually he began to do better and grew into a handsome, confident, charming and well-groomed young man.
Josef Mengele passed his Abitur, (high school exams) in April 1930 with good, although not excellent grades, and was accepted into the medical and philosophy faculties at Munich University six months later.
The ladies soon began to notice the dapper Josef Mengele, who stood out from the other bright young things in Günzburg, always dressing impeccably in only the finest suits and wearing only the most expensive fabrics. Always the perfect gentleman, Josef was known for his dancing skills at the numerous balls he attended and as a man who respected women like a gentleman of old. His looks generated even more admirers. Of medium height and build, Josef Mengele had an enigmatic smile, with a distinctive gap in his upper front teeth, large varicoloured eyes and classic features. Acutely aware of his physical attributes, he seemed a young man destined for the finer things in life, not the horrors he would immerse himself in only a few short years later.
While Mengele spent much of his time cultivating an image at once carefree and at the same time virtuous and serious, he also involved himself in politics, joining the Stalhelm (steel helmets) party in March 1931 while studying in Munich. A nationalist volkish (people’s) party that like so many in Germany of the time hearkened back to a bygone age, the Stahlhelm would prove a bridge into the Nazi Party.
Günzburg would always be too small for the ferociously ambitious Mengele. Deciding to make it on his own, he chose to study medicine rather than inherit the family business, knowing that he would face an uphill struggle to excel, give his mediocrity at school. Undoubtedly hard work and dedication paid dividends and perhaps Josef surprised even himself because he not only graduated, but found time to enjoy classical music concerts, fine dining and museums.
Whilst Mengele pursued his studies, Germany was changing. The Nazis were growing stronger and their demand for ‘racial purity’ found an audience not only in the streets and beer cellars, but also in the lofty academic world of Munich University. Mengele responded to the Nazi call and, absorbing himself in theories of eugenics and ‘Social Darwinism’, began to see himself as a racial scientist. The followers of eugenics and Social Darwinism held similar beliefs – the former that populations could improve through selective breeding of those with ‘desirable’ characteristics, the latter agreed with this but were prepared to take more extreme methods to achieve their desired ‘results’.
In Sweden, the UK and USA as well as Germany, eugenics had many followers across the political spectrum. Democratic, as well as demagogic politicians advocated the implementation of eugenics as the best way to ‘improve’ humanity and ‘weed out’ undesirable traits. Such advocates considered themselves idealists, believing it their duty to shape the destiny of mankind towards a better future; one freed from poverty, physical and mental handicap. Eugenicists believed that criminality, alcoholism, insanity, laziness and other traits could simply be bred out over time. Social Darwinists of the Nazi creed believed there was no time to waste and that the blood of blue-eyed, blonde-haired ‘Aryans’ was being contaminated by that of ‘races’ they considered ‘inferior’. Such races included those intertwined with Germans for millennia, Slavs and Jews among them. The Nazis were convinced that both Slavs and Jews were untermensch (subhuman), while the German/Nordic races were ubermensch (supermen). Nazis believed the Slavs were ‘stupid’ the Jews ‘devious, cunning, resourceful’ and ‘evil personified’. It was such warped beliefs, enthusiastically held by Mengele until his death, which put him on the road to Auschwitz.
In 1935 Mengele was awarded a PhD in Anthropology for his thesis entitled: Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups. The paper was meticulously researched and devoid of racism or anti-Semitism. By this time, the Nazis had held power in Germany for two years and were tightening their grip on academic life and work in Germany. The Nuremberg Laws were introduced, removing Jews entirely from academic life and forbidding all sexual relations between them and those of German blood.
Mengele graduated in medicine in the summer of 1936 and began a four-month stint at Leipzig’s university clinic that was necessary to obtain his full medical degree. With a history of educational achievement by the age of 25, Mengele soon became a disciple of Professor Otmar Freiherr Von Verschuer, Germany’s leading racial ‘expert’, joining his staff on 1 January 1937. Von Verschuer had built up the grandiose sounding ‘Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity’ at the University of Frankfurt. At this lofty institution, Mengele helped his new colleagues decide who was and who was not a Jew, when those suspected of breaking the Nuremberg Laws were tried. Thousands of dossiers were compiled, which would become invaluable in future years as the Nazis sought out Jews for deportation and extermination.
In May 1937, Mengele finally joined the Nazi Party, as member number 5,574,974. The Stahlhelm had been co-opted into the Sturmabteilung (storm troopers) at Hitler’s express instruction in January 1934. Membership of the Nazi party had been forbidden by the Führer for four years after his accession to power to prevent ‘opportunists, careerists and liberals’ from swamping the ‘true believers’. In the years before the war, Mengele worked diligently at perfecting his vocation as a racial scientist, joining both the Arztebund (Nazi Doctors’ Association) and in May 1938 – with profound implications for the future – the SS.
In the late thirties, the SS was still rather obscure. Formed as Hitler’s Schutz Staffeln (protection squad), it had expanded into running concentration camps and its leader, the pompously titled Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, had pretensions of making the still tiny SS a rival to the army itself. In the meantime, the SS was seen as an elite organisation that recruited only the finest specimens of racially pure German manhood and was pitiless to enemies of the Nazi regime.
In the summer of 1938, the University of Frankfurt awarded Mengele his medical degree. He also became engaged to the tall, blonde and beautiful Irene Schoenbein, the daughter of a university professor and six years his junior. They were married in July 1939 but not without some difficulties. While Mengele could show documentation to prove he was of ‘pure’ Aryan descent, Irene could not provide sufficient evidence that her grandfather was legitimate. As this could mean her family was ‘possibly infected’ by Jewish ancestry, the marriage was in doubt. Mengele’s family influence (Hitler had twice visited the Mengele factory) and Irene’s ‘obvious’ Nordic ancestry won the day and the couple were married. However, their names were omitted from the Sippenbuch (Kinship Book) for SS men and their wives who could prove their ancestry back to 1750. This meant that the Mengeles would be deprived of the coveted ‘swords and spoons’ awarded to SS men on the birth of each child. Perhaps this slur impacted on Mengele to such an extent that his hatred of Jews, until then barely evident, would boil over into bestial cruelty some years later.
In October 1938 Mengele was called up for three-months service in the army. An expert hiker and skier, Mengele revelled in his posting to a Tyrolean mountain regiment. Hatred of his commanding officer, leading to a fight between them, caused Mengele to turn his back on the army. With the coming of war, Mengele was at first prevented from serving due to a kidney infection that he had as a child. In June 1940 he was called up at last, achieving a posting to the Waffen SS as an Untersturmführer (second lieutenant). Mengele saw no combat initially, being employed by the Genealogical Section of the Race and Resettlement Office to examine the racial suitability of those who would colonise the conquered lands and reviewed the citizenship applications of Volksdeutsch, those of German ethnic origin who lived outside Germany’s borders, using racial criteria.
In June 1941 Mengele participated in Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. There, he was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, for heroics under fire. In January 1942 he transferred to the predominantly Scandinavian Viking SS division to serve as a field doctor. Again he proved himself something of a hero, winning the Iron Cross, first class, for pulling two wounded men from a burning tank. Mengele was intensely proud of his medals and displayed them prominently on his uniform for the rest of the war.
Conditions at the front were appalling and medical supplies rarely kept up with mounting casualties. Often Mengele had to take decisions as to which German soldiers would live or die. While Mengele loathed this task, which could only have helped inure him to suffering, he was to have no such scruples in ‘selecting’ those who would live from those who would die in Auschwitz.
By the end of 1942, a wounded second lieutenant Josef Mengele had been invalided out of the front and would serve there no more. Instead, he went back to the Race and Resettlement Office at Verschuer’s insistence. After a few months working in Berlin Mengele, now promoted to Hauptsturmführer (captain), was given the ‘practical’ research post he craved. His old boss Verschuer helped him obtain a posting to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the latest crackpot eugenics theories could be indulged, using living human subjects of almost limitless variety and number.
The Hippocratic Oath meant nothing to Nazi doctors as far as those they considered racially inferior were concerned, with Jews occupying the lowest rung of the ladder. To the anti-Semitic Mengele, they provided merely the canvas on which to carry out experiments of the most fiendish design. Of course, he was no pioneer. In Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, Jews were injected with virulent strains of virus and bacteria, exposed to cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, influenza and yellow fever. Prisoners were struck on the head repeatedly with rifle butts to see how many hits it would take before they suffered irreversible brain damage. Jews were fed on a diet of salt water to observe how long they could survive, injected with gas gangrene, exposed to low atmospheric pressure to simulate high altitude and placed in tanks of freezing water to simulate the effect of freezing conditions on downed aircrew.
In Auschwitz, Dr Horst Schumann, who on one occasion castrated 90 men in a single day, had been conducting sterilisation experiments by exposing men, women and children to massive doses of X-ray radiation. Professor Karl Clauberg, a gynaecologist of renown, had developed over a period of a year, a system for sterilising 1,000 women in a day using one doctor and ten assistants. In Auschwitz, Mengele would go beyond all that had gone before with his own experiments. In that hell-on-earth, Mengele also had another task to perform – selecting his victims.
The Nazis had a whole plethora of slave-labour camps and seven extermination centres where the destruction of Europe’s Jews could be carried out in utmost secrecy: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Maijdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor and Treblinka. With the exception of Maly Trostenets, all were located in Poland. Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, was actually two camps that combined the role of extermination centre and the largest slave labour camp in occupied Europe with, at its peak, 140,000 slave workers: Auschwitz-Birkenau. The former was where the stronger, fitter inmates were ‘exterminated through labour’, being worked to death, starved, exposed to the elements and regularly beaten, shot or ‘selected’ for the gas chamber, while forced to aid the German war effort. Birkenau, two miles from Auschwitz itself, was where the gas chambers and crematoria were located and where the majority of new arrivals were murdered on arrival. Here the ovens were stoked 24 hours a day. More people would be killed there than anywhere else under Nazi rule. It was also in Birkenau that Mengele conducted his vile and inhuman experiments.
A dank, miserable place even before the war, Auschwitz was chosen for its quiet location and a railway junction interconnected with the railway networks of all of Europe, making the task of bringing in victims logistically easier for the Nazis.
In the towns and villages of occupied Europe, the Endlosung (Final Solution), to what the Nazis perceived to be the ‘Jewish Problem’ was gathering pace. Entire communities of Jews, regardless of age and infirmity, were uprooted and herded into ghettos where starvation and disease took an inexorable toll. Thus corralled, it was relatively easy to force the weakened survivors onto cattle trucks when the time came for their deportation to the death camps. Packed in like sardines and locked in without heating, food, water or sanitation, the deportees began a nightmare train journey often lasting days in freezing cold or sweltering heat, amidst increasingly squalid conditions. Terrified, exhausted, jostling, shouting, dying, many went insane or tried to kill themselves. Mothers, anticipating an even bleaker future, occasionally tried to throw very young children from the train in the hope that others would find and look after them.
As the ‘transports’ of Jews approached Auschwitz their horrified passengers’ nostrils were filled with the ominous and vile stench of burning flesh and scorched hair. A pall of smoke, which could be seen for 50 kilometres, rose high above the death camp and flames rose from the red brick chimneys of the crematoria.
When the transports eventually reached their destination, the bedraggled, bewildered survivors heard the doors of their cattle trucks open and the shouts of SS guards yelling for them to get off the train. ‘Raus! Raus!’ (‘Quickly! Quickly!’) the guards would scream as they clubbed or whipped those who were too slow, setting their vicious guard dogs on any who hinted at resistance or defiance. Often arriving at dead of night beneath searchlights, the disoriented prisoners struggled to stay together in family groups.
One Nazi in particular is remembered by the few who survived their first day in Auschwitz. Dr Josef Mengele’s other role was as the man prisoners called ‘the selector’, a job in which he revelled. Arriving on 24 May 1943, Mengele took part in his first selection the following day with the arrival of a transport of 2,862 Dutch Jews. On 25th he sent 1035 Gypsies he suspected of having typhus, after a perfunctory examination of their barracks to be gassed.
Chain-smoking and always dressed immaculately in his beautifully tailored white SS medical uniform with white gloves and polished boots, the handsome Dr Mengele greeted the arrival of a transport with an air of nonchalance and grace. He then chose, in an instant, which prisoners were to live beyond that day and who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. He rarely smiled or showed emotion and merely flicked his gloved hand to the right, for life or the left, for death. Occasionally he would whistle a cheery tune – The Blue Danube Waltz, or an aria from Tosca. At one selection a beautiful girl caught his eye. Asking her if she was educated and knew the tune he whistled, she answered: ‘I’m not sure. Tannenhauser?’ to which Mengele replied ‘Sorry. It’s Lohengrin.’ For her mistake she was directed to the left.
Sometimes Mengele would wink knowingly to a family selected for annihilation. Reassured, they would walk assuredly to their doom. Mockingly, he would stop to chat to one of the new arrivals, feigning concern while revelling in their tales of horror regarding their journey and mistreatment. After such a conversation the prisoners would usually be sent to their destruction. When a cattle truck of rabbis from Hungary arrived, Mengele greeted them with more energy than usual forcing them to dance and sing the Kol Nidre, the anguished prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as he cracked his whip. Tiring of their humiliation, the rabbis stood tall and marched off to their deaths singing the prayer Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad (Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one).
On occasion, entire transports would arrive in such a terrible state that all those who spilled from the trucks were immediately gassed without any selection process whatever. Usually, 15-20% were deemed fit enough to be worked to death in Auschwitz itself. All children under 14, the elderly, sick, infirm or middle-aged were gassed on arrival. Only a few exceptions were made. In all, Mengele carried out selections on at least 74 transports, possibly hundreds more. He had a saying: ‘Here the Jews enter through the door and leave through the chimney’.
As a ‘racial scientist’, Mengele immersed himself in research from the moment he arrived at the vast arena that was Auschwitz. For his experiments, Mengele could choose any ‘specimen’ he wished. Those who were unusual: deformed, lame, giants, midgets or dwarfs were sought out by the guards as the trains spewed out their human cargo. One other group caught the eye of the Herr Doktor: twins.
Mengele was fascinated, almost obsessed by twins, identical and fraternal, of any age. Here he thought lay the secret of genetics. So keen was he to ensure no sets of twins were missed that he volunteered to attend transport selections ‘day and night’, in the words of one prisoner. Some 1500 pairs of twins were selected over a period of some 18 months. Of these, perhaps less than 200 individuals were to survive.
In the confusion at the Auschwitz arrival ‘ramp’ many parents tried to hide their twins. Prisoners, who helped the SS empty the trains, would shout, ‘twins good’ or ‘twins will live’ in many languages. The terrified new arrivals had to make instant decisions. A mother who was selected for labour would often ask to keep her child company in the group she did not know was destined for destruction. Asking Dr Mengele if she could join her child, he was always more than happy to comply. Within an hour, mother and child would be gassed, their bodies violently torn in a search for valuables, burned and reduced to ash and fragments of bone.
Occasionally, twins would be hauled out of the line marching to the crematoria. Sometimes, if only infants or babies, their mother would be spared in order to look after them. The rest of their family would be enslaved or exterminated. In the late spring and summer of 1944, with Hitler clearly losing the war, some 437,403 Hungarian Jews arrived between 15 May and 8 July. Few of these were chosen for anything other than immediate destruction as the Nazis hastened to annihilate European Jewry before being overrun by advancing Soviet troops. More than 10,000 Jews a day were being burned after gassing, as not only Hungarians but the surviving Jewish populations of Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands and Romania also arrived. In all, at least 1,100,000 people would perish in Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews.
Once chosen, the twins and other ‘specimens’ would be taken to their living quarters, not in Auschwitz but near the Birkenau gas chambers. Most were in shock, having been informed that their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers so cruelly taken from them were now dead. Their new ‘home’ was a nightmare world of heaps of rotting corpses, with the nauseating, all-pervading stench of burning flesh in the air and overwhelming heat from the furnaces.
While slave labourers in Auschwitz had their heads shaved and were forced to wear prison garb, the mostly child specimens of Mengele did not. Their barracks, nicknamed ‘the zoo’, were cleaner and their food slightly better, though all remained hungry. The boys’ quarters were sited almost immediately opposite the crematoria.
Once his ‘patients’ had arrived, Mengele, the ‘Devil’s Doctor’, could begin his ‘work’ which he carried out with gusto, gaining a reputation as a fanatical workaholic among his SS comrades and those prisoner-doctors forced to work for him. So what kind of research did Mengele carry out and to what purpose?
First, victims had to complete an extensive questionnaire. Young children were assisted in this. He or she would be asked to give their age, specify physical traits such as weight, height, eye and hair colour, any health problems, social, geographic and ethnic background. Mengele would then personally interview his prospective victims and take further notes. All completed reports would be forwarded to Berlin. By taking such steps, Mengele wanted his research to be considered valid and tried to show it had been undertaken in a scientific way.
In Birkenau each morning, thoroughly dedicated to his gruesome task, Mengele had his victims prepared for experimentation. They were bathed, cleaned and carried in trucks emblazoned with the Red Cross to one of his many laboratories. In one, blood tests and X-rays were carried out. These were frequent, painful and undertaken almost daily, usually by one of the many Jewish medical specialists press-ganged into working for the Nazis on pain of death. Mengele often took part himself, occasionally scolding a prisoner-doctor who had inflicted pain on a child unnecessarily, as he saw it. As part of his twisted personality he enacted a fatherly bedside manner, even giving the children sweets. As a result, the children nicknamed him ‘The Good Uncle’. At the same time Mengele was simultaneously planning and implementing the most barbarous experiments imaginable. Blood had almost a mystical significance for the Nazis and Mengele was no exception, believing it held the key to the mysteries of life and genetic inheritance. Large quantities were shipped to the German Research Association for further study. In focusing on twins, Mengele hoped to achieve a scientific breakthrough that would allow for a reduced gestation period and the multiple births the Nazi hierarchy hoped would help replace Germany’s catastrophic wartime casualties and provide the raw material for future wars of conquest.
One group who suffered most grievously from the frequent blood tests were the midgets, who were given double rations when bled. Often they would volunteer to bleed more often for the luxury of extra rations. They eventually bled to death.
Other laboratories were even more horrific. Thousands of experiments were performed and anaesthetic was never used, resulting in agony for the victims. During experiments, victims were always naked. A pair of twins might be sewn together until they died, as happened with two boys, Tito and Nono, one of whom was a hunchback. One identical twin had his brother taken from him one day. An operation was performed on him, leaving him paralysed. Subsequently, the same boy had his sex organs removed. A short time later he disappeared. He was 12 years old.
If one twin died of natural causes, his sibling was killed to provide comparative data. Only in Auschwitz-Birkenau did twins die at the same time, making them available for immediate autopsy.
Surgical experiments frequently included the removal of organs or limbs, partial or entire, immersion in water to correlate loss of temperature and consciousness, lumbar punctures, transplantation of blood and organs between twins, the injection of various painful and toxic methylene dyes into the eyes to attempt a permanent colour change, children were m,ade to stand on their heads to see how long it took for blood to drain from their organs, female victims were sterilised, boys castrated, sex changes attempted (always unsuccessfully), and injections of typhus and tuberculosis were carried out to see how long the disease took to incubate. Wounds were deliberately infected with gangrene to see how each twin would react. Bone marrow transplants were carried out that caused extreme agony for the victims, causing death or leading to amputation and a trip to the gas chamber soon after.
On occasion ‘endurance’ tests were carried out in both Birkenau and the nearby synthetic rubber plant at Monowitz, whereby groups of eight or more women would be given increasing electrical voltages until they died, fell unconscious or into a coma.
A wall of Mengele’s laboratory was lined with human eyes, pinned up like specimen butterflies and classified by colour. Three pairs of Jewish twins under 10 years of age with ‘heterochromic’ (ie varicoloured) eyes were gassed and their eyes and organs shipped to Verschuer in Berlin along with those from a pair of Gypsy twins, for whose eyes Mengele had their entire family murdered and dissected. The shipment was marked ‘War Materials – Urgent’. When a complaint was received that eight records had arrived but only seven sets of eyes, an unrelated child was killed and his eyes forwarded as an alleged twin. Mengele was thus only too happy to corrupt the results of his own warped experiments.
So many and varied were the hideous experiments that no proper studies could be carried out, even if they had any scientific merit, which they did not. It appeared to the prisoner-doctors forced to assist that some were carried out for reasons of pure sadism alone. After the war, the head of a Gypsy that Mengele had sent to Berlin for analysis was found in a box along with photographs of four other Gypsies he had castrated. Photographs of Mengele himself were rare, as if he knew he would be held to account after the war.
Near the crematoria was the conveniently situated pathology unit. Here autopsies were carried out on the bodies of those who had died and the results meticulously recorded. If a prisoner seemed to Mengele to be particularly fascinating, he or she would be despatched by an injection of phenol, evipal or chloroform straight into the heart and dissected while still warm. Prisoners were also executed by a shot to the back of the neck. On one such occasion 80 corpses were pickled in formaldehyde and shipped to Natzweiler Concentration Camp in France for ‘further study’.
Mengele had many other duties. Even in Auschwitz, babies were born. To their mothers no mercy was shown. Any woman showing signs of pregnancy was gassed. For those women near full-term, Mengele would deliver the child himself, often meticulously careful in his delicate work. Usually, mother and child were sent immediately afterwards to be gassed. Sometimes Mengele would let the baby live but tape the mother breasts; he would amuse himself by watching the mother’s anguish as he let the baby starve to death. On another occasion Mengele dissected a one-year-old child while the baby was alive.
Some Jewish doctors performed abortions surreptitiously to save the lives of mothers before their pregnancy showed. If the confinement was advanced, they tried to reduce the mother’s torment by telling them their baby was stillborn. Mengele himself became a father on 11 March 1944 when his only son Rolf was born. It was an occasion he mentioned to no one in Auschwitz-Birkenau and one that mellowed him not the slightest.
Jewish doctors, who worked with Mengele under duress, such as Miklos Nyiszli, Gisela Perl and Olga Lengyel and survived the war, testified to Dr Mengele’s zeal, vicious temper and cruelty. He beat one poor girl to a bloody pulp for simply avoiding gas chamber selection six times, all the while calling her a ‘dirty Jew’. He was totally unpredictable, raging at his underlings for surreptitiously eating stolen food one minute, whistling a tune the next. Mengele threw a Russian prisoner’s baby onto a pile of corpses, shot a prisoner dead in a fit of temper and in a fury, smashed open the skull of an old man who wanted to join his son’s work detail.
One of worst atrocities Mengele committed was the burning alive of 300 children on an open fire. Witnessed by a number of Jewish and Russian prisoners, Mengele had a pit dug and a fire lit in the yard at Birkenau. Ten trucks containing Ukrainian children from a nursery in the town of Dnepropetrovsk backed up to the fire and dumped the screaming children directly onto the flames. None of the children was more than five years old.
To fellow SS members, Mengele was the most fanatical of Nazis. Unlike his medical colleagues who dreaded selections and usually had to be drunk to carry them out, Mengele was enthusiastic and always sober. SS Dr Hans Munch, who was acquitted of indulging in criminal activities at Auschwitz after the war, implausibly because he ‘knew nothing’ of Mengele’s barbarous experiments, described his colleague as being ‘driven by ambition’. To him, Mengele wanted to be a star in Germany’s post-war academic firmament and saw his vile experimental research as a way to achieve it. This, combined with limitless power within the camp and the ‘insane’ atmosphere of the place, turned Dr Josef Mengele into a monster. The lives of untermenschen were worth nothing; they simply provided him with material, a human canvas on which to work.
Mengele’s responsibilities included ensuring that Auschwitz remained free of epidemic. He caught both malaria and typhus in the camp. To ‘quarantine’ a camp population suspected of harbouring typhus Mengele simply despatched the barracks where the disease was suspected straight to the gas chambers. Such was the fate of the camp’s Gypsies. In the summer of 1944, some 4,000 Gypsies lived in appalling conditions in Auschwitz. Considered ‘parasites’ by the Nazis, spreaders of syphilis and racially inferior, they were nevertheless considered marginally superior to Jews. As a result, the Gypsies were not separated by sex and allowed to reside in a family enclosure with their children, where, despite starvation and poor sanitation, their community survived. Children played, their parents told stories, danced and sang songs. Violin music and traditional laments filled the air nightly. Resembling a Gypsy himself in physical appearance, Mengele enjoyed visiting the camp and was always pursued by youngsters eager for the sweets and chocolates he carried with him. Mengele would indulge the Gypsy children and occasionally some were taken to add to his experimental work. Others would sing for him and dance jigs. One four-year-old boy took to Mengele’s liking and became his mascot, accompanying him round the camp dressed always in white.
The conditions in the Gypsy camp deteriorated on a daily basis and disease took hold. On 2 August 1944, the order came to seal the Gypsy camp and liquidate its inhabitants. The Gypsies knew their fate and wailed all night. The following day, 2,987 were exterminated and 1,408 sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. One four-year-old girl who told Mengele she did not want to leave was grabbed by a German prisoner and, on Mengele’s orders, ‘flung against the wheel of a lorry where her skull was shattered’. The Gypsies used in Mengele’s experiments were not spared. They were not sent west but died in Birkenau with their people. Thoughtfully, Mengele ordered their bodies marked with an ‘X’. They would thereafter be dissected rather than incinerated like the rest. As for his ‘mascot’, Mengele took him to the gas chamber by hand, shoved the trusting little boy inside and left him to his fate.
The dutiful doctor also carried out selections from amongst those prisoners who had survived their initial arrival, on at least 31 occasions. Often accompanying Mengele was the ‘Blonde Angel’, SS Guard Irma Grese, whose penchant for sadism matched that of Mengele himself. This physically attractive couple provoked fear, hatred and even grudging admiration, particularly from the female prisoners. Mengele himself was not unaware of the sexual allure he held for women prisoners and always maintained his impeccable dress sense. As they were forced to parade naked in front of him, he would speak quietly and softly. Mengele then sought their trust. Women would often confide they were feeling unwell or exhausted. Such faith would be rewarded with a trip to what Mengele called the ‘bakery’ (gas chamber) or lethal injection. Such was the anti-Semitism of Mengele that, at the 1944 Festival of Yom Kippur, he ‘celebrated’ by ordering the gassing of 1,000 Jewish boys and girls. He ‘greeted’ the Jewish New Year in 1944 by selecting a further 328 Jewish children for the gas chambers.
Although Mengele may have appeared attractive to female prisoners, he was not immune to the beauty of a woman in his charge, regardless of being shorn of her hair, the rags she wore and lack of make up. Arousal in such circumstances stirred even greater malice within Mengele than usual. One such woman was a tall, blonde, statuesque 15-year-old Jewess from Transylvania. When he saw her naked, Mengele found himself overwhelmed by lust. His assistants and other prisoners noticed it. He acted it on it soon after, not by taking the girl as a lover, but by subjecting her to twisted gynaecological experiments. Soon she was unrecognisable, old beyond her years, sick-looking and bloated from the surgery inflicted upon her. Attractive no longer, Mengele had dealt with his shameful feelings of desire for her. After all, she was a Jew and he was an Aryan so such an attraction to her was an abomination.
Occasionally, Mengele would ‘adopt’ a child, like the little Gypsy boy. Typically, the child would be male, three or four years old and ideally be a mirror image of Mengele himself. Mengele would cuddle the boy, dress him smartly, hand him sweets, chocolates and toys. He would also play with the child and talk to him, laugh and joke too. Eventually, after a few weeks Mengele would tire of his pet and nonchalantly walk ‘his’ child hand-in-hand to the gas chamber.
As 1944 drew to a close, some 70 elderly women were ‘spared’ by Mengele from immediate gassing upon arrival. ‘God bless you for your goodness!’ the women wailed in gratitude. ‘Why bless me when you do not know me?’ Mengele replied, who then ordered them to be killed immediately by phenol injection.
Mengele enjoyed managing the death camp’s ‘hospital’. Here, prisoners who could still be worked to death were, on occasion, brought to recuperate from their debilitating conditions. Prisoner-doctors were asked to assess the prisoners’ ailments and when they would be ‘fit’ to return to their backbreaking toil. The doctors were in the difficult situation of trying to second guess their capricious master. If the prisoners’ recovery time was too long, the trek to the gas chamber was the inevitable result. If too short, death by exhaustion was certain following a return to the barracks.
To his Nazi superiors, Mengele was an ‘exemplary officer’. On 19 August 1944, a report on Mengele by Commandant Rudolf Hoess, who had been convicted of murder in Weimar days, described Mengele’s mental state as ‘outstanding’. The doctor ‘carried out all tasks given to him, often under very difficult conditions, to the complete satisfaction of his superiors … often using his little off-duty time to utilise the scientific material at his disposal to make a valuable contribution to anthropological science.’ The report added: ‘Mengele shows the impeccable demeanour of an SS officer. He is just, strict when required, popular and respected by colleagues and subordinates.’
Irene Mengele left her son Rolf with his grandparents and visited her husband in autumn 1944, staying for three weeks. She was aware of the exterminations but probably not the nature of Josef’s ‘research’. She described in her diary their time spent together in Auschwitz as ‘idyllic’. The couple bathed in the nearby River Sola, picked blackberries, listened to music played by the camp orchestra and enjoyed the lavish food and hospitality available to the families of SS offices. She acknowledged the camp’s ‘sweet stench’ and was proud of her ‘charming, funny and sociable’ husband.
After contracting diphtheria, Irene Mengele spent more than a month in hospital before returning to the camp for a ‘second honeymoon’. As the gassing of Jews reached a climax, the Mengeles took a week’s leave in Günzburg, Josef returned alone on 6 November.
Mengele was at the height of his powers but it would all soon end. The Russians approached with each passing day. The SS grew ever fearful of retribution and Mengele became increasingly despondent about the future. By early 1945, the crematoria had already been blown up on Himmler’s orders. Able-bodied prisoners were force-marched through winter snows to new destinations in Germany and documents were shredded. Warehouses full of goods stolen from victims were shipped west. Carrying out his experiments until almost the last moment, Mengele had his equipment, samples and reports sent off to Berlin, Frankfurt, Günzburg and other ‘safe’ locations. He could not bear for such ‘valuable’ work to fall into the hands of the hated Bolsheviks. When one prisoner accidentally spilled grease on one of his files, Mengele disapprovingly asked: ‘How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love?’
From the very start, Mengele believed bizarrely that his work had real scientific merit but there was to be no Utopia, no promised land, no blueprint for a race of new superhumans. Dreams of winning the Nobel Prize would remain a fantasy in the twisted mind of Mengele.
On 17 January 1945, Mengele simply disappeared. The camp was set on fire and, on 27 January, the encroaching Soviet troops finally arrived. A few thousand sick prisoners remained in the wreckage of the camp. The survivors of Mengele’s experiments were also found – cold, ill, hungry, frightened and exhausted. Almost all were children – the twins. A few others who survived the death marches also survived. Despite the best efforts of their liberators, many died as a result of what they had suffered. The rest would bear the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.
And Mengele? For a few weeks he found himself employed as a physician in Gross-Rosen concentration camp, 300 kilometres from Auschwitz. Although bacteriological experiments had been carried out on Soviet prisoners of war for three years, Mengele had no experiments or selections to carry out and on 18 February, as Soviet troops closed in, he de-camped to Mauthausen in Austria. This was the last concentration camp to be liberated and thereafter Mengele was on the run. He was smart enough to shed his SS uniform but was soon afterwards captured, in the guise of a Wehrmacht officer, having joined a kriegslazarett (war hospital) unit on 2 May. There he met a friend Dr Hans Otto Kahler. Despite Kahler’s grandfather being half-Jewish, Verschuer had employed him in Frankfurt before the war.
On 3 May 1945, Irene Mengele heard an Allied radio broadcast detailing some of her husband’s actions and declaring him wanted for ‘mass murder and other crimes’. She was apparently relieved that he was still alive.
Mengele became anxious and depressed as a prisoner. Working initially in the field hospital, he was stuck in an area between the Russian and American lines while the allies discussed jurisdiction. The identity of the Wehrmacht soldier he acquired was constantly changed but he daily feared exposure as a member of the SS. He also had an affair with a nurse and entrusted her with some of his files. The Allies were combing all camps for SS, Gestapo and Nazi Party functionaries. Soon, 50,000 were identified with a view to screening out and prosecuting the war criminals among them. SS men were particularly easy to find as all had a blood group tattoo under their left arm. Mengele was lucky; he abhorred tattoos and had adamantly refused to have one when he joined the SS. As a result, having recently made a successful break for the American sector, the former Auschwitz doctor was not suspected of SS membership, even when he reverted to his own name. US troops assumed responsibility for Mengele and his colleagues on 15 June and he was released on 18 August 1945. Mengele was now 34 years old. Little did he know this was the number of years he was to spend ‘on the run’.
In hiding, Mengele was despondent, cautious and doubted his luck would hold. He returned to Günzburg and his family, but did not live with them, preferring to hide in the woods. Soon, fearing detection, he moved again. Dr Kahler introduced Mengele to a neurologist, Dr Fritz Ullmann, whom he had met in captivity. Ullmann became Mengele’s confidant and to him he admitted his heinous crimes. Ullmann provided Mengele with another false identity, that of himself. While staying with a childhood friend, Dr Albert Miller, American troops arrested Miller for his Nazi connections. A fearful Mengele hid in a back room.
After a fruitful but highly dangerous three-week journey into Soviet occupied East Germany to find the nurse who held the notes he treasured, Mengele returned to Bavaria. At first he stayed with a pharmacist friend in Munich who had served with him in the Viking SS Division. Mengele next contacted and obtained the assistance of Ullmann’s brother-in-law, yet another doctor, who found a farm for Mengele to live and work on. In the Bavarian hamlet of Mangolding, the war criminal worked for a farmer, George Fischer, as Fritz Hollmann, ironically selecting potatoes into those fit or unfit for human consumption.
For the best part of three years, Mengele laboured on the small Alpine farm, with occasional forays home. He worked hard, ate well, played and laughed with the Fischer children and read prodigiously. The family guessed their employee was a wanted Nazi. His soft hands, educated accent and obvious intelligence gave him away. They never enquired of ‘Hollmann’s’ past and, satisfied with his work, discipline and temperament, helped register him in his new name.
Elsewhere in Germany, poverty, starvation and uncertainty plagued the ravaged country. Younger brother Alois was in Yugoslavian captivity, the Americans detained his father for his Nazi sympathies, his mother died in early 1946 and his wife and son Rolf lived with Mengeles’ in-laws in Günzburg. The name of Mengele, hitherto unknown, was becoming more and more familiar to the Americans. With his murderous role in Auschwitz recounted by numerous survivors, Mengele became a wanted man. This intensified even more so after the Belsen trials.
Held at the end of 1945 on Luneburg Heath at the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, at this trial some of Mengele’s old cronies were brought to justice, including Irma Grese and the former commandant of Auschwitz and Belsen, Dr Josef Kramer. Both were hanged but not before Grese admitted to the cruelties she was accused of and named Mengele as the man who ordered her to act so viciously. To add insult to injury, his old mentor Verschuer retained his professorship and accused Mengele of carrying out experiments without his knowledge. Verschuer claimed to know nothing of the gassings, experiments without anaesthetic or the source of the blood, tissue and skeletal samples Mengele forwarded to him during the war. Colleagues supported Verschuer in claiming that Mengele was an aberration, a person for whom they had only contempt. Verschuer temporarily fell into disfavour, losing his post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In 1949 he was judged fit to resume his career by a committee of fellow professors and was appointed Professor of Genetics at Munster University until his death in 1969.
In 1946, Manfred Wolfson of the US War Crimes Council in Berlin was asked to look into the cases of both Verschuer and Mengele. The former was exposed as a rampant racial Nazi, the latter as a mass murderer. After taking evidence and investigating Mengele’s wartime activities, Wolfson produced a report recommending that: ‘Former SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr Josef Mengele be placed on the wanted list and indicted for war crimes.’ That autumn, 23 Nazi doctors went on trial for war crimes, in which some 200 were believed to have participated. Astonishingly, Mengele, the most notorious of all, was not even indicted. The report on him had been ‘lost’ somehow. Yet even the worst of those tried, such as Dr Waldemar Hoven of Buchenwald, who had carried out hideous experiments, had not undertaken selections. Others had selected but not experimented. Even the prosecution did not mention Mengele, who had experimented and selected on a monumental scale, in the trial. Such was the scale of medical crimes that the horrors of Auschwitz were inadvertently ignored.
Such trials, and a further judgement of Auschwitz personnel in Poland in 1947, persuaded Mengele that he must flee. He left Mangolding for a while and returned to live first with friends and relatives in Günzburg and then, fearing detection or betrayal, in the woods outside the town before finally returning to the Fischers’ farm.
The attitude in Günzburg to Mengele was that he was unjustly accused. Those who knew Josef did not believe one iota of the ‘nonsense’ the Allies were spreading about him. At the same time the town was itself being ‘de-Nazified’, having expelled all 309 of its Jewish inhabitants after Hitler had taken power, Günzburgers had little sympathy for tales of anti-Semitic atrocities.
American troops had called on both Irene Mengele and her father-in-law, Karl. Irene simply said she had no idea where her husband was, probably dead. Karl said much the same thing. Apparently, that was enough for the somewhat disinterested investigators. The family were bothered no further and concentrated on rebuilding the family firm. With West Germany in the midst of massive reconstruction, the Mengeles produced vast numbers of wheelbarrows as well as their customary farm machinery and their post-war prosperity was soon assured.
While in hiding, something remarkable happened to Mengele – he was pronounced dead! The Nuremberg war crimes investigators concluded that Mengele had died in October 1946, despite not having a shred of evidence to support their decision. Hearing of this, the Mengele family used it as an opportunity to ‘close the book’ on the doctor and held a funeral in Günzburg at which his brothers, father and wife tearfully said farewell, knowing all the while that the war criminal was still alive nearby. Irene Mengele took to wearing widow’s weeds and prayed in church for the soul of her ‘dear departed husband’. All the time, she visited him twice-monthly for trysts by the Sinnsee. In spite of her support, the deeply insecure Mengele became insanely jealous, continually accusing her of seeing other men. The couple became progressively estranged and their marriage was never to recover.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Dr Gisela Perl, a Jewish doctor who was one of Mengele’s assistants, published a graphic account of the nightmare that was Auschwitz. The crimes of Mengele took centre stage. Dr Perl also wrote to the US War Crimes Council in Washington, pleading to be allowed to speak as a prosecution witness at what she supposed would be Mengele’s forthcoming trial in Nuremberg. Her letter received not even the courtesy of a reply. Her book was also ignored and when she wrote to Washington again, she was informed, on 12 February 1948, that Mengele was dead. Thus, no trial was forthcoming and Mengele was not even condemned in absentia. In fact, prosecutors at first thought the war criminal was in custody, then that he was a prisoner of the Poles and finally that the Poles had tried, sentenced and executed him. Such incompetence took the heat off Mengele and he was soon to make a clean getaway.
After a fruitless attempt to obtain forged documents, Mengele took a train to Innsbruck and walked over the Alps, crossing into Italy on Easter Sunday, 17 April 1949. Paid guides, ignorant of who he was, helped him every step of the way. Heading for the South Tyrol, whose inhabitants were stateless because of an unresolved border dispute between Austria and Italy, Mengele easily obtained an International Red Cross ID card in the name of ‘Helmut Gregor’ that he subsequently used to obtain a Swiss passport.
Moving to Genoa, with a view to escaping Europe altogether, Mengele was met by his boyhood friend Karl Sedlmeier, who, acting on behalf of Mengele’s wealthy father, gave the doctor not only a large sum of money but a box of slides he had sent from Auschwitz to his home for safe keeping. Mengele was overjoyed and intended to resume his experiments once he reached his new homeland of Argentina. First, he needed a medical examination and inoculations. He was contemptuous of the Croat doctor who examined him without bothering to sterilise the instruments from his previous patient. Clearly, Mengele considered this doctor unprofessional, yet failed to see the irony of his indignation, considering his own experiments. Taking a bribe to backdate Mengele’s inoculations, the Croat doctor announced him fit and healthy.
After several setbacks, including a three-week spell in prison for trying to bribe an official from whom he sought an exit visa, Mengele was ready to set sail, departing on the North King in the summer of 1949 to begin a new life. Arriving in Buenos Aires on 26 August 1949, Mengele felt safe at last. He now lived in the domain of Juan Peron, dictator and President of Argentina and husband of Eva Duarte or ‘Evita’ as she was often known. Peron had long admired both Mussolini and Hitler and believed Germany would return to the Nazi fold within a decade. He had provided 10,000 blank Argentine passports and identities to facilitate the emigration to Argentina of Nazi fugitives. Six German U-boats had delivered more than 20 tonnes of gold (much of it dental gold stolen from the mouths of Jews in death camps), 100 kilos of platinum, 4,638 carats of diamonds and precious works of art. Four Germans in charge of overseeing the booty, paid into the personal accounts of Juan Peron and Eva Duarte, would meet violent ends over the next few years. The loot would never return to Germany or the families from whom it was stolen.
Thousands of Jews and Nazis alike had left Europe in the previous decade seeking a new life. Both communities prospered side-by-side with no conflict between them. The Nazis sought to blend into a German community that had been in Argentina for more than a century and was significant to the extent that three of Buenos Aires 18 daily newspapers were published in German. Although nostalgic for the ‘old days and old ways’ of Hitler’s Reich, apart from forming a few organisations proclaiming loyalty to their Nazi creed, they caused no trouble. Mengele had to start afresh. His first home was a cramped room in a cheap hotel he shared with two others in the suburb of Vicente Lopez. He could not practise as a doctor and found work as a carpenter. He was good enough at it to make ends meet and when money arrived from his family, he was able to establish a business selling farm equipment like his family did, half-a-world away. Gradually he prospered.
In a matter of months, through securing the assistance of Federico Haase, a famous architect with family connections to politicians in Paraguay and social contacts with senior Nazis in both Paraguay and Argentina, Mengele became a fixture on the local Nazi social scene. His past was known and respected by many. The fact that he was wanted as a war criminal mattered little in such circles and, if anything, gave him more credibility. In 1953 he even had an article published in one of their publications, the virulently anti-Semitic Der Weg (The Way), on a subject close to his heart: genetics, under the pseudonym ‘G Helmuth’.
By the mid-1950s Mengele was homesick and it was later alleged by Sedlmeier that he made a brief journey home to West Germany. He missed his family and Irene divorced him on 25 March 1954, an event not precluded by his supposed ‘death’ in 1946. A beautiful woman, Irene Mengele grew tired of living in Günzburg and being married to a fugitive whom she never saw. Mengele remained jealous of her after arriving in Argentina and continued to accuse her of infidelity. He was arrogant and haughty in his letters, expecting her and his son to follow him into exile. She had no intention of doing so, even though she did not believe Mengele guilty of the crimes attributed to him. Once divorced, the former Mrs Mengele married businessman Alfons Hackenjos in her hometown of Freiburg. Remarkably, not only did Mengele remarry too, he married the widow of his brother Karl.
Karl Mengele junior had died in 1949. In March 1956 his beautiful widow Martha met the still handsome, dashing Josef Mengele again on a family skiing holiday to Engelberg, Switzerland. There he not only charmed her but also her son, Karl Heinz, and his own teenage offspring Rolf, who knew his father only as ‘Uncle Fritz’, with exciting stories of the Russian front, pocket money, his apparent warmth and sense of humour. Rolf stayed with his mother, but that year Martha and Karl Heinz moved to Argentina to be with her new amour. They married in Uruguay in July 1958. Although many were shocked in Günzburg at the Josef-Martha union, the Mengele family backed the marriage as a way of ensuring the family firm stayed in Mengele hands.
Life for the war criminal in the 1950s was good, even after Peron’s regime was ousted in a 1955 coup. Backed by his father’s money, Mengele’s business grew steadily. In 1954 his father visited him in Buenos Aires and gave his son a million marks to buy half of a pharmaceutical company, Fadro Farm. Gradually, Mengele moved into larger and more elegant homes, and eventually settled into a villa at 970 Virray Vertiz, in the luxurious suburb of Olivos, near Peron’s old estate. The mortgage was in the name of ‘Karl Mengele & Sons’. Many Jews and other wealthy Germans lived nearby. At work he would often whistle a cheery tune, just as he had done as a boy, just as he had done in Auschwitz. Once again his clothing was beautifully tailored. He bought himself a sports car, dined and socialised with the elite of Argentine society.
Living almost openly, Mengele’s confidence and feelings of security were such that in 1956 he decided to change his name from Helmut Gregor back to Josef Mengele. Astonishingly, although this meant confessing when he requested a West German passport from their embassy to having lived under a false name since arriving in Argentina, their staff did not bat an eyelid. Mengele gave the West Germans his birth certificate, addresses in Günzburg and Buenos Aires and details of his divorce from Irene. Despite Mengele’s application having supposedly been checked with Bonn, no wanted lists were perused. That the West German ambassador to Argentina, Werner Junkers, was himself a former Nazi was perhaps more than a coincidence, although he later denied any knowledge of the former Auschwitz doctor.
The Mengele idyll did not last. Shortly after his marriage Mengele was arrested for practising medicine without a licence, specifically as an abortionist. Charges were not pursued after a $500 bribe was paid. Soon after, Mengele’s father died and it is believed he went to the funeral to pay his final respects. Returning to Argentina, Mengele realised he was once again a wanted man. Yet how had he been able to live so openly for so long?
In the immediate postwar years there was a genuine effort to catch, try and punish Nazi war criminals. The task was enormous and in the chaos it was inevitable that many would escape justice, sometimes for a few years, often permanently. Eventually, after the surviving Nazi ‘bigwigs’ were tried and sentenced, the public became weary of the daily horrors exposed by the trials, particularly in Germany itself. At the same time, the Iron Curtain had descended on Europe and in both the Soviet and Western spheres of Germany, capturing the hearts and minds of the German people took precedence. Both sides used people guilty of war crimes to undermine their former allies. Those who were tried and found guilty of war crimes in the late 1940s and early 1950s were often given remarkably light sentences. For example, Otto Bradfish, who murdered 15,000 Jews as part of an Einsatzgruppen (special action group) death squad received only 10 years hard labour. Israel was pre-occupied in the decade after its foundation primarily with survival and the integration of hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors. Hunting Nazis was a luxury it could not afford. Thus, Mengele and his cohort had years of respite before they would again fear retribution.
In 1959, the West Germans were at long last persuaded to look for Mengele. Auschwitz survivors wanted justice and began their own investigations. One such survivor, Vienna based Hermann Langbein, remembered a man now known as ‘The Angel of Death’. It is not known exactly how Mengele acquired his nickname, one much more resonant of his crimes than ‘The Selector’. It seemed to have emerged after the war, perhaps from the evil spirit the ancient Hebrews called the Malach Hamavet. In any case, the nickname added drama to the search for Mengele. Langbein had long been frustrated that such a monster had eluded the hangman and resolved to find him. The divorce papers of Irene and Josef Mengele provided the first clue, revealing that his quarry was alive and living in Buenos Aires.
Preparing a file on Mengele with the assistance of other Holocaust survivors Langbein demanded that the West German government take action. Some 14 years after the war, there was no interest. Eventually, Langbein found a prosecutor in Freiburg, Judge Robert Muller, who agreed to pursue the matter and Germany finally issued its first arrest warrant for Mengele on 7 June 1959. There were 17 counts of premeditated murder. The charges accused Mengele of:
Killing numerous prisoners with phenol, benzene and/or air injections and in the gas chamber; killing a 14 year old girl by splitting her head with a dagger; injecting dyes into the eyes of women and children which killed them; killing several pairs of Gypsy twins with his own hands or by poisoning for the purpose of undertaking medical studies on their bodies during autopsy; and ordering prisoners to be shot for refusing to write to relatives saying they were being well treated.
The warrant was passed to the West German Foreign Ministry, which now sought Mengele’s extradition from Argentina. The press soon heard about it and the World Jewish Congress appealed to Auschwitz survivors to provide Langbein with evidence of what they witnessed Mengele do or their ill-treatment at his hands.
Mengele soon got word that the game was up in Argentina. Helped by Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, a Nazi war hero and alleged ‘Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich’, he fled to Paraguay, where a large, influential and sympathetic Nazi community awaited him. Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay, was himself of Bavarian origin and Mengele became a Paraguayan citizen, under his own name, on 27 November 1959 after Werner Jung, head of the local Nazi Party during the war and White Russian Captain, Alejandro von Eckstein, vouched that he was a resident of six years standing. This was despite the Paraguayans being fully aware that he was wanted in West Germany for war crimes. He lived for a while under his own name in south-east Paraguay, a place where tens of thousands of Germans had settled in the half-century before the war. Pro-Nazi during the Hitler era, the area was known as Nueva Bavaria.
Mengele still had assets in Argentina and made several trips to Buenos Aires to sell his villa, pharmaceutical shares and equipment business. The Argentines thus had numerous opportunities to arrest him but were not so much sluggish as obstructive. In fact, they denied he had ever entered their country – despite his listing in the Buenos Aires telephone book under his own name. The Germans too were lackadaisical and took six months to point out this fact. They did not even hand the extradition warrant to the Argentine consul general in Munich, Alberto Malddonni, until 11 March 1960. Previously, on 27 October 1959, Argentina had indicated that no extradition treaty existed between their country and West Germany and that the Mengele case would be submitted to their solicitor general for a ‘recommendation’ once the warrant was in their hands. Eventually the warrant arrived in Buenos Aires on 30 June 1960, over a year after it was issued. For reasons known only to themselves and to their lasting shame, the government of Argentina said that, as Dr Mengele’s crimes were ‘political’, they would take no action at all. The Argentines had contrived to let the mass-murderer escape.
While staying in Paraguay at the home of his friend Alban Krug with Martha and Karl Heinz, Mengele pondered his next move. In the meantime, his world was rocked by a world-famous event that had recently taken place on the streets of the Argentine capital. In May 1960, agents of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the most important war criminals still at large and flew him to Israel. Eichmann had dedicated himself to the pursuit of the ‘Final Solution’ by rounding up Europe’s Jews for deportation and extermination. He had met the death-camp doctor on a number of occasions but the two did not get on. Perhaps wary of Mengele’s reputation, the cash-strapped Eichmann politely declined when Dr Mengele offered to look after his medical needs free of charge. Mossad had hoped to capture Mengele too but he had already vanished and they did not have the agents on the ground to mount a pursuit.
For Mengele, it appeared only a matter of time before he too was hunted down, caught and taken for trial in Israel. He felt that he had to go deeper into hiding and move to Brazil but Martha thought differently; she had no intention of living a life looking over her shoulder in an impoverished Latin-American backwater. She left her husband and took Karl Heinz back to West Germany.
For Nazi hunters, there was a new lease of life. Langbein and Simon Wiesenthal, another Holocaust survivor working out of Vienna, persuaded a West Germany embarrassed by its Nazi past to do more to bring war criminals to justice. Soon, Richard Baer, a former commandant of Auschwitz, SS General Karl Wolff and a number of Eichmann’s former cronies were arrested. It was clear to Mengele that the days of skiing holidays in Europe and hobnobbing with the Argentine elite were now over.
The West German government placed a reward of 20,000 deutschmarks for information leading to the capture of Mengele, the first time it had offered a reward for the capture of a war criminal. The Argentines were now keen to catch Mengele, as they believed this would provide them with considerable international prestige and set up a nationwide manhunt. It was too late, the Auschwitz doctor had vanished again.
Mengele remained at large for so long because he never seemed to have troubling obtaining help. In Paraguay, Rudel put him in touch with a fanatical Austrian Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard. Gerhard, whose son was called Adolf and whose Brazilian wife Ruth once gave her landlady a present of two bars of soap made from Auschwitz victims, helped Mengele move on to Brazil in November 1960, where the death-camp doctor hoped to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
In May 1962, Eichmann was executed. Two years earlier, Argentina had protested not only to Israel, but also to the United Nations, that Israel had violated its sovereignty by kidnapping Eichmann. A rise in anti-Semitism in South America and rebukes for Israel for violating international law brought fear of Nazi revenge for Eichmann’s death. Synagogues were vandalised, Jews assaulted and a Jewish girl, Merta Penjerek, was murdered. Although Israel had sent a tough group of agents to find Mengele in the wake of the Eichmann success and they discovered he had stayed with the Krugs, they were nowhere near catching him. Reluctantly, Israel decided to call off its hunt for Mengele, despite considering him a much greater prize than Eichmann. With Nazi scientists now employed in the rocket programme of Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israel believed that its agents were much better employed addressing that threat.
Mengele was vain enough to believe that he would be the focus of all Israeli attempts to seek out Nazis in South America and remained convinced for the rest of his life that an active search team was on permanent lookout for him. Although he had friends and assistance in hiding, the myth later perpetrated that a powerful postwar Nazi organisation, such as ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen), and the Paraguayan government protected him is false.
Tales soon spread that the war criminal controlled a vast web of agents, paid with looted Nazi gold. Norit Eldad, an Israeli woman, was killed in a climbing accident in the Andean resort of Bariloche. To the press, she was a Mossad agent who was hurled to her death by Mengele’s agents or possibly the monster himself. Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in his book The Murderers Among Us claimed that Eldad was an Auschwitz survivor sterilised by Mengele and was murdered by him when he recognised her camp tattoo. It was all nonsense.
Throughout his time in hiding, Mengele maintained regular contact with his family in Bavaria. His son Rolf discovered in 1960 that Josef Mengele was his father and would remain loyal to him, despite being appraised fully of his monstrous crimes. Hans Sedlmeier continued to send funds and one might consider that, had Mengele’s mail to his former home simply been monitored, his exact location could have been easily pinpointed.
Unknown to Mengele, in the early 1960s regular sightings of him and action by both the Brazilian and Argentine police led to the arrest of a number of Germans suspected of being him. Ironically, one of them was the blind German Jew Lothar Hermann, the man who had originally notified the Israelis of Eichmann’s whereabouts after his daughter had dated Eichmann’s son.
Mengele remained an unrepentant Nazi throughout, showing not a shred of remorse for his wartime activities, fervently believing all the while that he was the real victim. When not wallowing in self-pity, Mengele would write in his diary of his continuing loyalty to the Fuhrer’s long defunct regime, recalling with fondness ‘the incredible zest for life of the German nation under Hitler’.
In Brazil Mengele lived at first on the Gerhard farm at Itapeceria, 70 kilometres from São Paulo. Gerhard then found a Hungarian couple, Geza and Gitta Stammer, to look after Mengele and in 1961 the doctor went to live on their small farm at Nova Europa, 300 kilometres from São Paulo and bought with Mengele family money. The Stammers were fascists who were initially unaware of their guest’s true identity, presented to them as he was as Herr Hochbichler, a Swiss exile. Mengele managed the farm for no salary as part of the deal. For long hours, he would scan the horizon from a six-metre high watchtower. He seldom left the the place.
Now middle-aged, Mengele hated multi-racial, vibrant and youthful Brazil. He was getting older, increasingly bad-tempered, was missing his comforts and suffered from hypochondria. The man who had gassed thousands for the mildest complaint, daily moaned of his own minor afflictions. He looked down on his hosts as socially, intellectually and racially inferior and became increasingly bored and morose. He attempted to write a ‘novel’ obviously based on his own life with himself as the ‘hero’. Mengele also wrote in his diary describing the flora and fauna of his surroundings and commenting on his imaginary illnesses. He was terrified of being discovered and constantly wore a bush hat, even in the most inappropriate of circumstances. Years earlier, Mengele had briefly considered plastic surgery. A scar was left on his forehead that he believed could somehow identify him. His features were otherwise unchanged as, having been given only a local anaesthetic Mengele had second thoughts and terminated the operation almost before it had begun.
In his Brazilian exile Mengele proclaimed an undying love of Germany, yet felt ever more the scapegoat for its past. He was comforted by German music and philosophy which he absorbed avidly.
In mid-1962 Mengele reluctantly moved again. The Stammers bought a 45-hectare farm at Serra Negra, 150 kilometres north of São Paulo in which the Mengele family took a half share. The climate was better and the verdant soil more suitable for growing coffee. The cooler climate also suited cattle much better. As had happened on their previous farms, Mengele’s relationship with his hosts and the farm workers was a difficult one. He shouted at the workers, was arrogant, opinionated and intolerant. He bullied the Stammers and even tried to interfere in the way they raised their children. Gradually, their relationship soured as they rejected his domineering ways. Only money kept them in his life and, after 1963 when they guessed the war criminal’s true identity, he was effectively in their power, making him fearful and suspicious, but without altering his abusive treatment of them. When the Stammers mentioned to Gerhard that they were considering informing the authorities, he responded that ‘Something might happen to their children, if they did.
It is alleged that Mengele and Mrs Stammer were lovers. Geza Stammer often worked away from home as a surveyor for several weeks at a time, and his wife soon became very close to her host. Her own children believed an affair had occurred and later commented, as did farm labourers, that they would hold hands and spend time together alone in his bedroom. Mengele even wrote a love poem dedicated to ‘beautiful Gitta’ found later in his diary. The romance fizzled out eventually, due to Mengele’s insufferable high-handedness, tedious intellectual snobbery and his oft-stated view that as a German he was racially superior to the non-Aryan Stammers who were merely ‘Finno-Ugric’.
In 1963 Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, offered Paraguay’s President Stroessner $2.5 million if he would extradite Mengele. The offer was declined, leading many to believe that the war criminal was not only still in Paraguay but influential within leading political circles.
In 1964, a major war-crimes trial began in West Germany. Franz Stangl, former commandant of Treblinka and recently extradited from Brazil, was one of the ‘star’ defendants. In absentia, detailed evidence was given regarding the scale of Mengele’s crimes and he became an object of loathing for the German public. What later hurt Mengele the most was that the trial made clear the utter worthlessness of the degrading and inhuman experiments he had undertaken. It had all been for nothing.
Convinced that the Angel of Death was living in Paraguay, West German ambassador Eckart Briest asked President Stroessner to hand him over. Furious, Stroessner insisted that Mengele was either in ‘Brazil or Peru’ and had the diplomat deported, creating a breach with West Germany. The West Germans now raised the reward for his capture to 50,000 deutschemarks.
In the wake of the Frankfurt trial, Hermann Langbein managed to persuade both the universities of Frankfurt and Munich to rescind Mengele’s medical and doctoral degrees. Backed by Mengele’s money, Martha, the war criminal’s estranged wife, fought in the courts unsuccessfully to prevent it. Frankfurt University accused Mengele of violating his Hippocratic Oath and invited him to come and defend himself, an offer that Mengele unsurprisingly did not respond to.
The situation between the Stammers and Mengele had now deteriorated to such an extent that he sought new accommodation and new friends. On behalf of the Mengele family, Hans Sedlmeier smoothed things over financially with the Stammers, while Wolfgang Gerhard introduced Dr Mengele to new ‘minders’; Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert. Both dedicated Nazis. Wolfram had been a Hitler Youth leader in the war and actually admired Mengele, despite, or rather because of, the horrors associated with his name. Their children ‘doted’ on Mengele, who was as charming as ever where children were concerned, and even called him titio (little uncle), just as many of his Jewish and Gypsy victims once had. The Bosserts, warped by ideology, even considered the man who had experimented on thousands of young and innocent children and sent vast numbers to their deaths a ‘good influence’ on their family. The Bosserts looked after Mengele, who still lived with the Stammers, revelling in his company and conversation.
Early in 1969, the Stammers and their unwelcome guest moved again to facilitate Geza’s surveying work, most of which was in São Paolo. A four-bedroom house in one hectare of land was bought just 40 kilometres from the city at Caieiras. Mengele tried to bicker less with the Stammers, spending much of his time planting lemon trees and shrubs. The Bosserts persuaded him to go out a little more and not to continually draw attention to himself by suspiciously covering his face with his hat or hands whenever anyone glanced in his direction.
By the early 1970s, almost a decade had passed since West Germany had initiated the Frankfurt trials. The Germans had made no effort in pursuit of war criminals since. One investigating judge, Horst von Glasenapp, was not prepared to let things lie and, fearing key witnesses might pass away, travelled across Europe, to Israel and North America. He devoted six years to building up testimony that could be used to convict Mengele, if and when he was apprehended. Karl Sedlmeier was interviewed and admitted he had met Mengele but lied that he had not seen him for 10 years, saying he did not know where the war criminal was. Sedlmeier’s house was searched but the police had tipped him off. Nothing was found.
The Israelis continued to have other priorities. While they were convinced that Mengele was in Brazil, more immediate crises confronted them. The murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich by the Palestinians of Black September, an attack of which Mengele ‘disapproved’, as the ‘wrong way’ to kill Jews, ensured that avenging their athletes would occupy Mossad more than the hunt for men like Josef Mengele.
Alois Mengele, younger brother, died of cancer in 1974. Of all the Mengele clan he had been most disturbed by what he had heard about the brother he once idolised. Prior to his death, Alois had been estranged from the fugitive, having discovered to his horror that the stories of his brother’s cruelty and sadism were all too true. The loss of his Alois’ affection was a bitter blow for Mengele.
In 1975, Wolfgang Gerhard left Brazil and returned to Austria. As his wife and son were dying of cancer, he believed they would receive better treatment there. Before leaving, Gerhard gave Mengele his identity papers.
With Gerhard gone, the Stammers felt their position strengthen. Frequently they threatened to expose the old murderer and so Mengele was obliged to find a new home. The Stammers sold their house in Caieiras and found him a small, rather decrepit bungalow at 5555 Alvarenga Road in the poor São Paolo neighbourhood of El Dorado and left him to fend for himself. The old doctor became depressed and, on occasion, suicidal. His relationship with the Bosserts and frequent correspondence to and from Günzburg kept him going.
Suffering a stroke in 1976, Mengele recovered only slowly. He felt increasingly helpless and isolated. He continued to write incessantly to relatives in Bavaria offering, advice, criticism and even rebukes to his son when he believed the occasion demanded it. He even insisted on seeing Rolf one last time. Keen to find out more about the father reviled as a monster, Rolf Mengele travelled to Brazil on a false passport and met his father in October 1977. During their meeting, Auschwitz was discussed. Dr Mengele swore he had never ‘personally’ killed anyone, that he had even tried to save lives and was forced to work their under pain of death, a somewhat unlikely tale given his SS rank and status as a winner of the Iron Cross. Tellingly, Mengele showed no remorse for his activities in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The departure of his son left Mengele alone again. Then, remarkably, he fell in love. The woman in question, Elsa Gulpian de Oliviera, was his Brazilian housekeeper, some 40 years his junior. She wanted marriage. Mengele was still married to Martha, and although he considered Elsa racially and socially beneath him, he courted her in the ‘proper manner’ before asking her to move in with him. However, after a year Elsa married another and Mengele became even more aggressive and domineering towards his friends, the Bosserts. Suffering now from constant insomnia, Mengele was fading fast. He completed a memoir, complaining that the values of his youth: ‘Race, nation, class and social status’, had disappeared. Unrepentant to the end, he remained wistful for the Nazi era.
In February 1979, Mengele accepted an invitation to the Bossert cottage at Bertioga beach. Constantly complaining about his aches and pains, his miserable life and homesickness, Mengele went for a swim at around 4.30pm to obtain relief from the burning Brazilian sun. Mengele was suddenly gripped by paralysis. He struggled desperately for the shore, trying to swim one-armed. Wolfram Bossert saw his friend’s distress and tried to save him, an effort that led to him being hospitalised. Bosserts efforts were in vain. Mengele had suffered a stroke, gave up the fight, drowned, and was dragged ashore with difficulty. The Angel of Death was not yet 68 years old.
Even in death, mystery continued to surround Mengele. Quickly buried to avoid decomposition, his friends notified Günzburg and ensured that no one outside his close circle was aware he had died, just as they had kept secret his life and true identity. If they thought the memory of his crimes would fade away, a minor footnote in history, it did not quite work out that way.
Rolf Mengele travelled to Brazil, dealt with his father’s estate and divided it among the Bosserts and Stammers as a thank you for helping his father.
Ironically, interest in Mengele then mounted. Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck played him in the movie, The Boys From Brazil that brought his name to the attention of millions. ‘Sightings’ of him, apparently unchanged from his Auschwitz days, occurred across Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay with increasing frequency, as Nazi hunters, Holocaust survivors and members of the US Congress all demanded action. In Paraguay, US Ambassador Robert White insisted that the Stroessner regime hand him over, despite their repeated denials as to knowledge of Mengele’s whereabouts. Under pressure, the Paraguayan Government eventually revoked Mengele’s citizenship, granted 20 years earlier.
The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, portrayed in The Boys from Brazil by Sir Lawrence Olivier, who ironically had played a dentist based very loosely on Mengele in the film Marathon Man, produced regular reports on Mengele. The fugitive was ‘spotted’ dining with Klaus Barbie, the ‘butcher of Lyons’, shopping in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, working on a Mennonite farm in the Paraguayan jungle and relaxing with Martin Bormann, now known to have died in Berlin at the end of the war. It was even alleged by Professor Richard Arens of Temple University Philadelphia that on a recent visit to Paraguay he was informed by Paraguayan officials that Mengele was employed by the Stroessner regime to advise on methods of torture. Supposedly, Mengele was even carrying out medical experiments, this time on Ache Indians in Paraguay’s remote Gran Chaco. The whole sordid and entirely fictional tale was published by Time magazine.
As Mengele hysteria mounted, US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance even issued an arrest warrant for Mengele when the FBI was informed of a certain flight he was arriving on in Miami under his own name. Such nonsense at least kept the now dead doctor in the headlines and ensured his crimes would not be forgotten.
By 1985, the West German and Israeli governments, California-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Washington Post and others had together placed a reward for the capture of the deceased doctor totalling $3.3 million. Journalists and bounty hunters searched the more remote corners of South America for their long-extinct prey. Unfortunately, there was little to go on. No reliable photographs of their elusive quarry existed and no definitive sightings had occurred for a generation. The ‘Günzburg connection’ was not explored and time wasted following speculative rumours. Eventually, it finally dawned on the authorities that the extended Mengele clan, including friends and employees past and present, held the key.
Hans Sedlmeier, who in the 1970s admitted to journalists and von Glassenapp to helping Mengele in previous years, had his home searched in the spring of 1985. This time he was not tipped off and a notebook and letters detailing the names and addresses of the Stammers and Bosserts were found. Quickly interviewed, Liselotte Bossert told investigators that their search was over. Mengele was dead, buried in an untended grave in Embu under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard. Rolf Mengele confirmed that he was aware of his father’s death and burial in Embu, but had stayed silent out of respect for the many who had helped him escape justice over the years. Expressing ‘profound sympathy’ for his father’s victims and relatives earned Rolf a rebuke from the rest of the Mengele clan, who no longer acknowledge him.
Hundreds of journalists and television crews waited excitedly nearby when the crumpled remains buried in Embu were unearthed. With undue haste, forensic scientists attested in only three days and with ‘scientific certainty’, that the bones, teeth and hair found were those of Dr Josef Mengele. Not everyone was convinced. It appeared far too neat, too easy, especially when the Bosserts began to change their version of Mengele’s death. Perhaps the anti-climax of finding a dead and rotting Mengele ruined the chase. Nevertheless, there were more compelling reasons for doubting the evidence available.
The osteomylitis that Mengele suffered as a child should have been clearly visible on the Embu skeleton, yet mysteriously not a trace of the disease was found on the bones. Tantalisingly, the skull of Mengele was supposedly 57cm long, yet the Embu skull was only 50.5 cm in length. The US team of forensic scientists swore before congress that the skeleton was Mengele’s. Despite this, doubts remained. The Mengele family offered to provide medical records but never did. X-rays from Mengele’s youth were not forthcoming from West Germany and it took a year for his alleged dental records to appear, although these confirmed the skeleton to be Mengele’s. In 1986, the Justice Department had the skeleton examined again by an expert from the Smithsonian Institute, focusing on the osteomylitis. No evidence of the disease was found. Only Dr Lowell Levine, who examined the dental evidence was willing, of all the scientific investigators, to put his findings on paper. It was never published because the case was never closed.
Israeli Auschwitz survivor, police colonel and Nazi hunter Menachem Russek carried out his own investigations in Brazil and Germany. He concluded that the death of Mengele was rather too convenient. At his insistence, Israel kept the case open, obliging West Germany and the US to do likewise. As a result, the findings of these governments were never published. Russek himself was cajoled into retirement by Israel and prevented from publishing his conclusions.
Finally, to settle the matter, in 1992 a team of British scientists led by Dr Alex Jeffreys of Leicester University, carried out a DNA test comparing samples from a reluctant Rolf Mengele and the Embu skeleton, proving with ‘99.97% certainty’ that the Embu remains were indeed Josef Mengele. Finally the Angel of Death was no more.