Mengele is the subject of a section of Lifton’s work, and also of a book by Gerald Posner and John Ware. While Posner and Ware present a chronicle of Mengele’s entire life, from youth in Günzburg to his pseudonymous grave in Brazil, Lifton is concerned only with the Auschwitz period and its implications. He observed: ‘While he is obscured by his demonic mythology, he has in many ways earned it…. My task is to try to understand how his individual psychological traits fed, and fed upon, the Nazi biomedical vision.’
It is, indeed, a very great pity that Josef Mengele was never caught and tried. Retribution apart, the survivors needed to understand just who, and what, it was that they so much feared. One of the twins from Mengele’s camp kindergarten said:
I would wish to have a good front-row seat…. To me he is the key to my sense of fear from everything that is German…. I would be very interested to hear the details and to see him pass [through] this metamorphosis of turning back into a person instead of God Almighty.
Mengele was the most adept ‘doubler’ of them all. The visual sense of him survives very clearly: neat and handsome, his black uniform immaculate, smiling pleasantly or whisding Puccini as he distributed death or life on the ramp, sometimes dashing into the oncoming torrent of human beings with a shout of ‘Get those twins over here!’ In the medical blocks, Mengele’s absolute unpredictability terrified the inmates. His kindness toward some of ‘his’ children, gypsies or twins or children with eyes of contrasting pigment, seemed quite genuine. This in no way impeded his ability to have them killed without any apparent feeling, or indeed to kill them himself for dissection. There was no chink in this armour, no way to ‘get around’ Mengele or to take precautions against his changes of mood. And playing his ‘Auschwitz self plainly gave him enjoyment, the pleasure of acting out the fantasy syndrome of sadism-omnipotence which affected so many of the Nazi doctors. Was this a man who loved his work, or who was in love with his own actor’s reflection in the black mirror of Auschwitz?
The Mengele myth afterwards became so potent that the world now believes that he alone performed all the Auschwitz experiments, that he commanded the entire medical department or even the camp itself, that he committed atrocities that in fact never happened, and that he performed all the selections on the ramp – a fantasy that even some survivors share. However, Mengele was not the only experimenter, and – in terms of the deaths and agony inflicted – not the bloodiest. One should remember also Professor Clauberg, the only Auschwitz doctor with a real international reputation – for his infertility research – who carried out injections of caustic substances into the Fallopian tubes of hundreds, perhaps up to a thousand, Jewish women, or Horst Schumann’s irradiation of male and female genitals, or the programme sponsored by Bayer (makers of aspirin) which involved the wholesale slaughter for dissection of patients given an experimental drug against typhus.
Mengele did research on dwarfs, on noma sufferers, and on heterochromia (contrasting eye colour) – in the latter work, gypsy children were killed and their eyes dispatched in boxes to the Friedrich-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But his obsession was with twins. By 1944, he had collected some 250 individual twin children; he did most of the measurement and examination himself, and provided the children – who looked on him as an ‘uncle’ – with above-average care and nourishment. The twin unit was provided with a special laboratory and dissection suite, complete with a large library. Mengele killed some 15 per cent of his twin subjects, which meant that many of them survived Auschwitz.
What was he after? He was plainly driven by a furious ambition to achieve academic fame, and the twins research was intended to form the basis of his Habilitation–qualification as lecturer and then professor. But opinions still differ both about the quality of his work and its purpose. Lifton tends to the view that he made exaggerated scientific claims for erratic and unsystematic work. He has also concluded, after initial scepticism, that Mengele was – as many prisoners have suggested -working not on genetic determinism but on learning ‘the secret of multiple births,’ a discovery that would have had enormous implications for Nazi ideology and the accelerated breeding of ‘outstanding’ racial types.
For the Nazi doctors, Auschwitz was the great temptation. It was not just that commitment to ‘research’ was a handy catalyst for the numbing and doubling processes of self-deception. It was the blinding opportunity offered to ambition by a place in which live human beings were easier to come by than laboratory rats – to quote one particularly foul example, human flesh was used for blood experiments because it was far more plentiful than scarce animal meat. Some of the doctors said openly that it would be morally unforgivable to pass up this unique chance of research on living human beings: another instance of the healing-killing paradox. History has no more terrible example of the Faustian bargain: for the chance of renown, for their own diseased vision of the higher good of the race, these doctors sold their souls.
Some paid their debts on earth. Many of the doctors were executed after the war, and many committed suicide. A number of them got off lightly. Professor Verschuer, who had supervised Mengele’s research and who was the recipient of those boxes of human eyes, was reinstated in a chair at the University of Münster after the war. A committee of fellow professors considered his case, and pronounced that ‘it would be Pharisaical for us to regard in hindsight isolated incidents in the life of an otherwise brave and honourable man, who has had a difficult life and frequendy displayed his nobility of character, as an unpardonable moral stain.’ Similarly, the German Chamber of Physicians, sitting in 1955, refused to withdraw the tide of doctor of medicine from their colleague Professor Clauberg.
Josef Mengele got clean away. Doggedly shielded and financed by the Mengele clan, using the wealth of the family agricultural machinery factory at Günzburg, he survived for 35 years until – a miserable, sick, frightened old man – he had a heart attack and died while swimming in Brazil in February 1979. When his bones were finally identified in 1985 I had the chance to look at his diaries, a stack of notebooks piled on the desk of a magazine office in Munich. They seemed no more than the ramblings of a sour exile engaged in lying to himself about the past, and offered little to grow excited about. To my surprise, however, Gerald Posner and John Ware have written a book on Mengele – well researched and wonderfully free of all the customary fantasy and exaggeration – that makes fascinating reading.
They dredge up for rueful examination all the nonsense about Mengele as the Führer of heavily guarded Nazi enclaves in the jungle, all the phony announcements that he had been found or had escaped arrest by hours. It is – alas – all too clear why Mengele evaded capture and retribution for so long. The reason is that nobody tried hard enough or long enough to find him. His cover was not difficult to penetrate. In fact, in his Argentina years, he abandoned concealment altogether and frequently used his own name. Even after his move to Paraguay in 1959, a typist at the West German embassy in Asunción was able to remark casually that her broken ankle had been set by a German doctor named Mengele. His nineteen years in Brazil, from October 1960 to his death in 1979, took him from one fairly amateurish concealment and pseudonym to another, much of the time within reach of the city of Sao Paulo or, finally, in its suburbs.
Any dedicated team of investigative journalists, given time, patience, money, and a modest element of luck, would have tracked him down. No such team appeared. Posner and Ware, a New York lawyer and a British television producer, were the right kind of investigators, but they only began their hunt when Mengele was already dead.
Before 1960, the year of Eichmann’s kidnapping from Argentina by a Mossad unit, few people were much interested in Mengele. In that year, however, the West German press began to give copious publicity to his crimes, and rewards were offered. The West German authorities, in contrast, did little until they went into a final burst of activity long after his death. In spite of the pressure of the late Fritz Bauer, public prosecutor in Frankfurt and the real architect o
f the 1963 Auschwitz trial, the police failed to intercept the steady flow of letters between Mengele and his family in Günzburg, or the busy correspondence of Hans Sedlmeier, the family lawyer, who supplied Mengele with money, visited him on several occasions, arranged his trip to Switzerland to meet his son Rolf, and dealt with the various families who sheltered him in Brazil. One raid on Sedlmeier’s house was frustrated by a police source in Günzburg who tipped off the intended target. It was not until May 1985 that a more securely planned raid hit Sedlmeier again, and found reams of Mengele correspondence and data in his wife’s cupboard. As for the West German embassy in Paraguay, its efforts to lay hold of Mengele in 1959 and 1960, when he was living under its nose, were puny.
The Paraguayans themselves, President Stroessner in person and some of his henchmen, were responsible for the obsessive conviction in Europe and North America that Mengele was hidden in that country, although – as Stroessner and Co. knew very well – he had remained there for only a year. Why did they not say openly that he had gone? In fact they did so, but only after they had told so many lies and behaved so evasively that nobody believed a word they said. Their motive seems not to have been any political sympathy for old Nazis, but something much more Latin American: furious patriotic resentment at the way that Nazi-hunters and foreign governments seemed to be pushing them around. They were damned if they would help foreigners who insulted Paraguayan sovereignty and made disparaging remarks about the regime. The result of their refusal to cooperate was, of course, to make things far worse. The world concluded not only that Mengele was still in Paraguay but also that Stroessner was an old German fascist who was deliberately protecting his own.
Every con man and hack who could raise money from a credulous newspaper was soon reporting sure-fire sightings or near-miss meetings, almost all in Paraguay. A more serious question is why the Israelis missed him. Posner and Ware have taken much trouble to seek the answer, and have talked to many of the Mossad men involved. The explanation turns out to be prosaic: bad luck, and lack of resources. In 1960, Isser Harel, then head of Mossad, made some efforts to find and seize Mengele while he was in Argentina on the successful operation to kidnap Eichmann. In spite of a few good leads, Isser Harel had neither the time nor the men to do the job thoroughly. Two years later, however, the small Mossad team under Zvi Aharoni made a breakthrough. An ex-SS officer named Willem Sassen agreed to help, and soon established that Mengele was living in Brazil under the protection of a certain Wolfgang Gerhard. Aharoni and his men trailed Gerhard to a farm near Sao Paulo. And there, while they were eating sandwiches and contemplating the next move, three men rounded the corner of the track and passed within feet of them. Two were Brazilians, but the third was an elderly European with a moustache. It is almost certain that this was Josef Mengele.
Near certainty was not good enough for Aharoni, who flew to Paris to meet Harel and plan the kidnapping. Here the witnesses contradict one another. Aharoni says that Harel ordered him to drop the Mengele inquiry and concentrate on the case of Yoselle Schumacher, a child abducted by his Orthodox grandfather to prevent his parents from taking him back to Russia. Harel claims that he carried on the Mengele operation, but failed to confirm the identity of the man on Gerhard’s farm. What is certain is that, when Harel was replaced shortly afterward, his successor, Meir Amit, insisted on the concentration of Mossad’s efforts upon tasks directly connected with the state security of Israel. Mossad, simply, was too small to pursue effectively both the hunt for old Nazis and more urgent problems like Nasser’s attempt to develop ballistic missiles.
Nobody else came anything like as near to Mengele as the Israelis. But the Mengele-hunting industry boomed on for more than 25 years, fuelled by sensational nonsense about vast Mossad raiding projects. Many of the most amazing tales emanated from the offices of Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna.
Posner and Ware make a judgment on Wiesenthal that seems to me fair. There is no doubt that many of the Mengele sightings or Mengele hide-out reports that Wiesenthal spooned into the jaws of credulous newsmen were quite baseless, and that a man as tough and shrewd as he was should have known that they were baseless. He encouraged the idea that he was a spider sitting at the centre of a world-wide web of agents and informants, which was unfortunately not the case. However, Wiesenthal was not by nature a boastful fantasist out for headlines. His problem was that the Jewish Documentation Centre was a hopelessly under-financed one-man operation. If anybody had given Wiesenthal the money and agents he really needed, I have no doubt that he would have found his man. As it was, he took the only sensible course open to him: using every means to raise publicity and keep the world excited about the search for Mengele, in the hope that – eventually – a reliable informant would be persuaded to come forward. But in spite of all the rewards and feature movies and pseudo-trials staged in absentia, none did so. One detail however, continues to nag. What happened to Willem Sassen, who found the way to Mengele in 1962? Or, more properly, what happened to his information, and why did Aharoni and his colleagues apparently sit on it, instead of passing it on to others who might have made good use of it? This is a hole in the story which Posner and Ware do not fill.
On the subject of Mengele, both books have drawn on the testimony of Dr Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew whom Mengele appointed as his personal research pathologist. His memoir was first published in an English translation in 1960, and Seaver Books have done well to issue it again now in a cheap paperback. Nyiszli saw more than any other survivor whose writings are known to me. Mengele’s dissection laboratory was set up in one of the crematory blocks, and Nyiszli’s job was not only to assist his research but to care for the health of the Sonderkommando - the special work squad of Jewish prisoners whose appalling task was to assist in the process of gassing and cremation. Each Sonderkommando was put to death after about four months, and Nyiszli was a witness both to the ultimate secret of mass murder and to the heroic revolt of a Sonderkommando on the night of 6 October 1944 (all were killed, but only after they had blown up one of the crematories and killed dozens of SS men with weapons smuggled in by the Polish resistance).
Nyiszli was not, it seems, very popular with other prisoner-doctors, who resented his remarkable privileges and felt that he put altogether too much professional zeal into his work for Mengele. But we do not have to like him in order to recognise that this is the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available to a reader, even though – like both Lifton’s book and that by Posner and Ware – it would have been gready helped by a plan of the camp itself. The book also reprints the famous essay by Bruno Bettelheim which served as its foreword in 1960, and which added so much fuel to the agonising controversy over Jewish behaviour in Nazi Europe. I do not agree with it, but its eloquence and outrage must guarantee it a permanent place in Jewish historiography.
‘The Jews of Europe,’ Bettelheim wrote, ‘could have marched as free men against the SS, rather than to first grovel, then wait to be rounded up for their own extermination, and finally walk themselves to the gas chambers.’ The essay also includes Bettelheim’s attack on the Anne Frank legend, in which he claims that the Franks should have obtained guns and gone down fighting, and – here I sympathise – he criticises the stage version of the Diary for the way it ends with Anne proclaiming her belief that there is good in all men. For Bettelheim this speech ‘denies implicitly that Auschwitz ever existed.’
The opposite point of view is put by Etty Hillesum, the young Dutch Jew who voluntarily entered the Westerbork transit camp to help her friends and her people as they awaited the trains to Auschwitz. Her own train left in October 1943, and she did not return. The new volume of her letters is a supplement to the wonderful ‘An Interrupted Life’ which was based on her diaries.1 But even a person as brave and original as Etty Hillesum could write, a few months before the death she foresaw quite clearly, that ‘this is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept.’
[1987
A review of ‘The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide’ by Robert Jay Lifton (Basic Books), ‘Mengele: The Complete Story’ by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware (McGraw-Hill), ‘Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of Mengele’s Infamous Death Camp’ by Dr Miklos Nyiszli, translated by Tibere Kremer and Richard Seaver (Seaver Books), and ‘Letters from Westerbork’ by Etty Hillesum, introduction and notes by Jan G. Gaarlandt, translation by Arnold J. Pomerans (Pantheon).
The Shadows Over France’s Feast
With less than four years to go, France is already preparing a gigantic festival of self-congratulation. In July 1989, it will be 200 years since the French Revolution began.
Robespierre organised the Festival of the Supreme Being. In 1989, Europe will be treated to a Feast of the Supreme Nation. What modern French people now think about the Revolution is another matter, which I will come back to. But official France admits to no doubts. The republican nation of today will be ritually confirmed as the mighty and worthy descendant of the First Republic, ‘united and indivisible,’ which emerged from the flames and blood of 1789.
France under President Mitterrand displays a queer contradiction. At home, there has never been a time when so many of the founding myths of the Republic have been so widely challenged, whether it is the Gaullist-Communist legend of the immaculate Resistance or the value of the Great Revolution itself. But abroad, French nationalism has never seemed so uncritically smug.
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