Josef Mengele

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SS camp doctor Josef Mengele (detail), taken at the Solahütte near Auschwitz, 1944

Josef Mengele (born March 16, 1911 in Günzburg ; † February 7, 1979 in Bertioga , Brazil ) was a German medic , anthropologist and National Socialist war criminal . After working as assistant to the hereditary biologist and racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer from 1937 , Mengele volunteered for the Waffen SS in 1940 . After serving at the front as a troop doctor with the 5th SS Panzer Division "Wiking" , Mengele was deployed as a camp doctor in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from May 1943 to January 1945 . In this function he made selections , monitored the gassing of the victims and carried out inhuman medical experiments on prisoners . He collected material and carried out studies on twin research , growth anomalies , methods of sterilizing people and transplanting bone marrow, and treating typhus and malaria .

After the end of the Second World War , he was wanted internationally as a Nazi war criminal, but never caught. He died in 1979 in the Brazilian seaside resort of Bertioga . Mengele drowned when he suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea. In 1985, during an intensified manhunt, his bones, buried under a false name, were discovered and identified.

Mengele did not move into the focus of the prosecutors until the early 1960s as part of the investigation into the Auschwitz trials. Before that, he had lived undisturbed in Argentina under his real name for a number of years . His further flight via Paraguay to Brazil gave rise to innumerable speculations and legends, but could only be cleared up after his body was discovered.

After the person of Mengele had been perceived increasingly distorted by sensationalist press reports and Hollywood films since the 1960s, research since the mid-1980s endeavored to "de-demonize". While the circumstances of the flight and Mengele's personality structure were initially the focus, in recent years his integration into the basic scientific research carried out at the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes during National Socialism has been examined. Mengele's close contact with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) under Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in Berlin, to whom he sent hundreds of specimens, his human experiments on prisoners and, above all, his twin research in Auschwitz are recognized by some historians as " pseudoscience ", seen by others as part of an experimental medicine operated without conscience and under racist premises.

Life

Origin and youth

Josef Mengele was the eldest of the three sons of Karl and Walburga Mengele (née Hupfauer), who bought an agricultural machinery company in Günzburg in 1907 and built it up into the town's largest employer in just a few years. When Mengele's father died in 1959, the company Karl Mengele & Sons employed over 2000 people worldwide. Karl Mengele fought in World War I , joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten , during the 1920s and was at least temporarily a member of the DNVP . He is described as conservative, but is not considered an anti-Semite . He ran unsuccessfully in 1924 and 1929 on the list of the Free Citizens' Association for the Günzburg City Council. The fact that he made one of his factory halls available for Adolf Hitler's election campaign appearance in 1932 is often cited as evidence of National Socialist sentiments, but historians unanimously regard it as a solidarity action on the Harzburg Front . In May 1933, Karl Mengele joined the NSDAP and was apparently given a seat on the city council in return for a party donation. After criticism from party circles that he had bought his mandate, he also joined the SS in 1935 . The family milieu from which Josef Mengele came is described by historical research not as National Socialist, but as Catholic - conservative and German national.

Josef Mengele himself joined the Greater German Youth League (GDJ) in 1924 , which was part of the Bündische Jugend . Between 1927 and 1930 he was the "elder leader" of the Günzburg local group. Although the GDJ was anti-Semitic and represented an aggressive nationalism , Mengeles membership is not seen as an expression of an already National Socialist worldview , because the GDJ is assigned more to the spectrum of the “ Conservative Revolution ”.

Education

After graduating from high school in 1930, Josef Mengele enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich for medicine and moved to Bonn for the third semester because of a private relationship . Aware as he describes it himself, he joined no beating fraternity , since it does not behagten their drinking habits. In May 1931, however, he joined the Jungstahlhelm . In his diary in 1974 Mengele explained this by stating that he and a fellow student had observed a communist demonstration and thus had the certainty that it was time to take political sides. In the summer of 1932 Mengele passed the Physikum and returned to Munich in the summer of 1933 after spending a semester in Vienna. He now also enrolled in anthropology , which was taught at the natural history section of the Philosophical Faculty.

Mengele was in 1935 the Director of the Munich Anthropological Institute Theodor Mollison with the highest grade on "Rassenmorphologische examination of the anterior mandibular segment in four racial groups" Dr. phil. PhD . To do this, he examined 123 mandibles from the Munich State Anthropological Collection , i.e. material from the early history of mankind. His aim was to prove that these jaw sections could be used to determine race affiliation. From today's perspective, according to the medical historian Udo Benzenhöfer , this was “more madness than science”.

In the summer of 1936 Mengele passed the medical state examination. After a four-month internship at the Children's Clinic of the University of Leipzig , on Mollison's recommendation in 1937 he took up an assistant position at the University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt am Main , which was headed by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer at that time. Mollison and Verschuer are considered to be the ones who aroused Mengele's interest in genetic pathology and racial hygiene issues.

Assistant to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer

Verschuer gained particular importance for Mengele's further career. This had its name with studies of genetic biology made while in 1927 about inheritance with twins habilitation . Verschuer did not join the NSDAP until 1940, but never left any doubt that he unreservedly supported Nazi racial hygiene . He not only worked on the inheritance of diseases and their genetic prognosis, but also gave expert advice on forced racial sterilization and in processes of so-called “ racial disgrace ” under the Nuremberg Laws . Mengele, whom his institute colleague Hans Grebe described as Verschuer's “favorite student” after the war, collaborated on such reports or prepared his own reports.

Mengele received his doctorate with the highest grade in 1938 with “Family examinations in cleft lip and palate , an attempt to statistically prove their heredity. For this study, he selected 17 subjects who had been operated on between 1925 and 1935 at the Frankfurt University Surgical Clinic for this reason. Through the “clan investigation”, he identified a total of 1222 people, of whom he visited 583 personally. The medical historian Udo Benzenhöfer notes that Mengele primarily focused on so-called “micromanifestations”, of which, according to Benzenhöfer, it is actually not certain whether they can even be counted as cleft lip and palate. One can therefore assume that Mengele “wanted to 'achieve' a high heredity rate”. By taking into account the “micromanifestations”, Mengele initially achieved a heredity quota of 100%, which he lowered again as a result of only considering the occurrence of two “micromanifestations”. After receiving his doctorate, Mengele took on an assistant position in Verschuer's Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene on June 1, 1938 .

Mengele was deprived of both doctoral degrees because of the crimes he committed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1960 and 1961. This decision became legally effective on September 23, 1963.

When the Stahlhelm was integrated into the SA in November 1933, Mengele also belonged to the SA, but resigned there in October 1934 with reference to a kidney disease that had existed since his youth. In 1937 he applied for membership in the NSDAP ( membership number 5.578.974), which took place on April 1, 1938. In 1938 he joined the SS (SS no. 317.885). Hans Münch , who was also a doctor in Auschwitz, attested Mengele in 1985 that he had “[a] us cold career considerations and full of political conviction” on the track “which finally led him to Auschwitz in May 1943”.

Mengele was not significantly involved politically. From October 24, 1938 to January 21, 1939, he did basic military service with the 19th Company of the 137 Mountain Infantry Regiment in Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer, which was shortened to three months . In July 1939 he married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met in Leipzig . Because the father's grandfather was not known to his wife, the entry of the couple into the “SS clan book” was rejected by the Main Race and Settlement Office. After the beginning of the Second World War , Mengele initially stayed at the Frankfurt Institute until he was drafted into the medical replacement department 9 of the Wehrmacht in Kassel on June 15, 1940 .

Army doctor of the Waffen SS

Allegedly because he was harassed by an instructor, Mengele reported to the Waffen-SS and completed a military medical training with the medical inspection of the Waffen-SS in the rank of Hauptscharführer from the beginning of August to the beginning of November 1940 . In September 1940 he was promoted retrospectively to Untersturmführer . In the meantime - apparently immediately after joining the Waffen-SS - he was sent to the "Resettlement Office" in Łódź and to the "Immigration Office" in Posen of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum , where he gave an expert opinion as part of the National Socialist "Germanization" policy carried out the racial biological classification of ethnic German resettlers according to the requirements of the German People's List . Probably with the formation of the division from February to May 1941, at the latest at the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union , he was transferred to the SS division “Wiking” (SS pioneer battalion 5) as a troop doctor . The fact that Mengele took part in the Russian campaign from the start is proven by a meeting with a college friend at the front near Dnepropetrovsk in the summer of 1941. The division is held responsible for massacres of Jews in July 1941.

For his behavior in the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class and promoted to SS-Obersturmführer . There are different information about how long Mengele fought with the "Wiking" division at the front. Later statements by war comrade and later Auschwitz concentration camp doctor Horst Fischer , von Verschuer and von Mengele's wife Irene indicate that Mengele did not return from the front until mid-January 1943 because of an injury. In October 1942 he was still listed as a military doctor with his unit and suggested for promotion. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that he would comply with an ordered transfer to the Reichsarzt SS and Police department on July 23, 1942. After evaluating previously unknown letters from the field post and photographs dated September and October 1942, it can now be considered certain that Mengele returned to his unit and position on the Eastern Front at the beginning of September 1942 after an initial wound and a leave from the front in Freiburg in August 1942 . It is also certain that Mengele was transferred to the SS Replacement Battalion "Ost" on February 14, 1943 and, after his promotion to SS-Hauptsturmführer (April 1943) from the SS Command Main Office , to service on May 24, 1943 with effect from May 30, 1943 was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Camp doctor in Auschwitz concentration camp

Josef Mengele (center) between commanders Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höß at the Solahütte near Auschwitz, 1944. Recording from
Karl-Friedrich Höcker's Auschwitz album

Mengele acted as the chief camp doctor of the "Gypsy camp" Auschwitz B II until it was dissolved in August 1944. He then became the chief camp doctor in the "prisoner infirmary" (HKB) B IIf and in December 1944 a troop doctor in the SS military hospital in Birkenau. However, he always took on tasks in other sections of the concentration camp. His superior in Auschwitz concentration camp was Eduard Wirth's SS medical officer . Mengele left the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 18, 1945 while fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the direction of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, which was intended as a reception camp . Mengele's transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp gave rise to speculation. It was suspected that Mengele volunteered in order not to have to go back to the front, or that von Verschuer might have worked behind the scenes in order to have Mengele a confidant in the extermination camp who could provide research material. On the one hand, it is likely that the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office needed a replacement at short notice due to the sudden and long-term illness of Benno Adolph , the camp doctor of the "Gypsy camp" that had just been set up, and Mengele was just available from the replacement battalion.

On the other hand, there is evidence that Mengele stayed unofficially at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem during his stay in Berlin, of which Verschuer took over in 1942. In any case, Verschuer had intended to bring Mengele to Dahlem on occasion. The historian Benoit Massin considers Verschuer's assistant Siegfried Liebau to be the key figure. Liebau actually brokered an "alliance between Verschuer and the SS". As a personnel officer in the medical office of the Waffen-SS, he had signed Mengele's transfer to the Reichsarzt SS in 1942, worked there during Mengele's informal stay at the KWI-A and not only had been to Auschwitz before Mengele's transfer, but also had the researcher Karin Magnussen from there also brought photographs of "gypsies" with different colored eyes. This connection and a statement by Hans Münch that Mengele asked for the transfer “because of the great research opportunities” allow Massin to conclude that Mengele's presence in Auschwitz was no coincidence.

What Mengele did in Auschwitz emerges primarily from the testimony of survivors, not least because he took his documents with him and shortly before they fled, the camp SS tried to destroy the camp files and hospital documents. On the basis of his review of the investigative proceedings of the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor's office, Ernst Klee warned that statements about Mengele should be "treated with the utmost caution", since Mengele would have "raged" in the main camp , in Birkenau , Monowitz and the satellite camps at the same time . Mengeles area of ​​application was Birkenau. Witness statements can be incorrect, but in the Mengele case in particular, there are statements from inmate doctors and nurses who sometimes had to work closely with him over long periods of time in the Auschwitz concentration camp, so that their statements were evaluated as valid in various investigations. Mengele himself did not leave any records from his time in Auschwitz.

Head camp doctor of the "gypsy camp"

Graphic representation of the gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Various prisoners report that Mengele tried to improve the situation immediately after arriving in Auschwitz. For example, he instructed the kapos not to kill any prisoners, ensured that the children in particular were adequately and regularly cared for, allowed sports such as football and was open to the prisoners' concerns. But there are few such statements. Instead, the characterizations that show Mengele's changeable moods and his particular willingness to participate in the mass murder outweigh by far . According to a characterization of Hans Münch, he was not an opportunist, but completely convinced of the necessity of the "extermination of the Jews". He identified with his job without reservation. Hermann Langbein , a clerk with Eduard Wirths in Auschwitz, testified in the investigation against Mengele in 1960 that he was "the most feared camp doctor" after Friedrich Entress . Mengele stopped attempts to improve the situation of the sick prisoners. Not only did he conceal the hygienic deficiencies in his warehouse, but he also worked hard to ensure that as little medicine as possible was delivered.

Mengele stood out for his particularly ruthless and inhumane way of combating diseases and epidemics , which were widespread in the poor living conditions in the camp. When a typhus epidemic broke out at the end of 1943 in the women's camp, which was under his supervision at the time , he had the 600 inmates of an entire block gassed and then disinfected the block. The women from the next block were transferred to this block, the empty block was disinfected, and so on. He also proceeded in the same way against Hungarian Jewish women in camp B IIc who were sick with scarlet fever and against Jewish children in camp B IIa, among whom measles had spread. In the “gypsy camp” too, Mengele sent all the sick with such potentially epidemic infections to the gas chambers . According to Rudolf Höß , the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Mengele kept to a secret order from Heinrich Himmler , according to which the sick in the gypsy camp, especially the children, were to be removed inconspicuously by the doctors.

His superior Wirths suggested Mengele for the War Merit Cross in February 1944 precisely because of his work in the fight against epidemics . In July 1944, Mengele directed the liquidation of the “Theresienstadt family camp”, with around 4,000 people being murdered under the pretext of fighting a typhus epidemic. On August 19, 1944, Wirths judged that Mengele had “fulfilled all the tasks assigned to him, often under the most difficult conditions, to the full satisfaction of his superiors and that he was able to cope with any situation”.

Due to the illnesses and poor nutrition, of the 22,600 Sinti and Roma deported to Auschwitz - more than half of them women and children - around 70% died by the end of 1943. By the time their systematic murder began, 13,600 inmates had died. The liquidation of the "gypsy camp", which was probably decided in May 1944, was advocated and implemented by Mengele. After Mengele's selection of those who were still able to work, who were initially transferred to the main camp of Auschwitz and then to other concentration camps, he personally supervised the violent dissolution of the camp on August 2, 1944. The remaining inmates, according to various reports, were between 2897 and 3300, murdered in the gas chambers.

The Polish inmate doctors Tadeusz Śnieszko, Tadeusz Szymański and Danuta Szymańska report that Mengele's way of working as a camp doctor in the “gypsy camp” was “very strange”. During inspections he had shown himself to be mild, so that "even the less skilful gypsies turned to him with their requests and complaints and addressed him as father, father, uncle or the like". In general, Mengele showed no interest in the many sick people. During delousing campaigns, he let sick people stay naked for hours, regardless of their condition, even in winter outdoors in snow and rain, so that many died. In late autumn 1943 he evidently sent 60 tuberculosis sufferers to the gas chambers, so that no one dared to report sick with chest pain. He fought scabies in the spring of 1944 with an acid bath that disinfected but was life-threatening. Mengeles was particularly interested in the spread of noma , twins, children with congenital anomalies and people with eyes of different colors ( iris heterochromia ).

Selections

Arrival of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz concentration camp (May 1944) - recording from the " Auschwitz album "
An old woman with children on the way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau (May 1944) - recording from the " Auschwitz album "

One of the main tasks of the camp doctors in Auschwitz was to make selections . The doctors made regular selections on arriving transports at the so-called ramp, but also regularly in the camp itself. They mainly decided by visual inspection who should or should not be killed immediately. Children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the weak and pregnant women in particular were designated for immediate gassing, which the doctors supervised.

Mengele reported that he formally urged himself to make selections, while other SS doctors like Münch avoided this task whenever possible. The Günzburg SS man Richard Boeck, who was part of the main camp's driver service in Auschwitz, reported in the investigation against Mengele in 1971 about the selection of a transport of Hungarian Jews. Mengele let the column of deportees pass by and pointed his thumb sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right. With this gesture he sent some to the gas chambers , the others to the camp. Survivors report that Mengele, who was always very well-groomed and very good-looking, attracted attention because he did not look like a murderer at all. Sometimes he smiled and sometimes whistled an opera aria, especially themes from Rigoletto .

Also within the Auschwitz concentration camp, selections were made again and again, in which Mengele was the one who "always went far beyond the prescribed number". The camp elder of the Birkenau quarantine camp for Jews, Hermann Diamanski , reported during the investigation in 1959 that Mengele went from block to block and pointed out those inmates whom he had designated for gassing or shooting. During a transport from Lithuania that brought about 80 to 90 children and young people to the camp, Mengele set up a frame about 1.20 to 1.40 m high. Anyone who went through this framework without bumping into something was destined for murder. This method of selection is also confirmed by other witnesses. The prisoner clerk Tadeusz Joachimowski also described that Mengele occasionally commissioned prisoner doctors with selections when he wanted to perform other tasks himself.

For selections in the infirmary, Mengele often used a kind of indirect selection, in which he asked the inmate doctors to submit a list of diagnoses and prognoses and made a decision on the basis of these documents. It was not uncommon for inmate doctors and nurses to try to work against Mengele, for example by writing down wrong inmate numbers of the selected, skipping numbers or trying to hide selected inmates, which sometimes, but not always, succeeded and with Mengele, when he discovered it, regularly Led to tantrums.

Mengele was involved in the killing of tens of thousands of people through the selections within the camp alone. Joachimowski estimates that in 1943 and 1944 Mengele sent around 51,000 women to their deaths in camp sections B II b, B II c, B II e and B III alone. The number of victims of his sick selections is also in the thousands, because 400 to 800 prisoners were "sorted out" with each selection. When the "Gypsy camp " and the " Theresienstadt family camp " were dissolved, Mengele selected those prisoners who were still able to work and had the others gassed.

According to the Italian Auschwitz prisoner and doctor Leonardo De Benedetti , Mengele also carried out selections in the infirmary of the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp . De Benedetti reported that he had been subjected to four sick selections by Mengele in Monowitz in 1944: “In the Monowitz camp, these selections took place in two stages: The first selection was made by an SS officer, assisted by the doctors from the hospital in the camp, and a few days later, Dr. Mengele and confirmed the selection of the first by a second, just as quick and superficial review. "This was" final "and represented" an incontestable judgment and an irrevocable death sentence. "De Benedetti's fellow inmate and friend Primo Levi also testified in a statement on the Warsaw trial against Rudolf Höss 1947 Mengeles presence and responsibility for sick selections 1944 in Monowitz.

Medical experiments and investigations

The "water cancer" epidemic
Noma - colored lithograph after a drawing by Robert Froriep (1836)

Mengele paid particular attention to " water cancer " (noma), a rare bacterial infectious disease. This initially creates a swelling of water on the cheek, which, as the inflammation progresses, develops into oral rot up to rotting of the cheek with holes in the facial skin and ultimately leads to death due to blood poisoning . The prerequisite for this most severe course of the disease is a considerable weakening of the body's defenses.

The “water cancer” broke out in the “gypsy camp” in the summer of 1943, where malnutrition and poor hygiene prevailed. Children and young people in particular fell ill. "Whole pieces of meat fell off, and the lower jaws were also affected," reported the Czech inmate doctor Jan Češpiva. “I've never seen a facial burn like that there.” Mengele had his own barrack set up on the grounds of the infirmary for the sick and supervised by the Jewish prisoner and pediatrician Berthold Epstein , who had been deported from Prague to Auschwitz. With the help of another inmate doctor, Rudolf Vítek (still Rudolf Weißkopf in the camp), Epstein examined the course, causes and healing methods of the disease on Mengele's order and gave regular reports.

Mengele carried out detailed examinations of the sick, photographed the affected parts of the cheek and commissioned a painter among the prisoners to draw the faces. In an interrogation on April 13, 1972, the doctor Czesław Głowacki, carer and corpse bearer in the “Gypsy Camp”, also reported that Mengele removed secretions from the oral mucosa of sick children and injected them into healthy children. There was also a test group of adults. After the injections, a rapid deterioration of those affected could be observed. According to Głowacki, 3,000 people died from these “vaccinations”, mostly children.

It is also reported that Mengele had sick children killed in order to have them examined and that he carried out experiments on the effects of different diets. Histopathological examinations and other laboratory analyzes were carried out by the laboratory of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS in Raisko , where prisoners such as Václav Tomášek and Ludwik Fleck worked. Preparations of individual organs, and according to Češpiva also whole children's heads, were made for the Medical Academy of the Waffen-SS in Graz . From various quarters it is emphasized that Mengele was less interested in the problems of malnutrition in all of the investigations that lasted until the hospital in the "Gypsy camp" was closed in June 1943, and more concerned with the role of genetic or racial factors.

Twin research

Another main area of ​​interest Mengeles was twin research, which was also Verschuer's specialty. The systematic twin research goes back to the British Francis Galton , who is also considered the founder of eugenics . The development of identical and dizygoti twin pairs is compared under the assumption that differences between identical twins are exclusively caused by environmental influences because these twin pairs, in contrast to dizygoti twin pairs, have identical genetic material. Since the 1920s in particular, twin research has been an internationally recognized and widespread research method for problems of human heredity. In Germany, this was mainly used to investigate hereditary pathological questions. In the early 1940s, the main desideratum in research consisted in the desire to know what role heredity played in human responses to infections. In terms of method, however, this required an examination of sick twins as simultaneously as possible. In practice, however, such cases were very rare. Even more seldom was it possible to dissect deceased twin pairs as soon as possible in order to be able to carry out histological or anatomic-pathological examinations.

Given this assumption, it is very likely that Mengele saw an opportunity to raise his profile in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hans Münch reported that Mengele considered it irresponsible to let the opportunities that would present twin research in Auschwitz slip by. "If they hit the gas anyway ...", Mengele said. “There will never be this chance again.” He probably intended to do his habilitation using the material from his twin research.

Mengele set up a so-called “kindergarten” on the site of the “gypsy camp”, in which all children up to the age of six were housed and specially looked after. The barracks were in better condition than most of the others, a real children's playground with a sandpit, swings, carousel and gymnastics equipment was set up, and the children received better food for a while. Mengele also carried out the first tests on twins here and brought further pairs of twins which he mainly got from the constantly arriving transports. For this purpose, Mengele often stayed at the ramp outside of his actual duty roster.

Mengele could not carry out his extensive investigations without help, however. He made Epstein head of his experimental laboratory and ensured the cooperation of the inmate doctors and inmate nurses, whom he strictly supervised and left in the dark about the purpose of his research. In the case of the Polish anthropologist Martina Puzyna, who was sick with typhus when she met Mengele in March 1944 during a selection in the infirmary, Mengele provided additional food and better accommodation so that she could have anthropological measurements on twins after her recovery. She stated that rumors were circulating that “an increase in the Nordic breed” was being sought and the breeding of twins was being tried out. She did not learn anything about the further fate of the twins.

Many inmate doctors were terrified and followed Mengele's orders. A few chose to commit suicide . According to a report by the head of the inmate corpse detachment in Birkenau, Joseph Neumann, the doctor, Dr. Koblenz-Levi, who had researched meningitis before the Second World War , was ordered by Mengele to continue his research in the Auschwitz infirmary together with his brother, who was also a doctor. After a few days Koblenz-Levi had told him, Neumann, “that he could not do such barbaric research. [A] few days later, Dr. Koblenz-Levi committed suicide like his brother. [...] I remember how Dr. Koblenz-Levi cried like a little child all the time at work. "

The procedure developed by Verschuer and used by Mengele to differentiate between monozygotic and dizygotic twins was based on a detailed examination of various physical characteristics. At Auschwitz, Mengele used KWI-A questionnaires, on the basis of which a 96-point personal file with photographs, x-rays, regular examinations, urine and blood tests was created for each twin. So far, no reliable information is possible about the special experiments and investigations Mengele carried out on twins.

Eva Mozes Kor , one of the few survivors and founder of CANDLES ( Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors ), recalls:

“We went to the main camp at Auschwitz three times a week to do experiments. These lasted six to eight hours. We had to sit naked in a room. Every part of our body was measured, touched, compared with tables and photographed. Attention was paid to every movement. I felt like an animal in a cage. We went to the blood laboratory three times a week. There we were injected with germs and chemicals, and they took a lot of blood from us. "

- Eva Mozes Kor : Healing from Auschwitz and Mengeles experiments
Surviving children during the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, including the Jewish twins Miriam and Eva Mozes (with knitted hats) - still from film material of the Soviet soldier Alexander Vorontsow (January 27, 1945)

Experiments with blood transfusions , injections of foreign substances and pathogens as well as surgical interventions without anesthesia are documented . As objects of Mengele's research, the twins in the camp enjoyed a kind of special role and protection. At the same time, however, Mengele readily determined her fate. Killings have been reported several times, either on behalf of Mengeles or by him personally, in particular cases in which one twin died of natural causes and the other was killed by an injection of phenol or chloroform into the heart so that he could also be autopsied . In the summer of 1945, the pathologist and inmate doctor Miklós Nyiszli reported how Mengele personally killed 14 “Gypsy twins” by injection and then had them dissected . As a rule, the victims did not notice that Mengele was killing or had killed as part of his investigations. Towards them, also referred to by Mengele as “my guinea pigs”, he behaved correctly and approachably. After the war, survivors therefore had difficulty admitting the insincerity of Mengele's attention.

Since May 1944, some of the Jewish twins had been housed on the premises of the infirmary (Section B Ia) in Barrack 22 of the women's camp. These were moved to wooden barrack I in July 1944. Mothers with twins aged up to two years remained in Barrack 22. Older boys and men were in Barrack 15 of the men's infirmary in Birkenau (B IIf). After the liquidation of the "gypsy camp", Mengele's laboratory with facilities for radiology , stomatology and ophthalmology was also located here .

When the "gypsy camp" was dissolved at the beginning of August 1944, the last twelve pairs of twins that remained there were killed. According to Snieszko and the Szymanski's testimony, Mengele shot the children in the anteroom of the crematorium in Birkenau and then ordered their dissection. Miklós Nyiszli, who dissected the last of these couples, assumes that the children were gassed.

The exact number of twins studied by Mengele is unknown. Massin estimates their total number to be at least 900. A prisoner nurse states that the highest number of twin pairs in wooden barrack I was 350 and that in January 1945, shortly before the evacuation, there were still 72 twins there. Most of them were children between the ages of eight and twelve, and less often adults. Very few survived Auschwitz.

Eyes from Auschwitz

While Mengele was primarily pursuing his own research interests with his twin studies, some of his experiments are brought into direct connection with the projects of other scientists who researched at KWI-A. After 1945 prisoners reported several times that Mengele had told them that he was working “on the possibility of changing the color of the iris”. Mengele was observed dripping liquids into children’s eyes, which made the eyes swell, fester and redden, and which also led to blindness or death. Some witnesses report a large number of prepared eyes, which Mengele apparently also sent to the KWI-A in Berlin for further investigation. Mengele carried out the experiments on Sinti children as well as on Jewish and non-Jewish children, including newborns.

A connection is seen between Mengele's experiments and a research project by the biologist Karin Magnussen at KWI-A. Magnussen worked on the question of the extent to which eye color is hereditary and could serve as a basis for race and ancestry studies. In doing so, she first tested the effects of hormones and pharmacological substances on the pigmentation of the eyes of various “races” on rabbits in the department for “Experimental Hereditary Pathology” headed by Hans Nachtsheim . Her experiments are reminiscent of the instincts made by Mengele. Since Mengele had no ophthalmological experience, he probably got his substances from Magnussen. In an essay from the summer of 1944 on the relationships between iris color, histological pigment distribution and pigmentation of the globe in the human eye , Magnussen also reported on the study of human pairs of eyes. For 31 of these pairs of eyes, she did not provide any information about their origin, so that it is likely that these eyes came from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As part of its denazification sverfahrens 1949 Magnussen to did not specify, but described how her on a "gypsy clan" in 1938 - the family Mechau - became aware in which heaped Heterochromie occurred. In the spring of 1943, shortly before the family was deported to Auschwitz as "gypsies", they photographed the eyes of twins of this family. Mengele gave her the opportunity to continue her research. She asked him to send her a section report and the pathological eye material after the death of a member of this family. Many members of this family died in Auschwitz. Even if the circumstances of her death cannot yet be fully clarified, it is considered certain that the children of the Mechau family were victims of Mengele's human experiments. The inmate doctor Iancu Vexler, for example, testifies that Mengele commissioned him to take heterochromic eyes from members of a Gypsy family after their death, to prepare them and to send them to Berlin for examination. Here Magnussen's superior Nachtsheim took the box.

“I have to admit that it was the greatest shock for me that I experienced in the entire Nazi era when Mengele sent the eyes of a gypsy family housed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The family had heterochromia of the iris and a staff member at the institute who worked on heterochromia had previously shown an interest in these eyes. "

- Hans Nachtsheim : letter from 1961

Miklós Nyiszli also reports of four pairs of twins who Mengele on 27 June 1944, injection of chloroform or phenol killed and their heterosexual chrome eyes he prepare. SS-Oberscharführer Erich Mußfeldt , command leader of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp Special Command , confirmed this as early as 1947.

“When I came on duty, I found three inmate doctors dissecting the bodies of these children. I asked what kind of corpses they were. The doctors replied that Mengele's children were injected with poison because they had features that Mengele was particularly interested in in connection with his research. It was mostly about the color of the eyes. He had found out that of the twin pairs, each twin had one blue and one gray eye. During the dissection, the eyeballs were removed and sent to Berlin as exhibits. "

- Erich Mußfeldt : Statement from August 19, 1947
Blood tests

Mengele officially worked as a camp doctor in Auschwitz in another research project at the KWI-A in Berlin. The biochemist Emil Abderhalden contacted Verschuer in 1940 because he needed the blood of twins to check the “Abderhalden reaction” on identical twins, which is named after him. Abderhalden made the claim that certain reactions of the immune system stimulated the production of specific proteases . The detection of such enzymes in the blood - Abderhalden called them "defense enzymes " - should make it possible to detect diseases such as mental illnesses or cancer through blood tests. Abderhalden also believed that the proteins in tissue and blood contained racial characteristics.

Verschuer took up this idea and developed a research project on the inheritance of “specific protein bodies” from which he obviously hoped to be able to develop a blood test to determine human race. In an interim report by the KWI-A to the German Research Foundation , which funded the project, Verschuer explained that his assistant Mengele, who was employed as a camp doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp, had joined this branch of research. "With the approval of the Reichsführer SS , anthropological investigations are carried out on the various racial groups of this concentration camp and the blood samples are sent to my laboratory for processing." The biochemist Günther Hillmann , who is a recognized specialist in protein research from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was also involved in the project for biochemistry under Adolf Butenandt . In this context, Verschuer spoke of 200 blood samples from members of various "races" that had already been examined and from which substrates had been made.

The molecular biologist Benno Müller-Hill brought these blood tests in connection with another research project at KWI-A, namely on the race specifics of tuberculosis , worked on by Karl Diehl . Accordingly, Mengele targeted “Gypsy” twins and Jews infected with tuberculosis and typhus , in order to then take blood from them for examinations in Dahlem. This was the content of Günther Hillmann's tests, because it was hoped to be able to develop a therapy on a molecular basis. His thesis is made plausible by the external circumstances, coincidences between the research projects and by what has already become known about Mengele's experiments.

In contrast, the historian Achim Trunk asserted a different reconstruction. Accordingly, the tuberculosis research project and the protein body project were in fact separate from one another and not linked to one another. Instead, Verschuer was primarily concerned with the "determination of the racial specificity of proteins", ie with a serological breed test. For this purpose, the subjects in Auschwitz were subjected to a racial anthropological examination and blood was drawn from them. From the blood samples a plasma substrate was produced in Dahlem and rabbits were injected in order to be able to observe the suspected "defense enzymes". In this context, Hans-Walter Schmuhl cites a letter from Verschuer to Diehl from 1944, which he sees as clear evidence of Trunk's reconstruction. The aim was not to detect "defense ferments" against tuberculosis and other infectious diseases in the blood samples taken by Mengele, but rather to process the samples into substrates that should be converted by defense enzymes obtained from rabbits.

Short stature

In addition to his interest in twins, the special attention Mengele paid to people of short stature and those with congenital disabilities is reported. Mentioned in this context is about a group of twenty-two Hungarian dwarfs who were brought to Auschwitz on May 19, 1944 as part of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. Mengele put her on hold from the selection and placed her in block 30 of camp section B II b, later in block 9 of women's camp BI a and carried out extensive investigations. Members of this family were liberated by the Red Army. The small victims in particular always assumed, despite their privileges, that they would not survive Auschwitz.

“We were given numerous syringes in almost every organ, given medication, and had countless blood draws. We were experimented with almost every day. ... Mengele personally supervised the experiments, and he was there almost every day and gave instructions to the inmate doctors about us. ... Even if our living conditions were much better "[than those of the other prisoners]," we experienced great mental agony because we knew that sooner or later we would be killed and that our skeletons would be placed in a biological museum. "

- Ľudovít field : Testimony in the Mengele preliminary investigation , June 12, 1967

The killings of deformed people for research purposes are confirmed by various sources. Miklos Nyiszli reports that he first had to precisely measure people with deformities. They were then of Sergeant Erich Mußfeldt with a small-caliber gun by shot in the neck killed. Nyiszli then had to dissect the bodies and finally etch them with chlorinated lime . He then sent the clean bones in parcels to the KWI-A in Dahlem, where a “Central Biological Collection” was maintained. The recipients there were probably Hans Grebe and Wolfgang Abel , the specialists in these areas at KWI-A. The number of these victims is unknown.

More medical crimes

Mengele carried out human experiments not only in the context of his own research interests, but also oriented himself on the experiments of other concentration camp doctors in Auschwitz. So Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann experimented with special support from Heinrich Himmler to sterilize people. Even Mengele tried various surgical techniques for sterilization and castration of men and women, experimented with the injection of acids in the female oviduct , with X-ray irradiation and hormone gave. Mengele, who had no specialist training in surgery , usually performed these and other operations without anesthesia . Those who survived the operations were later gassed.

Apparently Mengele was only marginally involved in the testing of the new drugs against typhus and malaria, which the Behringwerke , Hoechst and Bayer AG sent in large quantities to the concentration camps. Stanisław Czelny, a Polish doctor who was a prisoner attendant in the “Gypsy Camp”, testified in the investigation in 1972 that Mengele first infected him with typhus in June 1943 and then treated him with an unknown, apparently ineffective drug. The former corpse bearer in the infirmary, Jakov Balabau, reported that Mengele had once looked for prisoners who had at least once suffered from malaria. A total of 48 prisoners were there, who were led into a room one by one and killed by injection. The blood was taken from the still warm bodies, probably in the hope of being able to make a vaccine from it.

The district clerk Judith Guttmann, who originally attracted Mengele's attention as a twin, testified on January 21, 1972 that Mengele carried out experiments with "electric shocks". Around 70 to 80 prisoners, mostly women in Auschwitz-Monowitz, were given electric shocks of various strengths to find out the strength at which they died. The survivors of this series of experiments were also gassed afterwards.

Ruth Elias , who had been deported to Auschwitz as a heavily pregnant woman at the end of 1943, reported in her memoirs that Mengele forbade her to breastfeed her child after she gave birth, apparently to determine how long a newborn could survive without food. After six days, Mengele announced that she should get herself and her child ready to be "picked up", which meant nothing more than the announcement of her gassing. In this hopeless situation, Ruth Elias took a morphine injection from a prisoner doctor and killed her own child. As a young, able-bodied woman without a child, she was assigned to a transport to another camp. The historian Thomas Rahe describes this example of infanticide, as it happened again and again in Auschwitz in order to at least save the mother's life, as part of the counter-logic constructed by the National Socialists, which turns every rational assumption into its deadly opposite and the survival intent of the victims instrumentalized as part of the extermination plan.

Interim balance: Mengele - director of a branch of the KWI-A in Auschwitz?

The question of the extent to which Mengele conducted serious scientific research in Auschwitz despite all the inhumanity has recently been answered anew. Opinions about his qualities as a scientist already differed widely among those who had seen him at Auschwitz. For Hans Münch, he was a talented, almost prophetic scientist. Former inmate doctors questioned the scientific nature of his work because he had only cataloged and collected data without being able to evaluate the data obtained in this way without bias. Other inmates thought he was an obsessed megalomaniac.

Benno Müller-Hill, in a powerful interpretation of the collaboration between Mengele and Verschuer, viewed “mass murder and truth” as fundamentally incompatible and spoke of “pseudoscience”. The objection was that this interpretation relieved science as such. Historian Stefanie M. Baumann, for example, sharply criticized the designation of human experiments in National Socialist concentration camps as "pseudoscientific". Because “the terms 'pseudomedical' experiments or 'pseudoscience', which are still used today in reparation terminology, [contribute] to the trivialization of the facts, and especially the German medical community insisted on these terms after 1945. The distinction between serious and dubious research should help excuse the 'real' scientists [...]. The term 'pseudoscience' is incorrect for the simple reason that the experiments were not unscientific per se. ”When discussing the quality of National Socialist science, it is neglected that the experiments are to be rejected mainly because they are disenfranchised and defenseless People were carried out.

Ernst Klee , on the other hand, identified Mengele's experiments and killings as an “orgy of consuming research” with science. A research project on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society revealed that the connections between the German elite research institutions and the National Socialist violent crimes were wider and more complex than these characterizations suggest. Mengele was well connected in academia and received invitations to international congresses before the war. According to historian Carola Sachse, the Mengele case shows “that there were indeed scientists in this elite organization who were able to benefit from the medical crimes in Auschwitz by obtaining human specimens from there to order. They used this opportunity for their research, in accordance with a way of thinking that went far back in experimental medicine and has by no means been overcome today, which cares as little as possible about the origin of their preparations for the sake of scientific progress. "

Especially since Mengele's various visits to Verschuer in Dahlem are documented, Benoit Massin Mengele referred to as “'Institute Director' of the 'Auschwitz Branch'” of the KWI-A Dahlem. Hans-Walter Schmuhl finds this extensive interpretation problematic because it assumes an institutional connection that actually did not exist and that Mengeles is too dependent on Verschuer. Schmuhl points out that Mengele tried to integrate himself into science, for example by carrying out pharmaceutical studies for IG Farben . Mengele's collaboration with various researchers such as Grebe, Abel and Liebau, but also with the SS doctor Erwin von Helmersen , who was a pupil of the racial hygienist Fritz Lenz and as a camp doctor in the "Gypsy camp" and in prison hospital B II f subordinate Mengeles, leave a whole lot Network of connections with possible other clients from science, industry and SS appear.

In abbreviated form, these historical research results were perceived as if Mengele had carried out inhuman but serious genetic research. It should not be overlooked, however, that the research questions were perhaps in line with the times, but that they were primarily determined by an unquestioned racism that was based on an organic worldview and had practical relevance to Nazi racial politics. The American historian Sheila Weiss also raised the question of whether Verschuer or Mengele would have been willing to carry out experiments on people for the benefit of science who they did not see as inferior.

Verschuer at least lost his position at the KWI-A because Robert Havemann , who had taken over the management of the KWI institutes in Berlin at the beginning of 1946, made the contacts between Mengele and Verschuer public and a commission of inquiry was set up. In interrogations by the military authorities in 1947, Verschuer himself denied knowing the extent of the crimes in Auschwitz; Mengele only told him about factories and how well he got on with his patients.

Camp doctor in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp

On January 17, 1945, the Red Army advanced to Krakow , just fifty kilometers east of Auschwitz . While camp commandant Richard Baer ordered the evacuation of the camp, Mengele left the camp by car in the direction of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, his hastily packed medical documents in his luggage. Since January 18th he was listed as a camp doctor in Groß-Rosen. He was designated as the successor to Friedrich Entress, who was transferred from February 6, 1945, as the new SS medical officer. After Groß-Rosen had been cleared, the headquarters staff moved into the Reichenau subcamp in order to continue to administer the subcamps in the Groß-Rosen camp complex from there until the end of the war. Presumably Mengele also continued his work from Reichenau, because multiple inspections in the infirmary of various Groß-Rosen women's satellite camps in the Sudeten area are documented for February and March 1945. There, among other things, he made selections of sick and pregnant women who were transferred to other camps. Towards the end of the war Mengele was in Northern Bohemia in the war hospital 2/591 of the 17th Army . Here the internist Otto-Hans Kahler worked as a military doctor, whom Mengele knew as a colleague at the Frankfurt Institute under Verschuer. Through Kahler's intercession, Mengele received permission on May 2, 1945 to join the hospital in uniform of the Wehrmacht.

After the end of the war

Internment by the Americans

On their further retreat, the unit initially stayed in the Ore Mountains and finally arrived in Bavaria in June 1945, where it was interned by members of the US Army , initially in a prisoner of war camp near Schauenstein . After six weeks Mengele was transferred to another camp near Helmbrechts and released after two more weeks, although he had been on the war crimes list since May 1945. He was not identified as a member of the SS, let alone as a concentration camp doctor, because he had no papers with him, used false names, comrades vouched for him and he also did not have the typical blood group tattoo of the SS - allegedly he did not have himself out of vanity get tattooed. With forged papers in the name of "Fritz Hollmann" he made his way home via Donauwörth to Günzburg, where he contacted his family and initially hid in the forest for a few weeks.

On the run

Servant in Upper Bavaria

At the beginning of October 1945 Mengele came via Munich to a lonely homestead in Upper Bavaria, the Lechnerhof in Mangolding . Here he worked withdrawn as a servant . The Mengele family avoided any contact for security reasons. It was not until autumn 1946 that his wife Irene visited him, who asked him for a divorce. Although the name Josef Mengeles had already been used in several trials, the Americans considered him dead, especially since the Mengele family had given the public the impression that he was missing in the East.

Via the "rat line" to Argentina

In the summer of 1948 Mengele had come to the decision to flee to Peronist Argentina. He left the Lechnerhof on August 1, 1948, ceded his inheritance by a notary public and crossed the “green border” to Italy on April 15, 1949. In Sterzing , South Tyrol , he received forged identity papers in the name of "Helmut Gregor" and turned to the Swiss consulate in Genoa , which issued him a Red Cross passport. He obtained an Italian exit visa through bribery and left Europe on May 25, 1949 on the North King ship for Buenos Aires . He followed one of the so-called " rat lines " organized by escape organizations such as the "Kameradenwerk" of Hans Ulrich Rudel .

Josef Mengele (Buenos Aires, 1956)

On June 20, 1949, Mengele arrived in Buenos Aires. He found refuge with Gerald Malbranc, received a foreigner's identity card on September 17th, and got to know other emigrants such as Rudel, Willem Sassen and Adolf Eichmann in the German colony . With the support of his family, Mengele was economically independent. After his divorce was announced in 1954, he came into closer contact with his widowed sister-in-law Martha Mengele , née Ensmann. In 1956, a meeting of the two was organized for a ski holiday in the Swiss winter sports resort Engelberg . Mengele flew into Geneva via New York City and met his son Rolf in Engelberg, who was born in Freiburg in 1944 and to whom he was introduced as "Uncle Fritz". Mengele then briefly visited Günzburg before returning to Argentina.

In order to make his wedding to Martha possible, Mengele needed a birth certificate . In the summer of 1956, Mengele therefore applied for identification papers in his real name at the German embassy in Buenos Aires and received a new German passport on September 11, 1956 , because there was no arrest warrant for him in Germany . The authorities hadn't bothered to match Mengele's name with the list of internationally wanted war criminals.

In October 1956 Martha Mengele traveled to Argentina with her son Karl-Heinz. Mengele had bought himself as a partner in a pharmaceutical company and married Martha on July 28, 1958 in Nueva Helvecia (Uruguay).

German arrest warrant and hiding in Paraguay

In the spring of 1958, the writer Ernst Schnabel published his book Anne Frank - Trace of a Child , in which Josef Mengele was mentioned. Excerpts appeared as a continuation in the Ulmer Nachrichten . Nobody knew, it was said at one point, where Mengele was. Soon after, the editorial staff received an anonymous letter. The clerk stated that some people in Günzburg knew very well where Mengele was staying. The editors passed this letter on to Schnabel, who handed it over to the Ulm Public Prosecutor's Office on August 3, 1958 . The Memmingen public prosecutor's office then started investigations, which were brought to the Mengele family. On February 25, 1959, the public prosecutor's office in Freiburg im Breisgau , which had taken over the investigation, issued an arrest warrant, and a few days later Mengele went into hiding in Paraguay.

Hermann Langbein also recorded Mengele's trail independently of Schnabel. He had identified Mengele's divorce lawyer and put together a dossier on Mengele, which he submitted to the Federal Ministry of Justice . He even managed to find Mengele's address, which he then passed on to the Freiburg public prosecutor. It was Langbein who submitted an application in 1960, initially asking the University of Munich to comment on Josef Mengele's qualification for a doctorate.

While Martha Mengele returned to Europe in 1961, Josef Mengele initially hid in the south of Paraguay on the farm of a friend of Rudels near Hohenau near Encarnación . With the help of influential friends, he obtained Paraguayan citizenship in November 1959 in the name of "José Mengele". Not only was Paraguay ruled by the dictator Alfredo Stroessner , of German descent , with whom Rudel had close contacts, but the Paraguayan constitution also forbade the extradition of its own citizens. Mengele were less concerned about the extradition requests that the Federal Republic of Germany had meanwhile sent to Argentina. On May 11, 1960, the Mossad kidnapped Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem . Since his papers were in his real name, Mengele had to fear that he would soon be tracked down. He therefore fled to Brazil in mid-October 1960 with a Brazilian passport made out to the name “Peter Hochbichler” .

There are different reports as to how close the Mossad Mengele was and why the search was finally stopped. Mengele's trail had been followed as far as Brazil and his escape helper had also been identified. The agent Zvi Aharoni was certain that he had discovered Mengele. But at the end of November 1962, Isser excluded Harel for the time being as part of a strategic realignment of the Mossad commando company like that in the Eichmann case.

Hiding in Brazil and death

In São Paulo , Wolfgang Gerhard from the “Kameradenwerk” accepted Mengele and employed him in his printing shop. Dissatisfied with the monotonous work, Mengele took on a position as administrator on the farm of the Hungarian couple Stammer at Araraquara in 1961 . When the Stammers realized who their new steward really was, they forced Mengele to participate in the purchase of a new farm, the Santa Luzia coffee plantation near Lindóia . At the beginning of 1969 Mengele helped to finance half of a house purchase by the Stammers in Caieiras near São Paulo and then moved there as well. Here he made friends with Wolfram Bossert, who took over the necessary messenger services in 1971 when Wolfgang Gerhard returned to Austria. Gerhard left his papers to Mengele. The contact with the Mengele family was mainly through Hans Sedlmeier, an authorized signatory of the Mengele company. In 1975, long-standing tensions between Mengele and the Stammers could no longer be bridged, and Mengele moved into a small house in São Paulo. His son Rolf visited him there in October 1977. On February 7, 1979, during a beach holiday with the Bosserts in Bertioga, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned. They actually wanted to have him cremated. However, since the family's consent was required for this and no contact could be made with them so quickly, he was buried on February 8, 1979 as "Wolfgang Gerhard".

The family was informed but decided to remain silent. Although the Mengele family were not threatened with any legal consequences as relatives, the loyal contact Sedlmeier could have been brought to justice for preventing punishment . This crime expired five years after Josef Mengele's death, i.e. in February 1984.

discovery

With the identification of Martin Bormann's remains in 1973, Mengele was probably the most wanted Nazi criminal worldwide. In August 1979 Paraguay revoked Mengele's citizenship following an intervention by the German federal government under Helmut Schmidt . But it wasn't until 1985 that the investigation began to move. Almost one hundred surviving victims of Mengele, who formed the organization CANDLES in 1984, visited the memorial in 1985 on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz , January 27 . The so-called "Mengele Tribunal" took place in Yad Vashem from February 4 to 6 , during which Mengele was indicted in absentia and thirty survivors described their fate. Both events attracted a great deal of attention around the world. The US began to investigate its involvement in the Mengele case and launched a concerted international search to get Mengeles. Richard Breitman explains the American commitment by saying that the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials have been internalized by the American security authorities. The US had been prepared to take considerable risks in capturing Mengele in order to put Paraguay under pressure.

The rewards offered for his capture totaled the equivalent of ten million DM . In connection with Alfredo Stroessner's planned visit to Germany, which was still said to be hiding Mengele, Petra Kelly addressed a parliamentary question to the federal government that was widely publicized.

On June 6, 1985, the discovery of Mengele's body was reported in the Embú cemetery . The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office had the house of Hans Sedlmeier searched on May 31, 1985 and discovered Mengele's extensive correspondence and an address book. On June 5, the apartment of the Bosserts in São Paulo who reported Mengele's death was searched. Brazilian, German, American and Israeli experts examined the exhumed remains and came to the unequivocal conclusion on June 21 that it was indeed the person wanted. A DNA analysis in 1992 dispelled any last doubts.

estate

It was only after his body was found that it was possible to trace the stages of Mengele's escape. A key source was Mengele's handwritten estate, which his son Rolf had already fetched from Brazil in 1979 and left in June 1985 to Burda-Verlag Munich under individually unknown contractual conditions. The journalists Gerald Posner and John Ware report that Rolf Mengele initially tried to offer Stern magazine his father's estate for money. The freelance journalist Herbert Bauermeister then advised him to leave the bundle of the magazine Bunte over on the condition that the profits should go to victims of concentration camps. While Burda-Verlag has denied a payment to Rolf Mengele to this day, the business journalist Gisela Freisinger came to the conclusion in 2005 that Hubert Burda paid Rolf Mengele one million DM in 1985 and a further million to a charity fund in Jerusalem. Wolfram Bossert sold another part of the estate to Stern .

While the materials in Stern's hands were freely visible, Burda-Verlag kept its part of the estate under lock and key. Experts were only allowed to inspect the documents for a limited time to check their authenticity. As an expert in writing research, Wolfgang Conrad established the authenticity, which was confirmed by the historians Uwe Dietrich Adam , Andreas Hillgruber and Zdenek Zofka on the basis of the detailed knowledge documented in the documents. Zofka pointed out, however, that the authenticity of the documents he checked did not mean the authenticity of the entire material, because unusual spelling errors had been noticed in other documents and the manuscripts of Bossert and Mengele were similar. A systematic examination of the estate was not possible at the time.

The 3500-page diaries and journals from Mengele's estate, of which small excerpts had been published in a series of articles in the magazine Bunte in 1985 and which Posner / Ware also had insight into for their Mengele monograph (1986), were published on July 21 2011 for 245,000 dollars (170,000  euros ) at auction auction house autographs by an American. Neither the provenance of the estate nor the identity of the new owner was disclosed. Mengele's records from or about his time in Auschwitz do not exist. Letters before 1973 were long considered missing or were allegedly destroyed by the family. In 2015, as part of an essay, an annotated transcription of a total of ten letters from the field by Mengele was published, which he had written to his wife Irene in Freiburg and most recently in Günzburg from the Eastern Front or from Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. The providers of the letters auctioned by European and American auction houses between 2010 and 2013, like the new owners, remained anonymous.

Josef Mengele's personal reports from 1960 to 1975 in South America show a self-pitying and isolated person plagued by fluctuating moods. Even long after the end of the war, he justified himself in his notes with topoi of Nazi propaganda , for example by stating that Judaism had forced the war on Germany and that it was a racial struggle in the social Darwinian sense. He told his son that he had never killed anyone. Rolf Mengele also reported that his father claimed that he had only done his duty and carried out orders in Auschwitz. He, Josef Mengele, is not personally responsible for what happened in the camp. He did not invent Auschwitz.

The Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt has Mengeles pocket calendars from 1962, 1963, 1967, 1970, 1973 and 1975 as well as individual notepads. In this, too, Mengele never goes into his National Socialist past or the first post-war years, but sometimes comments on world events in an anti-Semitic way. In the course of the 1970s, increasingly socially isolated and plagued by health problems, correspondence with his son Rolf and his nephew and stepson Karl Heinz Mengele was extremely important to him.

Legends

Although Mengele was one of the world's wanted war criminals as early as 1945, he did not gain public awareness until the early 1960s. This had to do with the investigative proceedings of the German judiciary that began in 1959, with the intensified efforts to get Mengeles in South America, and with the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trials , through which Mengele's crimes became known to a wider public. His apostrophization as "Angel of Death" probably goes back to testimonies in the trials. The revised German arrest warrant from 1981 lists a number of other crimes that can be described as "excesses".

On July 7, 1964, the Bild-Zeitung published the article “Did time stand still in Günzburg?” The Frankfurt attorney general Fritz Bauer had told reporter Willy Schwandes that Mengele had millions at his disposal, which must have come from his brother Alois from Günzburg. Mengele is covered in his hometown, since the whole place lives from the Mengele machine factory . Other media then picked up on the matter, including the rumor that Mengele had attended his father's funeral in November 1959. The historian Sven Keller speaks of a "Günzburg myth" in this context. Around the real core that the Mengele family covered Josef, "a dense tangle of legends of Nazism, conspiracy and anti-Semitism" developed.

Even Simon Wiesenthal took up this "myth." In his book But the Murderers Live , published in 1967, he dedicated the chapter The Man Who Gathered Blue Eyes to Mengele . It contains a number of startling stories, but only a few were true. Wiesenthal reports that Mengele regularly visits the best restaurants in Asunción ; he drives in a black Mercedes-Benz 280 SL , surrounded by armed bodyguards; in the summer of 1960 he wanted to travel to Egypt on a chartered yacht from the Greek island of Kythnos ; he killed an Auschwitz survivor who was looking for him on behalf of the Mossad. Other stories that Michael Bar-Zohar spread, for example , said that Mengele narrowly escaped a kidnapping squad of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Paraguay in 1964 or that he was hiding in the Brazilian jungle with Martin Bormann . Countless people wanted to have seen Mengele. The television reporter Adolfo Cicero sold an alleged film recording from 1966, which was even used on wanted posters . The Brazilian police officer Erich Erdstein claimed to have caught Mengele and shot him in 1968. Beate Klarsfeld suspected Mengele with Bormann in the jungle of Peru in 1971 . According to the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1985, Mengele became “a kind of Flying Dutchman of the millennial empire”.

The Mengele myth continues to produce new headlines even today. Most recently, the Argentine author Jorge Camarasa caused a stir with his suspicion that Mengele made various short visits to Cândido Godói in Brazil during his stay in Paraguay , also known as the "City of Twins", where an above-average number of twin births is recorded. Camarasa speculates that Mengele made experiments here. However, a study by Brazilian geneticists found no evidence of such a connection and attributes the above-average number of twin births to the fact that the city was founded by very few families, so that a genetic peculiarity could come into play.

Literature, film and art

Mengele also used literature and film as a template. The figure of the "Doctor" in Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy appears inspired by him, as does the figure of the dentist Dr. Christian Szell, nickname "The White Angel", in the novel Marathon Man (1974) by William Goldman . In Hochhuth, the "doctor" appears as the embodiment of absolute evil, which differs from his SS comrades and from humanity as a whole. According to Hochhuth, he only plays the role of a person. In the film adaptation of Goldman's novel by John Schlesinger (1976), one scene in particular left an impression in which the antagonist Szell ( Laurence Olivier ) tortures the protagonist "Thomas Levy" played by Dustin Hoffman . Benno Weise Varon, former Ambassador of Israel in Paraguay, said that more than anything else it was the idea that Mengele could torture and kill Dustin Hoffman that made the American public want to catch Mengele.

In the novel The Boys from Brazil (1976) by Ira Levin , Mengele himself is at the center of a conspiracy and has made 94 clones of Adolf Hitler in the South American jungle. The film adaptation by Franklin J. Schaffner was one of the first cloning thrillers . Gregory Peck played Mengele and Laurence Olivier this time his opponent "Ezra Lieberman", who was unequivocally modeled after Simon Wiesenthal. Although the film and the novel raised some important questions, for example about the hiding of Nazi war criminals in South American, authoritarian-ruled states, they also served common Hollywood clichés.

Mengele's last personal meeting with his son Rolf in Brazil in 1977 was made the subject of his story Vati (1987) by the writer Peter Schneider . The text was sharply criticized by literary critics. Gerda-Marie Schönfeld accused Schneider in the mirror that his book was "inferior", "obscene and annoying". He basically plagiarized the five-part exclusive series that the Illustrierte Bunte published in 1985 with Rolf Mengele . At the time , Wolfgang Nagel held that the plagiarism allegation was "unqualified". But beyond the known facts, the story does nothing. Schneider failed because of the language and avoided "pathos or clichés, banalities and platitudes".

In the German film Nothing but Truth , Mengele ( Götz George ) only faked his death in 1979 and faces a lawsuit in Germany twenty years later. This controversially discussed film alluded in its dramaturgy as a court drama to the film The Judgment of Nuremberg (1961). In the form of a generational drama, director Roland Suso Richter discussed the questions of medical ethics and political seducibility.

The artist Jean Tinguely created a Mengele dance of death altar for the city of Basel . In 2005, a memorial plaque for the victims of Josef Mengele was erected in the town of Günzburg.

In the film Schindler's List , Mengele is shown briefly during a selection. In The Deputy of Constantin Costa-Gavras Mengele is embodied in the character of the doctor, in the film just called "Doctor". The figure of Dr. Josef Heiter in the horror film The Human Centipede (First Sequence) , which wants to turn people into a human centipede , is based on Mengele, as is the figure of Dieter Vogel, who is persecuted by the Mossad , known as "The Birkenau Surgeon", in the agent thriller An Open Account from 2010.

Historical research

Mengele was initially the best known or most notorious concentration camp doctor, neither in public perception nor in historical research. In 1946 , Miklós Nyiszli had one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz at all under the title I was the pathologist of Dr. Mengele in the Auschwitz crematorium , but initially only in Hungarian. Since Mengele had also managed to evade prosecution, other Nazi medical crimes were in the foreground. In the physician process 1946/47, in which 20 concentration camp doctors for medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps were accused that were about vacuum trying Sigmund Rascher in Dachau concentration camp or the sulfonamide experiments Karl Gebhardt in the concentration camp documents. Admittedly, the publication of the final report of the German Medical Commission as well as of documents on and from the trial , which Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke provided in 1949, did not attract broader public attention until the new edition from 1960. Until the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trials also brought Mengele's acts in Auschwitz to public awareness, Mengele was therefore just one concentration camp doctor among many.

Mengele's flight, shrouded in mystery, also made serious research into his life difficult for a long time. The biographies that appeared up to 1985 were therefore flawed for various reasons and to varying degrees. The study by journalists John Ware and Gerald Posner , who traced the circumstances of the escape in detail for the first time , is based on Mengele's legacy, which also includes an autobiography and diaries . In 1986, the historian Zdenek Zofka was one of the first in an article in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte to attempt to de-demonize Mengele. Mengele did not act out of a pathological thirst for murder, but out of cold-hearted, unscrupulous calculation. His personality is characterized by boundless ambition and boundless cynicism .

In the same year, the American psychiatrist Robert Lifton , who devoted a chapter to Mengele in his book on Doctors in the Third Reich, also caused a stir . He explained Mengele's crime with a psychological duplication that made it possible for him to incorporate his sadism into an ideological logic of action. The growing interest in Mengele as a person was documented not least in the documentary The Death Doctor from the series Hitler's Helpers (1998) by Guido Knopp and the corresponding Mengele chapter in the book edition of the same name. The only German-language monographic representation of Mengele's biography, published by Ulrich Völklein in 1999, was just as deliberately aimed at a broader readership. Völklein attested to Mengele that he was not a split personality , but a seriously deficient person whose weaknesses in Auschwitz became the prerequisite for his functioning. Sven Keller, whose master's thesis was included in the publication series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 2003, tried to clear up various myths . He mainly dealt with Günzburg's relationship to the Mengele case.

Most recently, Mengele's diverse relationships with top German research in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes during National Socialism were examined. In addition to the pioneering work of Benno Müller-Hill and Ernst Klee's studies on Nazi medicine, it was above all the research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism that reassessed the role of Mengele's human experiments in Auschwitz.

Awards

Publications

  • Racial morphological investigation of the anterior lower jaw segment in four racial groups. In: Morphologisches Jahrbuch 79 (1937), pp. 60-117. (also Munich, Phil. Diss. of Nov. 13, 1935.)
  • Kin examinations for cleft lip and palate. In: Journal for Human Heredity and Constitutional Theory 23 (1938), pp. 17–42. (Also Frankfurt, Med. Diss. of March 30, 1938.)
  • as G. Helmuth: The inheritance as a biological process. In: Der Weg nd (probably 1953).

reception

Movie

music

Fiction

swell

literature

  • Udo Benzenhöfer : Comments on Josef Mengele's curriculum vitae with special reference to his time in Frankfurt. In: Hessisches Ärzteblatt 72 (2011), pp. 228-230, 239 f. (PDF) .
  • Sven Keller: Günzburg and the Josef Mengele case. The hometown and the hunt for the Nazi criminal. Oldenbourg Wissenschaft, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-486-64587-0 .
  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. 3. Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
  • Helena Kubica: Dr. Mengele and his crimes in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In: Auschwitz notebooks. Volume 20, State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau 1997, ISSN  0440-5897 , pp. 369–455.
  • Robert Jay Lifton : Doctors in the Third Reich. Translated from the American by Annegret Lösch. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-608-93121-X .
  • David Marwell : Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death". WW Norton & Company, New York 2020, ISBN 978-0-393-60953-0 .
  • Benoît Massin: Mengele, twin research and the “Auschwitz-Dahlem Connection”. In: Carola Sachse (ed.): The connection to Auschwitz. Life sciences and human experiments at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Documentation of a symposium (= history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Vol. 6). Wallstein, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-699-7 , pp. 201-254.
  • Franz MengesMengele, Josef. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 69-71 ( digitized version ).
  • Benno Müller-Hill : Deadly Science. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-15349-1 .
  • Benjamin Ortmeyer : Beyond the Hippocratic Oath. Josef Mengele and the Goethe University. Protagoras Academicus, Frankfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3-943059-13-7 .
  • Gerald L. Posner, John Ware: Mengele. The Complete Story. McGraw Hill, New York 1986; first German translation under the title: Mengele. The hunt for the angel of death. Translated from the English by Manfred Schmitz. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1993, ISBN 3-351-02409-6 .
  • Hans-Walter Schmuhl : Crossing borders. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics 1927 to 1945 (= History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Vol. 9). Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-799-3 .
  • Achim Trunk: Race Research and Biochemistry. A project - and the question of Butenandt's contribution. In: Wolfgang Schieder, Achim Trunk (ed.): Adolf Butenandt and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Science, industry and politics in the “Third Reich” (= history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism. Vol. 7). Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, pp. 247-285, ISBN 3-89244-752-7 .
  • Ulrich Völklein : Josef Mengele. The doctor from Auschwitz. Steidl, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-88243-685-9 .
  • Guy Walters: Hunting Evil. How the Nazi Criminals Escaped and the Hunt to Bring them to Justice. Bantam, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-553-81939-7 .
  • Markus Wolter: The SS doctor Josef Mengele between Freiburg and Auschwitz - a local contribution to the banal and evil. In: "Schau-ins-Land", magazine of the Breisgau history association . 133rd yearbook 2014, Freiburg (2015), pp. 149–189. ISSN 1434-2766, DNB 011861479 ; Freiburg historical holdings - digital , Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, (PDF) .
  • Zdenek Zofka: The concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. On the typology of a Nazi criminal. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 34 (1986), pp. 245-267 (PDF) .

Web links

Commons : Josef Mengele  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. Zofka, Typologie , pp. 248-250; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 33-52; Keller, Günzburg , pp. 73–75.
  2. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 77–79.
  3. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 53–69.
  4. Benzenhöfer, Remarks , p. 228.
  5. Hans-Peter Kröner: Mengele, Josef. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 969.
  6. Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 456 f.
  7. ^ Benno Müller-Hill : Deadly Science . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-15349-1 , p. 39, 157 ff., Cit. 158 . Benzenhöfer, Remarks , p. 229.
  8. Benzenhöfer, Remarks , p. 229.
  9. The impetus came from a petition from Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein . Mengele's second wife Martha, who represented his legal claims in Germany, had an objection lodged with the help of lawyers. The legal dispute dragged on for several years and was mainly conducted against the University of Frankfurt. In 1963, the legal challenge brought by Mengeles' lawyers was dismissed in the final instance by the Hessian Administrative Court. Mengele's lawyers had prepared a non-admission complaint to the Federal Administrative Court in 1964, but then withdrew them at short notice. Stefanie Harrecker: Graduated doctors. The revocation of the doctorate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität during the time of National Socialism (= contributions to the history of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, vol. 2). Utz, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-8316-0691-7 , pp. 233-238; Keller, Günzburg . P. 57; Völklein, Mengele , p. 273 f.
  10. ^ Völklein, Mengele , p. 70.
  11. Aleksander Lasik: The staffing of the health service of the SS in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in the years 1940–1945. In: Hefte von Auschwitz 20 (1997), p. 314.
  12. ^ Völklein, Mengele , cited above. P. 75. Zofka, Typologie , p. 253 also suspects career reasons .
  13. Völklein, Mengele , p. 89 f.
  14. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 72–74.
  15. Völklein, Mengele , p. 89 f.
  16. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 19-21.
  17. Dieter Pohl : National Socialist Persecution of Jews in East Galicia, 1941–1944. Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-56233-9 , p. 70.
  18. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 22-25.
  19. See: Markus Wolter: The SS doctor Josef Mengele between Freiburg and Auschwitz. A local contribution to the banal and evil . In: "Schau-ins-Land", magazine of the Breisgau history association. 133. Yearbook 2014, Freiburg (2015), pp. 149–189, here p. 159; Transcription of the letter from the field post of September 2, 1942, here p. 184.
  20. a b Völklein, Mengele , p. 91 f.
  21. Benoît Massin, Mengele, twin research and the "Auschwitz-Dahlem Connection". In: Carola Sachse (ed.): The connection to Auschwitz. Life sciences and human experiments at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Documentation of a symposium. Göttingen 2003, pp. 224-233. Hans-Walter Schmuhl: Crossing borders. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics 1927 to 1945. Göttingen 2005, pp. 474–477.
  22. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 , p. 274.
  23. Zofka, Mengele , p. 259 f .; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 30-32; Keller, Günzburg , pp. 64–66.
  24. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 11-17, cited above. P. 16; Zofka, Mengele , p. 265.
  25. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , pp. 412-413. The arrest warrant issued by the Frankfurt Regional Court on January 19, 1981 states that Mengele had 1035 "gypsies" gassed on May 25, 1943 on suspicion of typhus. See Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , p. 44. However, he did not start his service in Auschwitz until May 30, 1943.
  26. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , pp. 412-415.
  27. Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel , Angelika Königseder (ed.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps . tape 5 . Beck, Munich 2007, p. 117 f . ; Karola Fings: National Socialist Forced Camps for Sinti and Roma . In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps . tape 9 . Beck, Munich 2009, p. 211 .
  28. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 414; Völklein, Mengele , p. 122 f .; Keller, Günzburg , p. 32.
  29. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 117–121.
  30. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 21 f., 126-133.
  31. ^ Völklein, Mengele , p. 133 f .; Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 412.
  32. Völklein, Mengele , p. 134 f.
  33. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 140-143.
  34. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 136-143; Keller, Günzburg , p. 32 f.
  35. Cf. Primo Levi: That was Auschwitz. Certificates 1945–1986. With Leonardo De Benedetti . Edited by D. Scarpa and F. Levi. Munich, Hanser 2017, ISBN 978-3-446-25449-7 , in it mainly the texts: Leonardo De Benedetti: Anklage gegen Dr. Josef Mengele (1959), pp. 77-84; Primo Levi / Leonardo De Benedetti: Report on the hygienic-medical organization of the concentration camp for Jews in Monowitz (Auschwitz) (1945/46), p. 13–47, here p. 42 f. and Leonardo de Benedetti: Statement about Monowitz (1946), pp. 58–62, here p. 59. The text Anklage gegen Dr. Josef Mengele was conveyed to the public prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1959 via Hermann Langbein , which issued the first international arrest warrant against Mengele that year.
  36. De Benedetti, Indictment , p. 78.
  37. : Primo Levi: Explanations for the Höß process (1947), in: Primo Levi, So war Auschwitz , p. 64: “From the camp staff [in Monowitz] in the narrower sense, I remember the name and physiognomy of Dr. Mengele, the senior medical officer in all the camps around Auschwitz (!). "
  38. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 379.
  39. Völklein, Mengele , p. 161 f.
  40. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , pp. 378-380; Lifton, Ärzte , p. 421 f .; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 118 f .; Klee, Auschwitz , p. 466; Massin, Mengele , p. 237.
  41. Massin, Mengele , pp. 202-204, 214 f.
  42. Quoted from Lifton, Ärzte , p. 418. The witness quoted by Robert Lifton as "Doctor B." can be identified as Hans Münch. Massin, Mengele , p. 220; Völklein, Mengele , p. 144 f.
  43. Massin, Mengele , p. 220.
  44. Völklein, Mengele , p. 16; Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 380 f.
  45. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 148 f, pp. 27-29; Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 379 f .; Lifton, Ärzte , pp. 416-420.
  46. Völklein, Mengele , p. 159; Klee, Auschwitz , p. 482.
  47. Carola Sachse (ed.): The connection to Auschwitz. Life sciences and human experiments at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Documentation of a symposium. Göttingen 2004, p. 65.
  48. Massin, p. 239 f .; Völklein, pp. 146-149; Kubica, pp. 382-404; Lifton, Ärzte, pp. 411-413.
  49. Völklein, Mengele , p. 151 f.
  50. Zofka, Mengele , p. 257.
  51. ^ Lifton, Doctors , pp. 413-415.
  52. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , pp. 384-386.
  53. Massin, Mengele , p. 237.
  54. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 383 f.
  55. Massin, Mengele , p. 236; Kubica, Dr. Mengele , pp. 382-387; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 149, 152.
  56. Hans Hesse: Eyes from Auschwitz. A lesson on Nazi racial madness and medical research. The case of Dr. Karin Magnussen. Essen 2001, pp. 74-77; Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 407 f .; Massin, Mengele , p. 247.
  57. Hesse, Augen , pp. 56–73; Massin, Mengele , p. 249.
  58. Hesse, Augen , pp. 56–58.
  59. Völklein, Mengele , p. 169 f.
  60. Massin, Mengele , p. 240.
  61. ^ Völklein, Mengele , p. 150.
  62. Achim Trunk: Race Research and Biochemistry. A project - and the question of Butenandt's contribution. In: Wolfgang Schieder u. Achim Trunk (Ed.): Adolf Butenandt and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Science, industry and politics in the “Third Reich”. Göttingen 2004, pp. 260-264.
  63. Massin, Mengele , p. 232; Trunk, Rassenforschung , p. 250.
  64. Benno Müller-Hill: The blood of Auschwitz and the silence of the scholars. In: Doris Kaufmann (Ed.): History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism. Inventory and prospects for research . Göttingen 2000, pp. 189-227, especially pp. 204-212.
  65. ^ Trunk, Rassenforschung , pp. 267–277; Wolfgang Schieder: Top Research and Politics. Adolf Butenandt in the Weimar Republic and in the 'Third Reich' . In: Wolfgang Schieder u. Achim Trunk (Ed.): Adolf Butenandt and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Science, industry and politics in the “Third Reich”. Göttingen 2004, pp. 66-68.
  66. Schmuhl, Border Crossing , p. 506 f.
  67. Völklein, Mengele , p. 156 f.
  68. ^ Völklein, Mengele , p. 157.
  69. Völklein, Mengele , p. 170. Mussfeldt mentions that a man had a particularly crooked spine, but not his son. Both were killed and their prepared skeletons were sent to Berlin. Völklein, Mengele, p. 150.
  70. Kubica, Dr. Mengele , p. 408; Schmuhl, Border Crossing , p. 480.
  71. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 164 f., 170 f.
  72. Vöklein, Mengele , p. 172 f.
  73. Völklein, Mengele , p. 163 f.
  74. Thomas Rahe: Hear Israel. Jewish religiosity in National Socialist concentration camps . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1999, pp. 60-62.
  75. ^ Lifton, Ärzte , pp. 428-430.
  76. Müller-Hill, Blut , p. 212. Völklein, Mengele , p. 185 also uses the interpretation of “pseudoscience” .
  77. Stefanie Baumann: Victims of human attempts as a special case of reparation. In: Hans Günter Hockerts , Claudia Moisel, Tobias Winstel (eds.): Limits of reparation: Compensation for victims of Nazi persecution in Western and Eastern Europe 1945–2000. Göttingen 2006, p. 155. See also Michael Grüttner : Wissenschaft. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism. Stuttgart 1997, p. 153.
  78. ^ Klee, Auschwitz, Nazi Medicine , p. 483.
  79. Massin, Mengele , p. 221.
  80. Carola Sachse: Human experiments in Auschwitz survive, remember, take responsibility. In: Carola Sachse (ed.): The connection to Auschwitz. Life sciences and human experiments at Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes. Documentation of a symposium . Göttingen 2004, pp. 10-13, cit. P. 12.
  81. Müller-Hill, Tödliche Wissenschaft , p. 129; Zofka, Mengele , p. 259.
  82. Massin, Mengele , p. 236.
  83. Schmuhl, Grenzüberreitungen , pp. 478–481; Sachse, Menschenversuche , p. 13.
  84. ^ Mathias Schulz: Teufel im Barackenmeer . In: Der Spiegel 12 (2005), March 21, 2005.
  85. Trunk, Rassenforschung und Biochemie , pp. 278–282.
  86. ^ Sheila Faith Weiss: The Nazi Symbiosis. Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich. Chicago 2010, ISBN 978-0-226-89176-7 , pp. 115-118.
  87. Helga Satzinger: Adolf Butenandt, hormones and gender. Ingredients of a scientific career. In: Wolfgang Schieder , Achim Trunk (ed.): Adolf Butenandt and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Science, industry and politics in the “Third Reich”. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-752-7 ( History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism 7), p. 127; Carola Sachse: Adolf Butenandt and Otmar von Verschuer. A friendship among scientists (1942–1969). In: Wolfgang Schieder, Achim Trunk (ed.): Adolf Butenandt and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Science, industry and politics in the “Third Reich”. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-752-7 ( History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism 7), p. 299 f.
  88. Schmuhl, Border Crossing , p. 481 f.
  89. Andrea Rudorff, Women in the satellite camps of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, Berlin 2014, pp. 173, 212 f, 217, 221, 230.
  90. a b Posner u. Ware, Mengele , pp. 82-113; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 187-224; Keller, Günzburg , pp. 42–49.
  91. ^ Keller, Günzburg , p. 115 f.
  92. Nothing is known about Mengele's stay in the meantime.
  93. ^ Keller, Günzburg , p. 49 f .; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 225-235; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 114-122.
  94. https://www.zeit.de/2017/37/josef-mengele-auschwitz-arzt-mossad-akten/seite-2
  95. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 50–52; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 123-144; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 236-248.
  96. ^ Keller, Günzburg , p. 52 f .; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 144-149; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 248-251.
  97. On the - incorrect - registration address in the Freiburg arrest warrants from 1959 and to determine the actual Freiburg address 1940–1944 cf. the documentation on Mengeles biographical connections to Freiburg in: Markus Wolter: The SS doctor Josef Mengele between Freiburg and Auschwitz. A local contribution to the banal and evil. In: "Schau-ins-Land", magazine of the Breisgau history association. 133rd yearbook 2014, Freiburg (2015), pp. 149–189.
  98. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 253-256; Keller, Günzburg , p. 53 f.
  99. ^ Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903–1968. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 310 f.
  100. Harrecker, Degradierte Do Doctors, pp. 233 f.
  101. ^ Keller, Günzburg , p. 54 f .; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 259-262; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 150-167.
  102. Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 168-185, 225-236.
  103. a b Keller, Günzburg , pp. 56–60; Völklein, Mengele , pp. 263-308; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 197-206, 270-297, 314-348.
  104. ^ Keller: Günzburg , p. 180.
  105. ^ Keller, Günzburg , p. 67.
  106. ^ Richard Breitman: US Intelligence and the Nazis. Cambridge 2005, p. 431.
  107. Breitman, US Intelligence. Pp. 430-437.
  108. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 159–170; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 367-391.
  109. Völklein, Mengele , p. 309 f .; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 394-401. Richard Helmer : Identification of the remains of Josef Mengele. In Archiv für Kriminologie 177 (1986), pp. 129-144. AJ Jeffreys, MJ Allen, E Hagelberg, A Sonnberg: Identification of the skeletal remains of Josef Mengele by DNA analysis. In: Forensics Science International 56 (September 1992), pp. 65-76.
  110. Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , p. 387 f.
  111. ^ Gisela Freisinger: Hubert Burda. The media prince. Frankfurt 2005, p. 202 f.
  112. a b Posner u. Ware, Mengele , p. 13 f., P. 380, p. 387 f .; Zofka, Mengele , p. 247 f.
  113. Zofka, Mengele , p. 247 f.
  114. ^ Nazi was criminal Josef Mengele's journals to be auctioned . In: The Telegraph , July 19, 2011; on estate and estate auction 2011 cf. Wolter, The SS doctor Josef Mengele , p. 162 f.
  115. $ 245,000 for the "Angel of Death" . In: Spiegel Online , July 21, 2011; Angel of death without repentance . In: Spiegel Online - Panorama , November 24, 2004.
  116. Wolter, Der SS-Arzt Josef Mengele , p. 162 ff.
  117. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 205-215, 277-280.
  118. Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , p. 338.
  119. Jana Lösch: The pocket calendar of Josef Mengele. An archive report in review. Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute 16 , autumn 2016, p. 94 f.
  120. Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , p. 237 f.
  121. Using the example of a testimony in the Eichmann trial: Nina Burkhardt: Rückblende. Nazi trials and media representation of the past in Belgium and the Netherlands . Münster 2009, p. 148.
  122. Zofka, Mengele , p. 259 f.
  123. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 126-143, cited above. P. 142.
  124. Keller, Günzburg , pp. 67–72; Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , pp. 254-269.
  125. Posner et al. Ware, Mengele , p. 302 f.
  126. Like a soldier. In: Der Spiegel 26 (1985), June 24, 1985, p. 112.
  127. Jorge Camarasa: Mengele. El ángel de la muerte in Sudamérica. Buenos Aires 2008.
  128. A. Tagliani-Ribeiro, M. Oliveira, A. K. Sassi, M. R. Rodrigues, M. Magonel-Oliveira, G. Steinman, U. Matte, N. J. Fagundes, L. Schuler-Faccini: Twin Town in South Brazil: a Nazi's experiment or a genetic founder effect? In: PLoS One. 6 (2011). doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0020328 . PMC 3110757 (free full text)
  129. ^ Henry C. Lee, Frank Tirnady: Blood Evidence. How DNA is Revolutionizing the Way We Solve Crimes. Perseus, New York 2003, p. 127 f.
  130. ^ Annette Insdorf: Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust. 3. Edition. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, MA 2003, p. 10 f.
  131. Peter Schneider: Dad. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1987. Erin McGlothlin: Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration . Camden House, Rochester, NY, 2006, pp. 149-152.
  132. Gerda-Marie Schönfeld: Such a neighborhood. Is Peter Schneider's story “Vati” simply a plagiarism of illustrated magazines? In: Der Spiegel 11/1987, March 9, 1987.
  133. Wolfgang Nagel: A visit to a monster. Peter Schneider dares to tackle a monstrous topic . In: Die Zeit 17 (1987).
  134. ^ Hanno Loewy: Are we going to do this again? Nuremberg, Jerusalem, Frankfurt. Auschwitz and the courtroom drama. In: Stephan Braese (Ed.): Accounts . Legal and literary discourse in dealing with the Nazi mass crimes. Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, p. 97 f.
  135. ^ Rebekka Jakob: Moments of Remembrance: Memorial for the victims of the concentration camp doctor Mengele in Günzburg , Augsburger Allgemeine , March 12, 2005.
  136. Rainer Traub: God's spy in hell. In: Der Spiegel , April 14, 2001, p. 63.
  137. Miklós Nyiszli: Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i krematóriumban (= Dr. Mengele. As a former autopsy doctor in the Auschwitz crematorium). o. O. (1946). An English-language edition appeared in 1960 with a foreword by Bruno Bettelheim : Miklós Nyiszli: Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account . F. Fell, New York 1960. Initially only excerpts were published in German. See, for example, The Death Factory. In: Gerhard Schoenberner (Ed.): We saw it. Eyewitness reports on terror and persecution of Jews in the 3rd Reich. Hamburg 1962, pp. 248-252. A complete edition in German was first published in 1992: Miklós Nyiszli: Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit. A coroner in Auschwitz . Edited by Friedrich Herber. Translated by Angelika Bihari. Dietz, Berlin 1992.
  138. Mengele was not charged in the Nuremberg medical trial and accordingly was not convicted in absentia. Alexander Mitscherlich , Fred Mielke: Science without humanity: Medical and eugenic wrong ways under dictatorship, bureaucracy and war. Schneider, Heidelberg 1949. The entire edition was bought up by the medical associations. New edition: Medicine without humanity: Documents of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. Fischer, Heidelberg 1960, ISBN 3-596-22003-3 . Angelika Ebbinghaus , Klaus Dörner (ed.): Destroying and healing . The Nuremberg Medical Trial and the Consequences . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-351-02514-9 .
  139. Jürgen Peter: The Nuremberg Medical Trial as reflected in its processing based on the three document collections by Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke. Lit, Münster 1998.
  140. Cf. for example the marginal mention in Raul Hilberg: Die Vernichtung der Europäische Juden. Through u. exp. Edition, S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1990, p. 1010.
  141. Keller, Günzburg , p. 13 f.
  142. ^ Zofka, Mengele , pp. 261, 266.
  143. Lifton, Ärzte , pp. 437-448.
  144. Guido Knopp and Theo Pischke: The death doctor . In: Guido Knopp: Hitler's helpers. Täter und Vollstrecker, Munich 1998, pp. 329–396.
  145. Völklein, Mengele , pp. 184-186.
  146. See Sven Keller (2003/2004): A long shadow: Josef Mengele and Günzburg (PDF). This text is linked on the website of the city of Günzburg (under city ​​history , section A long shadow ).
  147. a b Zofka, Typologie , p. 254.
  148. ^ Zofka, Typologie , p. 254; here erroneously referred to as the "war wounded cross".
  149. Der Weg was a magazine for German emigrants in Argentina. It was published by Eberhard Fritsch, the former German teacher in Buenos Aires and owner of the Dürer publishing house, and, under the editorship of Willem Sassens, had developed into a point of reference for National Socialists in the country. Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903–1968. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 291.