Mengele at Auschwitz

At the end of May 1943 a 32-year-old SS doctor arrived at Auschwitz who was to become the best-known – and the most hated by survivors – member of the camp staff. Josef Mengele, a veteran of the Eastern Front recently promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, with doctorates in anthropology and medicine, was posted to the largest German concentration and extermination camp on 24 May 1943 and reported for duty there on 30 May. For the next twenty months he decided on the ramp at Birkenau over the life and death of thousands of people, and in the camp barracks he conducted pseudo-scientific research on prisoners – above all on children – for one of the Reich’s most prestigious scientific institutes.

The popular account according to which Mengele “became the chief doctor of Auschwitz” needs correcting. The SS garrison physician (SS-Standortarzt) for the whole complex was, from the autumn of 1942, Eduard Wirths, and it was he who assigned Mengele his post. Mengele took up the position of camp doctor (Lagerarzt) in the Gypsy family camp – section BIIe at Birkenau. He became chief doctor of the whole Birkenau camp only in 1944. This does not alter the fact that from his very first weeks he was among the most active SS doctors in the camp.

The road to Auschwitz

Mengele was not just any officer who happened to be sent to camp duty. In the 1930s he gained a doctorate in anthropology in Munich, and in Frankfurt am Main a doctorate in medicine under the geneticist Otmar von Verschuer, one of the leading exponents of German “racial hygiene”, who had for years studied twins as the key to understanding heredity. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP, and a year later the SS. During the war he served as a doctor with the Waffen-SS Wiking Division; for pulling wounded men out of burning tanks he received the Iron Cross in both classes. In the summer of 1942, badly wounded near Rostov, he was declared unfit for front-line service and was posted to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Berlin.

In the spring of 1943 he was again working alongside Verschuer, who by then headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem. According to most historians it was Verschuer who encouraged him to transfer to service in the concentration camps. Auschwitz, where transports arrived daily from all over Europe, offered an ambitious scientist what no university could give him: unlimited access to human beings with whom he could do anything he liked.

The Gypsy camp

Section BIIe, in which Mengele began his service, had existed since February 1943. Following the order issued by Heinrich Himmler on 16 December 1942 for the deportation to Auschwitz of the Sinti and Roma from the Reich and from parts of the annexed and occupied territories, the first transport reached Birkenau on 26 February 1943. Unlike the Jews, the Roma were not subjected to selection on arrival: whole families – men, women and children – were placed together in several dozen wooden stable barracks, without windows or heating, on waterlogged clay ground. The prisoners were tattooed with numbers bearing the letter Z (Zigeuner). The Gypsy family camp was overcrowded, starving and constantly plagued by epidemics – typhus, dysentery, scabies and noma, a gangrene of the facial tissues that attacked starving children.

Even before Mengele’s arrival the SS dealt with epidemics by killing the sick. In March 1943 some 1,700 Roma from the Białystok area, among whom typhus had been detected, were gassed without being entered in the records. On 25 May 1943 – five days before Mengele arrived – 1,035 people, mainly Roma from the Białystok region and from Austria suspected of having typhus, were sent to the gas chambers. This crime is sometimes attributed to Mengele, but according to the camp chronicle and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum it was committed before his arrival. The new doctor nevertheless adopted the same method of “combating epidemics” and applied it consistently: when typhus broke out in the women’s camp, he had an entire block of Jewish women prisoners – some 600 women, according to accounts – sent to the gas chambers, and then had one barrack after another disinfected.

The ramp and the selections

The SS doctors at Auschwitz did not treat prisoners. The work in the camp hospitals was done by imprisoned doctors, while the SS doctors supervised it and decided which of the sick were to die. Mengele, like his colleagues, regularly inspected the hospital barracks and sent to their deaths those who had not recovered within two weeks.

The most important duty of the SS doctors, however, was selection on the railway ramp at Birkenau. The doctor on duty decided who among the new arrivals would be registered as a prisoner fit for work and who – children, their mothers, the old, the sick and the weak – would go straight to the gas chambers. The overwhelming majority of deported Jews were sent to their deaths immediately on arrival. Mengele performed these duties like the other doctors, but he also came to the ramp when he did not have to: he was on the lookout for twins, people with different-coloured irises, people of short stature and with physical anomalies, and doctors whom he could employ in his research. Survivors remembered him as an elegantly uniformed officer who separated families with a movement of his hand or his riding crop. Some later memoirs attribute to him selections at which he was not present – for the prisoners his name became a synonym for selection as such – but his participation in many of them is beyond doubt. He carried out a particularly large number of selections in the spring and summer of 1944, during the deportation of the Jews from Hungary, when several transports a day were arriving at Birkenau.

The experiments

Mengele treated Auschwitz as a laboratory. He set up his workroom in the Gypsy camp and chose his research material from among the prisoners. He conducted his research on behalf of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG), which funded Verschuer’s project; he sent blood taken from some 200 prisoners of various origins to Dahlem for research on “racial proteins”, and the eyes of dead and murdered prisoners to Karin Magnussen, a researcher studying heterochromia of the iris.

He devoted most attention to twins, mainly Jewish and Roma children aged between two and sixteen. One sibling could serve as the subject of the research, the other as the “control”. The historian Nikolaus Wachsmann estimates that as many as a thousand pairs may have passed through Mengele’s hands; the number of survivors remains a matter of dispute among historians. The twins lived in separate barracks, in somewhat better conditions than the other prisoners; some of the children remembered Mengele as an “uncle” who brought them sweets. The research included hours of anthropological measurements, X-rays, the drawing of large quantities of blood, procedures without anaesthesia, deliberate infection with diseases and observation of their course. The imprisoned Hungarian pathologist Miklós Nyiszli, forced to perform autopsies, testified after the war that he had seen Mengele kill fourteen pairs of twins in a single night with injections into the heart in order to compare their organs. Mengele was also interested in people of short stature – in May 1944 the Jewish Ovitz family, deported from Maramureș, then part of Hungary, fell victim to him – and in noma in the Gypsy camp, which he studied with the imprisoned Prague paediatrician Berthold Epstein.

Many accounts that cannot be confirmed have also grown up around his experiments. Historians at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum regard as a myth, for example, the story of twins being sewn together to create artificial conjoined siblings. The overwhelming majority of the documentation has not survived: Mengele took it with him when he fled the camp, and the rest was lost. The research had no scientific value – it was a crime committed in scientific dress, part of a system that since the Wannsee Conference had been moving towards the murder of the Jews of Europe and in which Auschwitz, alongside the camps of Operation Reinhard such as Treblinka, became the principal site of extermination.

The camp under SS rule

Mengele worked in a camp that in May 1943 was still run by Rudolf Höss, who had been building Auschwitz since 1940. The expansion ordered by Himmler as early as March 1941 had turned Birkenau into a vast complex, and in the spring of 1943 new crematoria with gas chambers were brought into use. Mengele was one of a dozen or so SS doctors in the complex, alongside men such as Carl Clauberg, who carried out sterilisation experiments on women. For “bringing under control” the epidemic in the women’s camp, Mengele received the War Merit Cross Second Class with Swords.

The Gypsy camp survived until the summer of 1944. Of the roughly 23,000 Sinti and Roma deported to Auschwitz, the overwhelming majority died or were murdered there – estimates speak of about 21,000 victims. On 16 May 1944 the SS attempted to liquidate the camp, but the prisoners, forewarned of the plans, barricaded themselves in the barracks with spades and stones, and the operation was called off. Some of the young and those fit for work were later transferred to other camps. On the night of 2–3 August 1944 the rest – according to the Museum’s figures about 2,900 people, many of them children – were gassed. The genocide of the Roma, known as the Porajmos, claimed at least hundreds of thousands of victims across occupied Europe; the exact number remains disputed.

After the liquidation of the Gypsy camp, Mengele became chief doctor of the Birkenau camp. On 17 January 1945, ten days before Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, he left with other doctors for the Gross-Rosen camp in Lower Silesia, taking with him some of his documentation and specimens.

Place in the war

From the SS point of view, Mengele’s arrival at Auschwitz was the routine transfer of one officer. From the point of view of history, it has become a symbol of how far German medicine and science entered the service of genocide. Mengele did not invent the gas chambers or the selections – these existed before him – but with extraordinary zeal he used the system of mass murder for his own scientific career, supported by renowned institutions of the Reich.

After the war he escaped justice. In 1949 he fled to Argentina, later hiding in Paraguay and Brazil, where he died in 1979; the identification of his remains was finally confirmed by DNA testing in 1992. He was sought by West German prosecutors, by Israeli intelligence, which in 1960 abducted Adolf Eichmann, and by Nazi hunters, but he never stood trial. The testimony of survivors – especially the twins, many of whom struggled all their lives with the consequences of the experiments – made his name one of the most recognisable symbols of the Holocaust, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where some 1.1 million people died, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, remains its foremost site of remembrance.