Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  In late 1944, when the machinery of extermination was taxed beyond capacity, Mengele took ‘pity’ on seventy aged women from a Jewish old people’s home in Slovakia and, to ‘spare’ them the long death lines, had them delivered to his infirmary instead. One of them called out, ‘God bless you for your goodness, that you take such pains to protect us old people!’ To which Mengele responded, ‘Why are you blessing me before you know me?’ A few minutes later, he ordered all the old women killed by lethal injections of phenol to the heart.

  Mengele’s fame had preceded him when a fourteen-year-old Transylvanian Jewish scholar arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. He remembers ‘the notorious Dr Mengele’ as ‘a typical SS officer’ with ‘a cruel face, but not devoid of intelligence’, wearing a monocle and waving a conductor’s baton which sent his subjects either right or left. By lying to Mengele that he was eighteen and a farmer, Elie Wiesel lived to bear witness to the calamity that he was the first to call ‘the Holocaust’ and tell the truths of the Final Solution to an uncaring world in a way that won him the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.

  In the Auschwitz memoir appropriately titled Anus Mundi, Polish survivor Wieslaw Kielar characterizes ‘the anthropologist Dr Mengele, who was also camp doctor’ as ‘an exceedingly elegant and good-looking SS officer who, thanks to his attractive appearance and his good manners, conveyed the impression of a gentle and cultured man who had nothing to do with selections, phenol, and Zyklon B. What he was like in reality was something we were to learn soon enough.’

  * * *

  As a matter of fact, however, Dr Josef Mengele was no evil mastermind, no ancient dybbuk, no devil incarnate, but a dumb intellectual, a dilettante, a dabbler who used human beings as his guinea pigs. Though better educated and endowed, he was as much a loser in life as Eichmann or Stangl: a bungler whose failures bred failures, aborted starts and abrupt ends that, almost without design, carved a trail of blunders and false clues leading only to Simon Wiesenthal’s greatest postwar disappointment. Even Mengele’s 1979 drowning in three or four feet of water – which cost the world and Wiesenthal a chance to confront him in court – was banal and stumbling, as befits the man’s mediocrity.

  Oldest son of Karl and Walburga,37 Josef Mengele was born heir to a farm machinery fortune in the Swabian town of Günzburg, which lies between Stuttgart and Munich, on 16 March 1911. In Günzburg – a quaintly half-timbered medieval town of 12,000 on the banks of the Danube near its source in the Black Forest – Wiesenthal says ‘the Mengeles have been its first citizens for almost a century and everybody depended on them one way or another’, which is why a veil of silence shrouded Josef Mengele’s return visits to his home town even when he was the world’s most wanted war criminal with hundreds of thousands of dollars of rewards on his head.

  When he went off to university in Munich in 1930, Josef Mengele was noted only for his family name, his ballroom dancing, and the white car his parents gave him as a high school graduation present. Munich, at that time, was still the centre of the swirl of violence which Adolf Hitler had unleashed with his abortive beer-hall putsch seven years earlier, but young Mengele plodded through his PhD studies in the philosophical and medical faculties while staying aloof from current events. Although his parents had embraced Nazism early and his father had donated the Mengele factory hall for a Hitler appearance in Günzburg, young Josef did not join the Nazi Party until 1937 and the SS a year later.

  By then, he was a certified physician whose mentor at medical school in Frankfurt was a name to be reckoned with in Nazi Germany: Professor Otmar von Verschuer, a ‘race scientist’ specializing in twins. Having hailed Hitler in 1937 as ‘the first statesman to recognize hereditary biology and race hygiene as leading principles of statesmanship’, von Verschuer would proclaim prophetically two years later: ‘We specialists in race hygiene are proud that the work normally associated with scientific laboratories or classrooms has extended into the life of our people.’

  For von Verschuer, Mengele did his dissertation on cleft palates in children and, after interning at the University Hospital in Leipzig, spent his residency at his mentor’s newly endowed Institute for Eugenics at the University of Frankfurt, and stayed on as a physician there.

  Early in the war, young Dr Mengele was mobilized as a physician in the Waffen (military) SS Viking Division. ‘A lot of people still think Waffen SS means a fighting group,’ Simon Wiesenthal told me in 1985. ‘Yes, it started that way, but in April 1942, they transferred 34,000 guards from concentration camps and prisons and the Einsatzgruppen – those SS “Special Action Groups” that were sent in right behind every conquest to kill off “civilian enemies” – from the regular SS to the Waffen SS because they were now needed in combat. Then, in 1943, three brigades – the First and Second Infantry and the First Cavalry: Sonderkommandos who operated behind the front in Russia to kill thousands of Jews, gypsies, Russians, and intellectuals – were put into Waffen SS regiments like Der Führer and Das Reich, which already had big reputations for burning villages and slaughtering civilians. This is why, at Nuremberg after the war, the whole SS, including the Waffen SS, was condemned as a criminal organization.’38

  In 1942, on the Russian front, the Viking Division penetrated the Caucasus, some 2000 miles from pre-war Germany, just before the great westward retreat began when the Germans took 300,000 casualties in the battle of Stalingrad: a turning-point in the war. That year in Russia, Mengele won his first Iron Cross for ‘rescuing two wounded soldiers from a burning tank under enemy fire on the battlefield and giving them medical first aid’, and his second when he was wounded himself.

  While recuperating in a military hospital in Germany, Mengele contacted von Verschuer, by then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Human Genetics and Eugenics in the Dahlem district of Berlin. In early 1943, around the time that Auschwitz was authorized to establish ‘an experimental physiological, pathological station’, Mengele volunteered to go there as camp doctor and von Verschuer lined up financing for him to experiment on twins, though Mengele later took advantage of Auschwitz to extend his research to hunchbacks, dwarfs, midgets, and, eventually, foetuses, babies, children, women, men, Jews, Gentiles, gypsies: a doomed cross-section of the whole human race in the Third Reich.

  ‘More than any other SS doctor, Mengele realized himself in Auschwitz,’ writes the American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). ‘There he came into his own – found expression for his talents, so that what had been potential became actual. Intelligent but hardly an intellectual giant, Mengele found expression and recognition in Auschwitz beyond his talent. The all-important Auschwitz dimension was added to . . . create a uniquely intense version of the Auschwitz self as physician-killer-researcher.

  ‘Mengele took hold of and maximized the omnipotent authority held by any SS doctor in Auschwitz. He could give a forceful and flowing performance in displaying that omnipotence because it blended so readily with the traits and ideology he brought to the camp. In Auschwitz, Mengele was the “right man in the right place at the right time”. His energies no less than his ambition were galvanized by this Auschwitz synchronization of all his faculties.’

  Hoping it would lead to a postwar professorship, he claimed his research on twins would unlock the biological secrets of multiple birth in such a way that the Master Race could eventually mass-produce its own breed of blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan supermen: a tribe to which neither Hitler nor Himmler belonged. Neither, for that matter, did the dashing Dr Mengele.

  Despite the many ‘Angel of Death’ accounts that picture Mengele as tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Wiesenthal has always insisted (and the recent autopsies bear him out) that Mengele was ‘a small, swarthy, dark-haired man with a slight squint in his left eye and a triangular cleft between his upper front teeth. While still in Auschwitz, he was beginning to go bald. He looked like a gypsy, but wanted to look like an Aryan – which he never did.’ His eyes were greenish brown, hi
s hair dark brown, and his height around five feet eight inches.

  A woman prisoner who worked as a medical and anthropological artist – diagramming and documenting Mengele’s experiments – remembers him graphically as looking ‘like Peter Sellers, but better . . . His head was like a cat’s head. It was wide at the temples. He had a widow’s peak, dark brown hair, brown eyes. His eyebrows made a kind of accent circumflex, like a cat. Using Mengele’s own terminology, I would say he had an M-shaped mouth; a straight, short regular-medium nose; a wide, broad head; a mark on his left ear – a flat round disc on his ear cartilage . . . His eyes were like Peter Sellers’ eyes – as though only half of the iris would show. They were dead eyes.’

  In Mother Was Not Home for Burial, the disturbing memoir of a survivor who revisited Auschwitz in 1980 and died of grief in 1985, M. S. Arnoni recalled his one crucial glimpse, as a teenager arriving at Birkenau, of Mengele: ‘He was a strikingly handsome young man. He was not huge, like most of the other SS officers. Medium height and build, his facial features were delicate and refined. No Aryan type, he was dark, around his SS officer’s cap protruding silky dark hair.’

  In his laboratory, an entire wall was lined with human eyes, classified by colour (from pale yellow to bright violet) and pinned like butterflies. He also tried to turn children’s eyes blue by injecting them, most painfully, with methylene dye; when the experiment didn’t work – and it never did! – the children were gassed. Three pairs of twins, all under ten years of age, particularly interested Mengele because within each pair were two different eye colours. After he had injected chloroform into their hearts so they died virtually simultaneous deaths, he removed their eyes and other organs and sent them to von Verschuer’s institute in Berlin in a packet marked ‘WAR MATERIALS – URGENT’ . With one set of ‘heterochromic-eyed’ twins – gypsies who had been shipped to Auschwitz as a family – he had the whole family of eight killed and dissected. When Berlin phoned back to say Mengele had sent eight records, but only seven pairs of eyes, he plundered a pair of heterochromic eyes from an unrelated gypsy and rushed them to Berlin. So much for scientific integrity!

  He stood children on their heads for hours to compute the speed at which blood drained from their stomachs. He immersed them in cold water to correlate temperature levels with loss of consciousness. Dr Martina Puzyna, a University of Lemberg anthropologist jailed for Polish underground activities and employed by Mengele to measure his victims, despised him as a scientist. She told Mengele biographers Gerald L. Posner and John Ware in 1985 that their subject could ‘only be described as a maniac. He turned the truth on its head. He believed you could create a new super-race as though you were breeding horses. He thought it was possible to gain absolute control over a whole race. Man is so infinitely complex that that kind of strict control over such a vast population could never exist. He was a racist and a Nazi. He was ambitious up to the point of being completely inhuman. He was mad about genetic engineering. I believe he thought that when he’d finished with the Jewish race he’d start on the Poles, and when he finished with them, he’d start on someone else. Above all, I believe that he was doing this for himself, for his career. In the end, I believed that he would have killed his own mother if it would have helped him.’

  Perhaps his own appearance afforded Mengele an affinity for gypsies. As trainloads rumbled towards him in 1943 and 1944, Mengele never missed a selection. The gypsies arrived wearing gaily coloured shawls. Some were singing; others played bizarre instruments. ‘I have seldom enjoyed a selection as much as this one,’ Mengele remarked after a few thousand gypsies had passed in review. Some he selected for his pigmentation experiments; a rare condition called ‘dry gangrene of the face’ was relatively common among gypsies. And one, a four-year-old boy dressed in white, became Mengele’s mascot – going everywhere with him, giving command performances of song and dance, even standing beside him at selections in the summer of 1944.

  For a while, gypsies fared better at Auschwitz than Jews or other minorities. Some even arrived wearing Hitler Youth uniforms; others greeted their captors with shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ Still others had been plucked from the ranks of the German Army. For them, a special ‘Gypsy Camp’ was created where they could live with their families (and Mengele could explore their heredity) – until the night in late 1944 when all 4500 of them were annihilated. Twelve pairs of twins were gassed apart from the others so Mengele could dissect their corpses. And, at the very last minute, Mengele pushed his little gypsy pet into the gas chamber, too.

  If gypsies were his fetish, twins were his forte. ‘Scientists,’ Mengele once gloated, ‘have always been able to study twins after they have been born together. But only in the Third Reich can Science examine twins who have died together.’ Sometimes, he would even dissect them while still alive. When the first twins were born in Birkenau – boys to a Frenchwoman – he not only presented them with a basket, a blanket, and a pair of baby shirts, but gave their mother an unheard-of white sheet for her stretcher. Yet he took her twins away from her every morning and returned them only at night, weaker and darker from each day of life. Within three weeks, both babies were dead – and their mother, having outlived her usefulness to Mengele, was thrown into an oven.

  Miriam and Tovah Fuchs were Polish Jewish twins who had grown up in the ghetto of Lodz knowing nothing but Nazi oppression there from 1939 to 1944. Their parents were taken away in 1942: their mother to an unknown destination, never to be heard from again; their father was burned in Chelmno. At the age of ten, their older sister, Hana, became mother and father to the orphaned twins. When the three sisters were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Miriam and Hana were sent to the right with the healthier people, while Tovah was sent to the left with the elderly and infirm. Seeing several twins standing in a small cluster on the right, Hana Fuchs protested to Dr Mengele: ‘My sisters are twins and they’ve never been parted.’ Mengele looked from one to the other and, with a flick of a white glove, ordered Tovah to rejoin the living. All the twins were taken to what Miriam has remembered all her life as ‘a hospital that wasn’t a hospital, but a place where they didn’t heal people, where they made well people sick, where you sat up from the injections and transfusions and anaesthetics with new pains in parts that had never hurt before. From then on, I have suffered from ulcers, back pains, headaches, difficulty in concentrating, lapses in memory, and inferiority complexes. To make matters worse, the punishment Mengele inflicted on me has been passed on to the next generation. I gave birth to three children. The first was born with a defective heart and lived only a few hours. The second had to be operated on as a baby for a defective stomach. The third is physically underdeveloped and suffers from damage to both ears and partial deafness as well as jaw defects. He has been in medical treatment ever since birth and will still require several difficult operations. The doctors have certified that all these deformities trace back to the experiments that were made upon me, but I don’t need more doctors to tell me what one doctor did to me. My complaints and the experiences that brought them on are the central truths of my existence,’ she told me over coffee in my living-room in Vienna in 1988.

  Stirring her empty coffee cup aimlessly, she added that her twin, Tovah, now in Israel, has a similar medical history. Also in Israel was their sister, Hana, who was shipped as slave labour to Germany. Hana never forgave herself for the misery she inflicted on her sisters by saving Tovah’s life, though they are thankful. As with Simon Wiesenthal after more than half a century, the Holocaust is still with the Fuchs sisters every day of their lives.

  Simon Wiesenthal says: ‘AIways I am thinking about the cruel experiments he made on twins. I ask myself why. Now I will tell you why. The perverted Nazi racism was based on blood: good blood, bad blood, mixed blood, Jewish blood, the Nuremberg Laws. When Himmler decided to kill the children of Stauffenberg,39 it was because they had bad blood. So what kind of experiments did Mengele make? He took blood from twins and transfused it to expectant mothers.
Why? Because he thought maybe this blood of twins would give them twins. Later he would try giving twins’ blood to young fathers so maybe they will make twins. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ Wiesenthal snorts, his own blood boiling. ‘Twin-makers!’

  On the assumption that, whether or not Germany won the war, the Fatherland would want to recoup its casualties by repopulating in Hitler’s Aryan image, Wiesenthal says Mengele sought to double the reproduction rate and win glory for himself. He kept his ‘Twins’ files in bright blue covers. When one prisoner, a physician from Budapest assigned as a research assistant, spilled a spot of grease on to one of Mengele’s neatest folders, the young German glared at the Hungarian Jew and asked reproachfully: ‘How can you be so careless with these files, which I’ve compiled with so much love?’

  The outraged Hungarian, Dr Miklos Nyiszli, later wrote a book called Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account in which he accused Mengele of sending ‘millions of people to death merely because, according to a racial theory, they were inferior beings and therefore detrimental to mankind. This same criminal doctor spent long hours at his microscope, his disinfecting ovens and his test tubes, or standing near his dissecting table, his smock befouled with blood, his bloody hands examining and experimenting like one possessed.’

  Nyiszli says that Mengele ‘took himself to be one of the most important representatives of German medical science.’ Indeed, tattooing a twin with a battery-operated device, Mengele told the child: ‘You’re a little boy. You’ll grow and some day you can say you were personally given your number by Doctor Josef Mengele. You’ll be famous. Don’t scratch it.’

  History, however, has attested to Mengele’s mediocrity as a scientist. In the words of his captive assistant, Dr Olga Lengyel: