Josef Mengele – the Creation of a Myth

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-11-2021, 08:01 PM

The earliest mention of Mengele I found on Newspapers.com was a story from May 1945 by Edward Roberts, which was about the 15-year-old boy Jenda Weiss who worked for two years at Auschwitz. I tried googling for his name within double quotes, but I found no information about him apart from the newspaper story: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22jenda+weiss%22.

It could be that his name was misspelled, but when I tried searching for his name without double quotes on revisionist websites, I still found nothing: (site:codoh.com OR site:vho.org OR site:ihr.org OR site:fpp.co.uk OR site:inconvenienthistory.com OR site:carolynyeager.net OR site:phdn.org) jenda weiss.

The article about Weiss speaks of a "transcript of his testimoney [sic] taken by the war crimes commission". Is there somewhere we can search for the transcript? (I'm mainly asking PHDNM.)

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-11-2021, 11:53 PM

Another interesting part from Marwell's book about Mengele is that for his PhD dissertation, Mengele developed a method to determine the race of an individual based solely on the front part of the mandible (http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=marwe...ng+angel+death):

For the subject of his dissertation, Mengele selected a topic that was entirely consistent with how anthropology was seen and practiced in Nazi Germany. In "Rassenmorphologische Untersuchung des vorderen Unterkiefersabschnittes bei vier rassischen Gruppen" (Racial-Morphological Examination of the Anterior Section of the Lower Jaw Among Four Racial Groups), Mengele wanted to "give a complete picture" of the racial differences that found expression in the front section of the lower jaw,[68] an effort that must be seen in the larger context of attempts to link differences in physical characteristics to race and ultimately to the development of a "racial diagnosis." He took issue with earlier attempts by anthropologists to discern race-based differences in the shape of the lower jaw, criticizing them for methodological failings.[69]

Mengele's research involved the careful examination of 122 lower jaws, originating from six different racial groups, which were part of the university's anthropological collection. Looking only at the very front part of the lower jaw - an area whose horizontal boundaries were the _foramina mentale_ on each side and whose vertical limits were the edge of the tooth socket and the base of the jaw - Mengele determined thirty-two linear and five angular measurements relating to important landmarks within this region and derived nine ratios and other relative functions. Using these analytics, he examined their value as a racial indicator by creating a _Wertigkeitsindex_, or significance index, which was calculated by comparing variations of a characteristic within and between the various racial groupings. The higher the "significance index," the more important that characteristic was for racial discernment. He subjected the data to further analyses relating to statistical issues concerning the accuracy and reliability of his measurements.

Mengele's next challenge - to present his data in the most appropriate manner - was undoubtedly influenced by Mollison. In 1907 Mollison had devised a technique for displaying the results of anthropometric research into racial differentiation that changed the discipline and gave dramatic visual expression to the hard measurements that were the nuts and bolts of physical anthropology. Traditionally, data were summarized in tabular form, with columns for minimum, maximum, and computed mean values for particular measurements; such a presentation provided little useful analysis, especially when comparing data of several different populations, which was, of course, the goal of those studying racial differentiation. Mollison's method allowed for the comparison of mountains of measurements in such a way that simple observation could determine connections and influences that no amount of scrutinizing the raw data could reveal.

Mollison called his technique Abweichungskurve, or deviation curve, because it displayed the degree to which the characteristics of one tested sample deviated from the values of the baseline group. It succeeded in "transforming numerical values into points on a plane, and by connecting those points to create a curve, anthropologists turned numbers into visual entities. Statistical data now had a form that could be - perhaps even should be - visually assessed."[70] Mengele acknowledged the power of this method: "With a graphic presentation, it is readily possible to provide a clear picture of the characteristics among individual racial groups."[71]

Mengele's conclusions were unambiguous: "The jaws of the examined racial groups indicate in their front sections such distinct differences that they permit one to distinguish between the races."[72]

And this was in the 1930s... Physical anthropology has fallen so low since then, since today this forum is the main online community about physical anthropology.

There's also an audiobook of Marwell's book:

https://odysee.com/@RedBaronAudioBooks:5/111111'-1me:e - Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" Part One
https://odysee.com/@RedBaronAudioBoo...1'-12222:5 - Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" Part Two

The author is a mainstream historian, so he is not allowed to tell the full truth, but he is still unusually honest for a Jew: "If Auschwitz, as place, stands as a symbol of the Holocaust, then Mengele, as perpetrator, has come to serve a similar role for the death camp itself. Perhaps for this reason, much of what is known about Mengele's time at Auschwitz is more trope than truth. Countless imagined encounters, misattributed deeds, and clichés about Mengele's activities have obscured the larger nature of his enterprise. [...] Mengele's outsize reputation as a medical monster is in inverse proportion to what is known and understood about what he actually did."

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-12-2021, 01:39 AM

From Marwell's book:

There are some who recall a confrontation with Mengele but are mistaken, having confused him with another SS doctor or simply having assumed it must have been Mengele who carried out the monstrous deed that left them alive while taking so many they loved. Historian Zdenek Zofka notes that many survivors recall Mengele speaking to them in Hungarian, a language he did not speak but which was spoken by his colleagues, the pharmacist Viktor Capesius and the physician Dr. Fritz Klein. "Often Mengele would be described as tall and blond, when he was only 5ft 8½ inches tall and dark-haired."[31] "Almost all inmates" at Auschwitz, according to Zofka, maintain that they had been selected by Mengele.

Hermann Langbein, a former Auschwitz inmate and author of the authoritative _People in Auschwitz_, wrote of this phenomenon, which he deemed the "Mengele Effect," a particular form of "memory displacement":

> If a member of the SS is repeatedly named in public in connection with especially monstrous deeds, it is possible that survivors will project their experiences on to him. . . . More than once I heard survivors say that Mengele did this or that to them, even though Mengele had not yet arrived in Auschwitz at the time. Olga Lengyel has described him as a blonde angel, even though Mengele was a markedly dark-haired type. In short, crimes of an anonymous SS physician were imputed to Mengele, about whom people had read so many bad things. . . .
>
> Some well-known SS men have been positively idealized after the fact. Thus Fania Fénelon has called Mengele a "handsome Siegfried," and Therese Chassaing writes, "Mengele is immaculate in his belted uniform, tall, with shiny black boots that bespeak cleanliness, prosperity, and human dignity." Elie Wiesel mentions as one of Mengele's characteristic attributes "white gloves, a monocle, and the rest."[32]

Langbein saw Mengele "almost every day in the office of the SS infirmary where he was doing routine bureaucratic work," and he claims that Mengele never struck him as either attractive or elegant. He never saw him with a monocle. Doris Bergen, describing the work of Israeli historian Na'ama Shik, wrote about the "so-called Mengele Effect," noting that survivors' accounts decades after the fact could be shaped by what "they have read and heard in the meantime."[33]

Geoffrey Hartmann, who wrote extensively on survivor testimony, observed that "every Auschwitz survivor seems to have gone through a selection by Mengele, as if he manned his post 24 hours a day."[34] In fact, Mengele took his turn at "ramp duty" like the rest of the medical staff in the camp. There is no evidence that he served there more frequently or for longer hours than his colleagues. It does seem, however, as Zofka suggests, that "the name Mengele had become detached from the man" and had become "a synonym" for every doctor at the Auschwitz camp.[35] Similarly, historian Christopher Browning, in describing witness testimony about a selection by Mengele that was proved never to have occurred, called such an encounter with the Angel of Death on the ramp in Auschwitz "one of the most broadly recognized archetypical episodes of the Holocaust, widely disseminated in both books and films."[36]

Reference 32 is Langbein's book _People in Auschwitz_:

https://books.google.com/books?id=DzWPL6hjk9MC&pg=PA296
http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=langb...ople+auschwitz
https://www.academia.edu/5644775/Her...Auschwitz_2004

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-12-2021, 01:49 AM

From Marwell's book:

There are some who recall a confrontation with Mengele but are mistaken, having confused him with another SS doctor or simply having assumed it must have been Mengele who carried out the monstrous deed that left them alive while taking so many they loved. Historian Zdenek Zofka notes that many survivors recall Mengele speaking to them in Hungarian, a language he did not speak but which was spoken by his colleagues, the pharmacist Viktor Capesius and the physician Dr. Fritz Klein. "Often Mengele would be described as tall and blond, when he was only 5ft 8½ inches tall and dark-haired."[31] "Almost all inmates" at Auschwitz, according to Zofka, maintain that they had been selected by Mengele.

Hermann Langbein, a former Auschwitz inmate and author of the authoritative People in Auschwitz, wrote of this phenomenon, which he deemed the "Mengele Effect," a particular form of "memory displacement":

> If a member of the SS is repeatedly named in public in connection with especially monstrous deeds, it is possible that survivors will project their experiences on to him. . . . More than once I heard survivors say that Mengele did this or that to them, even though Mengele had not yet arrived in Auschwitz at the time. Olga Lengyel has described him as a blonde angel, even though Mengele was a markedly dark-haired type. In short, crimes of an anonymous SS physician were imputed to Mengele, about whom people had read so many bad things. . . .
>
> Some well-known SS men have been positively idealized after the fact. Thus Fania Fénelon has called Mengele a "handsome Siegfried," and Therese Chassaing writes, "Mengele is immaculate in his belted uniform, tall, with shiny black boots that bespeak cleanliness, prosperity, and human dignity." Elie Wiesel mentions as one of Mengele's characteristic attributes "white gloves, a monocle, and the rest."[32]

Langbein saw Mengele "almost every day in the office of the SS infirmary where he was doing routine bureaucratic work," and he claims that Mengele never struck him as either attractive or elegant. He never saw him with a monocle. Doris Bergen, describing the work of Israeli historian Na'ama Shik, wrote about the "so-called Mengele Effect," noting that survivors' accounts decades after the fact could be shaped by what "they have read and heard in the meantime."[33]

Geoffrey Hartmann, who wrote extensively on survivor testimony, observed that "every Auschwitz survivor seems to have gone through a selection by Mengele, as if he manned his post 24 hours a day."[34] In fact, Mengele took his turn at "ramp duty" like the rest of the medical staff in the camp. There is no evidence that he served there more frequently or for longer hours than his colleagues. It does seem, however, as Zofka suggests, that "the name Mengele had become detached from the man" and had become "a synonym" for every doctor at the Auschwitz camp.[35] Similarly, historian Christopher Browning, in describing witness testimony about a selection by Mengele that was proved never to have occurred, called such an encounter with the Angel of Death on the ramp in Auschwitz "one of the most broadly recognized archetypical episodes of the Holocaust, widely disseminated in both books and films."[36]

Reference 32 is Langbein's book _People in Auschwitz_:

https://books.google.com/books?id=DzWPL6hjk9MC&pg=PA296
http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=langb...ople+auschwitz
https://www.academia.edu/5644775/Her...Auschwitz_2004

Here's the part from Evil Weasel's book "Night" where he says that Mengele wore a monocle (I didn't find where the white gloves comes from):

Standing in the middle of it was, though I didn't know it then, Dr. Mengele, the notorious Dr. Mengele. He looked like the typical SS officer: a cruel, though not unintelligent, face, complete with monocle. He was holding a conductor's baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving constantly, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-12-2021, 04:07 AM

More from Marwell's book:

Given Mengele's ambition, his pursuit of his _Habilitation_, and his patronage from Verschuer, it is clear that he pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards. Historian Massin writes, "Mengele is sometimes portrayed as the embodiment of the pseudoscientific SS physician, who, in complete isolation, carries out his abstruse experiments. In fact, Mengele was very tightly connected to the scientific community."[104] For this reason, he sought to "recruit" the very best practitioners from the inmate population and kept, reportedly, comprehensive records of his scientific work. For the same reason, it is difficult to accept testimony about some of his experiments and their rationale, such as claims that Mengele attempted to create a Siamese twin by "sewing together" two twins,[105] or that he sought to "make boys into girls and girls into boys" through "cross transfusions," or even "connected the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon."[106]

The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something perhaps even more unsettling. Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. The science he pursued in Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with research carried out by others in what was considered to be the scientific establishment.

Marwell is a former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and he served as Chief of Investigative Research in the OSI. He wrote: "In February 1985, while working in the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at the U.S. Department of Justice, I was assigned to the international investigation to locate Mengele and bring him before a court of law."

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-22-2021, 05:13 AM

I searched the CODOH forum for posts about Mengele: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afor...oh.com+mengele. I found a thread about the supposed twin experiments that Mengele performed in Brazil: https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=9633. It linked to an article by Gerald Posner, who is a mainstream historian who wrote a biography of Mengele and who had access to Mengele's personal writings, but even he said that the Brazilian twin experiments are a hoax (https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-nazi-twin-myth):

So it is little wonder there was great interest this year when a self-proclaimed Argentine historian, Jorge Camarasa, published a book, _Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America_, in which he claimed he had discovered a Brazilian town with an inordinately high number of twin births, and more astonishing, that those were the result of Mengele himself having continued his Nazi experiments there during the early 1960s. The town, Candido Godoi, has only 6,000 residents, or about 80 families. There are 44 sets of twins there, about 1,000 percent above the worldwide average for twin births. Residents told Camarasa that a German doctor they identified as Mengele had started his work there in 1963. The book's contentions garnered international headlines, with most reports accepting the story as true. "Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele 'created twin town in Brazil,'" was typical of a banner headline that ran in the U.K.'s Telegraph. National Geographic Explorer investigated the story in a documentary that first aired Sunday night.

The problem with Camarasa's claims is that it's not possible. At the time Mengele was supposed to be continuing his camp experiments in Candido Godoi, he was hundreds of miles away, hiding on an isolated farm, and not traveling. However, after following the Mengele story for 25 years, I know that simple truth never stops a sensational postwar Mengele story from making the rounds. The 1978 Hollywood film _Boys from Brazil_ portrayed Mengele as a mythical figure of evil, a Nazi who went on to lead the Fourth Reich from his palatial jungle hideout, protected by armed guards and killer dogs, working hard to create clones of Adolf Hitler. In my own Nazi-hunting trips to South America, I met many well-intentioned people who said they had known Mengele, gone bowling with him, traveled recently with him, all sorts of wonderful and sometimes hair-raising tales. None proved true. An Argentine police captain wrote a book claiming he shot Mengele to death in a swamp near a secret jungle haven for Nazis. When I showed him incontrovertible proof that Mengele was alive after that encounter, the policemen didn't miss a beat: "Then I must have killed his identical twin."

The real Mengele was far more prosaic and mundane a fugitive than Hollywood and most storytellers would have us believe. Mengele lived in Germany, under an assumed name, in a southern farm, for four years after the war. I found the original documents in 1985 that revealed American troops had twice captured him in the hectic months after the war, but released him both times without realizing who he was.

It wasn't until 1949, as other physicians were being tried and convicted in the so-called Doctors Trials, that Mengele's wealthy industrial family paid for him to flee Europe on a fake Red Cross passport. He settled in pro-Nazi Argentina, and for the next decade he enjoyed a great life. Mengele was a regular at the Colón Opera, he started a farm-machinery company as an outlet for his family's products, and later invested in a small pharmaceutical firm. The fugitive married his sister-in-law after one of his brothers died, and in 1956 he traveled to Switzerland for a skiing holiday. There he met his 12-year-old son Rolf; Mengele was introduced as "Uncle Fritz."

When he returned to Argentina, Mengele felt so comfortable that no one was looking for him, that he applied to an Argentine court to use his real name instead of the alias under which he arrived in the country. He also got a West German passport as Josef Mengele. And by 1958, he felt so comfortable that he was listed under his real name in the Buenos Aires telephone book.

Everything changed in 1959. That June he was officially indicted by West German authorities for 17 counts of premeditated murder. (Before that indictment, there was, incredibly, no legal document seeking Mengele's arrest.)

Mengele moved across the border to Paraguay, where he got citizenship under the name Jose Mengele. But that stay was short-lived; in May 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who had run the section responsible for the trains that sent millions of Jews to the death camps, was run to ground and seized in Buenos Aires by Israeli agents. Eichmann was spirited to Israel, where he was eventually tried, convicted, and hanged.

Eichmann's kidnapping sent Mengele, and other Nazi fugitives in South America, into a panicked frenzy. Mengele had good reason to be worried. As I disclosed in my 1986 book, the Israelis had wanted to pick up Mengele at the same time they nabbed Eichmann, but they were unable to find him. After Eichmann's capture, they kept looking for Mengele for two years, and finally located him on an isolated farm in Brazil, before having to abandon the operation because of Middle East crises that threatened the very existence of the Israeli state.

Interviews with the Israeli operatives on his trail, combined with Mengele's own contemporaneous diaries and letters to his family, prove incontrovertibly that during the time he was supposed to be doing twin experiments in Candido Godoi, he was hiding on a 37-acre farm near Nova Europa, 200 miles southwest of Sao Paulo. There he stayed with a pro-Nazi Hungarian family, living under the name Peter Hochbichler. He now spent most every day in the farm's watchtower, scanning the approaching dirt roads with a pair of binoculars, trying to spot his hunters before they found him.

Until his 1979 death of a stroke, while swimming off the shore of Bertioga, a Brazilian beach just south of Sao Paolo, Mengele lived as a frightened and bitter man. He was simultaneously furious that he had to hide in multicultural and racially mixed Brazil, and he also was petrified that he would be unmasked as the wanted Auschwitz doctor and sent back to Germany or Israel to stand trial.

Two years before his death, his son Rolf made a secret trip to Sao Paulo to meet his father for the only time as an adult. The 33-year-old lawyer wanted to hear his father tell him that Auschwitz was terrible, and that while he served there because he had no other choice, he did so with great revulsion and he hated what he had done. Instead, Rolf found his father a man broken by half a lifetime on the run, yet still defiant about his time at Auschwitz. Mengele told his son that no one who wasn't there could ever understand what happened at the camp. Mengele felt no guilt, saw no inhumanity in what happened, and was so rigid and stubborn that eventually Rolf dropped the subject. "I gave up," Rolf told me. "It was impossible. He would never express any remorse in my presence."

It is possible that a German doctor showed up at Candido Godoi in the early 1960s. And maybe it was even a Nazi fugitive on the run. But the one thing certain from his detailed and tortured life on the run: It was not Josef Mengele.

Note how the quotation above also says that before 1959, there was no legal document seeking Mengele's arrest. Mengele was relatively unknown until the Eichmann show trial in 1960, so even in the archives of the New York Times, the first mention of Mengele I found was from the year 1960. At Newspapers.com, I found zero references to Mengele between the years 1948 and 1958, but in late 1959, an article about him appeared in the Brooklyn Daily.

The story was also debunked by a paper from 2011 titled "Twin Town in South Brazil: A Nazi's Experiment or a Genetic Founder Effect?" (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0020328):

Cândido Godói (CG) is a small municipality in South Brazil with approximately 6,000 inhabitants. It is known as the "Twins' Town" due to its high rate of twin births. Recently it was claimed that such high frequency of twinning would be connected to experiments performed by the German Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. It is known, however, that this town was founded by a small number of families and therefore a genetic founder effect may represent an alternatively explanation for the high twinning prevalence in CG. In this study, we tested specific predictions of the "Nazi's experiment" and of the "founder effect" hypotheses. We surveyed a total of 6,262 baptism records from 1959-2008 in CG catholic churches, and identified 91 twin pairs and one triplet. Contrary to the "Nazi's experiment hypothesis", there is no spurt in twinning between the years (1964-1968) when Mengele allegedly was in CG (P = 0.482). Moreover, there is no temporal trend for a declining rate of twinning since the 1960s (P = 0.351), and no difference in twinning among CG districts considering two different periods: 1927-1958 and 1959-2008 (P = 0.638). On the other hand, the "founder effect hypothesis" is supported by an isonymy analysis that shows that women who gave birth to twins have a higher inbreeding coefficient when compared to women who never had twins (0.0148, 0.0081, respectively, P = 0.019). In summary, our results show no evidence for the "Nazi's experiment hypothesis" and strongly suggest that the "founder effect hypothesis" is a much more likely alternative for explaining the high prevalence of twinning in CG. If this hypothesis is correct, then this community represents a valuable population where genetic factors linked to twinning may be identified.

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-25-2021, 12:20 AM

I now bought the Publisher Extra membership at Newspapers.com, so I was able to access more old newspaper articles about Mengele.

1945-08-26 - Sudeten Germans Herded Into Camps By Czechs

An article from August 1945 said that they skipped the gas chamber and sent weak inmates straight to the crematorium: "the weak ones were left, they went straight to the crematorium and were burned, sometimes alive". It said that "three million people have died in Oswicim" even though the official Auschwitz death toll is now about 1.5 or 1 million.

The article reported a nurse saying that "people sent to concentration camps were asocial. Most of them could not get along with their families. When they returned they were all right. The camp did something for them."

The author of the article wrote that he was the "chief of the intelligence department of the Office of War Information in London". His articles about the Marshall Plan were later compiled into a book titled "Marshall Plan, Goals and Gains: As Reported by Otto Zausmer in the Boston Daily Globe".

A slightly abridged version of the same article appeared in the same newspaper in November 1945: https://www.newspapers.com/image/434064192.

> https://www.newspapers.com/image/434027414
> The Boston Sunday Globe - 1945-08-26
> Sudeten Germans Herded Into Camps By Czechs
> By Otto Zausmer
> PRAGUE - I have had two windows to hell opened for me within an hour this afternoon. First, we went to a camp for Sudeten Germans who are going to be shipped off to Bavaria as soon as the Czechs get the green light. Up to 10 weeks ago all these people had lived in a little town - some 40 miles west of here.
> Now they are driven from their homes, deprived of their jobs, herded into barracks, living on a diet of potatoes, bread, black coffee and cabbage.
> I saw the little children, filthy, in rags and miserable. I saw the sick crowded together in one dark room. I saw old men walking like ghosts, carrying huge loaves of dark bread from the kitchen to the barracks or aimlessly wandering around with empty looks and pale faces.
> It was a depressing sight, more, it made your heart ache. True, I have seen hundreds of pictures, read thousands of pages of Nazi concentration camp reports and I realized that this place was a sanatorium compared with Dachau, Buchenwald or Mauthausen. Still, I could not help having a strange feeling in my stomach.
> ## "Just Propaganda"
> I talked to a number of the inmates. They all disassociated themselves from the atrocities committed by the Nazis. But I happen to know from personal experience and interrogatíons that prominent Nazi leaders such as Dr. Ley, Karl Hermann Frank and even Gestapo officers claim to have no knowledge of the horrors in the Nazi camps. For example, there was a very good-looking young English-language teacher. She complained bitterly. The Czechs were harsh, the food was poor, the rooms dirty, she claimed. I asked her what she knew of Nazi camps. She threw her hands up: "O, well, we had nothing to do with them, and besides, anybody taken to a German concentration camp was guilty in some way," she screamed.
> When she made the remark. I remembered an interrogation of a German nurse. I was still on a leave of absence from the Globe and chief of the intelligence department of the Office of War Information in London. We printed a little booklet of official pictures taken in Nazi concentration camps and showed them to Germans, asking them how they felt about it. The pictures made you sick for days. "O," said the nurse, "this is just propaganda, and besides, people sent to concentration camps were asocial. Most of them could not get along with their families. When they returned they were all right. The camp did something for them."
> Our complaining girl teacher in the Sudeten camp reacted very much like the nurse. Besides, I understood the bitterness of the Czechs; I have seen them before the war when the Nazi tide went high; they idolized Hitler more than any other German in the Reich or Austria.
> Our girl teacher said to me this afternoon, "Why can't we have this territory for ourselves and make it a part of Germany? Why can't the Czechs move out?" This danger of a hostile group of well over 2,000,000 people in the country is what makes the Czechs so bitter now. In fact, it must be said that the anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans (only 15 percent or so), have officially been charged with deciding who of the Sudeten Germans should be permitted to apply for Czech citizenship and who should move out. The oficial treatment is fair and correct, the individual Czechs may at times be unable to control his feelings and treat the camp inmates with scorn and contempt. All this I realized, but looking at this miserable lot of humanity, those human wrecks, I had to make for the exit as soon as I could.
> ## After math of Oswicim
> Just a few hundred yards from the camp I had the opportunity to look into hell through another window. The Czech Army captain who took us around the camp invited us for a drink at his house. Up to a few weeks ago he was a refugee in England, his wife in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Oswicim. Now they live in a most charming little house. The hostess brought wine egg nog and delicious sandwiches, and it looked as if fate had decided to make up for all the hardships the couple had gone through. The tall, very good-looking blonde, seemed to have recovered from her sufferings. Perhaps she has even forgotten what she went through? But when I noticed that she never touched a drink, I asked her why and she finally admitted she was forbidden to drink alcohol because she had come out of the concentration camp with a heart ailment. She told us some of her experiences under the Nazis. I did not tell her, but I had read in official secret reports almost every word she told me about Oswicim. I could thus satisfy myself that it was the absolute truth what she told us. When a new lot of victims arrived in Oswicim they were assembled, little children, women and old men. Then the camp physician, Dr. Mengele, had them file past him muttering just "left" or "right." The weak ones were left, they went straight to the crematorium and burned, sometimes alive. The others were sent to labor battallions. Three million people have died in Oswicim.
> One day the twins in the camp were ordered to assemble in one of the barracks. They were divided into two groups; one was fed the best diet possible - milk, butter and eggs. The others were kept on the camp starvation diet. After a few weeks both groups were taken to the hospital and the doctors used them as guinea pigs for vivisection experiments. Similar experiments were made with typhus basilli and new drugs. A number of women in Oswicim had long incisions on the legs because the Nazi doctors had operated on them to see the effect on a certain muscle. Once an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out and the inmates could see their unfortunate sisters and brothers carried off to the charnel house and thrown onto a pile with the dead. I would perhaps have shaken my head and thought this was an exaggeration, had I not seen the official reports, some of them Nazi accounts, many weeks ago.
> After Oswicim, the young woman was taken to a labor camp in Thuringia, and in the first week of May was marched back to the Czech border with many other slave laborers, men, women and children. They marched 14 miles a day on a diet of three potatoes. Whoever was tired or collapsed was thrown on a primitive wagon, drawn by old men, and the victims were neatly piled up in typical Nazi fashion, very orderly, five in a row, then five square and again another layer straight; dead and living without distinction. As I left the house, I understood the bitterness of the captain as he scoffed at the Sudetan Germans in the camps. I still wondered whether what he did was wise or just. But what is wisdom? What is justice?

1946-04-11 - She Killed 3,000 Babies 'To Save Them From Nazis'

There were also multiple articles like this which told the story of Gisella Perl in an abridged format:

> https://www.newspapers.com/image/129295841
> The Des Moines Register (Des Moines, Iowa) - 1946-04-11
> She Killed 3,000 Babies 'To Save Them From Nazis'
> NEW YORK, N. Y. (U.P.) - A Hungarian woman with a serial number tattooed in blue on her left forearm estimated Wednesday she had killed more than 3,000 babies in a German concentration camp, some by strangulation and others with poison. "You understand," she said "I had to kill them, to save both them and their mothers from the gas chamber and the crematorium." The Hungarian woman, Gizella Pearl, explained that she was prisoner in the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp from May, 1944, until the war ended.
> ## Her Family Slain.
> Having killed her family - mother, father, husband and 17-year-old son - the Germans sent her to Auschwitz, but spared her life because she was a physician. "I was placed in charge of the women's hospital, an old stable with no medicine and no instruments, in July, 1944," she related. "I found out immediately that all new born babies and their mothers were put to death.
> ## Day and Night.
> "I began then systematically to abort all pregnant women, and to kill the babies of those who gave normal birth. I would work all day on wounds of those who had been beaten by Germans, and at night I would do one abortion after the other.
> "I was supposed to give the new babies to Germans alive. I delivered them dead, to spare them pain in experimental laboratories and the gas chamber."
> By killing 3,000 babies, she said she had saved many mothers from certain death.
> Dr. Pearl said she had some experience with the notorious Irma Grese, "Beastess of Belsen," who recently was executed by the British. She described her as a "pathological case - like all the Germans I know."
> Dr. Pearl is scheduled to testify at the trial of Dr. Mengele, the director of Auschwitz, when he is captured. She described him as a sex maniac.

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-25-2021, 05:42 PM

In 1992, the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice published a report titled "In the Matter of Josef Mengele": https://www.justice.gov/sites/defaul...engele-rpt.pdf.

The OSI report referenced a document from 1945 which described Mengele's activities at Auschwitz, but the document was said to have been prepared by a "psychological warfare detachment of the U.S. Ninth Army":

> In what appears to be a radio script or similar text prepared by the psychological warfare detachment of the U.S. Ninth Army, dated 28 April 1945, a "Dr. Mengels" and his activities at Auschwitz are described in some detail:
> > "[He] was one of the chief selectors in the camp. In the hospital he used to joke with the patients whom he would condemn to the gas chamber a minute later. While he put the sign of death on a patient's chart he amused himself by whistling and singing popular tunes. His hobby was to select particularly all twins and liliputians for the gas chamber. He also used these types for his famous experiments and was assisted by a couple of women physicians who had specialized in dentistry, opthalmology, and anthropology."[163]

The report by the OSI also said that Mengele "had been active with urgent scientific problems in research concerning the racial identification of gypsies":

> The document was a captured recommendation list, dated March 29, 1944, for the awarding of the War Service cross, second class. First on the list to receive the decoration was "Dr. Josef Mengele, born in Guenzburg." The citation for the award indicates that Mengele was a camp doctor at Auschwitz from June 17, 1943, and that he had been active with "urgent scientific problems in research concerning the racial identification of gypsies."

Remember how Mengele was working on a book about the physical anthropology of gypsies according to his assistant (http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=marwell+mengele):

> Mengele had a special interest in Gypsies and took advantage of not only the twins who could be found among them but also the anthropological insights they offered. Inmate artist Dina Gottlieb, whom Mengele enlisted to paint portraits of his Gypsy research subjects, described Mengele's intense focus on them and suggested a possible explanation:
> > He showed me the differences between types of Gypsies: how in the Aryan type the hairline matched the line of the eyes, how the blue of the Gypsies' eyes was different from the Aryans' blue, and which color was deepest. He was using these experiments to gather material for a book on the physical similarities and characteristics of Gypsies from different countries. He talked about it constantly.

The OSI report said that Mengele's name was not featured on lists of war criminals prepared by the U.S. or Great Britain:

> For instance, the British 21st Army Group published, from time to time, lists of suspected war criminals under the title "21st Army Group Special Wanted List." The first such list was published in August 1945.[167] In addition, the Third U.S. Army published a wanted list, known as the "Third Army Wanted List," and the Intelligence section of the United States Forces European Theater (USFET) published the "Rogues Gallery." ... However, Josef Mengele's name did not appear on either the Rogues Gallery or the Third Army wanted list.[169]

However reference 169 says: "Mengele's name does appear on a September 1945 wanted list issued by the British, "The Black List of German Police SS and Miscellaneous Party and Paramilitary Personalities," which was distributed to U.S. agencies. (NARA: U.S. OMGUS RG 260, Civil Admin. Div. Pub. Safety Br. Box 260.)"

The OSI report described how Mengele was not charged during the 1946 Doctors' Trial, and how only one of the 23 defendants of the trial served at a concentration camp. A memo from 1947 listed 16 individuals who were considered to be charged during a second medical trial, but they didn't include Mengele even though they included another doctor who served at Auschwitz. The authors of the OSI report wrote that "Mengele did not immediately gain the widespread notoriety that he possessed by the 1950s":

> American occupation forces instituted prosecutions of 1,941 suspected Nazi criminals, of whom 1,517 were convicted and imprisoned or executed.[170] The first such trial, conducted before the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, was the so-called "Doctors' Trial." On October 25, 1946, twenty-three German physicians were indicted by the OCCWC. The defendants, all members of the German military, SS, or state medical establishment, were charged with war crimes in connection with medical research. The selection of the defendants was based in part on a desire to put the German medical establishment on trial. As a result, a representative group of defendants from the different branches of service, the SS, and the Nazi State was tried. The defendants, however, did not adequately represent the crimes in which the German medical system had played a role.
> Only one of the defendants was a physician at a concentration camp,[171] and none of the defendants served at a death camp. It would appear, on the face of it, that Mengele would have been an ideal defendant in this case. Although the accused were generally high-ranking individuals, there were several with ranks comparable to Mengele's. Since the "medical" trial was designed to be, in part, symbolic, Mengele would have represented at least two types of crimes committed by the German medical establishment. Unlike any of the 23 defendants, Mengele was involved in the selection of victims for annihilation. Selection was a medical crime; it was not by accident that medical personnel were chosen to perform this duty. In addition, Mengele, like the defendants, performed pseudo-scientific gruesome experiments on unwilling subjects, although, from the perverse perspective of the Nazi government, their "work" had a "practical," often military, objective. In Mengele's case however, the only objective was the advancement of his own grotesque view of "scientific research."
> No files exist that document the criteria used in choosing defendants for the medical trial, and the individuals involved in that process can no longer recall whether Mengele ever received serious consideration.[172] One explanation for his absence from the trial may lie in the fact that he was not mentioned in what appears to be an influential report prepared by the Director of Intelligence for the Office of Military Government for Germany, United States (OMGUS), concerning persons connected with SS medical research. Two-thirds of the defendants in the Doctors' Trial are named on this list, which was prepared in February 1946 and published by the United Nations War Crimes Commission Research Office. It was prepared long before Mengele was listed as being dead, and his absence from the list may explain why he was not among the defendants. We cannot, however, explain why his crimes were not discussed in the report.
> Mengele also escaped consideration for a future medical trial that was, in the end, never conducted. A memo from Prosecutor A.G. Hardy to General Taylor dated 15 August 1947 lists 16 individuals who "would be good fodder for a second medical trial." Some of the individuals, including a Mengele colleague at Auschwitz, Dr. Karl Clauberg, had not been located at the time. Clauberg is described as "the most reprehensible of all the remaining medical men not tried today . . . we have a conclusive case against him concerning his sterilization experiments at Auschwitz." Surely the information available concerning medical crimes at Auschwitz portrayed Mengele as being at least as "reprehensible" as Clauberg. That he was not on this list of potential defendants (and indeed his absence from the dock at the medical trial in Nuremberg) might be explained by the notation in the Locator and Apprehension Branch files at Nuremberg that he was dead. The belief that Mengele was dead is examined later in the report.
> At least one investigator at Nuremberg, who apparently had not received the false report that Mengele was dead, recommended that he be indicted for war crimes. Manfred Wolfson, a senior research analyst in the Berlin branch of the OCCWC, wrote a memorandum to the chief of the Berlin branch, Benjamin Ferencz on November 7, 1946, two weeks after the medical trial indictment was issued. The seven-page memorandum references information in Mengele's SS file as well as several witness statements linking him to experiments conducted at Auschwitz. Wolfson's memorandum concludes, "In view of the above stated facts it is recommended that SS Haupsturmfuehrer Dr. Josef Mengele be placed on the Wanted List and that he be indicted for war crimes."[175] Wolfson, who was interviewed by OSI, recalls little about the circumstances surrounding his writing of the memorandum and nothing about the effect the memorandum had. In addition, Mr. Ferencz has no recollection of receiving the memo or of any action that it might have inspired. (This episode illustrates an additional reason Mengele was able to evade capture: the difficulty faced by war crimes investigators in the chaotic initial postwar period in prioritizing their many thousands of suspects. That Benjamin Ferencz -- whose dedication in war crimes cases is renowned to this day and who devoted decades to the pursuit of reparations negotiations on behalf of Holocaust survivors -- would today have no memory of this episode serves as a telling reminder that Mengele did not immediately gain the widespread notoriety that he possessed by the 1950s.)

According to the report by the OSI, there were nearly 200 persons who were extradited to Poland by U.S. authorities because they were accused of crimes at Auschwitz, and the Poles made an extradition request for another doctor who worked at Auschwitz but not Mengele:

> We have already discussed the fact that Mengele did not fit squarely within the jurisdiction of the U.S. occupation authorities' war crimes program, except in the event that he was wanted for one of the proceedings at Nuremberg. For this reason, there was, unfortunately, no special incentive on the part of American prosecutors or any American authority to capture Mengele. This is not to say that had Mengele's whereabouts been known or discovered, there would not have been an attempt to apprehend him. It does mean, however, that no prolonged manhunt was undertaken.
On the other hand, the United States would have responded to a request from the Poles for his apprehension. Indeed, U.S. authorities extradited to Poland nearly 200 persons who were accused of crimes at Auschwitz. The questions remain: why was Mengele not among them, and did the Poles make a sUfficient effort to have him apprehended?
> As discussed above, the United States Judge Advocate General conducted an investigation into crimes committed at Auschwitz. Documents and witness testimony were forwarded to Polish authorities on November 6, 1946.[182] With the files, Colonel Clio Straight, Deputy Theater Judge Advocate for War Crimes, also transmitted a mimeographed "List of Perpetrators." This list contained the names of individuals that came up in the course of the American investigation into Auschwitz; Mengele was on this list.[183] Straight alerted the Poles that "wanted reports have not been requested on all of the perpetrators named in the mimeographed list." Nonetheless, Straight stated that "steps are being taken by this group to apprehend and to assemble for transfer to your government those named perpetrators who are located within the U.S. zone of occupation, it being understood that it is your intention to bring to trial all available perpetrators in this case." In other words, Straight was indicating to his Polish counterpart that there was at that time no need for specific wanted reports to be filed for the individuals listed. Presumably, it would have also been unnecessary to file immediately a request for extradition for anyone on the list.[184]
> This informal arrangement may explain why no extradition request for Josef Mengele was ever made after the date of the transmittal of the list of perpetrators (November 6, 1946). This hypothesis, however, does not explain why the government of Poland did not request Mengele's extradition prior to November 1946. Specific wanted reports and extradition requests had been made for many of the individuals named on the list. For example, a wanted report and request for extradition were prepared for Dr. Hans Muench, who served with Mengele at Auschwitz. The same was true for several other individuals who were successfully extradited by the U.S. to Poland, where they stood trial for their crimes.
> The suggestion that the Polish government never made a formal request for Mengele's extradition is challenged by the then-chief of the Polish Military Mission, Colonel Marion Mushkat. Interviewed by OSI in Israel, he claimed to have made not one, but two formal requests.[186] However, no evidence of any such requests could be located. On the contrary, OSI's research leads to the conclusion that no formal request for Mengele's extradition was ever made by the Polish government to the United States.[187]

**~~Komintasavalta~~** · 12-25-2021, 06:56 PM

During the Eichmann show trial in 1961, Vera Alexander testified that she witnessed only one experiment that was performed by Mengele (http://www.nizkor.com/hweb/people/e/...on-071-02.html):

> Attorney General: Do you remember the notorious Dr. Mengele?
> Witness Alexander: To my sorrow - very well indeed.
> Q. We have already heard about him, but there is one matter which we have not yet heard about. Do you remember the experiments he used to conduct on twins?
> A. I only witnessed one experiment.
> Q. What did you witness?
> A. There was a set of twins, Gypsies, whom he took away one day from the block where I was - that was the Zigeunerlager - the Gypsy camp. Some days later, he returned them, with veins in their arms and their backs sewn together.
> Presiding Judge: I did not understand that.
> Attorney General: He sewed them.
> Presiding Judge: Sewed the veins together?
> Witness Alexander: Yes.
> Q. Did he turn them into Siamese twins?
> A. He sewed their arms together - they were already full of pus, and full of wounds.
> Attorney General: And they did not live much longer?
> Witness Alexander : I succeeded in getting out of there, before...I asked the Lagerfuehrer who had transferred me there to send me back to the women's camp.

However in 1985, the Chicago Tribune reported that she also remembered another experiment (https://www.newspapers.com/image/388559843):

> Vera Alexander, 62, who lives in Israel, described how she worked as a warden in a block housing about 100 Gypsy twins.
> She told how Mengele impregnated one girl with the sperm of another twin, pampered her during her pregnancy and attended the birth himself.
> "But when he saw that there was only one baby and not twins, he tore the baby right out of the mother's uterus, threw it into an oven and walked away," she said. "We saw this."

Image of full article: https://i.ibb.co/hR35drD/newspapers-...-388559843.jpg. Transcript of full article:

Spoiler!