Nazi Hunter (40 page)

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:

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.