Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  He knew his notes were incriminating, even though he didn’t yet know how incriminated he was. Ever since Auschwitz had been liberated on 27 January, his name had recurred in survivors’ testimony to American, British, French, Russian, Polish, Yugoslav, and Czechoslovak authorities. Starting in April, his name had appeared high on the lists of major war criminals compiled by the US Office of Special Investigations, the fledgling United Nations’ War Crimes Commission, and the Allied High Command in Paris as wanted for ‘mass murder and other crimes’. But neither Mengele nor his colleagues had access to such publications, though, on 3 May, the day after he joined the field hospital, his wife Irene heard an Allied broadcast listing the charges against him.

  While Kahler knew Mengele was an SS doctor wearing a Wehrmacht uniform, he never told anyone. A senior physician in the unit, Colonel Fritz Ulmann, suspected the truth because every day at roll-call, Mengele gave a different name. Though the war in Europe ended on 8 May with Germany’s unconditional surrender, Ulmann’s and Kahler’s and Mengele’s field hospital was trapped for six weeks in a twenty-mile no man’s land in a forest of Saxony (now in eastern Germany) between the American and Russian lines, while the Allied commands worked out who had jurisdiction. Finally, in mid-June, their unit simply formed up as a medical convoy and passed through the American lines, making their way through several road-blocks into northern Bavaria.

  Safe from the Russians, they were apprehended by the US Army in the town of Weiden when their gas supply ran out. They were interned there, but, as anticipated, Mengele’s nurse girlfriend was released in a few hours and she headed home to Gera, in the Russian zone, with his research files intact. The officers would have to linger longer while their records were checked.42 When Mengele started to give his name as Memling, this was too much for Kahler, an art-lover, who told his colleague this was dishonourable. So Mengele gave his real name.

  Even though he was in American custody for eight weeks, nobody ever checked his name against the lists of wanted criminals. The early days of occupation were so chaotic that it is quite possible none of the lists filtered down to the camps he was in. One other detail literally saved his skin: back in 1938, when he’d joined the SS, his vanity had made him evade the tattooing of his blood group on arm or chest. Flaunting his expertise as a physician, he’d persuaded the SS that any competent surgeon would cross-match blood types before giving transfusions rather than rely on tattoos. In 1945, the SS tattoo was the first clue American investigators looked for and a soldier without one was considered relatively clean.

  Nonetheless, throughout his stay in American hands, Mengele worried that he might be unmasked. He fell into what Dr Kahler diagnosed as clinical depression and asked Dr Ulmann, who was a neurologist, to treat him. Ulmann voiced his suspicions to Mengele, who broke down and confided just a little of what he had done at Auschwitz. Closing ranks the way the medical profession so often does, Ulmann not only treated Mengele’s anxiety, but assuaged it by offering to obtain a second identification for him to use once he was released or if he escaped. Ulmann, whose own release was imminent, was working at camp headquarters, where he was able to obtain an extra set of his own separation papers. Once outside, Mengele was welcome to become Fritz Ulmann.

  Believing he was ‘clean’, the Americans released Mengele at the end of July, and a truck deposited him in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt on the Danube. He decided to head for nearby Donauwörth, where an old school chum, Albert Miller, was a veterinarian. Borrowing a bike from a friendly farmer, he pedalled to Dr Miller’s door and rang the bell.

  ‘Good day, Dr Mengele,’ was how Mrs Miller greeted her uniformed caller, who was taken aback to be recognized so readily. She invited him in and, when her husband came home, prepared dinner, during which Mengele told his hosts: ‘All the things you will be hearing about me are lies. Don’t believe a word of them. I have done nothing wrong.’

  Mengele asked the Millers to let his family know he was alive, safe, and free. They invited him to stay the night, but he decided against it when American troops arrived after dinner to arrest Dr Miller for questioning about his wartime Nazi activities. Mengele hid in a back room and, later that night, set out for East Germany to retrieve his precious files.

  During Mengele’s perilous three-week journey through Russian lines, Dr Miller (who was quickly released) and his wife passed the news of his visit on to the Mengele family in Günzburg. The doctor’s wife, Irene, who had moved to a cottage in nearby Autenried after their son Rolf was born in 1944, was relieved to hear she wasn’t a widow. On 11 June 1945, three American military policemen had driven up, looking for her husband. Mrs Mengele, who hadn’t heard from him all year, had told them with some certitude that he was ‘probably dead’.

  Bearing Fritz Ulmann’s good-conduct certificate from the Americans, Mengele made his way back to Bavaria and knocked on the door of a pharmacist in Munich who had served with him in combat on the eastern front in 1942. The druggist and his wife were friends of the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz, who had told them what went on there and the role Mengele played. They welcomed him to their apartment, where he stayed four weeks and insisted: ‘I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent. . .’

  ‘You’re crazy!’ the pharmacist told him. ‘It’s impossible for you to get a fair trial. If you turn yourself in, you’ll either be shot on the spot or else you’ll be tried and then hanged. Forget this nonsense about proving your innocence. We must find a place to hide you.’

  German medicine closed ranks around its blackest sheep once again. The pharmacist happened to know the real Dr Fritz Ulmann’s brother-in-law and his wife, both doctors too. They offered to look for work for the fake Fritz Ulmann on isolated farms in eastern Bavaria, whose young men had been so decimated in the war that few, if any, questions were asked of hired hands. Out of gratitude, Mengele volunteered to alter a few letters which changed the name on his document from Ulmann to Hollmann.

  With Mengele, the Ulmann kin drove around Mangolding, an Alpine farm area near the Austrian border. After being turned down twice by farmers, they were welcomed by the Georg Fischer family, who farmed twenty acres of potatoes and wheat, milked a dozen cows, and needed an extra hand. Mengele was introduced as ‘Fritz Hollmann’, a refugee from Görlitz in East Germany on the Polish border. The Fischers were sitting down to eat and invited their visitors to join them. Georg’s younger brother Alois remembers that Hollmann ‘ate as though he didn’t get much to eat in the war. He didn’t say a word – he just ate an enormous amount of food. My brother told him: “If you work as much as you eat, then you’re my man. We will try you.”’

  Fritz Hollmann, alias Dr Josef Mengele, signed on as a farmhand on Tuesday, 30 October 1945, for ten marks a week.

  In a 1987 visit to the scene of Mengele’s crimes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found only a handful of traces of his deathly work: a detailed packing list (signed by him) which had accompanied the head of a twelve-year-old gypsy boy that was shipped on 29 June 1944 to a research institute in Germany for further analysis; a photo of four gypsies he’d castrated; several pages of his handwritten ‘anthropological measurements’, and a letter of recommendation from the SS garrison commander at Auschwitz to the Chief Doctor’s Office. Dated 19 August 1944, it notes that:

  Dr Mengele has been here since 30 May 1943.

  Dr Mengele has an open, honourable, firm character. He is absolutely trustworthy, upright, and direct. His mental and bodily hygiene is outstanding. His appearance indicates no weakness of character, no inclinations or addictions. His intellectual and physical predispositions can be designated as excellent.

  In his function as camp physician at Concentration Camp Auschwitz, he applied his knowledge practically and theoretically while fighting grave epidemics. He seized every opportunity, even u
nder difficult circumstances, to improve both his theoretical and practical knowledge. He uses his spare time to search for further opportunities and unusual anthropological materials.

  The report concluded by recommending Mengele for promotion, but it was too late in the war for it to be acted upon.

  In the Auschwitz archive, I listened to a tape-recording of the disembodied electronic voice of a twin named Emil Reichenberger telling of two years of injections and experiments by Mengele that cost him his larynx, among other parts. ‘But I am the lucky one,’ the voice concluded. ‘My brother died in the same experiments.’

  There are only two pictures of Mengele in the archive: SS identification portraits, neither of them from Auschwitz. For all his vanity, he rarely let anyone photograph him because he knew he would one day be held responsible for his crimes against the human race.

  23

  Mengele the fugitive

  Upon learning in late July 1945 that her husband was alive, Dr Josef Mengele’s ‘widow’, Irene, kept the good news to herself. In 1946, she started taking the train to Rosenheim on weekends whenever farmhand ‘Fritz Hollmann’ could take time off from the Fischer family to visit his ‘girlfriend’ in Rosenheim. After making sure she wasn’t followed, Irene would walk up the road to Mangolding, encounter ‘Fritz’, and spend the night with him at an inn on a Bavarian lake called the Sinnsee. Back home in Autenreid and in her husband’s family stronghold, Günzburg, she continued the deception by telling friends she was sure she would never see her husband alive and even wearing black widow’s weeds to church and asking the priest to pray for the repose of her late husband’s soul.

  Her father-in-law, Karl Mengele Snr, did his bit by twice telling denazification investigators his son was missing in action and, the third time, that he was dead. Apparently, both he and Irene convinced the authorities, for, when Dr Giselle Perl, his Hungarian Jewish prisoner gynaecologist at Auschwitz, denounced Mengele to the Americans in 1947, she elicited this reply from Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief US counsel to the Nuremberg war crimes trials, who informed Washington a year later: ‘We wish to advise that our records show Dr Mengerle [sic] is dead as of October 1946.’

  Back on the Fischer farm in Bavaria, ‘Fritz Hollmann’ was still remembered in 1985 as ‘a very obliging farmhand who never started a fight and was always in a good mood’, as Maria Fischer put it to Dr Günther Deschner, a Munich historian on the trail of the late Dr Josef Mengele. Her brother-in-law Alois told Deschner that Mengele ‘was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but always very controlled and disciplined . . . Only once was there a small dispute. He was supposed to work as a labourer, but he gave me an order that I should take the hay down from the threshing fork. I told him he should do it himself. Then he got very angry, only for a short moment, but very, very angry. He looked at me with such fury I actually thought he would attack me. But then he completely controlled himself and such a thing never happened again’ during ‘Hollmann’s’ thirty-four months in the Fischers’ employ from October 1945 to August 1948.

  Toward the end of his days as a farmhand in Bavaria, the ‘great selector’ of Auschwitz tried to teach the Fischer family to perform ‘scientific selection’ of their crop in order to breed medium-sized potatoes. Even though the Fischers didn’t take Mengele’s theories seriously, he found that ‘in this way, my mind was kept active.’

  In spite of their bi-monthly trysts on the Sinnsee, however, Irene and Josef Mengele’s marriage was deteriorating beyond redemption. Insanely jealous of the men she saw in Autenreid and Günzburg between visits to him, he spent most of their time together berating her for her infidelity.

  In mid-1948, after a dozen SS doctors, including a couple of his Auschwitz colleagues, had been hanged for offences less heinous (qualitatively and quantitatively) than his, Mengele disappeared from the Fischer farm and returned to Günzburg, where friends and relatives hid him in homes, warehouses, and even at a convent school called the English Institute which, coincidentally, was later attended by Petra Kelly, the half-American Army brat who grew up to be the first Green Party member of Germany’s Parliament.

  With Karls Snr and Jnr denazified, and Josef’s other brother Alois home after four years in a prisoner of war camp in Yugoslavia, the Karl Mengele & Sons machinery company was thriving by making wheelbarrows for the rebuilding of Germany.

  In Günzburg, the only person who didn’t make Mengele feel welcome was his own wife. When he asked Irene to follow him to South America with their son Rolf soon after he’d send word he’d arrived, she declined. She had already met Alfons Hackenjos, who would become her second husband when she divorced Mengele in 1954.

  Günzburg, however, was not a retreat, but a rest stop on Mengele’s route to South America. As ‘Fritz Hollmann’, he crossed from Germany into Austria by train on Easter Sunday, 17 April 1949, and made his way to an inn at Steinach, at the foot of the Brenner Pass. In the early hours of the next morning, with a full moon illuminating the edelweiss, a shepherd – financed by his family through SS contacts in Günzburg – guided him across the Brenner into Italy in barely an hour. From there, he took two trains to Vipiteno, where he registered at the Inn of the Golden Cross. He was there a month.

  Whether his well-organized network of helpers were part of ODESSA is still being argued by Mengele biographers Gerald Astor in The ‘Last’ Nazi (1985) and New York attorney Gerald L. Posner and British television producer John Ware in their Mengele: the Complete Story (1986). But even Posner and Ware, who dismiss ODESSA as ‘mythology’, have to concede that there was ‘plenty of cloak-and-dagger’.

  At the Golden Cross, Mengele met an Italian code-named ‘Nino’, who asked for a passport photo and then provided him with a German identity card as ‘Helmut Gregor’. His next visitor, code-named ‘Erwin’, was an old schoolfriend, Hans Sedlmeier, who had become sales manager of the Mengele company in Günzburg. Sedlmeier, who would be the family’s go-between with its blackest sheep for thirty years, brought the doctor greetings from his father, dollars for the days ahead, and a small suitcase with scientific specimens, including two glass slides with a blood sample between them, plus his precious notes from Auschwitz.

  As ‘Helmut Gregor’, whose listed occupation of ‘technician’ covered a multitude of sins, Mengele moved on to Bolzano, the capital of the German speaking part of the South Tyrol, which was ceded by Austria to Italy after the First World War. At home among hosts who had hoped Hitler would annex Bozen (as they still called Bolzano) into the Third Reich, ‘Gregor’ was briefed by a man named ‘Kurt’ on the last phase of his escape from Europe. ‘You will sail in July from Genoa to Argentina’, he told ‘Gregor’.

  Going to Genoa for his emigration documents proved the most perilous part of ‘Gregor’s’ mission. He had no trouble obtaining an International Red Cross passport from the Swiss consulate in Genoa, or passing the physical examination required by the Argentine consulate; ‘Kurt’ supplied him with a fake vaccination certificate saying he had been inoculated within the past fortnight. When he went for an Italian visa, however, the official whom ‘Kurt’ kept on a retainer had gone on vacation. His substitutes not only spotted ‘Gregor’s’ documents, particularly the vaccination certificate, as phony, but refused a 20,000-lire (thirty-dollar) bribe and threw him in jail to await investigation of how he’d entered the country.

  For three weeks, ‘Gregor’ languished in an Italian jail with cellmates he characterized as ‘disgusting rural rejects’, ‘communist rabble’, and ‘the sewage of the big towns’. These included a dwarf street musician and a morphine-addicted doctor whose withdrawal symptoms Mengele diagnosed as due to ‘constitutional inferiority’. Then, just as swiftly as he’d landed in jail, ‘Gregor’ was released. ‘Kurt’s’ contact had come back from vacation. Suddenly, the police who had been ignoring and insulting ‘Gregor’ became very obsequious, and one of them even wondered aloud whether he was a Jew because so much influence had been brought to bear on his behalf. By way of amend
s, ‘Kurt’s’ corrupted Italian official used his own connections to upgrade ‘Gregor’ from tourist accommodation to second class on the North King for no extra charge. He sailed in mid-July 1949.43

  In Argentina, Mengele enjoyed easier going than Eichmann from the beginning. Upon arrival as ‘Helmut Gregor’, he continued to disguise his medical past by taking menial work as a carpenter in Vicente Lopez, the same suburb where Eichmann later lived, because the job came with a room. It also came with a roommate: an engineer whose family boarded next door. When the engineer’s daughter took sick, he asked ‘Gregor’ to treat her – having deduced his roommate’s real profession from the black bag in which he stored his Auschwitz specimens and research notes. Mengele obliged by quarantining the child in the storehouse and prescribing cold compresses, camomile tea, and a sulfa drug.

  Having been found out that easily, Mengele gave up manual labour after a few weeks and moved to the Spanish-colonial home of a Nazi sympathizer in a more elegant suburb called Florida. He bought a dog and made the acquaintance of not just such fellow fugitives as Eichmann and his interviewer Willem Sassen,44 the Dutch SS man turned journalist, but legitimate figures like Jewish bridge partners (who accepted him as just another refugee from the war they’d fled) and Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel (1916–82), Hitler’s most decorated air ace, the Luftwaffe’s ‘Red Baron’ of World War II.

  Credited with 2530 missions and 532 tank kills as well as sinking a battleship and a cruiser, Rudel escaped from Soviet imprisonment the first time he was shot down and lost a leg the second time. After the amputation in 1944, he was entrusted by Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, with Operation Land of Fire: the transport (mostly by night flying) of tons of gold, huge bundles of securities and shares, and crates of art to Argentina.