Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele was an SS doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 30 May 1943 to 18 January 1945. He served on the Birkenau arrival ramp during many of the deportation transports, conducting the selection of those to be killed and those to be admitted as labour. He ran the medical experimentation programme on twins, dwarves and others held in the Zwillingslager. He survived the war, escaped through the post-war ratlines to South America, and lived as a free man for thirty-four years. He drowned of a stroke while swimming off the Brazilian coast in February 1979. He was never tried.

The selections on the ramp

Mengele was one of around thirty SS doctors at Auschwitz who took turns at the arrival ramp. He took the duty more often than most. Survivors of the deportations describe him standing at the head of the line with a small cane, conducting the selection with quick movements of the hand: to the left for immediate gassing, to the right for admission as a labour prisoner. Each selection took a few seconds per arrival. Mengele was particularly attentive to twins and others he wanted for his research, calling out for twins to come forward and pulling them out of the line.

The selections sent around three quarters of the people who got off each transport directly to the gas chambers. Mengele knew exactly what was about to happen to the people he was sending left. He continued for nineteen months. He recorded later, in remarks to colleagues, that he found the selections psychologically difficult but considered them his duty.

The twin experiments

Mengele’s research interest was the heritability of physical traits, conducted on identical twin children selected from the deportation arrivals. The Birkenau Zwillingslager held around 200 to 250 children at any time, in conditions substantially better than the rest of the camp. Mengele used them as paired experimental subjects. He injected dye into eyes to attempt to change their colour. He performed blood transfusions between twins. He deliberately infected one twin with disease and observed the progression against the uninfected control. He performed surgical interventions, including amputations and joint fusions, often without anaesthesia. When he wanted to dissect, he killed both twins of a pair with phenol injections to the heart and dissected the bodies in parallel.

Around 1,500 pairs of twins, around 3,000 children, passed through his programme. Around 200 children survived to the camp’s liberation. The records of the experiments themselves were largely destroyed by Mengele in the camp’s closing weeks. The post-war reconstruction relies almost entirely on the testimony of the surviving twins.

The funding

Mengele was funded for his research by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin under his pre-war academic mentor Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer had submitted the funding application for Mengele’s twin study to the German Research Foundation in 1943 and received approval. Mengele sent body parts, blood samples and organs from his Auschwitz subjects to Verschuer’s institute in Berlin. The samples included internal organs from twins he had killed for the purpose. Verschuer continued his career after the war as a university professor at Münster, never prosecuted, never publicly accountable for what he had received from Auschwitz.

The personal manner

Survivor descriptions of Mengele are striking for their consistency on one point. He was charming, friendly, well-dressed, fond of children. He would distribute sweets to the twins he was experimenting on. The children called him uncle Mengele. The same survivors describe a man who would inject those children with disease, kill them by phenol injection, and dissect them. The two halves of his presentation are reported by survivors as if they were attached to the same man, because they were. The disconnect between his charm and his work is part of what has made him the most-recognised individual perpetrator in popular Holocaust memory.

The escape

Mengele evacuated Auschwitz on 18 January 1945 and served briefly with a Waffen-SS unit. He was captured by American forces in June 1945 and held under his own name in a US POW camp. The Americans did not realise who they had. He was released in late July 1945. He worked as a farm labourer in Bavaria for four years under various false names while remaining in regular contact with his family.

He escaped through the Catholic ratline operated by Bishop Alois Hudal at the Pontificio Collegio Teutonico in Rome, reaching Buenos Aires in summer 1949 with a Red Cross travel document under the false name Helmut Gregor. He lived in Argentina for ten years, openly under his own name from the mid-1950s, working as a doctor without medical credentials in clinics that catered to the German émigré community. He was photographed at gatherings of former SS men. He moved to Paraguay in 1959 when Argentine politics turned against him, and to Brazil in 1960. He lived in southern São Paulo for the rest of his life under various names.

The death and the identification

Mengele drowned on 7 February 1979 at Bertioga beach near São Paulo, of an apparent stroke. He was 67. He was buried in the Embu cemetery near São Paulo under the false name Wolfgang Gerhard. The death was kept secret by the Mengele family and the small German émigré circle who knew. The Mossad and the West German federal prosecutor’s office continued to search for him for the next six years. The truth came out in 1985 when German police searched the São Paulo home of Hans Sedlmeier, the Mengele family business manager, and found correspondence indicating his death. The grave was opened in June 1985 and the remains identified through dental records and skull morphology. The identification was confirmed by DNA testing in 1992 against samples from the Mengele family.

What he was

Mengele is the Nazi war criminal who got away. He lived as a free man for thirty-four years after the war, three times longer than his Auschwitz career. He was never tried, never imprisoned, never made to account for what he had done. The escape was made possible by the Catholic ratline, by the Argentine government, by the German émigré community in South America, by his own family’s payments, and by the limits of post-war international cooperation on Nazi war crimes. He had been at the centre of the Auschwitz killing operation for nineteen months. He had selected on the ramp. He had killed children for medical experiments. He had sent organs to a colleague in Berlin who continued his career as a respected academic after the war. None of it caught up with him in his lifetime.

See also

Sources

  • Gerald Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, 1986
  • Lucette Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Flames, Morrow, 1991
  • David Marwell, Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, Norton, 2020
  • Eva Mozes Kor, Surviving the Angel of Death, Tanglewood, 2009
  • USHMM: Josef Mengele