Josef Mengele – the Creation of a Myth

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From a review by Thomas Kues of Posner and Ware's book about Mengele (https://codoh.com/library/document/m...lete-story/en/):

> Gerald Posner is a Jewish-American journalist, born in 1954 and perhaps most well-known for his book _Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK_ (1993). In it, Posner asserts that virtually all of the findings of the Warren Committee were correct, and that Oswald killed Kennedy without the assistance of anyone. The book was met with much criticism from researchers skeptical of the official scenario as well as defenders of the lone gunman theory, while on the other hand it was praised by the political editors of American mainstream newspapers. House Select Committee on Assassinations chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi called it "a dishonest book". Critics noted that Posner had avoided the mass of documentation released in 1992, denied obvious connections between Oswald and various intelligence operatives, as well as distorted and withheld information on the handling of the president's corpse (several lengthy critiques of the book are available at the website assassinationweb.com). This background might be worth keeping in mind as we proceed to take a look at Posner's first published book, _Mengele: The Complete Story_ (co-authored with TV journalist John Ware).
> ...
> Indeed the first thing he does is to quote Nyiszli's description of "enormous tongues of flames" rising from the crematoria. According to Posner, "on a clear day, flame and black smoke could be seen for thirty miles, spewing from the chimneys of the crematoria."
> ...
> As for the Auschwitz death toll, he writes that it "is known to be about 2.5 million" - this despite the fact that the standard works listed in his bibliography, such as Hilberg and Reitlinger, claims a death toll between 1 and 1.5 million. He also trusts camp commandant Höß' claim that "the highest total of Jews gassed in twenty-four hours was 9000". Besides Nyiszli, Posner quotes another thoroughly discredited witness, Olga Lengyel, who in her book _Five Chimneys_ (1947) wrote that 24,000 Auschwitz prisoners were killed each day, and that not only soap were made out of the killed Jews, but also sausages.
> Posner uncritically presents us with the whole gamut of Mengele stories: dye injected into the eyes of children, eyes "pinned up like butterflies," twins experimented on and dissected alive (including a one year old baby), typhus injections, the makeshift Siamese twins of Ms. Alexander, one pair of twins forced to have sex with another, small children lured into the crematorium with sweets, prisoners killed to produce skeleton samples, electrical experiments... It is even reiterated (p. 46) that Mengele had 300 young orphans killed by throwing them alive into a flaming pit. "Although some inmates who knew Mengele have testified that they never saw him commit an act of violence," Posner writes, "there are witnesses to corroborate every one of these extraordinary allegations". Of course all we have is the witness testimony. What Posner calls "the most damning and complete document [...] ever compiled against [Mengele]", a series of indictments drawn up by the West German Prosecutor's Office, is in fact almost exclusively based on witness testimony.
> ...
> In 1977, Wiesenthal stated with confidence that Mengele "had two posh houses and was always surrounded by armed bodyguards with walkie-talkies", being a member of a fancifully-named "surviving network of Nazi bigwigs". Mengele was portrayed as killing off all "hunters" who got near to him, while enjoying the patronage of various South American _generalissimos_ and organizing drug trade (as well as experimenting on native Amazonians). In reality Mengele, a broken old man with a walrus mustache, was sitting in a rundown bungalow watching _telenovelas_ with the neighborhood gardener.

From a Time article from 1977 titled "WAR CRIMINALS: Wiesenthal's Last Hunt" (http://content.time.com/time/subscri...879774,00.html):

> Besides his villa in San Antonio, Mengele has a home in Puerto Stroessner, a town situated at the confluence of the Parana and Iguagu rivers.
> Within the hinterland of Paraguay, which contains many large German-owned farms, Mengele moves about a great deal. No matter how safe their sanctuary may seem to be, old Nazis live in constant anxiety. Says Wiesenthal: "That is a part of their punishment." Mengele travels in a black Mercedes 2805L, escorted by four armed guards. Even before entering the home of a German acquaintance, two guards approach it first and make sure it is safe before signaling an all clear on their walkie-talkies to the guards who remain with Mengele.
> In the past few months, Mengele has been seen at the German club in Asunción. Risking discovery, Mengele sometimes drinks too much; one evening, he drunkenly pulled out a pistol and waved it about. Another time he chatted with a visiting West German professor. Each time someone entered the bar, Mengele, who wears sunglasses as a partial disguise on his Asunción excursions, would quicky put them back on. Then, after he recognized the newcomer, he would take them off. Finally, he became so annoyed with putting on and taking off his glasses that he slammed them on the table, shattering a lens.
> Mengele is an active member of a surviving network of former Nazi bigwigs known as Die Spinne (The Spider). In addition to being a mutual protection society, this organization specializes in extortion and smuggling in South America. Mengele is also working on a book that supposedly will justify his experiments as valid scientific undertakings.
> The ugliest speculation about Mengele is that once again he may be involved in the destruction of a people - though on a much smaller scale. Despite Paraguayan denials, TIME's sources believe that he serves as an adviser to the Paraguayan police and frequently travels to the remote Chaco region where the Aché Indians are being hunted down or reduced to slave labor through techniques that are chillingly reminiscent of those of the German work camps. A high Paraguayan police official boasted to a visiting investigator that his government uses "German methods" in dealing with the Indians.

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From a New York Times article from 1985 (https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/07/w...f-mengele.html):

> Roughly 100 of those twins, dwarfs and others who survived Dr. Mengele's Auschwitz experiments gathered in Jerusalem over the last three days for an international hearing.
> ...
> Thirty of the twins and dwarfs testified at the Yad Vashem memorial here before a six-member board of inquiry led by Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor in the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Telford Taylor, chief American counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Many of their stories had not before been recorded.
> ...
> Some of the most gripping testimony was provided by two Rumanian Jewish dwarfs - the sisters Elizabeth Moscowitz and Perla Ovitch - who came from a circus family of seven dwarfs and three persons of normal height.
> "The minute Mengele first saw us he said, 'Now I have work for 20 years,' " Elizabeth Moscowitz recalled.
> ...
> At one point, she testified, Dr. Mengele forced their entire family to sing naked for the entertainment of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler and 2,000 Nazi soldiers and officials.
> "They prepared a small stage for us," she said. "Mengele stood on the stage with us. We were completely naked. Himmler sat in the front row with a movie camera, enjoying the performance."

Mengele was so busy with scientific experiments:

> One of the most moving moments came in the testimony of Ephraim Reichenberg, 58, who had had to have his vocal cords removed because of injections Dr. Mengele gave him in his neck. He gave his testimony through a special microphone placed on his neck just below his jaw that made his voice sound as through it was coming from a computer.
> Mr. Reichenberg was not a twin but greatly resembled his older brother.
> ...
> His brother had a "beautiful voice and sang once for the Germans," Mr. Reichenberg said. But his own voice was very poor, and Dr. Mengele wanted to know why one "twin" would have a beautiful voice and the other would not. He conducted "experiments" on their vocal cords that impaired their speech and eventually created growths that led to the entire removal of Mr. Reichenberg's cords in 1967.

I wonder if this witness couldn't have temporarily removed the boob tape?

> Another survivor's tale that had the audience in tears was told in an almost hypnotic monotone by Ruth Eliaz, who delivered a baby while under the authority of Dr. Mengele. Angered that he had not noticed her pregnancy beforehand, which would have prompted him to send her to the gas chambers, Dr. Mengele ordered her to give birth to the baby. Once it was born, he forced her to cover her breasts with tape.
> "He wanted to see how long a baby would live without food," Mrs. Eliaz said. "The child got thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker. Every day Mengele would come and look at it."
> A nurse in her bunkhouse stole some morphine and a syringe and told Mrs. Eliaz to put her baby out of its misery.
> " 'You want me to kill my own child,' I said. 'I can't do it.' "
> "We had a big argument, until I did it," she said, choking back tears as the audience fell completely silent. "I murdered my own child."
> "The next day Mengele came," she continued. "He couldn't find my baby's corpse among the heap of bodies outside our bloc. He cursed me for cheating him."

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Wow, I didn't know that in 1988 Ingrid Rimland published a book where she wrote that Mengele lived in a Mennonite community. The book is listed under fiction at WorldCat, but Rimland's two earlier books were both autobiographical. A reviewer of the book made it seem like the book was not meant to be entirely fictional, but maybe the reviewer had the wrong impression of the book (https://mla.bethelks.edu/ml-archive/...ke%20essay.php):

> _Demon Doctor_ is the third and the least well known of Rimland's four major books.(1) It is the story of Rimland's quest in the mid-1980s to demonstrate that Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi "Butcher of Auschwitz," had fled to Paraguay, taken on the identity of one Dr. Hans-Joachim Fertsch, and practiced medicine in the Mennonite colony of Volendam.(2) Rimland's mother worked as Fertsch's assistant, until the Mennonite colony leaders dismissed the eccentric, paranoid, philandering "Demon Doctor" from his position in 1951. Thirty years later, according to Rimland, the fugitive Mengele/Fertsch collaborated with Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator-president of Paraguay, to fake the fugitive doctor's death and funeral. Then the doctor retired to live out his days as a gardener in Stroessner's compound. With just a little more help and some good luck, Rimland tells us, she could have set up Mengele/Fertsch's capture.
> ...
> She also records visits and conversations with Mennonites who once knew Dr. Fertsch in Volendam and were now living in Canada. The book quotes extensively and repetitively from Rimland's correspondence with potential informants.
> ...
> In the end, with nothing proven and the popular Mengele mania eclipsed in the mass media, she writes, "Thus ends my Gothic tale. You are free to believe it or not." (p. 315)
> ...
> Rimland darkly implies that her revelations could place her reputation and even her life in danger.
> ...
> Rimland wrote The Demon Doctor before her conversion to the revisionist camp of Holocaust denial.
> ...
> According to the World Cat database of the Online Computer Library Center - a comprehensive database of worldwide library holdings - only three libraries worldwide own this book. One of them is the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College. It seems that the book was not marketed at all, or withdrawn almost immediately after publication. Rimland doesn't list the book alongside her other publications on her web site.

In 1983, Simon Wiesenthal also said that Mengele lived in a Mennonite community, even though Mengele is supposed to have died in 1979 (https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/02...3730413010000/):

> Interior Ministry Undersecretary Miguel Angel Bestard Tuesday denied a report by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that Mengele, the Auschwitz physician who conducted medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was living in a small Mennonite community on the Paraguay-Bolivia border.
> 'Every 90 days, Wiesenthal produces a regular declaration about Mengele, locating him in various areas of South America,' Bestard said in denying the report.
> Wiesenthal, who established the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, told Newsweek magazine that Mengele was located at the end of last year in a Mennonite town on the border between Bolivia and Paraguay.
> 'To the people living there, (Mengele) is a refugee, and they are not in a hurry to deliver him to the police. The Mennonites believe in justice after death,' Wiesenthal told the magazine.
> Bestard said Mengele left Paraguay some 20 years ago before German courts had time to ask for his extradition.
> 'If Wiesenthal is unaware of that, his information is not very credible,' Bestard said.
> Kornelius Sawaczky, administrator of the Loma Plata colony, the most important Mennonite community in the Paraguayan Chaco region, said Wiesenthal's report was inaccurate.
> He said there were no Mennonite colonies in Paraguayan territory near the Bolivian border. All of them, he said, are located in west-central Paraguay, far from the border.
> The closest colony is 400 miles from the Bolivian border, he said.

From an article from June 1985 (http://content.time.com/time/subscri...490-10,00.html):

> According to Simon Wiesenthal, the doctor was most recently spotted last summer in a Mennonite village in Paraguay called Valendam. One year earlier, in fact, Wiesenthal had observed that the 10,000 members of that close-knit community would provide the perfect cover for the fugitive.

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This post consists of quotations from the book "Giants: The Seven Dwarfs Of Auschwitz" from 2013 by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev: http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=negev%20koren%20giants. See this Guardian article for an overview of the book: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-of-auschwitz. An earlier edition of the book was published in 2005 under the title "In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe: A Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust".

Apparently during Mengele's shifts on the ramp, he not only plucked out the twins and dwarfs, but also fat people, hunchbacks, pinheads, hermaphrodites, and giants. Mengele also found a woman who had two noses, a girl who had sheep's wool instead of human hair, and a woman who had donkey ears:

> In the service of Professor von Verschuer, Mengele was collecting twins, but he was also using his long, diligent shifts on the ramp to select unusual and striking human mutations. Like a demonic impresario casting the ultimate freak show, he plucked out from the masses hunchbacks, pinheads, hermaphrodites, giants, dwarfs, extraordinarily obese men, grotesquely corpulent women and anyone else suffering from a growth disorder. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, an inmate in the Birkenau infirmary, recalls that:
> > Mengele loved to single out those who had not been created in God's image. He once brought a woman to our area who had two noses; another time a girl of about ten who had sheep's wool on her head instead of hair; on another occasion, he brought a woman who had donkey ears.

But at least the dwarfs didn't claim that they were selected on the ramp by Mengele:

> Contrary to most testimonies by Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors, that Mengele was the one who personally selected them, it is clear that he could not have been on the ramp day and night, week after week. On the night the Lilliputs arrived at Birkenau, Mengele was fast asleep in his room at the nearby SS headquarters. All the troopers on duty at the ramp, however, well knew his passion, his collector's mentality. To gain favour with the freak-hunter, they were always on the lookout for new specimens to enrich his 'human circus'. While a lone dwarf did not provide reason enough to knock on Mengele's door in the middle of the night, seven dwarfs, along with their tall, normal-sized siblings, seemed to be a good cause for disturbance.

In the quotation below, the authors of the book speculate that when the dwarfs said that they barely escaped a gassing, they must have been subjected to a disinfection procedure in the Central Sauna. The authors say that in the sauna, water was poured over heated stones. However Pressac wrote that "the building of a disinfection and disinfestation centre subsequently to be called the 'Zentral Sauna,' a building that was a sauna only in name" (https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-...ssac0065.shtml). Also as far as I know, the orthodox narrative is that in the Central Sauna, the inmates weren't made to stay inside the disinfectation chambers, but the chambers were mainly used to disinfect textiles. According to a letter which was sent by a Czech inmate to the Auschwitz Museum, hot air was used to disinfect large and heavy textiles like coats and outer clothing, and steam was used for lighter textiles (like underclothes, shirts, prison uniforms, and blankets), but for leather objects like belts and shoes, they used karbol, lysol, or water containing hydrocyanic acid (ibid.). The dwarfs claim that they were saved from gassing by Mengele, just like how Regina Bialek claims that she almost died inside a gas chamber until her number was called out by Mengele (http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/...03_Bialek.html). When the dwarfs describe being gassed, they say that they smelled gas and that they fainted, which doesn't seem consistent with being placed inside a chamber where hot air or steam was used for disinfectation:

> A black army truck pulled up to the hushed group of the Ovitzes. Simon Slomowitz and his son helped everyone get up onto the bed of the truck. They were all sitting on the metal floor, so they couldn't see where they were being taken. The truck stopped. Their bones cracking, they dismounted, and an officer led them into a building. A pungent odour assaulted them. Hooks with numbers were attached to the walls; there were wooden benches to sit on. They were the only ones inside, all twenty-two of them. 'Take off your clothes!' the officer bellowed. Then, in the anxious silence, everyone looked to the seven Lilliputs for guidance. 'We are Orthodox Jews and can't undress together, men and women, brothers in front of sisters,' pleaded Avram Ovitz. The officer was impatient. From the tone of his voice, they knew they had better not argue. Averting their eyes from each other, they shed layer after layer of their clothes. Judah Slomowitz was eleven at the time: 'I had never seen a naked woman before and I was bewildered and intrigued with so many of them around me: my mother, my sisters, the dwarf ladies. It excited me to embarrassment. I couldn't help myself and burst out laughing.'
> A heavy door opened and the wave of stuffy heat assailed their faces. They'd barely crossed the threshold, groping their way inside, when the door slammed behind them.
> It was almost dark and we stood in what looked like a large washing room, waiting for something to happen. We looked up to the ceiling to see why the water was not coming. Suddenly we smelt gas. We gasped heavily, some of us fainting on the floor. With our last breath we cried out. Minutes passed, or maybe just seconds, then we heard an angry voice from outside - 'Where is my dwarf family?' The door opened, and we saw Dr Mengele standing there. He ordered us carried out and had cold water poured on us to revive us.
> The event indelibly etched the imminence of death on their memory: they were beginning to be gassed - and everyone would have died if Mengele had not suddenly reappeared.
> Nevertheless, the story's verification with specialists and relevant documentary evidence suggests it is unlikely any gassing was scheduled for the Ovitz group that day. The gas chambers were designed to kill between 500 and 2,000 people at once, depending on the size of the hall. Zyklon B was effective only in a room temperature of 27° Celsius, which was achieved by cramming a mass of people together. Gas chambers were simply not operated for merely twenty-two people; small groups were shot. Furthermore, according to the camp's rigid safety orders, the SS personnel had to wear gas masks when operating Zyklon B. Although the victims died within fifteen minutes, the SS men routinely waited half an hour before turning on the powerful fans that dispersed the gas from inside the chamber. Only then were the doors opened. The operators themselves did not enter; instead, Jewish inmates from the Sonderkommando were sent in to drag out the bodies for cremation.
> Consequently, if the Ovitz group had been consigned to a gas chamber, once the extermination process had begun, it could not have been halted, as by then it would have been impossible to open the doors. What seems more likely is that the Lilliputs had been taken to the camp sauna for disinfection, where the water poured over heated stones would have produced much steam and fumes, as well as temperatures intense enough to open wounds and cause someone to faint. The sauna would have had a particularly traumatic effect on both small children and fragile dwarfs - an effect that might easily have created the impression of being gassed.
> In any case, the twenty-two members of the Ovitz group returned to the dressing room where they lay on the benches until they regained their senses. They were exempted from the sauna's second phase, in which they would have been forcibly shoved into the next hall to shower in ice-cold water and then to towel-dry with ten people to one flimsy towel. They were also spared the invasive search of all bodily orifices for gold or jewellery. Contrary to standard procedure, they were given their own clothes back, after they'd been disinfected. It was a practical move on the part of Mengele, a seasoned laboratory scientist, who cared for his human subjects the way he did his lab rats, according to their particular needs. And Mengele realised they needed their own specially sewn clothing. To dress them in clothes that had been stockpiled in storerooms after being stripped from some of the hundreds of thousands of children murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau simply would not do: though Lilliputian in height, the Ovitzes had the bodies of adults, with breasts and curves and wide bottoms.

The dwarfs were fed a witches' brew straight out of a fairytale:

> Lunch was either a watery soup made of potato and a few leaves of cabbage, or else roots, the sort normally fed to cattle, that had been boiled in a huge vat of water. The quantities were meagre, and Perla found the taste nauseating, rancid with the smell of rotten vegetables and more suspicious substances - some sort of poison, she feared. 'Once when they poured us soup, I saw worms crawling in the bowl.' There were bits of glass, buttons, things looking like teeth and little fingers of children.

The dwarfs were starving because they didn't want to eat porridge because they were not babies:

> > He gave us some porridge, baby food, but we had passed the age and hunger drove us crazy. The children were always crying for food.

I wonder if washing your hair with tea makes it cleaner:

> There was a warehouse full of little chamber pots that parents had taken for their babies on the long train journey. The babies were all killed, and Dr Mengele furnished us with one of the pots, as well as an aluminium bowl to wash in. Simon Slomowitz would bring a bucket of water from the washrooms and we would wash each other with the help of Sarah and Leah. Sometimes we used the undrinkable tea to shampoo our hair.

Despite everything, the dwarfs spent hours each day grooming themselves:

> Every day the Lilliputs groomed themselves, scrubbing and brushing each other for hours in preparation for their summons to Mengele's cabinet. They dressed up in their finery, powdered their faces and rouged their cheeks. Make-up had always been essential to them and they'd had the forethought to ferret some away in their pockets when they boarded the train to Auschwitz. They could stroke in a black line along the lids of their eyes, and they could pout their lips and colour them red.

The purpose of Mengele's cruel blood-drawing experiments is explained by medical forms issued by the "Hygienic Bacteriologic Laboratories of the Waffen-SS":

> Far from recording any effort to break the genetic code for dwarfism, the surviving forms reflect, instead, the routine healthcare procedures of the 1940s: the laboratory checked the blood for 'Takata-Ara' and 'Rest-NaCl' as well as vitamin C, in order to trace kidney problems, liver function and typhus.

Like the book by Marwell which I quoted earlier in this thread, the book about the dwarfs also mentions that Mengele was planning to write a book about physical anthropology which would've employed Dina Gottlieb's sketches:

> Not happy with Gottlieb's apparent preference for good-looking Gypsies, Mengele himself chose Dina's next set of models: a selection of elderly women and men. She got the impression that the doctor wanted simply to acquire visual documentation to support his racial theory, as Dina's series of eleven Gypsy portraits were intended to illustrate the book that Mengele was hoping to write.

Based on the following description, Mengele may also have collected photos for use in anthropological plates. The story about SS men taking a photo of a big d*ck Ukrainian seems semi-plausible:

> Block 28 of the main camp at Auschwitz was equipped with the most sophisticated gear of the time: a photographic workshop and studio. For the most part, the photos that were processed there depicted political prisoners, although Mengele also took advantage of the studio and workshop to compile a photographic record of his research subjects. One of the photographers was Polish prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. He had started working with Mengele at the end of 1943; at first, he photographed Gypsies with gangrenous faces; twins, triplets and even quadruplets came later. Then one day, in the summer of 1944, the truck from Birkenau brought the dwarfs. They all had to undress, and Brasse took the standard shots: one frontal, one from the side, one from the back. In addition, at Mengele's instructions, he also took close-ups of the dwarfs' hands and feet - of particular interest, as their trunks were nearly normal.
> The female dwarfs felt ashamed standing naked in front of Brasse, and it was embarrassing for Brasse as well. He had been ordered not to converse with the petite women with beautiful faces; nonetheless, he tried to make them feel at ease, by moving about gently, speaking softly, apologising that he had no choice in the matter. Later on, the SS brought to Brasse's workshop an extraordinarily obese man and a Ukrainian with a giant penis. After he took both men's photos, they were shot outside the studio.

Like Marwell's book, the book about the dwarfs also mentions how Martina Puzyna performed anthropometric measurements for Mengele:

> Too weak to walk on her own, Puzyna had to be carried to Mengele's office by two female prisoners. Mengele greeted her by asking what she had been doing at the camp since her arrival; when she answered that she had been carrying heavy stones, he burst out laughing. They discussed anthropology, his interest in comparative research on twins, and the appropriate techniques for measurement. Mengele ordered additional food for her and he had her billeted as a prisoner-physician. 'He was interested in seeing my work capacity restored as fast as possible. Compared to my former situation, it was heaven on earth.'
> Dr Puzyna was assigned a special workroom equipped with all the necessary tools - Swiss-made callipers, protractors, compasses, slide rules - and was furnished with two assistants, a female former anthropology student to help her do the measurements and a young girl to note the findings. While Mengele's specimens sat naked for long hours in the unheated room, Dr Puzyna fastidiously measured the length and width and shape of the eyes and nose as well as the various distances from the tip of the eye to the nose, the ear, the other eye, the jaw. 'Turn left! Right! Bend over! Stretch up! Don't breathe!' The inmates were bombarded with orders. Tediously and repeatedly, she measured finger after finger, joint after joint, and every digit was carefully recorded in its proper place on the chart.
> When the Ovitzes came in for measuring, they seemed to her to be consistently cheerful. Mengele never indicated to her the purpose of the Lilliputian measurements, although her impression was that his interest in heredity had prompted him to research the topic more thoroughly through pathology.
> ...
> Yet she [Puzyna] remained ambivalent in her judgement of Mengele's work and insisted long after the war that its results 'were of immense value to the science of anthropology. I recognised this fact at the time, and tried to secure these results for myself. I prepared copies and concealed them in containers, and buried them near my office barrack.'
> When the war ended, she hurried to her barrack to retrieve the documents, but she was unable to locate the exact spot where she had hidden them; they had disappeared forever. Documents she had smuggled out earlier have survived, including the anthropometric measurements of 296 Jewish girls and women from Hungary, 111 of them twins, on sheets of fading paper partly damaged by weather and time. Long columns in dense handwriting are filled with each prisoner's number, age and Dr Puzyna's twenty-four different measurements for each person.

When survivors tell of fantastical experiments which took place at Auschwitz, the experiments are often conducted by Mengele personally. But the actual medical examinations were often performed by Mengele's staff, and for example anthropological measurements were performed by Puzyna:

> Feld endured the same cycle of medical tests that the Ovitz family did. Although they shared the same handicap and fate, the Ovitzes resented Feld because of his conversion, and refused to exchange a word with him when all of them sat together in the clinic. Once Dr Puzyna had completed the initial round of anthropometric measurements, Feld was examined by a team of specialists: an internist, a neurologist, a psychiatrist, an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, a surgeon, a urologist, and an ear, nose and throat man - all of them prisoners, of different nationalities. While Mengele reviewed all the results, he himself conducted none of the actual examinations. According to Feld, Mengele behaved properly and politely during his visits; he even offered the dwarfs cigarettes.

Apparently it was punishable by death for the inmates to write or paint (but it's not clear here the claim was made by Feld or by the authors of the book):

> Feld had to deliver all his paintings to Mengele because any form of creative self-expression by inmates - writing, painting - was forbidden and punishable by death. But Feld, however, furtively tore small pieces of paper from Mengele's allotment and sketched scenes of camp life that he then hid under the mattress.

This is how the Nazis managed to trick the Red Cross:

> On 23 June 1944, an International Red Cross delegation had visited the ghetto of Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, to investigate reports that the Jews there were being transported for extermination. The delegation was scheduled to proceed next to Poland in order to inspect the Czechoslovakian 'Family Camp' at Birkenau. The Red Cross delegates had been highly impressed by the showcase Jewish habitat of Theresienstadt, especially when they were shown postcards written by former residents of Theresienstadt affirming that everyone was alive and well in Auschwitz-Birkenau. What the delegates didn't know was that the postcards had been written under duress just a few hours before their authors were gassed. Also, the cards were all dated two weeks after the gassing. The International Red Cross decided that with everything being so satisfactory, a trip to Poland was an unnecessary investment of time and energy. The Germans no longer had to fear an inspection of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Further camouflage became unnecessary and the liquidation of the 10,000 inmates of the 'Family Camp' could begin.

One of the dwarfs had such poor merchant skills that she doesn't deserve to be called a Jew:

> Before leaving, he put four cigarettes in my pocket. In my village it was unheard of for a Jewish girl to smoke, so after returning to the barrack, I traded them for a piece of pork fat. But since on religious grounds I couldn't use that either, I tried for another exchange. The only thing I managed to get was a small onion. Everyone told me I had been cheated.

However other inmates demonstrated cunning that was worthy of a Jew:

> Karl Stojka, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy, was transferred to Buchenwald, but he was found unfit for work and was to be sent back to Auschwitz - and certain death. Stojka's brother and uncle appealed to the SS, falsely saying that he was not a skinny child but a tough adult dwarf, fit for any work. In normal times, dwarfs were treated for the most part as outcasts who were generally denied employment; in these extreme times, though, deformity could prove to be a lifeline. So Karl Stojka, a average-sized boy, exploited the stereotype of dwarfs famous for extraordinary strength. He was allowed to stay in Buchenwald, survived the war and became a painter.

When the book quotes actual wartime documents, it gives a mundane impression of the experiments that the dwarfs were subjected to:

> The last two weeks of August were particularly terrible. The surviving medical records at the Auschwitz State Museum archive show that starting in the middle of the month the Lilliput group had to endure an increasing number of tests. On 16 August, Simon Slomowitz and his three sons were taken to the clinic with Avram and Micki Ovitz. Blood was drawn for a variety of tests, including syphilis. Two days later, the five dwarf sisters underwent the same tests. On 21 August, eight-year-old Batia Ovitz was driven alone to the X-ray lab in Auschwitz. The next day, a syphilis test was administered on two Slomowitz girls, their mother, and Leah and Dora - all of them average height. Two days later, it was the turn of baby Shimshon and Batia, as well as Elizabeth and Sarah. On 29 August, the four female dwarfs, excluding Perla, were summoned again.
> With so many tests, they feared they were entering a new, far more brutal and agonising phase in the research. Or worse, that Mengele was terminating his project and that they would soon be killed. One day, at the end of August, Mengele brought Dina Gottlieb a huge roll of paper. It was so long that she could not spread it open inside the clinic. She took it outside and stretched it out on the ground, holding the corners down with stones. Then, crawling along it, she enlarged various charts, and mapped out an extremely complex family tree. She filled the square frames with names, years and gender, as well as symbols - some large, some small - next to each name.

When the book describes how the dwarfs were made to perform in front of an audience of SS men, at first it sounds believable enough, but then when something fantastical begins to occur, it's Mengele personally who is involved, as is frequent in the tales about Auschwitz. For example here it was Mengele personally who told the dwarfs to undress before their performance:

> It was almost twilight when Mengele entered the Lilliput room at the women's camp. He was holding a small parcel under his arm. 'Good evening, Herr Hauptsturmführer,' they chorused, jumping to their feet at the unexpected visit. He signalled them to sit down and rested his boot on a chair. Then, clasping his waist, he announced that tomorrow he would be taking them on a special journey to a beautiful place they had never seen. They had to get ready, he said.
> Their faces grew pale. Mengele flashed a grin, in an attempt, it seemed, to put them at ease. He said that they were to wear their finest clothes and that their hair should be perfectly coiffed and their faces made up - for they were going to be appearing onstage in front of some very important people. Before he left, he laid his gift on the low wooden table. For a long time, the Ovitz sisters stared at the parcel, too terrified to move and touch it. Finally, warily, they unwrapped it and discovered to their delight a face-powder compact, crimson rouge, and brilliant turquoise and green eye shadow. Shiny red lipstick was tied together with a matching jar of nail varnish. And there was an extra treat - a bottle of eau de cologne.
> Thrilled with Mengele's gift, the sisters fiddled with the make-up. They sniffed the scent and rubbed it joyfully on their skin. They already had their own mirror and a small make-up kit - unheard of in Auschwitz - but the items in Mengele's parcel, they had to admit, were of much higher quality. They went through their few dresses. Each sister selected her most presentable one; then they tried to match each other's colours. Sitting on the low bunk, they reinforced the seams, and with the flats of their hands, smoothed away the wrinkles in the fabric. As they discussed what to sing the next day, they wondered how they would manage without their two brothers with solely feminine voices. In the past, they had sometimes split the troupe and performed in duos or trios, so they decided to trust their fifteen years of artistic experience and just improvise. They did not sleep a wink that night. They lay awake hoping that tomorrow's performance would transform their destiny.
> At dawn, Friday 1 September 1944, Sarah and Leah rushed out to get a bucket of water so they could help their sisters wash. They dressed each other and combed each other's thick, black hair. In turns, they held up the small mirror for one or another to powder her face. To their lips, eyes and cheeks they applied a heavy, theatrical layer of make-up. Their glamour restored, they felt jubilant.
> Mengele had ordered that the Lilliput Troupe's five female members be accompanied by another contingent, which included their two average-size sisters, Sarah and Leah; baby Shimshon; sister-in-law Dora and her daughter Batia; and Chaya Slomowitz along with her three daughters. Regina Ovitz, Bassie Fischman and her mother Gitel Leah were the only three who had been excluded. With a mixture of envy and worry, they watched the preparations and could not help but wonder what this separation would mean for them.
> A truck stopped near their barrack and Perla was struck silent with joy: her brothers, dressed in their best clothes, were sitting inside, as were Slomowitz and his sons.
> Indifferent to the convoys' exultation, the prisoners in the yard simply nodded at the spectacle. In the code of Auschwitz-Birkenau, any special gesture - the promise of a journey, a hearty meal - was a deadly omen.
> The truck passed through Birkenau's gate, but instead of driving to the main gate of Auschwitz it entered a nearby camp they had always bypassed before. It was the SS residential camp and administrative centre. Well-guarded and off limits, here there were no shabby barracks; no hairless, emaciated inmates who could barely drag themselves around. Instead, spotless brick buildings faced lush green lawns brightened by colourful beds of flowers.
> The group of twenty Jewish women and men was escorted to a corner in the shadow of a large, new building. Cars stopped at the entrance and unloaded scores of uniformed SS officers.
> They were astounded when china plates and silver cutlery were laid out on the lawn in front of them. For the first time since they had left home five months previously, they were having a proper meal. They balanced their plates, heaped with food, on their laps and strove not to spill anything on their clothes. Delight and indignation accompanied every morsel. The officers entering the building glanced incredulously at the dwarfs' picnic and chuckled.
> After a while a sergeant came to fetch them. They walked in a column, the seven Lilliputs in front followed by their family, the Slomowitzes ending the procession.
> We tiptoed into the building, hearing muffled sounds amplified by loudspeakers. It sounded like a speech or something. We were heading backstage, when suddenly two men carrying a stretcher with a body shrouded in black passed us by. We were numb. Where was Dr Mengele? We hadn't seen him all day. Where had he brought us? Was this going to be our end too?
> Nevertheless, eager to be back in the limelight, they managed to stifle their apprehension. They did wonder, though, why their tall sisters, the Slomowitzes and the children, none of whom had any theatrical experience, were being led to the stage with them.
> 'Off you go,' the sergeant whispered. Marching forward in a long line, they mounted the stage. To their relief they saw Mengele at the front of the stage. A solemn master of ceremonies, he waited for them to take their places in a line that stretched from one end of the stage to the other.
> The auditorium was packed; they had never seen so many medals and decorations. There was a murmur in the hall. The audience stared at the assortment of men, women and children onstage. The Lilliputs smiled in confusion, for they did not know how to begin. They looked to Mengele for a cue.
> He turned to them and snapped, 'Undress!'
> Aghast, their hands trembling, they fumbled with their buttons. The Lilliputs tried to shrink into themselves and wished they could disappear altogether. They bent their shoulders forward, in an attempt to cover their genitals with their hands. 'Straighten up!' barked Mengele. Standing to attention like soldiers on parade, they fixed their eyes at imaginary points at the end of the hall to avoid seeing their naked relatives next to them.
> It was not the first time Mengele, like some freak-show impresario, had exhibited the Lilliputs and their group. 'This zeal had earned him great praise,' recalls Auschwitz survivor Ella Lingens-Reiner. But in the past the show had always taken place in the privacy of their room or in his clinic.
> We always had to be prepared for Dr Mengele and wear make-up, since he had told us, 'You're something special, not like the rest of them, and I want my fellow officers and professors to see you.' He would bring them to our room and we would stand to attention until he allowed us to sit down. He used to boast to his visitors, 'I have a whole family; they are like dolls, only real.' Sometimes we remained dressed, sometimes we were naked. The guests would touch our bodies and measure us and repeatedly inquire about our parents. Once Dr Mengele asked us to sing - we sang something in German, and they all clapped their hands. Dr Mengele was so pleased that he then shook hands with each of us.

In reality Mengele was just an anthrotard:

> But 1 September 1944 was a very special occasion: it was the inauguration of the new Lazarett (hospital) in the SS camp. Many high-ranking guests from Berlin were in attendance and Mengele was the main speaker. After Mengele's years in uniform, away from the podium, the Auschwitz conference was his chance to retrieve his place in the academic limelight. His wife, Irene, sitting proudly in the audience, noted the title of his lecture in her diary: 'Examples of the Work in Anthropological and Hereditary Biology in the Concentration Camp.' Mengele was, in fact, going public with his work for the first time. Until then, afraid of competition and sabotage, he had been very secretive. After the war, his close assistant, the prisoner-anthropologist Dr Martina Puzyna, testified before the Frankfurt general prosecutor that, even to her, he did not reveal 'what he was aiming for in the final analysis and evaluation of the measurements we conducted for him'. Mengele kept everything locked in his cabinets. Dr Lingens-Reiner would not forget her surprise when one day he proudly invited her to glance at some of his files. She leafed through the papers, which were full of charts and measurements of heads and bodies of twins and dwarfs. 'Isn't it interesting? What a pity all this will fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks,' he said.

Whenever the book quotes Nyiszli, you can expect something ridiculous to come out of his mouth:

> According to inmate-pathologist Nyiszli, however, Mengele was aiming not only 'to discover the biological and pathological causes of the birth of dwarfs and giants' but also to demonstrate that 'in the course of its long history, the Jewish race had degenerated into a people of dwarfs and cripples'.

However Puzyna presents a more realistic image of Mengele's research:

> According to anthropologist Martina Puzyna, 'It cannot be said that research on twins was a Nazi idea alone. It has always played an important role in anthropology.' Mengele's research on heredity in twins and dwarfs, then, was in line with accepted anthropological methods of his time; in Puzyna's view, what gave him a singular scientific advantage was the unlimited human pool at his disposal in Auschwitz. Thus, he could conduct his research 'on a big scale, to gain results by statistical methods, with acceptable values', she testified.

They had soccer games at the death camp:

> To take some joy in the last days of summer, a football game was organised at the men's infirmary one afternoon. Two teams of twin boys were kicking the ball, to the cheers of the crowd. Judah and Joseph Slomowitz were among the players, and their father and brother encouraged them from the touchline. Avram and Micki Ovitz watched the game from their small stools.

The Nazis fattened up the inmates so they would burn more quickly:

> As Mordechai Slomowitz told us,
> > Dr Thilo selected dozens of twin children, as well as Avram and Micki Ovitz and my two young brothers, who were eleven and thirteen. They were all put aside in the barrack. The double portion of food brought in that evening was a sign they were doomed. The Nazis wanted you to gain weight so you could burn more quickly. My father and I decided that when the truck to the crematorium arrived, we would mount it as well. The SS wouldn't mind killing another two.

The book "The Nazi Doctors" by Lifton says that "Mengele fed his legend by dramatizing murderous policies, such as his drawing a line on the wall of the children's block between 150 and 156 centimeters (about 5 feet or 5 feet 2 inches) from the floor, and sending those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber." The book about the dwarfs similarly repeats a claim that Mengele selected children who were below a certain height to be killed:

> In the arrest warrant and indictment issued in Frankfurt am Main in January 1981 by the twenty-second criminal division of the Frankfurt Landgericht, Mengele was charged in absentia with having sent 328 children to the gas chambers on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year's festival - in 1944. In addition, the charge read, during the fast of Yom Kippur a week later, 'he hung a batten between the goal posts of a football pitch' and 'approximately 1,000 children under the required height' were sent on to their deaths.

Some eyewitnesses remember that the dwarfs performed acrobatic tricks:

> The Lilliputs also made an impression on inmates who had previously never heard of them. When testifying about Mengele's atrocities before the public prosecutor in Frankfurt twenty-five years later, a number of survivors recalled seeing dwarfs in the camp. Nurse Regina Teresa Krzyzanowska remembered the 'Lilliputians who were in block 23 and came to the camp from Hungary. They were whole families. They were circus artists and tried to stage a few shows.' In her memoir Sursis pour l'Orchestre, Fania Fénelon, a singer in the Auschwitz women's orchestra, speaks of '[dwarfs] jumping, doing acrobatics, shrieking at the top of their voices; there was a banal scene of clowns, their chubby little hands slapping ridiculously: what a pathetic sight'. The recurrent mistaken notion that the Ovitzes were circus performers may have arisen from the tradition that stereotypes dwarf artists as clowns and jesters. The Lilliput Troupe's style of performance was, by necessity as well as choice, far removed from clowning - their bowed legs and short, weak arms prevented them from doing any acrobatics whatsoever.

Other camp members remembered that the Lilliput Troupe acted like divas:

> Leah Nishri notes that
> ...
> > In my curiosity, I followed them back to their barrack, where they had a room for themselves, private and very spacious. Another dwarf lady appeared - decades later I recognised her on TV and learned that her name was Perla Ovitz. She was wearing a reddish-brown leather coat, padded with fur. A tall woman was walking behind her, carrying a bucket filled with potatoes. One potato was an unattainable dream to us, but a full bucket? In the camp I had never seen such a quantity. Perla was walking proudly, like an elegant lady returning with her servant from shopping. No other Jew in the camp walked with so much self-assurance. It seemed these people could get whatever they wished.
> Mengele's painter, Dina Gottlieb, gained a similar impression:
> > They did not look trapped like we did. They seemed hopeful and cheerful unlike the rest of us, who were frightened and pessimistic. It seemed they did not believe they'd be killed. They had a very good life before the war as VIPs, and continued to see themselves as special and privileged.

Here's another instance where one eyewitness contradicts another eyewitness:

> Living in the same barrack as the dwarfs, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was less than admiring. In her memoir _Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land_, she derides them for their endless prattle about Mengele:
> > 'How beautiful he is, how kind,' they repeated it every minute. 'How fortunate that he became our protector. How good of him to ask if we have everything.' They almost melted in adoration. They were accustomed to exposing themselves in public, and this was like another show for them.
> One afternoon, continues Nomberg-Przytyk, Mengele entered the barrack, and
> > we all stood at attention, including the midgets. Next to them, we looked like giants. He looked at them very closely. Then one of them stepped out of the row and fell at his boots. She was just about as tall as his boots. She hugged it with feeling and started to kiss it. 'You are so kind, so gorgeous. God should reward you,' she whispered, enraptured. He did not move for a minute, then he simply shook her off his boots. She fell. She lay there, tiny, spread out on the floor.
> Perla Ovitz firmly denies that such an incident ever occurred.
> > Dr Mengele never yelled or swore at us and, God forbid, never hit us. We all knew he was ruthless and capable of the worst forms of sadistic behaviour - that when he was angry he would become hysterical and literally shake from rage. But even if he were in a bad mood to begin with, the moment he stepped into our room he would immediately calm down, becoming a well-behaved boy. When he was in a good mood people would say, 'he probably visited the little ones'.
> And prisoner-doctor Katarzyna Łaniewska seems to confirm this: 'Mengele would often come to barrack 23 where the dwarfs were living, to chat with them and even crack jokes.'

Even here they had to insert the ovens:

> And Perla was aware of the Devil's charm:
> > Dr Mengele was like a movie star, only more good looking - he could have got prizes for his good looks. Anyone could easily fall in love with him. Nobody who saw him could imagine that behind his beautiful face a beast was hiding. He was a beautiful beast. Among ourselves we always asked how a man like that could become a Nazi.
> In return, Mengele praised the Lilliputs for their appearance. Perla recalls the sorts of compliments he would offer Frieda - the prettiest of them all - and her replies:
> > 'How beautiful you look today!' Mengele would say.
> > 'I knew that Herr Hauptsturmführer was coming, so I took great care to make myself up in his honour.'
> > 'If it was indeed for me, do continue to do so. But tell me, before arriving in Birkenau, did you also put on make-up every day?'
> > 'Of course I did, I'm an actress!'
> If Dr Mengele was not satisfied with Frieda's make-up, he would inquire, 'Are you in a bad mood today? Why didn't you apply your beautiful red lipstick?' Once he said to my sister Elizabeth, 'You've lost weight. That's not good!' When I heard this I panicked and started to cry, knowing that when he said 'it's not good', it had only one meaning: 'To the ovens!' 'Why are you crying?' he asked me. I said, 'Because Herr Hauptsturmführer said "it's not good".' Dr Mengele lifted his hand. 'Don't worry.'

Mengele even composed a couplet for the Lilliputs:

> Doctors were employed in the camp clinics and laboratories; musicians played in one of the three camp orchestras - all of them applauded by Mengele, the music lover who whistled arias from Verdi and Wagner while carrying out the selections. For the Lilliputs, he composed a special couplet that he often sang to them:
> > _Auf den sieben Bergen
> > Habe ich sieben Zwergen._
> > Behind seven hills
> > I have seven dwarfs.
> In the world of fairy tales, dwarfs always lived behind _sieben Bergen_ - seven mountains - but Mengele was also punning here on the proper noun _Siebenbürgen_, the German name for Transylvania, the region the Ovitzes came from. Because the dwarfs tried hard to please him, he composed another couplet for them:
> > _Die ungarischen jüdischen Zwerge
> > geschützte Häftlinge._
> > The Hungarian-Jewish dwarfs
> > are excellent prisoners.
> When he asked them to sing for him, they were reluctant, as they were afraid of what the other inmates might think. 'We don't have our full orchestra with us,' they protested. 'If I can sing a capella, so can you,' Mengele answered, and to prove it he hummed a line from a Hungarian Gypsy song that had been making the rounds of the restaurants in central Europe: 'There's only one girl in the world for me.' His joviality somehow injecting confidence into them, for a moment they felt safe in his hands and, as a token, they sang him one of their favourites: 'Come make me happy.'
> One day while chatting with the dwarfs, Mengele let slip that ever since childhood he had loved the Grimm Brothers' Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never, though, had he imagined such a real-life encounter.
> ...
> 'Forgive me for asking, Your Excellency, but when will this all be over so we can go home?' asked Frieda, with all the charm she could conjure up.
> 'What do you mean, _meine Liebe_? Don't I have a family that I want to see? I can't go home myself!' Mengele raised his voice. 'I'm not working here for pleasure but under orders. You've got nothing to complain about! As long as you're here with me you're better off!'

There were two orchestras at Birkenau:

> Two orchestras were operating in Birkenau, one at the men's camp and one at the women's camp. Their melodies could be heard twice daily, keeping pace and order as the inmates marched to their labour at dawn and as they returned from their labour in the afternoon. Music also provided an artistic interlude during the camp commander's speeches; it was featured at official ceremonies - and at the open-air hangings. On summer Sundays there were outdoor classical music concerts for the camp staff but the aloof Mengele, although a music lover, did not attend. The tunes travelled to the neighbouring barracks; prisoners ventured to the nearest electrified fence to catch a sound from another world.
> The living quarters of the orchestra members were a centre of attraction, and the SS officers and prisoner-functionaries went there at night for entertainment. The musicians, of course, had no choice but to comply with their whims and wishes. Smaller ensembles were often called upon to play at private staff parties and birthdays. In his book _fPeople and Ashes_, Professor Israel Gutman, an Auschwitz survivor and prominent historian, recalls that:
> > Feasts and saturnalias were celebrated at kapos' and block elders' quarters. The artistic programme consisted of obscenities and dirty jokes. Sometimes a prisoner with a sweet voice would sing pre-war hits in various languages. The kapos especially favoured melancholy tunes. The 'singers' were mostly Jews, who supplied their service for a ration of bread. The famous stars were very popular among the kapos and enjoyed a special income, thanks to their art.

This is what they had to do before there was hentai:

> SS guards often had Dina Gottlieb draw poster-size portraits from photos of their wives, fiancées and girlfriends, which they hung by their beds. Once, she was handed a postcard of a naked red-haired nymph sitting by a waterfall and was ordered to paint a life-size copy of it by the following morning. She worked frantically the whole night. 'A day later, the SS man brought it back for repairs - there were holes torn into the strategic body parts,' she recalls.

Earlier this dwarf book said that "any form of creative self-expression by inmates - writing, painting - was forbidden and punishable by death". But now an inmate told a camp clerk that he was a poet and asked for pencil and paper:

> Eighteen-year-old Abraham Cykiert was among the few permitted to watch the games. Something of a wunderkind in his home town of Łódź, he had been accepted into the local Yiddish Writers' Association at the age of fourteen, after publishing only three poems.
> ...
> He waited one day outside the _Schreibstube_ and ambushed one of the clerks: 'I'm a poet, can you lend me a pencil and paper?' Startled by the youth's innocent recklessness, the clerk furtively and surprisingly obliged. That night, words rushed from Cykiert's mind onto paper and in the morning he searched out his benefactor. The clerk's face was mask-like as he read the poem; Cykiert could not tell if he understood a word. 'Can you also write left-handed poetry?' asked the clerk, to the young man's incomprehension. He then pulled out a sheet of paper filled with jottings and scribbles, and handed it to Cykiert. The young poet blushed as he read gutter-rhymes, obscenities and abominations. 'Try it,' said the clerk.
> The next day, Cykiert showed him his latest creation. The clerk was so pleased that he paid the teenager with a hot bowl of soup. 'Can you recite as well as you write?' he asked. Cykiert nodded.
> The following night, he took me to the weekly binge of all the inmate-VIPs in the camp: veteran prisoners who assisted the SS in running the place. They were sitting around a table laden with delicacies: cheese, sardines, sausage, fruit. The alcohol flowed freely. There were other inmate-performers with me: singers, actors, musicians. We performed from the back of the room as they devoured the food. We were not allowed to touch anything, but when the party was over we could share the leftovers. I read my pornographic lines and they rolled with laughter. I was consequently accepted as the group's permanent jester. Every week, each of us had to come with new material - to this day I'm ashamed of the poems I was forced into writing.

But next the eyewitnesses again present conflicting testimony:

> Perla Ovitz insists that she and her family never took part in the 'night life' of the death camp: they never performed in these drunken revelries; they never sang in public; they never privately entertained parties of kapos and SS men. Yet nearly all witnesses - former fans, acquaintances and neighbours from Rozavlea who were in the camp with them, as well as inmates who shared their barrack - vividly recall the dwarfs performing for the SS. One such witness was Eta Tessler:
> > I knew the Ovitzes from Maramureş, as I was from Viseu, a nearby village. In Auschwitz I was part of the Scheisskommando. We had to collect the daily excrement of 32,000 women from the latrines, sift it into barrels and carry it outside the camp. All day long we were criss-crossing the camp, filthy and smelling, pushing the heavy cart with overloaded shit barrels. One day I came across two of the dwarf ladies. It was extremely cold, and I envied them for being able to have coats and warm pockets. I asked them where they were going and they answered 'singing'. I would run into them a few more times, walking in the same direction, but I couldn't tell if it was always the same duo or if they took turns.

The book says that Mengele ordered the women's orchestra to prepare a concert on Tisha B'av, but I can't verify if the order was given by Mengele personally. Perla Ovitz claims that when her family was at Auschwitz, they never put on a musical performance in front of an audience, but eyewitnesses say otherwise:

> Sunday 30 July was the fast of Tisha B'av, commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. On this day, Jews would cease working and gather in synagogues to lament the catastrophe, which led to a bitter exile. Being familiar with the Jewish calendar, Mengele perversely ordered the leader of the women's orchestra to prepare a special concert. He selected the programme himself: military marches, circus music, waltzes, the foxtrot. The forthcoming concert caused much excitement. The orchestra arranged extra rehearsals, not just to master the exceptional programme but to master it brilliantly enough to please the unusual guest of honour. Rows of wooden benches stretched out over the infirmary yard. Opposite the orchestra stage, a special platform was erected to hold the SS staff and their inmate-assistants, doctors, nurses and camp functionaries. In the centre of the dignitary box sat Mengele himself, the arena's emperor.
> As the orchestra struck its first notes, Fania Fenélon, one of the musicians, noticed a group of dwarfs crossing the stage in a straight line. 'It's a very famous dwarf circus from Hungary,' whispered one of her colleagues. Fenélon described the proceedings in her book:
> > We start with a foxtrot, Mengele waving his hand, the dwarfs filling the stage, some couples dancing, other participants only managing a kind of grotesque, depressing twist. The men bow with a touch of servility; the women follow. Their jewellery, silk, ornaments, glitter in the sun, igniting thousands of sparkles, dancing, swinging, intermingling. These creatures emit joyful sounds, trying to sing along with Clara, Lotte and me. They have high, shrieking voices. The orchestra plays a march, and they accompany with clapping and stamping. There is something unreal and awful about the fifty tiny hands covered with rings, the bracelets clicking on their little arms, the little legs stamping... The circus is at the foot of our stage, a circle with distorted creatures moving about, clapping like children, some of them fifty years old. The SS men burst out laughing. The young girls present at the scene start to tremble with fright at the uproar, the music, the dwarfs, the masquerade.
> Although Fenélon is wrong about their number - they were seven, not twenty-five - and despite the negative tone, she appears to offer a fairly realistic account. For her part, Perla Ovitz recalls an entirely different musical programme: romantic, melancholy German songs that moved her and her sisters to tears. She maintains adamantly that she and her family did not appear or perform onstage, that day or any other day, and insists that they watched the performance from their tiny stools in the audience.
> Against the bleak backdrop of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the evening was so vivid that it became deeply etched in the memory of many survivors. Isaac Taub was present that evening. He was part of the group of twin boys enlisted to carry chairs and benches and arrange them in rows. The children were allowed to stand at the back during the performance; afterwards, they dismantled the seats and carried them back to the depot.
> There were about 200 spectators and it was a full, professional show, with stage lights and music. I remember that the female and male dwarfs stood onstage. If I'm not mistaken, this concert was repeated once more. We all knew that the dwarfs were performing for the Nazis, but it was nothing to be ashamed of.
> After two hours, Mengele lifted his hand and declared the concert over. Fania Fenélon recalls that 'Mengele stood in the midst of the smartly dressed dwarfs, in their grotesque outfits and jewellery. He turned to us and said, in his ironic manner, "Sie haben ein gutes Publikum" (You have a good audience).'
> All the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Lilliputs safeguarded their musical instruments. Everyone in the ghetto had been told that the deportation would be the start of a new life; thus, the craftsmen and professionals had taken their tools with them. But in the havoc on the ramp they were all ordered to leave their belongings on the trains. The Ovitzes were no exception. 'You'll get them later,' they had been promised. 'They were always grumbling about their little musical instruments, which had been taken from them,' recalls Dina Gottlieb. 'They asked me if I could help get them back, as they were entertainers and needed their tools.'
> Many survivors recount a surrealistic scene in which a dwarf is playing the violin in a yard between the barracks. Gitta Drettler, who had lived next door to the Ovitz family on the main street of Rozavlea, remembers being:
> > happy to see them once again in the camp. The Nazis forced them to play in the SS barracks and I could hear the music from outside. They had their tiny musical instruments, and when I met them after the war in Romania and went to hear them playing, they said, 'These are the instruments we had in Auschwitz.'
> Likewise, Maria Halina Zombirt, who had worked in the infirmary as a clerk, testified to the Frankfurt general prosecutor that she had heard the family of ten Hungarian dwarfs 'playing on musical instruments - a very peculiar piece'. Kalman Bar-On, who lived in the same barrack as Avram and Micki Ovitz, recalls that
> > I would call them 'the two Toulouse-Lautrecs'. They always boasted, 'We are an artistic troupe!' They told us they arrived with all their equipment, stressing that it had been important for them to bring their musical instruments, even at the expense of clothes and household utensils, since their whole future depended on it.
> ...
> Still, though, Perla Ovitz insisted throughout her life that neither she nor her sisters and brothers ever performed in the death camp.
> > We only sang among ourselves in our room, to remind ourselves of the good old days, have a good cry, and try and forget for a moment where we were. Everyone in the camp knew that we were artists and we could not escape from it completely. So there were occasions when one of us, from fear of being killed or from no choice, succumbed to the demand of a kitchen supervisor or SS officer and sang for a candy or a bit of margarine. But we never put on a performance, and in any case did not have our musical instruments.

Mengele's life wasn't boring for sure:

> 'Now tell me, how did you live with your midget?' In her memoir of Auschwitz, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk recalls Mengele posing this question to Dora, the tall, full-bodied wife of Avram Ovitz. Mengele was pressing on the common stereotype of the male dwarf as a sub-human characterised by an unusually potent sex drive and wild, unnatural desires. Dora Ovitz blushed, dumbfounded, her blood pounding in her ears. 'Speak!' screamed Mengele, and then proceeded to interrogate her, vulgarly, in front of her young daughter, her sisters-in-law and the entire barrack. Had she conceived her child with her dwarf husband, he demanded, or was the father someone else? As Dora responded by praising her husband's intelligence and industry, writes Nomberg-Przytyk,
> > we all stood there like blocks of stones.
> > 'Don't tell me about that, only about how you slept with him.'
> > Mengele was salivating. The sweat poured down her face in big drops, on her clothes. She spoke and he asked questions. I cannot repeat the conversation. It was grotesque, inhuman torture.
> At times, Mengele's sexual curiosity took him beyond such interrogations. Two pairs of identical teenage twins testified for the Frankfurt prosecution that he forced them to have sex with other twins in order to determine if the girls would bear twins in turn.

I don't understand how the "forcing" worked in the following story:

> 'Among us in the experimental barrack for male twins and dwarfs was a misshapen, hunchbacked gnome, a little less than four feet tall,' recalls Efraim Reichenberg.
> > He was forty years old, had a fissure in his skull and could only walk with the aid of two crutches. He had been a watchmaker in Budapest and we came together on the same transport. Each of us was enduring his own private hell, but when he let us know what he was going through, there was still room for pity. Nearly every day he was put in a room and stripped naked. The SS brought him Gypsy women infected with syphilis and forced him to have sexual intercourse with them. The SS doctors stood watching. Every morning when he arrived and at the end of the day before he left, they examined him thoroughly to see if he had already caught the disease. When he first told me I didn't want to believe him, but one day I saw him through a crack in the door. A male nurse was holding him, forcing him down on a woman because he was no longer able. The unfortunate man didn't last long - he died some time later, not of syphilis but of exhaustion.

In the following passage where Nyiszli described the autopsy room at Krema II, I think he might have referred to a morgue similar to the morgue of Krema I, which is now presented to tourists as the only surviving homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz. Krema II has been destroyed, but it also had a morgue. Fred Leuchter has also pointed out that in the room of Krema I which is claimed to be a gas chamber, there is a drain on the floor (http://www.ihr.org/books/leuchter/auschwitz_k1.html, http://www.ihr.org/books/leuchter/birkenau.html).

> Pathologist Miklós Nyiszli has provided a description. The autopsy room
> > was located in crematorium II, to the left of the entrance. The walls were painted pale green, the floor red. In the centre of the room, mounted on a concrete base, stood a dissecting table of polished marble, equipped with several drainage channels. At the edge of the table, a basin with nickel taps had been installed.

This seems like it could've actually happened, because it's something that anthrotards on this forum would also do:

> There they were killed and their bodies, still warm, were sent to SS-Hauptsturmführer Professor Dr August Hirt. He was building up a collection of skulls at the Anatomy Institute of the Reich University in Strasbourg, and was looking for 'Jewish-Bolshevik commissar types', as examples of 'a repulsive but typical species of sub-humanity'.

There's multiple eyewitnesses who have said that one or more of the dwarfs were killed:

> 'One day, the dwarfs from block 23 were taken away,' recalls Dr Katarzyna Łaniewska. 'I don't know what was done with them.' Her colleague Ella Lingens-Reiner confirms that 'after about three weeks, the family disappeared suddenly. We were convinced they had been gassed.' Another doctor, Sigmond Hirsch, a French-Jewish roentgenologist and a resistance fighter, recalls that the experiments had ended and the dwarfs had been delivered to the gas chambers. Complete strangers to the dwarfs, inmates who saw them only briefly, like Maria Gasiorowska, a block elder at the women's camp, noticed that they had 'disappeared after a relatively short period of time, about two months. Following their disappearance, which attracted attention, there was news around the camp that they had been gassed. The news came from the crematorium workers.'
> One of these was _Sonderkommando_ Philip Müller: 'The only thing I saw regarding the midgets was how they executed them. He [Mengele] killed most of them, or had them killed, in order to perform autopsies on their bodies.' Maria Halina Zombirt, who had been a clerk in charge of the sick registry, testified for the Frankfurt prosecution that she 'met a group of ten Hungarian dwarfs and was told that they were a family who performed in a restaurant. When one of them died, he was prepared and skeletonised and sent to the museum in Berlin.'
> Two survivors have gone so far as to describe the death of the dwarfs in great, appalling detail. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk remembers Mengele ordering that little Shimshon be brought to his medical cabinet. When Mengele was finished with the baby, he locked the door behind him and left. Later, as Nomberg-Przytyk tells it, Leah Ovitz arrived, and discovered a terrible scene: she
> > grabbed the half-dead child and ran into a mad frenzy of pain. Not one drop of blood was left in his little face. 'He will die. He has to die,' she said, choked with tears. At night, the little one died. He never regained consciousness. In the small room, on the little table, lay the little boy. Around him, like pillars of stone, stood a large woman, along with the child's mother, slim and frail; the three midgets sat in miniature chairs. They did not cry. They were all frightened of the torturous death awaiting them.
> In the evening, the testimony continues, the dead child was placed outside the block with the other corpses to be taken to the crematorium. Nomberg-Przytyk also claims that she witnessed the awful death of Avram Ovitz: 'The old midget wanted his wife,' and he tried to slip through the wire; a guard spotted him and, when Avram got close enough, shot him. 'He never made it to his wife.'
> But little Shimshon did not die on Mengele's operating table and he survived Birkenau. Likewise, his uncle Avram was not shot, but lived to see liberation day. What, then, caused Nomberg-Przytyk to make such basic mistakes? Most likely she was compressing a number of events, and attributed to the dwarfs two common occurrences in the daily life of the camp: the death of a child in his mother's arms and the shooting of inmates who approached the electrified fence.
> In a similar manner, the singer Fania Fenélon maintains that immediately after the concert, 'the handsome doctor was seen crossing the camp, followed by his merry, squeaking army of dwarfs'. She describes Mengele as a Pied Piper proudly marching in front, with the dwarfs - joyful, self-assured, apparently unworried - behind him. 'Who could dream of exterminating such tiny creatures, always joyful and happy! Mengele laughs with them, he seems quite amused, he - so enormous, ruling over such small ones.' Fenélon then reports that later Mengele returned alone, his hands in his pockets. She concludes her account with the words ending the opera Pagliacci by Leoncavallo: _'La Commedia e Finita!'_
> A similar reminiscence was given by Renee Firestone, an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor: 'The Germans found a community of midgets, transported them to Auschwitz, shot them en masse and then were forced to let them sit in a pile for three days until the crematoria could take them.' A mass killing of dwarfs was not registered only in the memory of camp survivors, however. Documents in the Auschwitz archives have led some researchers to conclude that Mengele killed eleven female dwarfs on 7 December 1944.
> In the 'Labour Deployment List' of 5 December 1944, under the heading 'sick and unable to work', a new category appears for the first time: _Zwerge_. It indicates that sixteen female dwarfs were transferred to the women's camp in BIIe. It had previously been the Gypsy camp, but had stood empty since the extermination of all its inhabitants in August. The transfer was part of a rearrangement of Birkenau. The prisoners were being moved into fewer barracks, as the women's camp had been liquidated. Healthy women prisoners were transferred to BIIb, while the ill, as well as female twins and dwarfs, were transferred to BIIe. Three days later, the number of female dwarfs in the roster dropped from sixteen to five; the roster does not indicate the fate of the missing eleven.
> Many researchers have tried to decipher the horror behind the figures. 'They probably died the previous day as a result of the experiments conducted on them by SS Dr Mengele,' concludes Danuta Czech, in her extensive Auschwitz research. But although any sort of death was possible in the macabre world of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is most unlikely that Mengele would have arbitrarily eliminated eleven of his carefully maintained dwarfs at one go, before he had finished his work on them. Furthermore, he considered the autopsy vital to his research and would have been well aware that Dr Nyiszli could not possibly have dealt with eleven corpses in any exacting, productive way.
> There were indeed sixteen females in the Lilliput group: the five Ovitz dwarf sisters; their two average-size sisters; Avram's wife and her eight-year-old daughter; cousin Regina; Chaya Slomowitz and her three daughters; Bassie Fischman and her mother. Since Mengele regarded them as an extended family, he moved all sixteen of them to the new accommodations in Birkenau.
> But clearly, contrary to the conclusion of the camp historians, the eleven women did not die: all sixteen lived to see the end of the war and then emigrated to Israel or the United States.
> It would seem, in fact, that the disappearance of the eleven was simply a bureaucratic error. When the sixteen females of the Lilliput group arrived at their new barrack, they were duly recorded in the camp registry as dwarfs, in accordance with Mengele's note of transfer. But on a recount three days later, the officers in BIIe noticed that only five of the women were in fact dwarfs, and the eleven other average-sized women and young girls were thus excised from the category of Zwerge. While they no longer appeared in the same slot on the list, they nonetheless continued to live in the same room as the dwarfs.
> This being the case, why is there so much testimony concerning their brutal collective murder? One plausible answer might be that Birkenau survivors, who regarded their own deliverance as miraculous, found the chances slim that someone as helpless as the dwarfs could survive. In addition, the fact that the Lilliputs were transferred several times from one side of the camp to the other caused their fellow inmates to lose touch with them and in Birkenau, when you stopped seeing someone, it could mean only one thing.

Earlier the book quoted Perla saying that her family members never put on a musical performance at the camp, or at most "there were occasions when one of us, from fear of being killed or from no choice, succumbed to the demand of a kitchen supervisor or SS officer and sang for a candy or a bit of margarine." However there's two eyewitnesses who remember the dwarfs performing on Christmas Eve 1944:

> Though Jewish holidays were set aside for extensive killing, Christmas Eve 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau was relatively peaceful - a momentary respite from horror. Elizabeth Ovitz, escorted by her tall sister Sarah, went to wish a merry Christmas to the kitchen staff. On her way back, two SS officers stopped them and took Elizabeth into a back room while Sarah, frantic, waited outside. The officers mounted Elizabeth on a chair and demanded entertainment. Elizabeth's songs won her a shower of cellophane-wrapped candies, a piece of salami and some margarine, all of which she took back to her family. Christmas festivities were taking place in various parts of the camp. Dr Lucie Adelsberger remembers watching a party in the men's infirmary from behind the fence:
> > Physicians and nurses were allowed to strike up dance tunes with a jazz group. It was an open-air performance on the grassy area close to the wire. The women crowded around on the other side of the fence, shouting 'Bravo!' and clapping their hands. The programme was good, nothing was forbidden, no sentry shot into the crowd.
> The experience of Solomon Malik, then a fourteen-year-old twin, was even more extravagant:
> I went to a Christmas party in a large hall in the Kanada camp, near the crematoria. It was open only for camp functionaries but our kapo, Frau Schmidt, took me along with her. There was lavish food, drink, music and dance. It was a complete show: someone lifted a table with his teeth, clowns amused the crowd with their tricks. I remember that one of them rode a broomstick and laid eggs, to the cheers of the spectators. The Lilliputs were part of the artistic programme. I don't remember exactly how many of them were there, but they sang and played their tiny instruments.

Here's another instance where eyewitness testimony contradicts documented evidence:

> 'How many dwarfs like you were in the camp?' Ludovit Feld was asked by a Lieutenant Misivrov from the military prosecution office of the Red Army, who was sent to gather evidence. 'In Birkenau where I was, we were ten Lilliputians. Five men, five women.' 'How did the doctors and the SS treat you?' 'The doctors treated us fairly but the SS laughed at us, although they never hit us. Whenever they made selections, we were kept alive.'
> This testimony from March 1945 is the earliest evidence on record relating to Mengele's research on dwarfs. It also establishes their precise number: ten. However, this is not a figure on which researchers and survivors agree. Dr Gisella Perl, for example, indicates in her book that, 'One of these barracks housed Dr Mengele's pets, Polish and Hungarian Jewish midgets, about forty of them, some alone, some with their entire family.' Some research places the figure as high as a hundred or more. Nevertheless, there were only seven dwarfs in the Lilliput group and the Ovitzes insist there were only three other dwarfs beside them.
> This figure of ten is backed up by the surviving Auschwitz archives: between May 1944 and January 1945, listed under the category Zwerge are the names and camp numbers of the seven Ovitzes, Ludovit Feld, Arthur Seligsohn and the Budapest watchmaker.

A type of dwarfism ended up being named after Hans Grebe, who like Mengele worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute:

> In his rivalry with Hans Grebe, Mengele lost. By the 1950s, scientists had begun to taxonomise the various types of dwarfism. In 1952, Hans Grebe, now an honoured and distinguished scientist, published his papers on a rare form of short-limb dwarfism, to which he would lend his name: the diagnostic term 'Grebe Syndrome' is used to this day. Grebe identified the syndrome after studying a pair of Brazilian sisters, aged seven and eleven. Mengele had an entire family, seven of them dwarfs, at his disposal. Had he had the time to continue his research he, too, might have identified the Ovitz type of dwarfism that would in honour bear his name. But he did not, and the credit belongs to Maroteaux and Lamy, two French physicians who defined it in 1959. They named it 'pseudoachondroplasia'.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was actually full of children and old people: https://www.google.com/search?q=ausc...mates&tbm=isch. However the book about the dwarfs implies that the people who weren't gassed on arrival were usually between 15 and 35 years old:

> Almost nine out of ten people who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau were sent directly to the gas chambers. Some able-bodied men and women, usually between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, provided slave labour, a tortured interval before death.

When Americans "liberated" Buchenwald, they brought a film crew and a psychological warfare division to the camp, and they implanted two shrunken heads and the famous "human skin lampshade" in the camp: https://odysee.com/@Slammdcrxx/Buche...trayal-Of-Evil. Similarly a Soviet film crew arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau a day after liberation:

> The day after liberation, a Russian army film crew arrived at the camp. As the crew had missed the actual historical moment, they decided to stage it. Children always heighten the poignancy of a war story, so when Captain Alexander Vorontsov, a cameraman, chanced upon a group of Mengele's twins leaving the camp, he detained them. Dissatisfied with their randomly improvised clothing, he had them change back into striped prisoners' uniforms.
> In his search for a dramatic location, Vorontsov had found a narrow path that ran between two fences of barbed wire. He had another cameraman climb up a watchtower to get a bird's-eye view. Along the path, accompanied by nuns and nurses, the children in striped uniforms were paraded again and again; at the director's cue, they would stop and roll up their sleeves; then they'd point at the numbers tattooed on their arms to the camera. Extracts from the film are screened every half-hour at the Auschwitz State Museum.

The Wikipedia article about Mengele features one of the staged photos taken by the Soviets. Its description says that it was shot by "Alexander Voronzow and others in his group" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_...Auschwitz.jpeg):

[Komintasavalta]

In my previous post, there was a story of a hunchbacked gnome who was forced to b*ng so many gypsies with syphilis that he died of exhaustion. The story came from Ephraim Reichenberg, who was one of the claimants in a 1985 lawsuit where Mengele survivors sued the West German government (https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/07/w...f-mengele.html):

> One of the most moving moments came in the testimony of Ephraim Reichenberg, 58, who had had to have his vocal cords removed because of injections Dr. Mengele gave him in his neck. He gave his testimony through a special microphone placed on his neck just below his jaw that made his voice sound as through it was coming from a computer.
> Mr. Reichenberg was not a twin but greatly resembled his older brother.
> ...
> His brother had a "beautiful voice and sang once for the Germans," Mr. Reichenberg said. But his own voice was very poor, and Dr. Mengele wanted to know why one "twin" would have a beautiful voice and the other would not. He conducted "experiments" on their vocal cords that impaired their speech and eventually created growths that led to the entire removal of Mr. Reichenberg's cords in 1967.

The survivors ended up winning the lawsuit, but each of them only received about 13,000 USD: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...215-story.html.

In a video published on Yad Vashem's YouTube channel in 2015, Reichenberg said that he was injected in the base of the neck with cancer cells (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V41_BeF8Qo):

> My brother had a nice singing voice, but I couldn't sing. I had a raspy voice. They injected us at the base of the neck with a certain substance, that after the war we found out to be cancer cells. That experiment was repeated time and time again. Mengele would sit on the side and take notes. In 1946, my brother Menashe died an agonizing death from the the same illness that I suffer this day.

If you wanted to determine why one brother was better at singing than the other, how would it help to inject both of them in the base of the neck with cancer cells? Also isn't it convenient that because Reichenberg had to speak through a device which made him sound like a Dalek, the experiment performed by Mengele also involved his voice? (It reminds me of Phil Schneider, who was missing two fingers, and who showed his hand to his audience as proof that he had been in a fight with gray aliens whose laser beam had hit him.)

A newspaper article from 1996 also said that the reason for Reichenberg's experiments was that Mengele "was keen to find out why Reichenberg's brother had a beautiful singing voice and he did not" (https://www.newspapers.com/image/120682045):

> Ephraim Reichenberg, now 70, told of how he and his twin brother were whisked away, aged 17, on arrival at Birkenau to Mengele's laboratory. His parents and other seven brothers were sent straight to the gas chambers.
> The doctor was keen to find out why Reichenberg's brother had a beautiful singing voice and he did not, he said. "Every week we had lots of injections and our throats swelled up."
> The pair both lost their voices permanently as a result of Mengele's investigations. Reichenberg's twin died soon after.

In Reichenberg's testimony at YouTube, he said that "I was one of the first soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces." He also worked for the Communications Ministry of Israel (https://www.yadvashem.org/remembranc...ichenberg.html).

Reichenberg and his brother were included on a list of Auschwitz twins published by Mattogno, but I think it was based on Kubica's list or the CANDLES list: http://web.archive.org/web/201312171...s_on_twins.php. A list by CANDLES also included Reichenberg: http://web.archive.org/web/200502031...m/Twinlist.htm. Reichenberg is listed as having been registered under the code "B-10508". When I googled for the code together with his name, I found an entry for him in a "Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database": https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/per...rsonId=4963673.

In Mattogno's book about Nyiszli, Reichenberg is mentioned on a list of twins with dubious documentation regarding their registration at Auschwitz (http://holocausthandbooks.com/index....e=1&page_id=37):

> These are evidently not arrangements aiming at extermination: the transports mentioned are those which, according to Danuta Czech, arrived at Auschwitz on September 29 and 30.[286]
> A short digression is necessary here. In her Auschwitz Chronicle, Czech supports only her remarks on the first transport with documents, using the following sources (Czech 1997, pp. 718; 1989, p. 889):
> > "APMO, D-AuI-3/26, Inventory No. 148855; Docs. of ISD Arolsen, NA-Men, Series B, p. 2/1980."
> Helena Kubica, on the other hand, informs us that the first reference concerns a handwritten list containing 125 names of twins selected in 1943 and 1944 from transports arriving from Theresienstadt and other places.[287] She notes further that the document was donated to the Auschwitz Museum on April 13, 1965 by ex-deportee Robert Waitz, and that from July 1944 onward the persons named in the list were housed in Barracks 15 of the men's hospital camp (Sector BIIf) of Birkenau.[288]
> Czech's other source is presumably just the continuation of the "B" series of Auschwitz registration numbers.[289] In fact, the only proof of the arrival of the transport under discussion is the registration numbers assigned to three pairs of twins:
> - B-10502-10503 to the Hauptmann twins
> - B-10504-10505 to the Steiner twins
> - B-10506-10507 to the Reichenberger twins
> Kubica even provides their names (Zoltan and Jené Hauptmann, Endre and Zoltan Steiner, Laslo and Ernst Reichenberg) with their birth dates (between 1928 and 1930), but not their nationality (Kubica 1997, p. 453). In fact, nothing indicates that these twins came from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. On the contrary, Zoltan, Jené, Endre and Laszlé are all typically Hungarian names, and what is more important still, none of the named children actually appears in the official list of deportees to and from Theresienstadt (Karny 1995).
> Given that these six registration numbers are the only indication of the presumed arrival of 2,499 Jews from Theresienstadt at Auschwitz, these inconsistencies mean that one cannot even affirm with certainty that the transport in question really arrived at Auschwitz.
> With regard to the transport of September 30, Czech does not adduce any documentary sources at all, merely citing a timeline at the back of H. G. Adler's book on Theresienstadt, which is itself unsupported by any documentary references.[290] Other transports are "documented" by Czech in a fraudulent manner by recourse to the "Stdrkemeldungen" (strength reports), starting with that of October 6; here, the presumed arrival of 1,500 Jews from Theresienstadt is "demonstrated" with the admission of 271 Jewish women into the transit camp (1997, p., 724; 1989, p. 897). While it is true that the "_Stärkemeldung_" of October 6, 1944 registers, among the arrivals (Zugdnge), 271 "_Durchgangs-Juden_,"[291] nothing proves that these came from Theresienstadt.
> Czech's method is not only arbitrary but also contradictory, because with the same criterion one should have attributed the 488 "_Durchgangs-Juden_"[292] of October 3293 to the alleged transport of 1,500 Jews from Theresienstadt she recorded on that date. Instead, she limits herself to reporting that the young and healthy prisoners were interned in the transit camp, without specifying the number, while all the others were allegedly "gassed."[294]
> The only two transports from Theresienstadt actually documented as such arrived on October 14 and 30, 1944. Their arrival is traceable from the records of the quarantine camp, Sector BIIa, where three prisoners were registered from the first transport (Czech 1997, p. 731; 1989, p. 906), and 216 from the second."[295] Czech attributes this registration to the transport from Theresienstadt of October 14. Here she also mentions "242 female prisoners [...] sent to the transit camp," and furnishes in addition this precious piece of information: Hans Giinther Adler, who later wrote the history of Theresienstadt which she draws upon in her Auschwitz Chronicle, arrived with this transport in Auschwitz and was sent to the transit camp Sector Blle, evidently without registration (1997, p. 731; 1989, pp. 906f.).
> It is hard to comprehend how Czech can declare that, apart from 216 men admitted to the quarantine camp and 132 women registered as arrivals (Zugdnge) in the daily report on labor deployment in the Birkenau women's camp from 31 October 1944,[296] all "[the] remaining 1,689 people" of the October 30 transport were "killed in the gas chambers" (1997, p., 742; 1989, p. 920). Surely Adler cannot have been that rare of an exception, and one thus cannot exclude the possibility that at least some part of this group was also sent to the transit camp in Sector BIIe.
> As we can see, Nyiszli is not the only one to spin tales.
>
> 286 Note, however, that, while the first of these transports on September 29 brought 2,499 deportees from Theresienstadt, the second on September 30 brought only 1,500. According to Czech's source, H.G. Adler, the remaining 1,000 discussed in the file memo were sent with the third transport. See Adler 2005, p. 191.
> 287 Since twins would result in an even number, this is either Kubica's mistake or the transport also contained an odd number of triplets.
> 288 Kubica 1997, p. 389. In note 22 of this German version of the article, Kubica gives only the abbreviated reference "D-AuI/26," but the full record (D-AuI. n. inv. 148855) appears in the 1989 Polish version, Note 18, p. 100.
> 289 The "List of Jewish Transports" ends on September 21, 1944. APMO, Ruch oporu, Vol. XXc, pp. 15-22. D-RO/123.
> 290 Czech 1997, p. 719; 1989, p. 891, referring to Adler 1955, p. 694 (2005, p. 700); cf. also Adler 2005, p. 191.
> 291 APMO, _Stärkemeldung_ , AuII-FKL, D-AuII-3a, p. 55a.
> 292 In spite of the masculine, these were _Jüdinnen_ (Jewesses), since this documentation concerns the Birkenau women's camp (_Frauen-Lager, Kl. Au.II_).
> 293 APMO, _Stärkemeldung_, AuII-FKL, D-AuII-3a, p. 54a.
> 294 D. Czech, 1989, p. 894. In the next paragraph we read that these 488 women arrived at Auschwitz "wahrscheinlich am selben Tag mit Transporten des RSHA' "probably on the same day with transports of the RSHA" and that they "partially may also have come from the Theresienstadt Ghetto," but since the only transport on October 3 came from that ghetto, all of these 488 Jewesses must have come from Theresienstadt, not just some.
> 295 Czech incorrectly writes 217; 1997, p. 742; 1989, p. 920. The relevant source document is APMO, D-Aull-3/1, p. 8, Quarantine List.
> 296 APMO, Frauen-Lager, KL. Aull. Arbeitseinsatz des F.L. Birkenau den 31. Oktober 1944, p. 368c.

[Komintasavalta]

Reichenberg's testimony included the following sentence (https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/f...c-6f9d885e61a7, https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/...0.pss6210_1127):

> We were assigned to Birkenau barrack 11 together with approximately 1,000 children, mostly twins and dwarfs.

Reichenberg says that he was deported on July 7 1944 and that the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau took three days (ibid.).

However in the following quotation from the book "Beyond Camps and Forced Labour", it is said that before July 1944, the Jewish twins were held partly in barrack 22 of sector BIa, and I think that it is implied that sometime in July 1944 or soon afterwards, the twins who were "older male youths and men" were placed in barrack 15 of sector BIIf (and Reichenberg was 17 years old at the time, so he probably would've qualified as an older youth or man) (https://books.google.com/books?id=ko8REAAAQBAJ&pg=PA23):

> From May 1944 the Jewish twins were held partly on the terrain of the camp clinic (Abschnitt BIa) in Barrack 22 of the women's camp in Birkenau. In July 1944 Mengele expanded the research, and most twins were transferred to the Wooden Block 1. Only mothers with twins aged up to two remained in Block 22. Twelve mothers or other relatives of twins can be identified.[63] Older male youths and men were in Barrack 15 of the men's clinic in Birkenau (BIIf). Also here was Mengele's laboratory with facilities for radiology, dental surgery and ophthalmology. Locations included Barrack BIIe 29 and 31, Barrack BIa 22 and 1 and Barrack BIIf 15.[64]
> ...
> 63. Names can be found in the Medical Experiment Victim database; see Weindling, _Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments_.
> 64. Kubica, Helena. 1998. _The Crimes of Josef Mengele. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp_, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 317-37.

Marwell's book says that Dr. Heinz Thilo "carried out a selection in the twins barracks, which housed the male twins in Camp BIIf."

Birkenau and Auschwitz I were divided into sectors, and the sectors were further divided into blocks (http://auschwitz.org/en/history/ausc...onal-structure). Block numbers were similar to street numbers, and there were multiple sectors with a block number 11, in the same way that a city has multiple streets with a house number 11. The term "block number" is synonymous with the term "barrack number". However none of the barracks or blocks mentioned in the quotation above have the number 11. You can see block numbers on the walls of buildings in a virtual tour of Birkenau: https://panorama.auschwitz.org/tour2,7108,en.html.

I searched for the number 11 in books about Mengele, but at first I didn't find any book which mentioned that twins lived in a barrack or block with the number 11. However when I tried googling for the phrase `"barrack 11" "birkenau" "twins"`, I found the book "Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp", which features the following footnotes (https://books.google.com/books?id=mub823JQrdUC&pg=PA334):

> 19. Supplementary account, recorded on February 12, 1988, by former prisoner Elzbieta Piekut-Warszawska (manuscript in the possession of this author), and account by former prisoner Anna Lipka, a room attendant in barrack 11 for twins, ASAM, collection Affidavits, vol. 74, card 225.
> ...
> 22. ASAM, call no. D-Au 1-3/26, inv. no. 148855, miscellaneous. It consists of a list of names, accompanied by camp serial numbers of male prisoners, a gift to the archives by former prisoner Robert Weitz, April 13, 1965. No information is available on the circumstances under which it was compiled. Comparison of some of the names in it to the names appearing in other documents containing partial lists of twins allows us to conclude that it constitutes an incomplete list of boys and adult men who from July 1944 were present in barrack 11 in the men's camp hospital (section BIIf).

However the part of the book which features the footnotes doesn't say how many twins lived in barrack 11:

> From May 1944, some of the Jewish twins were placed in the women's camp hospital (sector Bla), in barracks 22. In July 1944, they were transferred to barracks 1 (a new numeration system was introduced in the second half of 1944). This group comprised girls aged two to 16 and boys aged seven and eight. Mothers with twins under two were left in barracks 22. Older boys, adult men, dwarfs, and handicapped males were incarcerated in barracks 15 on the grounds of the male camp hospital at Birkenau (sector BIIf). In July 1944, with the liquidation of the so-called family camp for Jews, cwin girls were incorporated into a group of twins in the women's camp and twin boys transferred to barracks 15 in the male camp hospital.[18]
> The number of twins in these barracks remains unknown. Elzbieta Warszawska, a prisoner who worked as a nurse in barracks 1, testified that about 350 pairs of twins of both sexes, aged two to 16, lived there. While they were of various nationalities, most were Jewish children from Hungarian and Czech (Terezin) transports, along with some Jewish children from German and Italian transports.
> Another woman prisoner who worked in the same barracks testified that there were about 200 children, most of them aged two to 16, including six under age three.[19] In the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is a document listing personal data and copies of findings of anthropological research on 296 Jewish women prisoners from Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, France. and Italy, on whom Mengele conducted experiments. The list includes 111 pairs of Jewish Hungarian cwins of both sexes who lived in the women's camp.[20]
> According to one survivor of Mengele's experiments on twins, about 107 pairs of male twins, aged four to 60, were incarcerated in barrack 15, sector BIIf.
> > The youngest cwin in our group was "Pepichko" from Czechoslovakia, who was four or five vears old [Josef Kleinmann, born on April 14. 1940, camp serial no. A-2459]. There was also Rene, a few years older [Rene Gutmann, born on December 21, 1937, camp serial no. 169,091]. Most of them were 12 to 15 years old. There were also Jewish triplets from Germany, aged about 60. In our block. we also had a family of dwarfs, consisting of two men and five women. The men stayed with us. I don't know where the women stayed: it's possible they were together with female twins.[21]
> Another document preserved in the museum is a hand-made copy of a list of male adult and children twins from Jewish transports, who arrived at the camp in 1943 and 1944 from the Terezin ghetto and Hungary. It contains 125 names, including names of 52 boys under age 14.[22]

From a translation of Kubica's article "Dr. Mengele und seine Verbrechen im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau" (https://codoh.com/library/document/d...ins-in-the/en/):

> The Archives of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau also contain a document which contains personal data and copies of anthropological studies on 295 inmates - Greek, Hungarian, Dutch, French and Italian Jews - upon whom Mengele performed experiments. This list also contains the names of 117 Hungarian Jewish pairs of twins in the women's sector of the camp. As for male twins from Barracks 15 of Camp BIIf, we know from the report on one pair of twins that there were 107 of them, aged from age 4 to 60.[19]

The twin list of CANDLES included the names of about 400 twins (http://web.archive.org/web/200502031...m/Twinlist.htm).

Reichenberg said that there were approximately 1,000 children in barrack 11, most of whom were twins or dwarfs. But in the book "Giants: The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz" which I quoted in post #24, the total number of dwarfs in Auschwitz-Birkenau was estimated as 10. So if you subtract a maximum of around 10 dwarfs from Reichenberg's figure of about 1,000 children at barrack 11, then "most" of the children would still amount to around 500 or more. And if all of them lived in a single barrack, the barrack would surely be more well-known. But all of the twins studied by Mengele were of course not children.

The book "Giants: The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz" says that "out of the 198 barracks that once stood in Birkenau BII, just twenty remain today." Here's a plan of Birkenau, where you can see that there are approximately 200 buildings within the BII area (https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=7930):

[Komintasavalta]

From the book "Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments" (https://books.google.com/books?id=rg-dBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA163):

> Vera K. recollected, 'I was not well behaved and not afraid of Mengele. I had OK relations with Mengele - symbiotic, he got information and I got food, symbiotic. . . I gave Mengele trouble any way I could.'[167]

The reference is "Vera K. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1090) Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library" (https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/hvt1097606).

If Mengele was the epitome of evil who sent inmates to be gassed on a whim, then why was this bratty little Jewess not afraid to mess with him?

[Komintasavalta]

The book "Giants" mentioned that there was a soccer match at Birkenau where one team of Mengele's twins played against another team:

> To take some joy in the last days of summer, a football game was organised at the men's infirmary one afternoon. Two teams of twin boys were kicking the ball, to the cheers of the crowd. Judah and Joseph Slomowitz were among the players, and their father and brother encouraged them from the touchline. Avram and Micki Ovitz watched the game from their small stools.

Mengele's twins were housed in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), which was the largest subcamp in the Auschwitz camp complex, and which was much larger than the Auschwitz main camp that is shown to tourists (Auschwitz I). Birkenau had a soccer field next to the hospital in sector BIIf, as you can see from the map in my earlier post.

Miklós Nyiszli was Mengele's assistant at Birkenau, and he is the main source for the orthodox historiography about Mengele's time at Auschwitz. He wrote that there was a soccer match between SS men and the Sonderkommando (http://holocausthandbooks.com/index....e=1&page_id=37):

> The _Sonderkommando_ men bring out a regulation soccer ball. The teams take the field, "SS versus SK." The crematorium's SS guards stand on one side, the _Sonderkommando_ on the other. They kick the ball. The sound of hearty laughter fills the courtyard. The audience, made up of SS and _Sonderkommando_ men, root for their sides, cheering the players on like they were at a peaceful small-town sports ground.

However Nyiszli's tales are largely fictional, so who knows if this one is true. The Sonderkommando at Auschwitz were inmates who were primarily Jewish, and their main task according to orthodox historiography was to dispose of corpses in the crematoria. They are unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommando, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.

From the book "People in Auschwitz" by Langbein (http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=langb...ople+auschwitz, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S_-...lZX9BwdlrpCHPy):

> In Auschwitz there was not only music-making but sports as well. As early as spring 1941 soccer games were played in the main camp. Tadeusz Borowski has described a soccer field in a section of Birkenau that was adjacent to the crematoriums. Jehuda Bacon, a child at the time, played there, and on one occasion so did the dreaded block leader Stefan Baretzki. Siegfried Halbreich tells about soccer matches in the Monowitz indoctrination camp. It goes without saying that only better-nourished inmates were able to participate in sports. Marc Klein remembers soccer battles between well-nourished VIPs that were often watched by SS men.

In the book "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen", Tadeusz Borowski described how they constructed the soccer field at Birkenau (http://libgen.lc/index.php?req=tadeu...ay+for+the+gas, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1stE...iKnZDgVPkgRWJW):

> It was early spring when we began building a soccer field on the broad clearing behind the hospital barracks. The location was excellent: the gypsies to the left, with their roaming children, their lovely, trim nurses, and their women sitting by the hour in the latrines; to the rear - a barbed-wire fence, and behind it the loading ramp with the wide railway tracks and the endless coming and going of trains; and beyond the ramp, the women's camp - _Frauen Konzentration Lager_. No one, of course, ever called it by its full name. We simply said F.K.L. - that was enough. To the right of the field were the crematoria, some of them at the back of the ramp, next to the F.K.L., others even closer, right by the fence. Sturdy buildings that sat solidly on the ground. And in front of the crematoria, a small wood which had to be crossed on the way to the gas.
> We worked on the soccer field throughout the spring, and before it was finished we started planting flowers under the barracks windows and decorating the blocks with intricate zigzag designs made of crushed red brick. We planted spinach and lettuce, sunflowers and garlic. We laid little green lawns with grass transplanted from the edges of the soccer field, and sprinkled them daily with water brought in barrels from the lavatories.
> Just when the flowers were about to bloom, we finished the soccer field.
> From then on, the flowers were abandoned, the sick lay by themselves in the hospital beds, and we played soccer. Every day, as soon as the evening meal was over, anybody who felt like it came to the field and kicked the ball around. Others stood in clusters by the fence and talked across the entire length of the camp with the girls from the F.K.L.
> One day I was goalkeeper. As always on Sundays, a sizeable crowd of hospital orderlies and convalescent patients had gathered to watch the game.

Other sources say that only VIP inmates were allowed to play soccer, but the quotation above says: "Every day, as soon as the evening meal was over, anybody who felt like it came to the field and kicked the ball around."

Monowitz (Auschwitz III) was a camp next to an IG Farben factory for producing synthetic rubber. In a subcamp of Monowitz for British POWs, they even had a soccer league (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...eath-camp.html):

> Ron Jones, 96, was held in E715 - a prisoner of war camp alongside the main Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland - after being captured by German troops during World War II.
> ...
> During the week prisoners were employed at forced labour camps, but on their rest day they were allowed to play football on a field just outside the camp - with armed German guards watching from the sidelines.
> Father-of-one Ron said: 'We didn’t work on a Sunday so we used to play football.'
> The Red Cross heard about it and brought the teams four sets of shirts - English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh.
> ...
> He has returned to the camp as a book about his survival called The Auschwitz Goalkeeper is published later this month.
> ...
> 'There was the humiliation and the lack of food but on the whole life wasn't too bad.'
> 'The Germans, contrary to what a lot of people think, were pretty good to us on the whole.'

Here's an image from the article above, with the caption "Prisoner of war Ron Jones (centre, back row) - the goalkeeper for the Welsh team in the Auschwitz football league":



I wonder why the Red Cross delivered soccer jerseys to Auschwitz but didn't find better ways to intervene?

According to the book "Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto who Survived Auschwitz", there was earlier another soccer field in Birkenau at the location where the infirmary for male prisoners was built later (https://books.google.com/books?id=ZNZgQWtvUdIC&pg=PA54):

> One day a new Roll Call Leader arrived. If I'm not mistaken his name was Hartmann, a man very keen on sport, an SS man naturally.[41] He asked around, the Block Senior, the Roll Call Clerks and the Block Orderlies, to identify those interested in sport: "Who plays football?"
> Naturally, I was interested, along with other lads from East Prussia who had played in major clubs, and also my cousins.
> He chose me as trainer and said, "You get together eleven or twelve footballers."
> I must say that, in my opinion, this Roll Call Leader had a humane side to him. He supplied us with some provisions that he had probably 'organised'[42] by taking them from others. But we didn't give this a thought at the time, it being a matter of survival.
> I selected footballers and trained them. At that time we had a sports field where later the male prisoners' infirmary, section BIIf, was built.[43] We organised ourselves, trained and made all the necessary preparations. The lads could play football, I saw this straight away but, unfortunately, we were short of a right winger. I couldn't find one, there was no one suitable. One day when we were training, two Jews were watching. There were some Jewish workers in our camp, in a separate block. One of them said, "I can play football." A short man, perhaps 5'5", 5'6" tall, he was slightly bow-legged. Well, we trained together and he was terrific.
> The first match was arranged: Auschwitz Main Camp v. Gypsies. There were six Polish national players in the Main Camp team. Kick off. Only a reduced SS presence remained in the camp, all the other SS men were at the sports field. SS lined the field on all sides as no prisoners were allowed to watch. Our camp lay directly adjacent to this sports field so we were able to watch. The electric current was switched off on the perimeter fence on the sports-field side. Everyone ran to the fence - the entire Gypsy Camp stood at the fence as spectators, with kith and kin, as the saying goes, or on the roofs of the blocks. The match began. We attacked from the start and scored the first goal after ten minutes. I thought, "Now all hell will break loose!" Normally the SS men from the Main Camp were rivals of those from Birkenau but at this moment they were sportsmen. As we scored our SS, the Birkenau SS, began to fire off their revolvers, like fireworks going off. So now, on, on! In the second half, we scored again. All hell _did_ break loose! I thought, "Lad, if only you survive this!" The two SS factions began to abuse one another and were close to hitting each other. Shortly before the end we conceded a goal. We won 2-1. That eased things.
> Hartmann, our SS man, who had made the whole thing possible, was naturally happy and a good sport. From then on he saw that we were better fed. I must say that we, these lads and I, always managed to barter or organise something, especially as we knew Leo in the kitchen. Everybody did this. It was because of this that these lads still had some flesh on their bones. They were all young lads and I was twenty-three. The packets we got from Hartmann fed us up a little. We played a return match and this time lost 2-1. But, oh, it was a terrific match.

The soccer field at Birkenau was also mentioned in the book "Fateless" by Imre Kertesz (https://books.google.com/books?id=0PsAAZA_BXYC&pg=PT69):

> A football pitch, on a big clearing immediately to the right of the road, was particularly welcome. Green turf, the requisite white goalposts, the chalked lines of the field of play - it was all there, inviting, fresh, pristine, in perfect order. This was latched onto straightaway by the boys as well: Look here! A place for us to play soccer after work.

[Komintasavalta]

If the following stories from Langbein's book "People in Auschwitz" are true (apart from the obvious lie of Mengele sending 1,500 Jewesses to be gassed), then Mengele might have been responsible for preventing many deaths from typhus:

> Ella Lingens describes how this "merciless cynic" with organizational talent and initiative combated the typhus in the women's camp that other ss physicians had not managed to keep under control. He first sent 1,500 sick Jewish women to the gas chamber, thereby emptying barracks in the overcrowded camp, which he had disinfected and provided with fresh pallets and clean blankets. Then patients from another barracks were carefully deloused and taken to the cleaned barracks without their clothes. At that point Mengele had the free barracks disinfected, occupied, and so on. This actually stopped the epidemic. That the same thing could have been accomplished without sending human beings to their death, perhaps by building a new barracks, does not seem to have crossed Mengele's mind. In January 1944 typhus was combated with similar methods in the infirmary of the men's camp. Alfred Fiderkiewicz writes that "the epidemic in the infirmary was controlled at the cost of a few hundred human lives." Mengele's example probably found some imitators. That Mengele was satisfied with his success in fighting an epidemic is shown by stories of Felix Amann, the capo of the disinfecting detail, who successfully accomplished the delousing of the Gypsy camp. As a reward Mengele gave him cans of sardines, and once even a bottle of schnapps with these words: "_Du sollst auch leben_" (Live a little).

Mengele received a medal for combatting typhus. From Marwell's book:

> Mengele wrote to Irene on April 26, 1944, to report the news that he had been awarded the War Service Cross Second Class with Swords, a decoration acknowledging wartime service unconnected with combat against the enemy. It was conferred upon soldiers in rear areas who had distinguished themselves, and on civilians who had advanced the war effort. As Mengele made clear to his wife, it was by no means a difficult medal to get; in fact, more than two million were awarded during the course of the war. In Mengele's case, the medal was for his actions combating the typhus epidemic; he indicated the decoration was known in the camp as "The Typhus Medal," and he included a sketch of it on the first page of his letter.

According to Marwell's book, Mengele himself was diagnosed with typhus, where the reference was a "laboratory register indicating Mengele had a value of 1:400 on the Weil-Felix test, December 24, 1943, copy provided by Charles Rattan".

The 1985 documentary "The Search For Mengele" featured an interview of Wolfram Bossert, who allowed Mengele to live with his family in Brazil. In the English dub, Bossert's comments are translated the following way (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9hFBLQphOg):

> All I know is that the subject came up once after a newspaper had again claimed that he'd carried out inhuman experiments on patients or people in the camp. When I mentioned this, he exploded and shouted: "But I didn't make any experiments. It's all lies. The people volunteered because they got more food if they allowed me to take blood samples." He assured us time and time again that he deserved a statue from the Jews, because as a doctor at the camp he'd saved many Jewish lives.

[Komintasavalta]

Mengele victim Eva Mozes-Kor says that she could see glowing flames rising high above the chimney of a crematorium (https://books.google.com/books?id=4P04DuPIfAYC&pg=PA55):

> In the barracks we met many other twin children. After our evening meal of a two-inch slice of black bread and a brownish liquid, two Hungarian twins briefed us about the camp. They explained that this camp was called Birkenau. Auschwitz, they said, had one gas chamber and one crematorium, while Birkenau had four gas chambers and four crematoriums. "We don't understand these words - _gas chambers, crematorium_," Miriam and I interrupted. They took us to the back door, where we looked toward the northern sky, to see a giant smoking chimney towering above the camps. I could see glowing flames rising high above the structure.

Like Reichenberg, she said she looked so much like her sibling that they were mistaken as twins:

> The SS soldiers walked by, shouting louder. Suddenly, they stopped my mother and looked at my twin sister and me, because we were dressed alike and looked very much alike. "Are they twins?" one soldier asked my mother. My poor mother was bewildered. What was this place? she must have thought. What was happening here? What were the rules? What was a good answer and what was bad? She asked the SS soldier if being a twin was good. The guard nodded his head. My mother said very hesitantly, "Yes, they are."

Couldn't they at least get actual twins to play Mengele survivors? Marwell's book about Mengele describes how at the time Mengele worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, they had developed a reliable method to test whether two people were twins, or whether they were fraternal or identical twins. The method relied on the same kind of anthropometric tests which were performed for Mengele's subjects, so wouldn't Mengele also have verified if his subjects were actually twins?

The experiments she describes don't sound very realistic:

> One set of experiments dealt with genetics and the other with germ warfare. In the germ experiments, Mengele would inject one twin with the germ. Then, if and when that twin died, he would kill the other twin in order to compare the organs at autopsy.

If twins were more valuable as guinea pigs than non-twins, then why would Mengele use a single twin for this kind of an experiment?:

> On one occasion, while in the waiting area of the lab, I observed one twin faint. She was being tested to see how much blood could be taken before death occurred. These experiments were felt to have a practical application on the battlefield.

She's the same witness who told the following three stories about which Marwell said that "it is difficult to accept testimony about some of his experiments and their rationale":

> One of the twins, who was 19 years old, told of experiments involving a set of teenage boys and a set of teenage girls. Cross-transfusions were carried out in an attempt to "make boys into girls and girls into boys." Some of the boys were castrated. Transfusion reactions were similarly studied in the adolescent twins.
> ...
> A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele's lab after they were sewn back to back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after 3 days they died. Mengele also attempted to connect the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon. Many experiments were performed on the male and female genitals.

Would the sky be red with flames if they just blew up a few buildings made out of concrete?:

> It was a midnight in January, 1945. We were awakened by the unbearable heat coming from the roof of the barracks. I looked outside; the whole sky was red with flames. The SS had blown up the gas chambers and crematoriums. The SS guards stood outside with their machine guns and ordered us to march.

Like Ephraim Reichenberg, Eva Mozes-Kor was also an early immigrant to Israel and she also served in the Israeli army, but there's nothing unusual about it, because the IDF has had conscription for women since its inception, even though she also served in the IDF after her period of conscription (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Mozes_Kor):

> In 1950, at age 16, they both received permission to leave Romania and immigrated to Israel,[3] arriving in the port city of Haifa. They both served in the Israeli army; Eva served for eight years.[3] Both Eva and Miriam attended an agricultural school as they adjusted to life after the Holocaust. Eva became a draftsman and attained the rank of Sergeant Major in the Israeli Army Engineering Corps.

In a newspaper article from 1996, it was said that Ephraim Reichenberg was actually a twin, but I thought that it may have been an honest mistake, because in an earlier article from 1985, it was said that he was not a twin but that he greatly resembled his brother. However now I also found a newspaper article from 1983 which said that Eva Mozes-Kor was a twin (https://www.newspapers.com/image/106223433):

> Yet, being born a twin gave her an opportunity that many Jews never received - the chance to live.
> ...
> Mrs. Mozes led her twin 10-year-old daughters from the train and Mrs. Kor recalls that, when she turned around, her father and sisters were gone.

Different sources say that the barracks at Birkenau had no bedding, straw bedding, mattresses filled with sawdust, or mattresses filled with human hair:

- In the newspaper article linked above, Kor said that there were mattresses filled with human hair at Birkenau: "Mrs. Kor said she still has nightmares about the soap she used at Birkenau, which she has learned was made from humans, and the mattresses stuffed with hair shaved from the heads of those being prepared for extermination."
- In a book where Kor is listed as the first author, she said that they had straw mattresses (https://books.google.com/books?id=cm_2DwAAQBAJ&pg=PP33): "We had none of these things, so lice multiplied and spread from person to person, onto clothing and bedding - they nested in our blankets, straw mattresses, and dresses."
- The book "Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz" says that the matresses at Birkenau were filled with sawdust (https://books.google.com/books?id=X_ytAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75): "Whereas Birkenau inmates slept two or three to a ragged blanket in their single set of clothes on thin, louse-infected mattresses stuffed with sawdust, the Lilliputs enjoyed individual wool blankets, sheets and even pillows."
- The book "The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial" says that there were no mattresses (https://books.google.com/books?id=83dvJxPm--EC&pg=PA529): "The barracks in Birkenau were not equipped with either bed linen or mattresses, and camp uniforms were in such short supply that they were worn until they were rags."
- Another survivor said that there were no mattresses (https://books.google.com/books?id=WN-CDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT97): "On the second day in Birkenau, my father and Hershy were moved to a barracks that had beds. No mattresses, no blankets, but wooden bunk beds."
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that straw was "sometimes supplied as bedding" at Birkenau (https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn75911): "The barracks had no insulation from the cold or heat, the wooden roofs often leaked, and the straw sometimes supplied as bedding was soon filthy and wet."
- The book "Values and Violence in Auschwitz" says that there were straw mattresses at the hospital barracks of Birkenau (https://books.google.cmo/books?id=xll6brxDcp0C&pg=PA28): "The so-called hospital barracks had bunk beds of the same dimensions. Women who were gravely ill would lie naked, 4 at a time, on the bare planks or on thin, rotting straw mattresses, covered by one lice-infested blanket."

However it's possible that they used different types of bedding at different times or at different barracks, or that the twins were housed under better conditions than other inmates.

In the newspaper article about Kor, another thing that stood out was that she said that they were brought to Siberia after they were liberated:

> Survivors marched two hours to the Auschwitz section of the camp and stayed for several weeks, until Jan, 27, 1945, when the Russians liberated them.
> It was another nine months, with stays in Poland and Siberia, before the Mozes twins returned to their Rumanian village, then went on to live with an aunt in nearby Cluj.

Here's the full newspaper article:



In the newspaper article, it is not mentioned that Mengele attempted to perform sex-changing cross-transfusions, to create Siamese twins by sewing together gypsy twins so that their blood vessels and organs are connected, or to connect the urinary tract of a 7-year-old-girl to her colon.

There are two books where Kor is listed as the first author, but they appear to be different editions of the same book: https://books.google.com/books?id=cm_2DwAAQBAJ&pg=PP33, https://books.google.com/books?id=oRjaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT37. The story about flames shooting out of the chimney of a crematorium is repeated in both books. However there were no results in either book when I searched for the word "Siberia" at Google Books.