From the 60 Minutes archives: Survivors of Josef Mengele’s twin experiments

60 minutes rewind 50 years ago at a railroad siding at a killing field called Auschwitz a German SS officer named Joseph Mengele dr. Josef Mengele stood on the platform and with a flick of his finger sent tens of thousands to the gas chambers among those arriving on the trains that came in day and night were children and among those children were twins who were spared the gas chambers only to become fodder for mingle as medical laboratory some he castrated or sterilized others had limbs amputated or died injected into their eyes to see if they would turn blue all in an effort to produce in a laboratory a master race one twin used for experiments the other held as the control one day I became extremely ill after a visit to the lab and I was taken to a barracks that was filled was practically living dead so there you are a living yet dead person knowing it well Mengele came in every morning and every evening twice a day with four other doctors and he declared very sarcastically laughing too bad she's so young she has only two weeks to live right in front of you right in front of me to Mengele the twins were just tattooed lab specimens Eva Moses and her twin sister Miriam no names just numbers seven oh six three and seven oh six four he wanted to play God he wanted to find by trial and error how to create blue-eyed blond males or females and multiple numbers three thousand twins became mangle as guinea pigs when Russian soldiers liberated the Auschwitz camp in 1945 just 150 were still alive and Mengele was gone in the years after the war the twins scattered and lost touch with each other some ended up in the United States but most came here to Israel and as they grew up they buried the horrors of dr. Mengele slab deep within themselves and Mengele they say he died in Brazil in 1979 but his name still dominates the German town of Gunzburg and is a trade mark proudly displayed on the farm machinery the family company manufactures we went to Germany to find out how Mangala had escaped the authorities and why none of the relatives or company employees who helped him hide has ever been prosecuted the only one who would talk to us was Hans climb the German prosecutor in charge of the Mengele investigation in the United States they would be prosecuted for harboring a fugitive I know this is different between the German law and the American law you couldn't go after the family no no under your law what's impossible for the twins to grasp what agonizes them to this day is that menglers experiments all of that torture turned out to be nothing more than perverse medical quackery among manga's victims were Kalman and Yehuda Barone 14 year old twins we found common and Israel yahood it lives there too but she refuses to talk to anyone about Auschwitz this terror this blind fear we never knew what's coming it was either a cold stethoscope on your back or a needle or just a tap you never knew what's coming the degradation of the human being that could do that to another child yes that someone in his right mind in his sick mind could conceivably use a human being a child and put him on a table and try an exercise so that we can find out what happens he died never mind where's the next one you just try it again in a different part of the body maybe the response will be different this is what we did for Mengele I think in this place this terrible place it was very important that you are two together two sisters together one keeps the other I was continuously fainting what of hunger even after I survived the medium saved her bread for one whole week now can you imagine what will power does it take she was hungry anyways sure sure to save and send the breath to me after they left Auschwitz it was 40 years before even in Miriam could talk about it only in 1985 did she ask me did you get the bread and I said yes thank you very much really yeah she never did she never knew in all those years no and we never discussed anything from camp most of the twins like Eva and Miriam kept silent all these years some say people didn't want to listen others say they simply weren't believed and many never discussed what happened to them with anyone not even their twin Rene and Irene Guttman had just turned six when they became part of what Mangala called his zoo we found them in New York 50 years later after Auschwitz they were adopted by an American family she was a cheerleader and I play basketball the all-american kids definitely fit right in did you not really tried look like we did on the surface always fit in on the surface but never inside always felt a part different couldn't talk about it you couldn't talk about it no there was a sense of embarrassment whenever we spoke to the normals that Co good people we found that there was a chasm an unbridgeable chasm they found it hard to listen let alone empathize with what we're saying some of the twins spoke out for the first time in a recent book children of the flames but the silence first began to crack in 1985 when Eva and Miriam led a small group of survivors back to Auschwitz to remind the world that Josef Mengele one of history's most notorious war criminals had escaped after dr. Mengele fled Auschwitz as the war ended his family here in Germany helped hide him from Allied search teams and then paid to have him smuggled out of Europe and into South America and as he moved from Argentina to Paraguay to Brazil his family and the family company sent him tens of thousands of dollars all the while insisting to authorities that they knew nothing the story will continue after this finally a skeleton believed to be Mengele x' was dug up in brazil in the summer of 1985 friends said he had drowned documents proved that the family firm in germany had helped hide him for more than 30 years but as we said the german government never prosecuted anyone still executives at the Mengele factory in günzburg get very edgy when people come around asking questions Josef Mengele is not here and has nothing to do with the company Mengele the name Mengele is visible in 3 foot high letters on the building of the factory they don't have to be ashamed of anything while behind the scenes in that night both figuratively and physically they have supported dear Papa for the last 40 years with money people organization and everything around the family was even arrogant when authorities try to prove once and for all that those bones from Brazil were Josef Mengele in 1990 scientists used a new technique to extract a so-called genetic fingerprint from the skeleton then they asked manglers only son Roth for a blood sample in order to make an exact match but for more than a year Rolf refused to give the sample we went to Germany to ask him why first visiting his law office in Freiburg where Roth's partner stopped me just inside the door one will be dead now will he get here for me today is he hiding well let me tell you what happened his law partner says that journalists come looking for him every month that he's not here his partner will not tell us where he is or how to reach him but we were able to find him anyway in another town at a company he runs which makes of all things children's clothes and toys we saw raw through a window but he refused to come out and talk to us just as he was refusing at the time to talk to German authorities he doesn't tell you why exactly he didn't tell me he didn't tell me why he don't cooperate with me do you pressure him nein under German law that's impossible for for me but Hans Klein seems to have found a way around the thou shalt not pressure law he simply threatened to dig up the bodies of Josef Mengele 'he's other blood relatives from the family plot in Gunzburg to get a sample from them suddenly rolf changed his mind last month he gave the blood and now the germans are waiting for test results they hope will close the case once and for all but the twins may still not be satisfied because solid proof of mangas death won't help them learn anything about his experiments only a few pages of documents about his grisly work have ever surfaced the twins have no idea what Mengele put into their bodies I mean member blood taken from my neck and I remember lots of x-rays and being strapped to a table and with a doctor with a scalpel in his hand that was fifty years ago and you are suffering telling me this it's so hard it's so vivid I to this day I tremendous fear of doctors and today Irene has multiple sclerosis you're in a wheelchair is that do you think related in any way I have no way of knowing because you don't know what what they injected you with I have no idea I have no idea I feel there's a human being we have a right to know I would like to know what I was injected with I would like to know what my sister was injected with it is possible that one day Eva and all of the twins will find out remember it was the Russian army that captured the Auschwitz camp and the papers the fleeing Germans left behind at the end of the war most of those documents were shipped to this special archive in Moscow and promptly labeled top secret now with the collapse of communism Western historians have been promised access to the files not a sure thing that mingle his records were saved but for the twins some hope if not some justice I don't think that there is justice at this point justice has long passed its time but at least the truth would help be very very helpful to us fifty years after Auschwitz the stirrings of a new Nazi movement in Germany scare the Mengele twins that's why they felt compelled to speak out they see that sign on the factory in günzburg and they say I too have a name worth remembering please the society that that allowed as a matter of course the name mangling to act and be a part of society it speaks volumes about the mores of Germany and its government you think that name should have been wiped away and for the next thousand years it should have been mentioned only at night

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 1,012,739

Keywords: CBS News, Holocaust, Aaron Elster, Shoah Foundation, Heather Maio, Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, artificial intelligence, 60 minutes

Id: ocq2zy2ZCTM

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020