Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  His experiments and observations were carried out in an abnormal fashion. When he made transfusions, he purposely used incorrect blood types. Of course, complications followed. He would inject substances and then ignore the results. But Mengele had no one to account to but himself. He did whatever pleased him and conducted his experiments like a mad amateur. He was not a savant. He had the mania of a collector.

  In her horrifying 1947 book, published under the titles Hitler’s Ovens and Five Chimneys, Dr Lengyel asked herself: ‘What conception could Dr Mengele have had of the medical work he did in the camp?’ Her answer: ‘His experiments, lacking scientific value, were no more than foolish playing and all his activities were full of contradiction.’

  In Prisoners of Fear (1948), another of the first postwar memoirs to mention Mengele, Dr Ella Lingens-Reiner – a Viennese Gentile physician who served in the Austrian underground until she was sent to Auschwitz for sheltering Jews and forced to assist him – described his ‘scientific method’ of weeding out patients by ordering inmate physicians to write out diagnoses and prognoses: ‘If we put down that a patient had to remain in hospital for over three to four weeks, he or she was condemned.’ If a shorter term was predicted, Mengele would summon patient and physician and scream, ‘What! You say you’re a doctor and you mean to send this wretched creature out of the hospital in less than four weeks?’ Sometimes he would send both to ‘The Bakery’, as he called the crematoria. Or he might insist upon releasing the inmate on the date specified, which, with enfeebled patients, ‘was sometimes nothing short of murder’, said Dr Lingens. ‘It was often impossible to find a way out.’

  Dr Olga Lengyel concurred with Dr Ella Lingens: ‘No medical considerations governed his decisions. They seemed entirely arbitrary. He was the tyrant from whose decisions there was no appeal. Why should he trouble to select on the basis of any method? Nor did the state of health have anything to do with his selections . . . How we hated this charlatan! He profaned the very word “science”. How we despised his detached, haughty air, his continual whistling, his absurd orders, his frigid cruelty!’

  The most perceptive diagnosis of Mengele by anyone who met him and lived to tell the tale was that of a layman. The twin he tattooed personally, Marcus Adler, later described the anomaly of Mengele to biographer Gerald Astor in terms similar to Simon Wiesenthal’s characterization of his most elusive quarry. Adler told Astor about ‘a doctor of philosophy, a medical doctor, a man who enjoyed music and poetry, and his greatest weapon was his manner. He could get people to do everything by appearing to be decent. He would totally disarm someone. You could not believe he was lying, yet he lied all the time. He acted on the basis that if you tell a Jew good morning, that proves you are a nice person.’

  Around 1975, when a medical congress was in Vienna, Wiesenthal was contacted by an eminent German doctor who claimed he had recently lunched with Mengele in a private room of the German Club of Asunción, Paraguay while two bodyguards stood watch. After alluding to articles he’d written for German medical journals in the 1930s, Mengele asked his guest what he knew about his subsequent ‘anthropological studies at Auschwitz’. The German – who was no admirer of his host – replied discreetly: ‘I know you only from your reputation in the German press.’

  ‘God damn the press and the Jews!’ Mengele exploded, pounding the table so hard that crockery and bodyguards jumped. ‘What do they want from me? My selections were only to increase the number of living. Without them, everybody would have died.’

  Upon hearing this, it was Wiesenthal’s turn to explode. ‘Why not propose him for the Nobel Prize?’ he berated his informant with sarcasm. ‘Look, more than two million people were “selected” at Auschwitz. There were twenty-three doctors who had selection duty, but how come Mengele wound up selecting more than 400,000? Why was he responsible for so many? We have the duty rosters. We know that Mengele on his own volunteered to replace the others. He was looking for special people for his terrible experiments and, of course, the other doctors said OK.’

  After blowing off steam and then apologizing to the German doctor, who had, after all, sought him out with his seemingly useful information, Simon pondered Mengele’s rationalization and realized, as he put it to me in his own English: ‘He was preparing his own line of defence. A man who is talking this way is thinking: “What will be my defence when I am catched?”’

  If so, Mengele was preparing his defence much earlier. Back in Auschwitz, he once explained to his infirmary’s head nurse, an imprisoned German communist named Orli Reichert, why he invariably sent Jewish women with young children directly to their deaths: ‘When a Jewish child is born, or when a woman comes to the camp with a child already, I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews who five in freedom. I can’t let the child stay in camp because there are no facilities here that would enable it to develop normally. It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother to be there to witness the child’s death. That’s why I send mother and child to the gas ovens together.’

  Since Mengele hoped to open an office as a fashionable obstetrician-gynaecologist in postwar Berlin, he practised his profession by delivering as many babies at Auschwitz as he could find time for – sterilizing all his instruments and cutting each umbilical cord meticulously. Thirty minutes later, unless the infant held some ‘scientific’ interest for him, he would dispatch mother and babe to the gas chamber.

  Mostly, though, he didn’t have time to waste on pregnant women and sent them directly to their doom. Still, he took a certain prurient interest when an inmate conceived in camp. He would interview the expectant mother and savour every detail of romance behind barbed wire. Then he would throw her away. Once, after asking a pregnant fifteen-year-old the most intimate questions, he patted her belly and sent her off to the gas chamber. ‘This camp is not a maternity ward,’ he told her.

  Of all the hundreds of thousands of ‘cases’ that Mengele moved through Auschwitz-Birkenau, the one that moves Wiesenthal the most is the saga of Ruth Eliaz, who did not look pregnant when she arrived there in December 1943. By May 1944, however, she had read the writing on the barbed wire and heard from the camp grapevine that, in the wake of Allied bombings, some healthier inmates would soon be sent to Germany to clear the rubble. More than four decades later, Ruth Eliaz recalled her struggle for survival with the immediacy of the present tense:

  ‘I am in the seventh month. I am told that pregnant women are sent to the gas chamber. I am only twenty years old. I want to live. Friends succeed in placing my number on the Transport to Germany list. We young stronger workers are brought to the women’s camp. Now there is further selection. This time, Doctor Mengele will personally make the selection. We are naked and must march like geese past Doctor Mengele. A few young women have decided to place me in their midst and thus try to direct the attention of Mengele to themselves. We never get near to him. Is it possible? Doctor Mengele doesn’t notice me. I may live? And the new life stirs within me.’

  She is sent to Hamburg, where more perceptive authorities take one look at her shape and ship her back to Auschwitz. Perplexed by his oversight, Mengele singles her out for special care in his hospital. When the baby, a girl, is born, Mengele binds her mother’s breasts with bandages to keep her from nursing. Ruth Eliaz remembers:

  ‘My child is crying from hunger. She wants to be fed. I chew a tiny piece of bread and place it in my child’s mouth. My breasts are full of milk. I am swollen from it up to my neck. Every day, Doctor Mengele comes to enjoy himself by looking at this spectacle.’

  Sympathetic nurses smuggle the baby tea, but it is not enough for the starving infant. On the eighth day, Mengele tells the mother: ‘Be ready tomorrow morning with your child. I am coming to get you.’

  On what she believes to be her last night on earth, Ruth Eliaz clings to her dying daughter until a woman inmate doctor comes to her and says, ‘I will help y
ou. Here is a syringe with a strong dose of morphine that will kill your child. It cannot survive. It is starved. Already it has hunger edema.’40

  Ruth Eliaz tells the woman to go ahead, but she refuses: ‘I am a doctor. I cannot be the one to kill the baby. Look, it has not much more life, but you are twenty years old. You will survive. You will have children. Can you look so on this baby and choose to die with her? Please do it!’

  After two hours of soul-searching, she kills her daughter.

  The next morning, Mengele asks: ‘Where is your child?’

  ‘Died during the night,’ she responds listlessly.

  ‘I want to see the corpse,’ he says. Satisfied, he tells her: ‘You are lucky. You leave for the work camp this morning.’

  In early 1985, to observe the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Mengele ‘trial in absentia’ was held in Jerusalem only a few weeks before his remains surfaced in Brazil. The panel of ‘judges’ included historian Yehuda Bauer, Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, and Simon Wiesenthal.

  As Ruth Eliaz testified – telling how her daughter had died slowly, ‘very close tome. I can still hear her last breath, her last groan’ – Wiesenthal was struck speechless. When he found words, he turned to the other ‘judges’ and said, ‘Please, no questions.’

  Later, Ruth Eliaz came up and kissed him for his eloquent plea for silence, which, she felt, honoured her martyred child as no words could. ‘I have three children,’ she told him, ‘three beautiful children, and they thank you.’

  Reflecting upon that encounter soon after his return to Vienna, Wiesenthal remarks: ‘You can imagine that I am taking with me not only what happened to me in the camps, but what happened to all those witnesses. Some emotions are so mixed that, for me, this was my baby that she killed. You know, after so many years of listening to such stories, people think I should be made from stone. I am not! When people are coming and telling me what happened to them, they start to cry and I cry with them. I feel it. I see it. For only a little while, I can forget. I tell myself that this is 1985 and that was 1944. But then I remember.’

  Quivering, then shuddering, Simon Wiesenthal begins to sob.

  22

  The world’s biggest battlefield

  In the beginning, there was a swamp. Early in 1940, a former Düsseldorf businessman named Richard Glücks discovered it in the fork of the Vistula and Sola rivers in the portion of Poland that Germany devoured after Hitler and Stalin invaded and dismembered their neighbour the previous September. For Glücks’ purposes, this was an ideal industrial site. Not far from the city of Cracow, it had its own community, Oswiecim, with a small hotel and a population of 12,000 potential workers. It was accessible to Vienna, Warsaw, Berlin, and several other key German cities. Most important of all, it bordered on an important railway junction. In his report back to his chief, Glücks described the swamp and its surroundings as a ‘suitable site’.

  Richard Glücks was Nazi Germany’s new Chief Inspector of Concentration Camps. The superior to whom he reported was Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany. And the ‘suitable site’ for their largest Polish enterprise, Oswiecim, later became known by its German name, Auschwitz.

  In the summer of 1941, Himmler summoned Captain Rudolf Höss,41 the first commandant of Auschwitz – by then a year-old slave-labour camp with factories belonging to Krupp, I. G. Farben, Siemens, and other German manufacturers – and told him that the Führer had ordered a final solution to the Jewish problem and the SS must enforce it. Höss returned to Poland from Berlin and, a few days later, Adolf Eichmann joined him.

  Höss, a former guard at Dachau and chief warder at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, had a more criminal past than most SS designated exterminators. In his early days as a Nazi, he had served five years of a ten-year prison sentence for the 1923 vengeance killing of a suspected informer named Walther Kadow in a forest where, after beating him within an inch of his life with clubs and branches, his abductors cut his throat and finished him off with two revolver shots. Kadow had been an elementary schoolteacher, and one of his former pupils, Martin Bormann, was convicted as an accomplice of Höss and sentenced to a year in jail. Bormann later became Hitler’s secretary and Höss’s protector.

  Höss was hanged in the Auschwitz camp on 7 April 1947, from a gallows erected beside the comfortable house where he and his wife and five children resided from 1940 to 1943. At his trial before a Polish military tribunal, he testified that Eichmann discussed with him various methods of extermination and the probable sequence of lands that would lose their Jews: first Russia, Silesia, and Poland; then Germany (including Austria), Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, and Holland. (Hungarian Jews, still protected by a pro-Axis regime, were not yet on the timetable of the Final Solution.) Höss and Eichmann agreed that shooting and hangings, executions and massacres, which prevailed in the East, were unsuitable for Auschwitz, which was expected to process hundreds of thousands of Jews. Nor could they rely on carbon monoxide, used in the euthanasia programme and the extermination empire ‘the savage Christian’, Captain Wirth, was setting up in the east of Poland. (Chelmno was already in operation, soon to be followed by Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.) Cost-effective analysis showed carbon monoxide expensive to produce in quantity while killing too few at a time.

  ‘We did not come to any decision at that time,’ Höss testified. ‘Eichmann was going to find out about some gas which would be easy to come by and not require a big apparatus.

  ‘I drove with Eichmann through the neighbourhood of Auschwitz to look for the most suitable place . . . We found a farm which suited the purpose . . . It was situated a little out of the way, hidden by a little forest, and was close to the railroad. The corpses were to be buried in a nearby field in wide deep trenches. We calculated that, with the right gas, we could kill 800 Jews at one sitting. This calculation later proved to be correct.’

  There were actually two farmhouses on the land Höss showed Eichmann. The Germans called them the White House and the Red House, but they belonged to the Harmatas and Wichajs, two peasant families that had intermarried and shared the land. They were evicted and their homes transformed into bunkers for experiments with the new wonder gas, Zyklon B. Under SS supervision, prisoners from Auschwitz, less than two miles away, dug trenches for the disposal of bodies. The first Jews were gassed in the White House in January 1942, shortly before the twentieth of the month, when the Final Solution was formalized at Wannsee.

  On 17 and 18 July 1942, Heinrich Himmler, who had visited Auschwitz the year before, came back to look at the new nearby transit-and-extermination camp which was sprouting on the two firms. He liked what he saw and told Höss to expand and speed up the operation by combining gas chamber with crematorium in one all-purpose building. Four such death centres were built in the mushrooming new camp, which had 175 hectares (432.5 acres) of land at Nazi disposal; a fifth was built back in Auschwitz, where the whole camp was only eight hectares (not quite twenty acres) in area. There, the first Zyklon B gassings had been tried in the basement of barracks 11, ‘the Death Block’, on 3 September 1941. The gas chamber at Auschwitz would be used for prisoners who rebelled or were punished, who were too sick to work, or were weeded out for other reasons. The other four, on the former farmland of the Red and White Houses, were mostly for new arrivals deemed unfit or who were not needed to work themselves to death for the Third Reich.

  At first, the new camp was called Auschwitz II, but then, thanks to a cluster of birch trees that had been its only distinguishing feature in the beginning, it was christened Birkenau. Together, Auschwitz and Birkenau formed what the Polish Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Resistance and Martyrdom (in conjunction with UNESCO) calls ‘the world’s biggest battlefield, where four million people died in World War II.’

  On Tuesday, 17 January 1945, with Red Army artillery booming in his ears, Dr Josef Mengele had packed two boxes of files on his big projec
ts – the experiments with twins, cripples, gypsies, and dwarfs – and loaded them into a waiting car which took him and several other Auschwitz doctors to the Gross Rosen concentration camp, some 200 miles to the north-west in Silesia. There, they were expected to continue their ‘scientific’ work.

  Thus, the first feasible encounter between political prisoner no. 127371, Diploma Engineer (in architecture) Simon Wiesenthal, and Nazi Party member no. 5574974, Josef Mengele, MD and PhD (in anthropology), would have been in early 1945 at Gross Rosen. Along his 1200-mile death march from the Janowskà and Plaszow camps to Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Wiesenthal’s short stay in Gross Rosen overlapped Mengele’s for a few days. Fortunately for history, however, Dr Mengele’s and Engineer Wiesenthal’s paths didn’t quite cross at that time.

  At Gross Rosen, where bacteriological experiments on Soviet prisoners of war had been going on for three years, Mengele stayed until 18 February. As the Red Army neared Gross Rosen, he flew westward through a landscape littered with corpses and clogged with refugees. Hooking up with a retreating German army unit, he exchanged his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht (regular army) officer’s. The soldiers stayed in central Czechoslovakia for a couple of months until the Red Army drove them to the west.

  At Saaz in the Sudetenland on 2 May, they encountered a motorized German field hospital – one of whose doctors, Hans Otto Kahler, had been a close friend of Mengele’s in the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt before the war. Even though Kahler had one Jewish great-grandparent, his twins research was so important to Professor von Verschuer, the director, that Kahler survived Nazi Party efforts to remove him from the staff and eventually was commissioned a Wehrmacht officer.

  That night, Mengele asked Kahler if he could stay with the field hospital, which specialized in internal medicine. Kahler put in a word with the commanding officer and Mengele was invited to join the staff. Soon after, he had an affair with a German nurse, to whom he entrusted his research files, for nurses were seldom imprisoned or searched by the Allied armies.