Nazi Hunter (39 page)

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her. ‘You’ll know the answer before long.’

Once, he stood before a dozen Yugoslav peasants who had just arrived at Birkenau. ‘Sing something from Wagner for me,’ he demanded. The Slavs had never heard
of Wagner. For that, they died.

At one ‘selection’, a beautiful young girl caught his eye. ‘You look like an educated person,’ he told her. Then he whistled a tune. ‘Do you know what that’s
from?’ he asked in a puzzled tone.

‘It’s Wagner,’ she said helpfully. ‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s from
Tannhäuser
.’

‘Sorry!’ said the genial master of ceremonies. ‘The answer is
Lohengrin
.’ And for that mistake, she went to the left.

When the first deportations from Hungary delivered a freight car-load of one hundred rabbis – all dressed in black hats and long black satin robes – Mengele formed them in a circle
and made them dance. Cracking a whip, he choreographed them faster and faster and made them lift their heads up to the sky and their Lord who was on leave. Then, for entertainment’s sake, he
commanded them to sing – and, without skipping a beat, humiliation turned to pride as the rabbis chanted the most sublime melody in the Jewish liturgy:
Kol Nidre
, an anguished,
plaintive prayer which ushers in the Day of Atonement,
Yom Kippur
, and seems to echo the Jews’ long history of torture, flogging, flaying, hanging, rending, burning, and boiling.
With that, the party was over for Mengele, as the hundred rabbis straightened their backs, broke their circle, and marched off defiantly to the gas chamber, chanting the Jewish death-bed (and
daily) prayer: ‘
Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad
.’ (‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’)

Of the millions he met in the eternal chill before the chimneys of Birkenau, Dr Mengele reserved a special welcome for those who had not been created ‘in God’s image’, for they
were laboratory animals for his diabolical pseudo-scientific ‘experiments’. The author of
Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land,
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, remembers how
‘he once brought a woman to our area who had two noses. Another time he brought a girl of about ten years of age who had the wool of a sheep on her head instead of hair. On another occasion,
he brought a woman who had donkey ears.’ And, of course, he adored midgets and dwarfs. He rubbed his hands with glee when one transport delivered a whole family of midgets from a circus in
Budapest. He was doubly delighted to discover that they had brought their own miniature furniture with
them. Personally assigned by him to private quarters, the midgets
primped and powdered themselves for his house call. ‘How beautiful he is! How kind!’ they exclaimed. ‘How lucky we are that he became our protector! How good of him to ask if we
have everything we need!’ When he arrived, the tiny matriarch fell at his feet, hugged his shiny boot, and started to kiss it. ‘You are so kind, so gorgeous. God should reward
you,’ she murmured. With a flick of his foot, Mengele shook her off his boot and sent her sprawling. ‘Now tell me how you lived with your midget,’ he commanded.
‘Speak!’ Recovering herself, the woman began to tell how her husband was a loving father, a hard worker, a good provider. ‘Don’t tell me about that!’ Mengele
interrupted, frothing at the mouth. ‘Only how you slept with him.’

Most of the midgets died slow, but relatively luxurious, deaths as Mengele bled them every few days to ascertain the secrets of their heredity in his ‘scientific laboratories’. On
blood-letting days, he gave them double rations of bread to reward them for their contribution to German research – and some of the more conscientious midgets even volunteered to be bled at
more frequent intervals just to earn extra bread to feed their families.

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, his 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!