Children of Nazis

by Tania Crasnianski; Molly Grogan

  Young Josef never gravitated toward the family business and passed on his right of succession to his younger brothers. He was a top student with an insatiable ambition who saw his future elsewhere, preferably in the history books.

  In 1930, when he began studying philosophy, anthropology, and medicine in Munich, Nazi ideals had already infiltrated German universities. Some of Mengele’s earliest professors were staunch eugenicists such as Ernst Rüdin, who pioneered the German law of forced sterilization of individuals with hereditary defects. Five years later, in 1935, he defended his doctoral thesis entitled “Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups” under the direction of Theodor Mollison, a specialist in “racial hygiene” at the University of Munich. Josef Mengele was already persuaded of the existence of a superior Germanic, Aryan-type race, and he set out to prove it through science.

  He became an assistant to Otmar von Verschuer who was a prominent eugenicist and director of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, whose theories led to National Socialism’s interest in genetics. Von Verschuer was convinced that twins held the genes for a blond, blue-eyed Aryan race. Under his direction, Mengele earned a second diploma from the University of Frankfurt in 1938, but not before joining the National Socialist party in 1937 as member 5574974. Upon graduating, he joined the SS, swearing for the “purity” of his own racial background, which he claimed to trace back to 1744.

  Mengele believed that genetic manipulation was the key to Germany’s future. By studying twins, he hoped to create a German race that would multiply and grow the German nation.6 With his mentor, Von Verschuer, he sought to identify the genes thought to be responsible for a pure, Aryan race. The National Socialist party was keen to back up its theories about racial hygiene with science, and Mengele contributed his research to the cause.

  Before Mengele would agree to marry Irene Schoenbein in 1939, she first had to satisfy him that her paternal lineage was free of Jewish ancestry. No proof; no wedding. She succeeded by emphasizing her “Nordic side,” and the union was declared acceptable. This tall blonde was the love of Mengele’s life, and she was both very devoted to him and very jealous. They would never enjoy a normal life as husband and wife, however. Mengele was singularly driven by professional ambition and patriotism, committing Irene to a life of solitude. Only two months after the wedding—at the moment of Germany’s invasion of Poland—Mengele enlisted in the German army, leaving his young bride behind without an afterthought.

  He joined the medical corps of the SS Wiking Division, which was dispatched to the Eastern front and to Ukraine in particular. Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross for saving and treating two German soldiers, but, injured in combat, he returned to Berlin in 1942 where he took up his genetics research with his former mentor. Von Verschuer had been appointed to lead the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, a scientific research body that advanced Nazi theories on eugenics and racial hygiene from 1927 to 1945.

  Six months later in late May 1943, Mengele—who in April had been promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmführer—was assigned to Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp built by the Nazis, forty miles west of Kraków near the Polish border with Czechoslovakia.

  Auschwitz was an implacable machine of industrialized killing. Smoke belched day and night from its four complexes containing the gas chambers and crematoriums; the smell of burning human flesh hung in the unbreathable air, a stink that was even worse in the warm months. The camp was enormous, consisting of three main sections that were constantly being expanded; identical redbrick and wood barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. Mengele was probably unperturbed by the sight when he arrived there and reported to barrack number ten.

  His priority was to get to work as quickly as possible. He viewed Auschwitz and its unlimited potential for experimentation on “human guinea pigs” as a unique opportunity for the advancement of both science and his racial theories. He sent human samples, marked with the label “Urgent: War Materials,” regularly to his colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to analyze.

  When Mengele was in school, his classmates teased him as being “the gypsy”7 because of his swarthy looks, black hair, and hazel eyes, and he later joked that he more closely resembled a gypsy than an Aryan. Yet he sent over fifteen hundred Romas to their deaths only a few days after he began at Auschwitz.

  Irene did not move to the camp with her husband but chose to stay in Germany. Mengele spent eighteen months at Auschwitz; Irene visited him there on only two occasions, in August 1943, and again in August 1944, a few months after the birth of Rolf, who did not accompany her on the trip. When she questioned her husband about the cause of the infernal smell at the camp, she was told to never again ask him about it.8 Nevertheless, Irene’s subsequent visit to the camp was like a second honeymoon for Mengele’s wife—an idyllic moment with the man she loved. In her diaries, she noted nothing about her husband’s activities or the functioning of the camp, only that she swam in the Sola river, picked blueberries, and made jam.9 Mengele was a cold and cynical man who kept his secrets to himself and avoided interacting with his colleagues. He took pride in his rank and his war decorations, particularly his Iron Cross, which he wore constantly. He kept apart from everyone to better concentrate on what he believed was his destined calling: to further the evolution of mankind, never mind that his methods were anything but humane or compassionate.

  Mengele intrigued several of his colleagues at Auschwitz, among them Hans Münch, who remarked about the Auschwitz doctor: “He was an ideologue, body and soul…. Never any emotion; he showed no hate or fanaticism. And in this way he saw the gassings as the only rational solution, and as the Jews were going to die anyway, he saw no reason not to use them first for medical experiments.”10 To his colleagues, Dr. Mengele was a mystery, whose discretion and reserve discouraged any familiarity. He told no one of Rolf’s birth in 1944, and did not travel to be at his wife’s side for the event.

  Little Rolf lived alone with his mother in Freiburg im Breisgau in the Black Forest. Josef came to meet his son for the first time in November 1944 when the baby was eight months old. In April 1945, mother and son moved to Autenried in Bavaria to be closer to Josef’s family. Rolf grew up with his grandparents and finally knew the pleasures of family life.

  At Auschwitz, trains arrived at all hours from all over Europe. Newcomers went through a first round of selection—to separate those deemed capable of forced labor—from the rest who were sent straight to the gas chambers, which were made to look like showers. Mengele was present to see every new trainload arrive, his eyes on the lookout for twins whom he needed for his sinister experiments. These usually ended in death for the victims after horrible suffering. He was hoping to understand the inheritance mechanisms of genes and to eradicate so-called weak genes. Nothing made his face light up like the news that twins had arrived in camp.

  His countless experiments were administered without anesthesia: blood and bone marrow transfusions, injections of infectious diseases, amputation of limbs, organ removal, sterilization. Mengele was also interested in eye color and the possibility of changing it, injecting chemicals into the eyes of his “patients’’ who usually went blind following these experiments. His objective was the creation of a superior race that would satisfy the ideals of National Socialism.

  When Mengele fled Auschwitz on January 17, 1945, he left mountains of cadavers behind him. Few of his “human guinea pigs” survived his macabre experiments, even though they were granted a momentary stay of execution to participate in his studies. As the Reich fell, the westward stream of German soldiers provided Mengele the cover he needed to escape the Allies. He traded his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht uniform and lay low in Czechoslovakia. Overwhelmed by the numbers of fleeing soldiers, the Allies ordered the arrest of SS members only: these men had their blood type tattooed onto the underside of the left arm, making them easily identifiable. Mengele was very protective of his body, however, and had refused
to be tattooed. Irene would explain to Rolf that his father was so particular about his appearance that he considered a tattoo an unthinkable violation of his person, both unsightly and repulsive11 for a man who prided himself on his tailor-made suits and spent hours gazing at himself in the mirror and admiring the softness of his skin. In the absence of a comprehensive list of war criminals established by the Allies, his vanity saved him.

  Irene remained without news of Josef for a short time after the war ended until the wife of one of his doctor friends informed her that he was still alive. His name had begun to circulate, however, and the Allies were on the lookout for any information that would lead them to him. The Mengele family was placed under surveillance and interrogated but they revealed nothing. The German newspaper Bund reported that the family feared the possibility that they could be sued for reparations by Josef’s victims.

  When Irene was questioned by two American officers, she told them he had disappeared and had likely died on the Eastern Front. She had taken pains to create the illusion of this fiction by dressing in widow’s weeds and arranging for a funeral mass to be said for her husband at the church in Günzburg.12 Irene may have turned a blind eye to Mengele’s activities while he was at Auschwitz, but she could not have remained ignorant after the war, and yet she chose not to denounce him.

  After a brief stop in Munich, Mengele returned to his ancestral grounds, hiding in the forests outside Günzburg, where his family regularly made food drops for him. The authorities noticed nothing unusual; a report filed by the Israeli police made no mention of any contact between Mengele and his family.

  In late 1945, the “Angel of Death” was living under the assumed name of Fritz Hollman and working as a farmhand in Rosenheim, in Bavaria. Masquerading as Rolf’s uncle living in South America, Mengele would use the same name to meet his son years later. Mengele’s family often visited him in Rosenheim; Irene came frequently, meeting her husband discreetly at a lake, and sometimes brought two-year-old Rolf. A photo taken during one of these visits shows a smiling Josef behind Rolf. On most occasions, however, Irene came alone. In November 1946, Mengele visited his wife and son in Autenried for two weeks, believing the Allies had suspended their manhunt.

  Rolf would remember the four years that followed the war as an unhappy and anxious time for his mother. Her one wish was to lead a traditional life as wife and mother within a close-knit family; instead, she found herself married to a fugitive with whom she had never shared a home and who was becoming a complete stranger to her. The Mengeles’ marriage, already weakened by the war, had little strength to resist its present trials. Irene, who had suffered for years from the strain of her solitary existence, could no longer ignore that her husband was no longer the man she had married. She sought out the company of other men, no matter that it sent Josef into a blind rage. Pathologically jealous, he berated his wife every time she left the house, resulting in spectacular arguments. For some years already, Irene was herself a changed woman, no longer Josef’s devoted wife as she had been in the early years of their marriage. She recognized that as long as she stayed with Mengele, she would live a fugitive’s life. In 1948, during one of her absences from the house that so infuriated Mengele, she met the man who would become her second husband: Alfons Hackenjos, the owner of a shoe store in Freiburg im Breisgau. Little Rolf, who was four years old, would come to think of him as the first father figure he had ever known.

  When he learned that his name had been cited in the “Doctors’ Trial” that was held at Nuremberg beginning in December 1946 following the trials of the major war criminals, Mengele, who had let his guard down for some time, realized the noose was tightening around him. He decided to flee to South America and boarded the North King in the port of Genoa, Italy, in the summer of 1949, carrying a false passport bearing the name of Helmut Gregor. He was still hopeful that Irene and Rolf would join him in Buenos Aires as soon as he could send for them, but it was never to be. Irene could not bear to leave Germany or her family and refused to live a fugitive’s life on the other side of the world. Her main reason, however, was that she had a new man in her life, and while she still had some feelings for Rolf’s father, she did not intend to give up her new relationship.

  In 1954, Irene, in love with Alfons and tired of her situation, asked Josef for a divorce. Rolf never had any reason to believe that his father’s activities at Auschwitz played into her decision to leave the marriage since the couple adhered to a simple rule: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”13 Irene was happy to finally part ways with her in-laws, and even happier that she needed no financial help from them. That same year, Mengele decided to abandon his assumed identity and live under his real name, making the change official at the West German embassy. The divorce was pronounced on March 25, 1954, and delivered to Josef Mengele. The “Angel of Death” had risen from the dead.

  He returned to Europe in 1956, meeting Rolf again during a family vacation in Switzerland. The boy was then twelve but still knew him only as his Uncle Fritz from South America. Martha, the pretty widow of Josef’s brother, and her son, Karl-Heinz, were also there on holiday. Every morning, Rolf and his cousin climbed into Uncle Fritz’s bed to listen to his grand stories of battles he had fought on the Russian front. Rolf remembered the vacation as the best he had ever known: no one treated him like a little boy anymore and he was happy, despite his intensifying rivalry with Karl-Heinz on whom Fritz doted, at Rolf’s expense. He did not know that his so-called uncle was having an affair with his real aunt Martha.

  Two years later, in 1958, Mengele married his sister-in-law in Montevideo, Uruguay. Martha and Karl-Heinz moved to Argentina for several years.

  Mengele blended in easily in Juan Perón’s Buenos Aires. Argentina had become the Eldorado of Nazis on the run and would remain so until Perón’s death. When many of these Nazis moved on to Paraguay, Mengele followed. As for Martha and Karl-Heinz, they preferred to return to Germany. Contrary to rumor, Mengele stayed only two years in Paraguay before moving to Brazil in 1962. During all this time, and even though he returned to Germany twice—in 1956 and 1959, under his true identity—he was never arrested. It was also during these years that Irene decided to explain to Rolf the reasons for his father’s absence: he had either died or disappeared on the Russian front, but in either case he was a hero. For over ten years, Rolf believed his father was dead, all the while exchanging long letters with Uncle Fritz, whom he never dreamt for a moment was his father, alive and well.

  Rolf was sixteen when he learned that the uncle who had joined them on holiday in Switzerland three years earlier was his biological father, Josef Mengele. Rolf recalled how the news hit him: “My father was always the war hero who died on the Eastern Front. He was cultivated and spoke Greek and Latin. The truth was a shock to me. It wasn’t at all good news to discover I was the son of Josef Mengele.”14 At school, he was taunted by his classmates who teased him as the son of a war criminal and called him a “little Nazi” or “SS Mengele.” Rolf responded with irony: “Oh yes, and I’m also Adolf Eichmann’s nephew.” His teachers attributed his laziness to the trauma caused by his absent father, who was alternately a hero and an executioner.

  Mengele’s attempts to develop an affectionate father-son relationship with Rolf were unsuccessful. The letters he wrote to Rolf were cold and distant, as if he were trying to replicate the relationship he had had with his own father. Mengele even wrote and illustrated a children’s book for Rolf but his efforts were in vain. Rolf was particularly resentful of his father’s affection and esteem for his cousin, Karl-Heinz. In reality, Mengele was much closer to his nephew and stepson, with whom he had an almost paternal relationship, while for Rolf he would remain forever a stranger. This was the reason Rolf needed to confront him, face-to-face, this reclusive, depressed, and suicidal old man that Josef Mengele had become, a far cry from the hero that his mother had invented for him.

  Mengele’s lodgings in São Paulo are spartan; he invites his son to take his own bed, ex
plaining he will sleep on a mattress on the floor. They will have no need, however: Rolf wants answers, and they talk late into the night. At first, Rolf avoids the question of his father’s involvement at Auschwitz but when he finally questions Josef, the frail, elderly man reacts immediately: “How could you believe I ever did those things? Can’t you see those were lies, propaganda?” He defends himself virulently: “I didn’t dream up Auschwitz and I’m not personally responsible for what happened there. Auschwitz existed long before me. I wanted to help, but my influence was very limited. I couldn’t help everyone.”

  When Rolf asks him how the subjects of his experiments were chosen from among the new arrivals, Mengele admits he participated. “What was I supposed to do with these people? They were sick and half-dead when they arrived. You can’t imagine the conditions there.” He wants Rolf to know that his job was only to determine who was fit to work and that he did his best to see that as many of the new arrivals as possible were given that designation. By his count, he guesses he saved the lives of several thousand people. He wasn’t the one who ordered the exterminations; he cannot be held responsible for that. He swears he never killed or hurt anyone personally.

  Rolf sees things differently, however: “It’s impossible for anyone who was at Auschwitz not to have tried every day to leave that place. It is impossible and horrible both to not have tried. I will never understand how human beings could do those things. That my father was one of them doesn’t change my opinion. For me, what happened is entirely unethical and immoral and is an affront to our understanding of human nature.” His late-night discussions with his father convince him that Josef regrets nothing and is still a National Socialist sympathizer who believes in the superiority of the Aryan race, a theory that Mengele supports by drawing on sociological, historical, and political arguments. Rolf listens but notes that his ideas are, paradoxically, hardly scientific at all.15 Mengele concludes that he only did his duty and obeyed the rules in order to survive. For those reasons, he absolves himself of all guilt. Rolf understands that Josef refuses to be the monster that he is in the eyes of the rest of the world.