DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  In order to make sure he got his old job back, Verschuer made Mengele the scapegoat, passing off responsibility for any scientific excesses onto his protege; just how Mengele felt at seeing himself blamed by his former idol is unknown: There is no apparent reference to Verschuer in any of his papers. But Verschuer also resorted to many other lies to regain entry into the academic fold. For example, he told the mayor of Frankfurt, who was overseeing the opening of the university, that he was close to developing a vaccine for tuberculosis. It was an ingenious idea: In the postwar months, an epidemic was raging throughout Germany, and there was an all-out search for a vaccine or a cure.

  Forced like thousands of other Germans to undergo

  “Denazification,”

  whereby former Nazis were probed for the extent of their involvement with the Reich, Verschuer was able to con the Americans who presided over the procedure into thinking he had been little more than a victim.

  If the Denazification authorities had found him to be an active Nazi, criminal charges would have been filed; as it was, Mengele’s mentor was declared to have been only a “hanger-on” of the Nazi regime, and fined the trifling sum of six hundred marks. His appeal was also helped by the accolades of his former colleagues at the University of Frankfurt, who heartily endorsed his efforts to regain his former chair.

  Like his favorite student, Otmar von Verschuer had no regrets about his commitment to eugenics, or about what he had done in the name of science. In years past, he had raised the pitch of his scientific preachings to appeal to the Nazi rulers. Now, Verschuer knew exactly how to soft-pedal his views to gain the trust of the postwar establishment.

  By the end of 1945, while the fugitive Mengele was sorting potatoes and cleaning stables, his teacher was on his way to attaining his former prominence. Versehuer was able to slip, chameleon like into the protective coloration of an innocent academician who has been trapped in evil surroundings. While men who had been far less influential in the Nazi regime than he now feared for their lives, Otrnar von Verschuer worried only about restoring his lost reputation.

  Verschuer’s self-serving technique was useful to other ex-Nazis as well. Mengele rapidly became the scapegoat not only for his old professor, but also for many of the theorists of racial science. They pretended the Auschwitz doctor was an aberration who had distorted the “ideals” of eugenics. Despite the fact that their theories had been used to justify the killing of millions of “inferior” human beings, they chose not to condemn these theories, but only the man who had best put them into practice. They rejoiced when Mengele was thrust into the limelight, for it meant their own actions would remain obscured.

  Verschuer’s attempts to return to the University of Frankfurt, which were going so smoothly in 1945, ran into trouble in 1946. Two of his more ethical former colleagues, upon hearing of his possible read pointment, published a lengthy article on May 3, 1946, in the Neue Zeitung, a Frankfurt daily, describing Verschuer’s activities during the war. The two scientists, who had worked with Verschuer for many years, exposed the fact that he had corresponded with Mengele and knew exactly what was going on at Auschwitz. They charged that he had known about the layout, functions, and activities of the death camp, and was well aware of the source of the “specimens” he regularly received from Auschwitz: Jews put to death by Mengele. As an intimate of the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, Verschuer knew about the Final Solution, had advocated killing Jews as a eugenic measure, and, the doctors claimed, also knew precisely how the exterminations were being carried out, since they believed he himself had visited Auschwitz.

  The scandal that resulted from the publication of the Neue Zeitung article aborted Verschuer’s plans to resume his career in Frankfurt.

  More significantly, the ensuing brouhaha brought both Verschuer and Mengele to the attention of U.S. authorities at Nuremberg. As the international military tribunals were winding down, plans were being made to conduct additional trials. There was to be a special proceeding for individuals who had worked in the death camps.

  At the Berlin office of the U.S. Counsel for War Crimes, a young investigator named Manfred Wolfson was assigned to look into the bizarre affair of Doctors Mengele and Verschuer. Despite the large backlog of cases, Wolfson began digging into the two men’s backgrounds.

  He interviewed their former colleagues from Kaiser-Wilhelm and quickly grasped that Verschuer was as important a target as the more notorious Auschwitz doctor. As Wolfson probed Verschuer’s past, he discovered the professor had consistently used his position as a racial scientist to enhance his ties with the Nazis. He also noted the frequent antiSemitic, pro-Hitler references in articles

  “Verschuer had published in the thirties and early forties.

  In a 1946 report Wolfson carefully prepared for his superiors, he made it clear that most of the horrors for which Mengele was becoming famous had been perpetrated under the aegis of Verschuer. Wolfson wrote that even Mengele’s passion for experimenting on human eyes could be traced back to Verschuer. His old professor had been studying the development of pigmentation in eyes, and had a keen interest in different-colored or hetero chromatic eyes. To satisfy Verschuer’s needs, Mengele would gas inmates who possessed this unusual trait, then ship the eyes to him in Berlin.

  These gruesome discoveries prompted Wolfson to recommend that “Verschuer be “interrogated and tried.” Only after exposing Mengele’s mentor did Wolfson pursue his former protege. He cited witnesses who described Mengele’s obsessive interest in pseudo medical tests on inmates. He noted the camp doctor’s fascination with the sterilization of women. And, of course, he described Mengele’s passion for young twins. “Twins and triplets, predominantly children, were kept in separate barracks so they could be experimented on properly,” one survivor had told Wolfson. This man recounted how his own twins had been placed in Mengele’s hands upon their arrival in Auschwitz in July 1944. He had asked Mengele whether he would ever see his children again. “Of course!” Mengele reportedly replied, cheerful as ever.

  But as the grieving father moumfully observed,

  “To date, I have not seen anyone, nor had any news.”

  MENASHE LORINCzI: For one year after the war, we had no news about our mother. As refugees kept coming back, we would ask them if they had seen her: Was she here? Was she there? Finally, by talking to dozens of people, we were able to piece together what had become of her.

  Mother had been part of a group of traveling women workers. She had spent some time working at Auschwitz, then had been transferred to several other labor camps around Poland.

  At last, she ended up in Riga, a death camp in Latvia. What the Nazis couldn’t do at Auschwitz, they succeeded in doing in Riga: They simply killed everybody.

  They put all the women and children on a ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea, and sank it. Everyone drowned.

  My sister couldn’t accept the fact that Mother had died. Lea kept believing Mother had somehow survived. We both did.

  We would think,

  “Maybe she is still in Russia.”

  LEA LORINCzI: I cried myself to sleep every night those first years after the war, thinking about my mother. I often dreamt that Mother had come home.

  Then, I would get up and realize it was only a dream, and I would start crying again.

  It was a period when I felt very sad. I did not want to be with other people. My father was also depressed. He missed our mother very much, and always wanted to talk about her.

  MENASHE LORINCZI: My sister was very unhappy, and she tried to forget her sorrow by burying herself in the Communist movement. She was extremely active in it.

  She was not a very strong-minded person-she was easily suggestible, and the Communists brainwashed her.

  Lea wanted me to join, too, but I knew the Communists were no good. I knew they hated the Jews.

  They always claimed to attack only

  “Zionists.” But who were the “Zionists”? The Jews. Only the Jews.

  I finall
y had to forcibly yank my sister out of the movement.

  After that, I knew that we had to leave Hungary. We had to emigrate to Palestine.

  But the Communists wouldn’t let us go.

  At the conclusion of his report, which Wolfson submitted to his superiors in November 1946, the investigator recommended that

  “SS

  Haubsturmfuhrer Dr. Josef Mengele be placed on the wanted list and that he be indicted for war crimes.” At last, the Angel of Death seemed about to get his due.

  But Mengele, tucked away in his pastoral hideout, could not have been more removed from the machinations to capture and try him.

  He did not know of Wolfson’s report, and was leading a quiet, peaceful life. His major source of anguish stemmed from his longing to be reunited with his family.

  Mengele’s homesickness was relieved by a visit from his brother Karl in October 1946. The reunion was bittersweet. Karl confirmed the sad news of their mother’s death and their father’s imprisonment. Karl brought with him Hans Sedlmeier, an old school chum of Josef’s, who was now managing the farm-equipment factory. The Mengeles had been forced to turn over control of the company to Sedlmeier because of the Americans’ interest in disbanding any firms run by ex-Nazis.

  Sedlmeier was an ideal interim manager, both because of his loyalty to the Mengeles and the fact that he did not have a Nazi past.

  The visit of Karl and Sedlmeier broke Mengele’s isolation. The two men brought Mengele up to date on Gunzburg gossip as well as on how the family business was faring. And afterward, there was a steady stream of visitors to the Mangolding farm area. One day, Irene herself showed up. Their reunion was a curious mixture of tenderness and disaffection. Years later, Mengele relived the meeting in his autobiographical novel: “I never believed that I would see you again,”

  lrmgard, the character who represents Irene, tells Andreas. She had apparently lost all hope of being reunited with her husband.

  Irene advised Mengele to leave Germany at once; it was simply too dangerous to remain there, she believed. She told him how a few months earlier an American officer and his interpreter had turned up at her house, demanding to know where Mengele was. Although very nervous inside, she had managed to retain her composure. Flashing her nicest smile, Irene had told them the stock story: that Josef Mengele was “missing” in the Eastern Campaign, and was presumed dead.

  While the officer had listened sympathetically to the pretty young woman, standing there with her young son, the interpreter-a Jewish soldier-had been more skeptical. He had lashed out at her, informing her that Mengele was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.

  The two men had finally driven off, but it had taken all of her energy to convince them she really knew nothing of her husband’s whereabouts.

  The tension of having to cover for her war-criminal husband affected Irene deeply, and added to her general unhappiness with her marital situation. Since their marriage, weeks before the start of the war, Irene and her husband had spent little time together. She had stoically borne Josefs going off to war and, after that, to Auschwitz for his scientific career. But now, peace was here at last, the country returning to normal life-yet still they were apart. Her husband was a fugitive, wanted by several governments for his alleged wartime activities. As their son, Rolf, would later reveal, although Irene didn’t believe the accusations leveled against Josef, she found it frustrating not to be with the man she still loved, to be condemned to live by herself, with none of the joys of family life she craved.

  TWINS’ FATHER: After the war, all the survivors wanted to get married, to build homes, to forget the Holocaust and what had happened.

  I met my wife seven months after Liberation. She came from a small village in Czechoslovakia. She had also been interned in the camps.

  We courted exactly four weeks.

  We were married on January 27, 1946-exactly one year after Liberation.

  My first child was born less than a year later.

  We lived in a beautitul city. I had a good job and a very lovely house. Yet neither of us felt settled.

  VERA GROSSMAN: When Mother came back to her hometown after the war, she learned that no one in her family had survived. Her parents and her seven brothers and sisters had all gone to the gas chambers. She was completely alone, with two seven-year-old daughters to care for.

  The three of us went back to our old estate-but the people who had taken it over threatened to kill us. And so we fled to another town.

  Mother got together with another Jewish woman, also a camp survivor.

  They rented two small rooms. They would take in geese and feed them-fatten them up-then sell them for a higher price. People loved buying fat geese, because they could get schmaltz -a thick, delicious paste you make from the fat.

  Eventually, Mother was able to buy a cow with the money she earned fattening the geese. She was convinced that as long as she had milk for her twins, we would never be hungry again.

  But she was always very nervous. She worried about who would take care of us if something happened to her.

  One day, a man she had met at Auschwitz turned up at our door.

  After Liberation, he had gone off to search for his family. He traveled throughout Europe, to Hungary, to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, in search of survivors. Only after he had determined that no one had survived did he come to us and ask for Mother’s hand.

  They were married very quickly. Mother said yes because she felt he would be good to Olga and me, and take care of us. And he did.

  He missed his own family, and was very loving toward us.

  We moved to another town. There, we rented a large apartment.

  Mother stopped working and had a baby. Then she had another baby very quickly afterward. We were a family again.

  But there were a lot of rats in that new apartment. It reminded me of Auschwitz. Each time I saw a rat, I thought of Auschwitz.

  TWINS’ FATHER: I found I couldn’t feel safe anywhere in Eastern Europe-not after what had happened.

  I simply didn’t trust the land where I was living. I had a feeling there was nowhere in Eastern Europe I could really settle down and establish roots.

  My wife and I both wanted a place we could call home. We wanted to emigrate to Palestine.

  All we could think of was running away from Europe and all its memories.

  We wanted out.

  To Mengele’s shock and dismay, during her visit Irene told him she wanted out of the marriage, an idea she had obviously been contemplating for some time. A divorce would free her from the innumerable burdens-and few rewards-of being Dr. Mengele’s wife.

  Mengele was distraught. “She wants to leave me because I am not back home like the other husbands-as if it were my fault,” the protagonist in his book complains at one point. Mengele was unsympathetic to his wife’s grumblings. The doctor-turned-farmhand had troubles enough of his own. In his book, there is a scene where Andreas berates his wife, sternly reminding her of the thousands of women whose husbands are POWs and who are in equally dire straits.

  The reunion with Irene left Mengele feeling depressed and forlorn.

  In the manuscript he wrote decades later, he described his sadness at losing both his mother and his wife. Walburga’s death clearly caused him the most pain, however. “One can never replace a mother,” he observes at one point. But the prospect of losing Irene was almost as distressing. It upset Mengele’s dream of once again leading a traditional family life, even though the life he could now offer her hardly fit the typical bourgeois mode.

  Although Irene’s advice to leave Germany made eminent sense in this period of manhunts and war-crime trials, Mengele felt safe enough in his farm retreat to risk staying put. Did he really think his notoriety would fade? Could he possibly have believed that the Allies would leave Germany and forget all about him? The smug former dandy of Gunzburg was certainly deluded enough to have entertained such fantasies. Perhaps in his heart he even hoped he would be able t
o reemerge and resume his old life in his native land. But for now, he was also pragmatic enough to take no chances and remain in hiding.

  HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: Life in our hometown in Hungary was very disappointing, very sad.

  We cried all the time.

  Only two widowed uncles had survived from our entire family. We were taken to live with them.

  These uncles were both very religious and very strict. We quickly realized there was no future for us in Hungary, there were no young people left. There was no Jewish community.

  There was nothing-absolutely nothing.

  We dreamt of going to Palestine, but our uncles forbid us to join the local Zionist movement, the B’nai Akivah. They didn’t want us in any coeducational groups. We finally were able to find another Zionist group that admitted only girls: Our uncles allowed us to join that.

  We decided we wanted to build a new future for ourselves-in Palestine.

  The continuing Nuremberg proceedings, in particular the concentration-camp doctors’ trial, should have made life most precarious for Mengele. In the fall of 1946, twenty-three representatives of the Nazi medical establishment were indicted. Of these, twenty were physicians, while the rest had served Nazi science in administrative capacities. It is ironic that this trial, where Mengele ought to have been the star defendant, came and went without him; the Wolfson memorandum, submitted even before the trial opened, had carefully outlined the medical crimes both of Mengele and Verschuer, urging that they be indicted.

  Somewhere along the way, however, the report disappeared. What became of it is not known, even to Wolfson, who is now teaching languages for the U.S. Army, and has settled on the West Coast. It may have simply fallen through the cracks, although one can conjure other, far more sinister explanations.

  To this day, that Mengele escaped judgment-even in absentia -in the trial of doctors like himself remains a great mystery of the postwar era. More than any of his peers, he exemplified the excesses of Nazi medical science. He engaged in far greater atrocities than Dr. Waldemar Hoven, the man picked by the Nuremberg team as the premier example of death-camp physician. Hoven, chief doctor of Buchenwald, had participated in many selections-but he never conducted medical experiments. Conversely, those doctors on trial for their inhuman use of human “guinea pigs” had not selected victims for the gas chambers.