DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  The Angel of Death of Auschwitz was one of the few Nazi doctors who had both relished selection duty and performed human experiments.

  “If they could have gotten hold of Mengele, there is no doubt he would have been tried and sentenced to death,” observed the late John Mendelsohn, a leading authority on the Nuremberg Trials who worked at the National Archives in Washington until his death in 1986.

  Mendelsohn believed that Mengele’s case was so outstanding, the sum of his crimes so horrifying, that he should have been tried along with the statesmen and generals before the international military tribunals.

  At the doctors’ trial, experts reached all the way back to ancient Greece to find a suitable name to describe the perversions of German science under Hitler. They called it “thanatology,” the science of death, after Thanatos, the Greek spirit who personified death. The proceedings revealed that over two hundred German doctors had been direct participants in “research” crimes, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, more had stood silently by. It was clear that no useful scientific findings had resulted from these experiments—only the suffering and deaths of helpless human beings. At Buchenwald, doctors had searched for a cure for malaria by exposing inmates to the disease-carrying mosquitoes. The prisoners were then “treated” with large doses of questionable drugs, which invariably killed them. At the trial, female witnesses tearfully recalled the brutal sterilization procedures they had undergone at Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.

  But oddly enough, no witness or prosecutor mentioned the supreme thanatologist, the Angel of Death, Dr. Mengele. No one mentioned the medical experiments he’d performed on twins, triplets, dwarfs, and giants. The trial never discussed his diabolical tests, castrations, and surgeries. And not a word was said about the active cooperation between Mengele and Professor Verschuer, one of the leading theoretical scientists of the Third Reich.

  The answer to this great mystery of why Mengele’s name never surfaced may lie in the sheer immensity of the medical crimes confronted by the Nuremberg prosecutors. According to Neal Slier, director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazihunting unit,

  “It is a commentary on the barbarity of the Nazis that someone with as much blood on his hands as Mengele would not have been Number One on the prosecutors’ lists. That fact alone should put into perspective the unbelievable scope of the horrors.”

  Another Holocaust expert, Dr. Robert Wolfe, director of captured German records at the National Archives, offers a simpler explanation: “He slipped through our fingers.” But in defense of the Nuremberg team, Wolfe argues that “in this chaotic situation, it’s remarkable we caught as many as we did. It’s remarkable we even had a doctors’ trial, because people were getting tired.”

  Sure enough, by late 1946 and 1947, war-crimes trials were starting to come under attack in the U.S. Congress. American foreign policy was changing. The new enemies were no longer the butchers of the Hitler era but the Communists. If fighting them meant joining forces with ex-Nazis, SS men, Gestapo agents, and German industrialists, the United States was ready to do so. American funding for Nazi prosecutions was drastically cut, while funds were poured into recruiting agents to aid in the fight against Communism.

  EVA MOZES: There was a lot of anxiety in the Jewish community about what the Communists were doing. At first, compared to Auschwitz, life in Eastern Europe seemed like heaven. We didn’t mind standing six hours to get a loaf of bread. Or waiting two days to buy a winter coat.

  At least we were free.

  But then strange things started to happen.

  Our house was raided a few times. My uncle was taken away by the secret police without explanation. Other people were also picked up and disappeared.

  The Romanian government, faced with massive numbers of Jews who wanted to leave, tried to deal with the situation in their own way.

  They banned Zionist organizations. They shut down Jewish schools.

  At one point, my aunt built a false closet in the house-exactly like the ones people had during the war. It was very unpleasant, very tense.

  Our aunt decided there was no future in Romania. We applied for visas for all of us to go to Palestine.

  MENASHE ioRINCzI: Jews simply didn’t enjoy the same status as non-Jews under the Communists. We were not treated equally.

  The government shut down the Jewish schools. I joined a Zionist agricultural camp in Bucharest. I was taught to be a farmer. I learned how to drive a tractor, how to plant crops. All of us at this school wanted to go to Palestine and were preparing for the day that we ould live there.

  But within a few months, the Communists came, boarded up the camp, and sent us all back home.

  I knew then that I had to go to Palestine immediately. I desperately wanted to go, but the Communists would not let me emigrate.

  In Augsburg, near Gunzburg, the regional headquarters of the U.S. army Counterintelligence Corps recruited Klaus Barbie, the infamous

  “Butcher of Lyons,” as an American agent and operative in April 1947. As head of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, Barbie had.

  shipped groups of Jewish children to Auschwitz-among other misdeeds.

  Yet, instead of being tried for war crimes, Barbie was placed on the U.S. government payroll and treated like a prize source of information on postwar Communist infiltration of Germany.

  To those who question whether the Auschwitz doctor also benefited from the same special treatment, it can be asserted that Mengele had little, if any, intelligence value for American agents. Genetics was simply not an area of compelling interest to them. It is probable, however, that Verschuer, deft politician that he was, succeeded in convincing U.S. officials that Mengele was a useful contact. Years later, Manfred Wolfson could only conclude that Verschuer had somehow wielded his influence to have the charges, as enumerated in the investigator’s pretrial report, dropped. Wolfson learned that Verschuer had become friendly with key Americans running the Occupation government and reportedly kept suggesting to them that the colleagues who were discrediting him were

  “Communist agents.”

  By the conclusion of Poland’s second set of Auschwitz trials in December 1947, the possibility of new war-crimes proceedings seemed remote. America and postwar Europe were anxious to bury the past and get on with rebuilding.

  But there were some people who refused to forget what the Angel of Death had done. In 1947, Gisella Perl, the Jewish doctor who had been Mengele’s assistant, published her shocking account of life at Auschwitz. Perl, who had made her way to the United States after the war and resumed practicing medicine, was haunted by her memories of the death-camp doctor. Her book focused on Mengele, and she told story after story of his atrocities at the concentration camp. In graphic, vivid prose, Perl wrote how Mengele had destroyed the lovely young Jewish girl lbi Hillman, simply because she was so lovely. She movingly described the women of Birkenau’s desperate ploy to please Mengele, and survive his selections, by smashing bricks and applying the red powder as a “rouge” to bring color to their pale faces. And she told of his unrelenting brutality toward anyone who stood in his way.

  Perl was under the impression that Mengele was to be tried at Nuremberg-certainly not a farfetched assumption in the wake of front-page press reports in Viennese and Budapest newspapers in December 1946 that Mengele had been captured and was in jail. At last, here was the chance Perl had waited for to denounce the monster. In January 1947, she wrote to the Washington office in charge of the war-crimes trials to offer herself as a witness. In her letter, Perl expressed her desire to testify “against this most perverse mass murderer of the twentieth century.”

  Perl didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply.

  She wrote to them yet again in the fall of 1947, renewing her offer.

  “I have learned the trial of the greatest ‘mass murderer’ Doctor Josef Mengerle (sic] will be held in Nuremberg… I would be very pleased to go there as a witness… and awaken the conscience of the world.”

  Dr. Perl
would certainly have made a dramatic witness at Mengele’s trial. After months of working side by side with him, the articulate young woman could have described the enormity of his crimes. Even if he had been tried in absentia, testimony by Perl would have caused such a storm that a massive manhunt might well have been launched.

  But the sheer incompetence-or duplicity-of U.S. authorities led them to overlook both Perl’s letters and her extraordinary book. By the fall of 1947, there was only a half-hearted effort to pursue Nazi war criminals, and Perl’s second offer was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

  A review of the U.S. Army’s file on Mengele shows that her October 1947 letter was stamped

  “Hold for Final Action.” A small note scribbled next to Mengele’s name states quite erroneously that he had been “tried by Poles.”

  America’s Nuremberg team made at least three major mistakes with respect to Perl, all of which helped Mengele evade capture. When reports of Mengele’s arrest proved to be false, they didn’t bother to reply to her first letter and inform her that the war criminal was not in their custody. By the time of her second letter, they wrongly assumed he was in the hands of the Polish government. They compounded the error by concluding that Poland had already tried and sentenced Mengele.

  But it was the Nuremberg team’s last mistake which guaranteed that SS Dr. Josef Mengele’s trial would never, ever take place. Per Is October 1947 letter was passed around from office to office, from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, in Washington. Then, it was dispatched overseas to the men responsible for the Nureniberg prosecutions. By December, it had finally reached the desk of General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes and the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg.

  In January 1948, General Taylor wrote to Perl, apologizing for the delay in responding. Taylor’s brief letter ended with a most startling assertion: “We wish to advise our records show Dr. Mengele (sic] is dead as of October, 1946.”

  No one knows what prompted the Nuremberg investigators to conclude that Mengele had died-in 1946, no less. Even an exhaustive Justice Department inquiry more than forty years later failed to clarify what happened. But all the available evidence points to the Mengele family.

  Beginning with Irene’s clever donning of nLourning clothes and her recital of a mass in memory of her “late” husband, the Mengele clan’s strenuous efforts at spreading disinformation had obviously succeeded.

  Their line that Josef was missing and presumed dead on the Eastern front had somehow found its way even into official American war-crimes files. Since Nuremberg officials believed Mengele was dead, they failed to continue the hunt for him. The only other possible conclusion is that U.S. authorities deliberately helped the Angel of Death evade capture, but nothing has surfaced to buttress such a theory.

  In Mangolding, Mengele fretted over problems more pressing to him than being tried for war crimes. His writings on the period suggest that his daily concerns centered less on avoiding capture than on forestalling a divorce from his unhappy wife. He remained deeply upset over his crumbling marriage. He continued to mourn his mother’s passing and the Gunzburg life he would never again know.

  VERA GROSSMAN: The Communists made life very unsettled for us.

  One day, a rabbi from England came to visit my parents. His name was Dr. Shlomo Schoenfeld, and he ran a famous school in England.

  Rabbi Schoenfeld was traveling through Eastern Europe, collecting Jewish children to take back with him to Britain. He wanted to offer them a better life.

  He convinced my parents that it was not safe for Olga and me to remain with them in Eastern Europe. We were nine years old at the time. It was only two years after Auschwitz.

  Mother sadly agreed. She hated to part with Us. She always called us her “miracle twins” because, as she liked to say, it was a “miracle” that two little girls had survived both Auschwitz and Dr. Mengele.

  I understood her decision. I may have been nine years old, but felt like a grownup person.

  Still, I was heartbroken to leave her.

  I remember the day they took us to have our pictures taken for our travel documents. I refused to smile.

  We were placed on board a train, this time bound for England.

  We were with lots of other war children. Olga and I celebrated our tenth birthday on that trip.

  I felt very angry.

  six.

  THE STORY OF ANDREAS TWINS’ FATHER.

  By the late 19405, most of the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe-not just the twins-had realized they had no future there, and were trying desperately to get out. We all felt home was in Palestine.

  But it was almost impossible to emigrate-at least legally. Many members of my family, including my twin, Magda, managed to slip in illegally, through Cyprus.

  My wife and and I wanted to get legal visas. But it was extremely difficult to do so. The Communists didn’t want to let us leave.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: I kept pushing my mother to leave. I belonged to a Jewish Zionist movement, B’nai Akivah, which exerted a great deal of influence over me. The group taught me to reject Communism and embrace Zionism.

  They made me long to go to Palestine.

  This was a trend among all the Jews. There was always that lingering fear-that they would once again persecute the Jews.

  We didn’t want what had happened once to happen again.

  Three years after the end of the war, the man who official Nuremberg records claimed had been dead for two years was still living at the Fischer farm. Irene, his discontented but dutiful wife, continued to act the part of the grieving widow. One day, she even had a funeral mass said in memory of her “late” husband at the local church. But as the terrible decade came to a close, it was becoming more and more difficult for Mengele’s wife to rationalize remaining in her in-laws’ insulated Bavarian town. Germany was beginning to come out of its own postwar mourning period. Lights were turned on at night for the first time in years. There were dances and parties. Irene saw her youth slipping away, and her marriage increasingly appeared to have been a foolish and unrewarding venture.

  The tension and acrimony in Irene’s marriage to Josef dragged on. They continued to meet occasionally, but reunions were marred by bitter arguments and recriminations, smoothed over by temporary reconciliations. Both were coming to the realization that they didn’t really know each other. Mengele’s writings suggest he perceived Irene as superficial, a self-centered “egotist” who was more concerned about her own pleasure and convenience than his immense suffering.

  He seems to have deeply resented her complaints about her life without a man in the house. Irene, on the other hand, saw him as irritable and domineering, as always trying to tell her what to do with her life and their son. He could also be jealous and possessive; as his book shows, he wove paranoid scenarios of Irene’s supposed liaisons, inventing lovers and trysts. Again and again, he questioned her about her relations with other men. The most innocuous encounter she might tell him about was proof of an adulterous relationship. There were instances when his rage was so overwhelming, she thought him unbalanced.

  The obsessive qualities Mengele had exhibited throughout his adult life had no release at the farm. In medical school, and later at Auschwitz, Mengele was able to throw himself into his work, becoming engrossed in the most minute details of a test or an experiment. His fanaticism, the long hours he spent at the laboratory, and the fastidious way he performed his work, had earned him praise and admiration. But now, there was only his marriage to occupy his troubled mind.

  It is by way of his autobiographical “novel” that Mengele provides the most truthful insights into his disintegrating relationship with Irene.

  While hiding behind a fictional protagonist, Andreas, Mengele says much about himself as a husband, a lover, and a man.

  In the novel, Andreas, a man in hiding, is driven to the verge of madness when he learns that his wife, Irmgard, is going on holiday to a Bavarian resort. Convinced she is planning to meet her lover, he pl
eads with her not to go. When he hears she has gone despite his entreaties, he decides he must join her there. Friends try to dissuade him from undertaking the foolish journey. They warn him of the extraordinary risks he is taking; he is, after all, a wanted man.

  Crazed with jealousy, Andreas goes anyway, determined to save his marriage, “this last remnant of my crumbling life.” After a long, tiresome train journey, during which he reflects on his failed marriage, the hero goes to the inn where Irmgard is staying. She has already left by the time he gets there, but he continues the chase in the hope of catching her with her lover. But when Andreas does meet up with her, Irmgard is alone. There is no other man.

  In real life, Mengele’s extreme jealousy appears to have extinguished whatever feeling remained between him and Irene. For Mengele, it had been a marriage of vanity. He had seen in the tall, lissome blonde the female embodiment of the Aryan ideal. Irene had been much more romantic. She had fallen deeply in love with the handsome Josef. But now she longed for a conventional life with a home, children, and a husband she could depend on to be there. “I am not an old soldier’s wife-almost all the men in our circle of acquaintances are back home again. But you cannot come home,” Irene’s alter ego, Irmgard, says at one point.

  In the novel, the alpine reunion proves to be a complete letdown.

  Although Andreas and Irmgard do spend the night together, it is “disappointing.” Mengele the novelist spares us the details, saying only,

  “The night brought the realization he [Andreas] had long suspected but had not wished to accept: the marriage was over.