The Nazi “Angel of Death”,
Joseph Mengele, is in hiding. Half the world wants to see him hanged. The
very thought of him swinging on the end of a rope makes him chew on the edges of his
mustache. Still, despite what people have said about his horrific experiments, he takes
out a pen and writes “Weaker humans should not be permitted to reproduce. This is the only
way for humankind to exist and sustain itself.” At that moment he stops writing for a second
and remembers the agonizing howls of the kids he experimented on. “It was all for a good
cause,” he thinks, and carries on writing. Make no mistake, this man committed some
of the most heinous war crimes in history, so it’s surprising then that he managed
to evade for so long the hands of the many Nazi hunters that wanted him to face the
music, i.e. a rope with a noose at the end. We’ll come to his unbelievable escape soon,
but for those of you not acquainted with this arguably most infamous Nazi doctor, let’s
first have a look at some of the things he did and what kind of background shaped
him into the monster we know and hate. Born on March 6, 1911, in Günzburg,
Bavaria, Germany, he grew up in fairly affluent surroundings. His father owned a farming
equipment company called “Karl Mengele & Sons” and so Joseph and his two younger brothers, Karl and
Alois, had all the things a child could ask for. The New York Times once asked what made this
“embodiment of absolute evil” a notorious Nazi who was the very “symbol of pure evil”, but
as the writer and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote after the war, we should never underestimate
the “banality of evil.” Evil wears a shirt and a tie and kisses its wife and kids on the cheeks
before it leaves for work in the morning. The young Josef Mengele was just an ordinary
kid, not some little psycho who went around setting cats on fire for fun. Had things in
Germany been just a little bit different when he was turning into a man, he might have gone
on to live a successful, normal kind of life, employing the medical skills he learned at
Goethe University in Frankfurt in a positive way. But as things turned out in the end,
a man named Adolf Hitler failed at being an artist and succeeded in moving a
large part of the German population into believing that their woes after the First
World War were mostly caused by the Jews. Mengele became useful to Hitler,
not just for his medical training, but for the fact he earned a Ph.D. in physical
anthropology, a discipline described as a “branch of anthropology concerned with the
origin, evolution, and diversity of people.” Diversity… not Adolf Hitler’s strong suit.
We are sure you’ve heard about what the Nazis thought was a “superior race” and “inferior
races.” As you all know, the Nazis exterminated millions of people they believed were inferior
kinds of people, not just Jewish folks, either. In 1931, when Mengele was just 20, he became
a member of an ultra-right-wing organization. This was just after the 1929 Wall Street Crash
in the USA, which affected Germany more than any other nation. Not being able to pay back
loans to the US, Germans were thrust into an economic crisis that had a large number of
the population down on its hands and knees. When that kind of thing happens in society, people
often turn to political extremes. They look for a leader who will take them out of their misery, and
that man was the charismatic killer, Adolf Hitler. By January 1933, Hitler was made Chancellor by
President Hindenburg. He then went about trying to get rid of that thing called democracy, giving
himself powers that no one could touch, sometimes eliminating his foes during this process. Then
when Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler gained total power in Germany as the Führer.
As this was happening, Mengele was one of the people cheering Hitler on. He enlisted in the
stormtroopers in 1933, aka, the “brownshirts”. Soon, Mengele became a fully-fledged member
of the Nazi Party and after that a member of the SS. In case you’re wondering, the
stormtroopers, or SA, was a paramilitary force that had been in existence for years.
The SS, or Schutzstaffel, started as bodyguards for Hitler, and then after something called “The
Night of the Long Knives” happened, in which Hitler had SA leaders executed in fear of a coup,
the SS became the leading paramilitary force under Hitler’s right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler.
It’s said when Mengele joined this group, he’d already rubbed shoulders with some of the
highest-ranking Nazi leaders. He was already in a good position to impress the Führer when he
joined the “Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene” in 1937, an ominous name
for an organization if ever there was one. Mengele joined the medical service in the
Waffen-SS after the Second World War started, and later became the second lieutenant in a medical
reserve battalion. Then when working at the “SS Race and Settlement Main Office” he worked on
selecting suitable candidates for Germanization. That meant, choosing the people they thought
could be assimilated into the German culture. In 1942, while working as a medical
officer on the Eastern Front with the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, Mengele
rescued two soldiers from a German tank and so was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and
also the Medal for the Care of the German People. He could add a “Wound Badge” to those medals,
meaning he was injured during the ordeal. His commendation read that he “acquitted
himself brilliantly in the face of the enemy.” He was wounded another time and so moved
to the “SS Race and Settlement Main Office” back in Berlin, and became a captain at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
You can see where his life was going, what kind of ideals he had. This was a man
with a vision, or so his friends later said. It was an ugly vision, one which saw the Nordic
race ruling over other races, one which according to a former colleague of his included “the
annihilation of the Jews” as “a provision for the recovery of the world and Germany.”
Through his studies, he came to believe in a superior race, however mad that might sound
to us now. Prior to ending up at Auschwitz and doing the terrible things we’ll soon talk
about, he wrote three books that encapsulated his vision. These books talked about hereditary
traits and how genetics shape the people we are. So, when he got to Auschwitz, he wasn’t
only a doctor with the kind of academic background that would make Hitler’s ears stand to
attention, but unlike all the other medical folks, he had been involved in serious combat and had
a list of medals to prove it. He was destined for big things among the Nazis. He was at the
top of his game, and it didn’t go unnoticed. His friend later said that when Mengele arrived
at the camp, he had a “special aura” about him. He’d actually asked to be stationed at the death
camp because he knew that was the place where he’d be able to conduct his completely unethical
experiments. When people arrived at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, they
were either selected for work duties or, if deemed not fit for work, sent to the gas chamber.
It’s thought 1.1 million people died in this camp alone, men, women, and children, each
being sent to one of the camps in a complex of Auschwitz camps where various horrific things
took place. Auschwitz I, for instance, was the first camp where at first mostly Polish and Soviet
prisoners were beaten and tortured and gassed. When Auschwitz II was completed, freight trains
took Jews in very large numbers to be killed in the gas chambers. It’s thought around 960,000 Jews
arrived, of which 865,000 were gassed soon after. But others that died at the Auschwitz
camps included 74,000 ethnic Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and
something close to 15,000 other Europeans. If they weren’t sent to the gas chamber, many
died from starvation, exhaustion, disease, or summary execution. As you’ll soon see,
some were taken out back and shot in the head. Many of those that were left faced being part of
medical experiments, the focus of our show today. Just to give you an idea of how someone might have
been chosen for death or labor or experimentation, here is what one survivor said happened
to her after she arrived at the camp: “Dr. Mengele pulled me out of a queue as we
were on the way from the c-lager camp to the gas chamber. I was the only one picked that
day personally by Mengele and his assistant. They took me to his laboratory, where I met
other children. They were screaming from pain… I was injected with drugs and chemicals.
My body most of the time was connected to tubes which inserted some drugs into my body.”
You might wonder why they were doing this? The answer is it was all in line with Nazi ideology
combined with the war effort. German soldiers were injured on the battlefield, and sometimes
ad hoc surgery needed to happen to save their lives. What better way to practice this
surgery than on prisoners in the camps? What if German soldiers parachuted into
freezing waters? How would you warm them up? That’s why medical doctors conducted horrific
freezing experiments. What if a German soldier was wounded and the cut got infected?
Sometimes the Nazis purposefully created an open wound on a person, often women called “rabbits”
and rubbed various things such as dirt and broken glass into the wound. They then administered
certain drugs they were working on, often on the behalf of German pharmaceutical companies.
In one such experiment, but not involving Mengele, a report stated that 13 people died from
gangrene, while six others were taken out and shot so they couldn’t ever tell
anyone about what had happened to them. It was later written, “The surviving
victims were permanently disabled, both physically and psychologically.” Some
of them eventually testified against these Nazi doctors after the war was over, with the
courts seeing the photographs of their scars. What’s shocking is that recent reports
have stated that not many Americans know this kind of thing actually happened. A paper in
the National Institutes of Health said in 2018, “41% of Americans, and 66% of millennials do not
know the historical significance of Auschwitz.” You’ll know a lot more after you’ve finished
watching this show. Lest we forget, dear viewers… We’ll never know the exact number of
people who were part of these experiments, but one study estimated it was 27,759. It said
4364 died either because of the experiments or were killed right after due to the fact the
Nazis wanted to keep them quiet. Bear in mind, even though the war itself was a monstrous
thing, the Nazis didn’t want their enemies or even the German populace knowing
what went on behind closed doors. Just to give you an example of what did go down
when victims were executed after the experiments, this is some testimony from a Czech
doctor who worked with the Germans: “High amputations were performed; for
example, even whole arms with shoulder blades or legs with iliaca were amputated.
These operations were performed mostly on insane women who were immediately killed after
the operation by a quick injection of evipan. All specimens gained in operations were
carefully wrapped up in sterile gauze and immediately transported to the SS hospital nearby,
where they were to be used in the attempt to heal the injured limbs of wounded German soldiers.”
So, these experiments involved many doctors and many camps, but let’s not lose ourselves
here and get back to Dr. Mengele, who, we should say, may have come out of the war as
the medical enemy number one. He was also one cog among many others in a giant machine.
Remember that Mengele’s big interest was hereditary traits. He also had a particular
interest in identical twins, given they share the same DNA. He was often responsible for
picking people out who arrived from the trains, allocating them a quick death or for one of
his experiments. He was delighted whenever he found twins, especially young ones, who it is said
often took a liking to this uncle-type character. When he happily whistled during the selection
process, perhaps one of the most disturbing things you can think of, he’d sometimes pull out
kids and later hand them candies. He also made sure they were fed well, but not because he was
a great guy. He wanted his specimens to survive. As one of the inmate doctors
later remarked about him: “He was capable of being so kind to the
children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details
in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that,
... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send
them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay.” But many went straight to the gas chamber.
At Birkenau camp, an Auschwitz subcamp, Mengele was later described by another doctor
as being “far and away the chief provider for the gas chamber and the crematory ovens.”
Mengele might have been just one of a few doctors on rotation who waited for the cattle cars full of
people to arrive at the camp, but reports now say, unlike some others, he actually enjoyed the
section process. Not all soldiers, it seems, liked sending people to their deaths, but Mengele
was often full of vim when it was his turn. This was expressed by some of the survivors,
who said when the dashingly handsome, neatly dressed Mengele looked them in the
eye he “conveyed the impression of a gentle and cultured man'' and spoke with a “cheerful
expression on his face . . . almost like he had fun . . . he was very playful.”
He then walked up and down the line pointing at each person, in turn shouting
“left” “left” “right” “left” left” “left” “right’. Left meant the chamber, right
meant labor or medical experimentation. And man, did he ever have a bad
temper, despite the whistling. There was one time he told a guard to separate
a child he wanted from her mother. The mother fought back, scratching the guard. Mengele,
now furious, calmly walked up to them and shot them both dead. The rest of the train’s
occupants screamed out, to which Mengele turned his back and said, “All of them, LEFT!”
Then there were the hospitals, where the Nazis actually treated prisoners but only so they
could do more labor. If they were too sick, they were sent to the gas chamber. One doctor
later testified that Mengele would often turn up at the hospital looking for suitable candidates
for his experiments. He said doctor Mengele’s men would “march before him with their arms in the
air while he continued to whistle his Wagner - or it might be Verdi or Johann Strauss.”
Things could happen quickly. In 1943, there was an outbreak of something called noma,
which is a gangrenous bacterial disease that affects the mouth and face. This happened at the
Romani camp and Mengele took a lot of interest. He had several afflicted children killed and
their heads sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz for research purposes. This disease was
caused no doubt by the conditions of the camp, but of course, Mengele thought it was down
to genetic factors relating to the Roma. In other cases, there were outbreaks of
typhus and scarlet fever. In one such case, Mengele sent 600 women to the gas chamber
and then ordered a full clean-up of the camp. After that, he said something along the lines
of, “Do I have to do everything around here?” But most of his work was around genetics. He loved
it when people with dwarfism arrived at the camp because he wanted to understand why they were
the way they were. As we said, he also liked it when twins arrived. Let’s say he found some twins
with blond hair and brown eyes, he would sometimes inject their eyes with methylene blue, just
to see if he could make them look more Aryan. One doctor later remarked, “In June 1943
I went to the Gypsy camp in Birkenau. I saw a wooden table. On it were samples of
eyes. They each had a number and a letter. The eyes were very pale yellow to
bright blue, green, and violet.” Twins have always been important when it
comes to understanding genetic traits, and Mengele was well aware that for the first time
in human history many twins were in the same place and all of them could be used for research.
What if, he pondered, through his study of twins he could improve what he considered the
genetic superiority of the Aryans. He was also very interested in how twins reacted individually
to specific experiments. What if you poisoned one and not the other, and then opened them up,
would they look the same? Stuff like that. When they arrived at the camp he immediately
gave orders that they should not be executed under any circumstances, or not until
he was done with them at least. They were to be well-fed and housed in comfortable
quarters compared to the rest of the prisoners. When they arrived, sad and confused, he leaned
down and said to them, “You should call me uncle Mengele.” Sometimes they called him “Uncle Pepi”.
The seemingly nice man that gave them treats and offered them rides in his car, sometimes,
unbeknownst to them, to the gas chamber. Survivors later testified that he treated them
well. One of them said that as a twin she felt “'completely elevated, segregated from the
hurly-burly of the camp.” Still, others remarked that they witnessed ”flames really coming up every
day, every night” where the bodies were burned. They heard “every evening a cacophony of screams”
which was followed by an “unbearable smell.” But they were just too young to really understand
the horrors that were happening around them. Another of those survivors said years later,
“Whenever he spoke to me, he was very polite, giving the impression that he was
interested in me. It was hard to believe that his little smile and courteous
behavior were just a facade behind which he devised the most horrific murderous schemes.”
Of the 1,500 pairs of twins that he had for his experiments only around 200 pairs survived.
That’s because sometimes he’d perform needless amputations and later have them killed. Other
times their hearts were injected with phenol so they could subsequently be dissected. He’d
inject one twin with a disease and not the other, and then see what happened when he conducted a
blood transfusion between them. They usually died. Survivor Jona Laks said, “Mengele removed
organs from people without anesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered.”
The reason for that was the doctor wanted to know not only how they compared in life, but what
happened to each of their bodies after they died. On one night alone he killed 14 pairs of twins
by injecting their hearts with chloroform. The Hungarian pathologist and camp POW named Miklos
Nyiszli explained what happened after: “I would bathe the corpses in calcium chloride and cook
them in large pots so that their skeletons could be preserved in the Museum of the Third Reich.”
Another time, Mengele was looking at two young male twins with joint pains. He told the
radiologist it was caused by tuberculosis, to which the radiologist argued back that
he’d seen no sign of the disease. Mengele then left the room and went to see the boys.
When he came back a few minutes later, he said to the radiologist, “You are right. There
was nothing.” The radiologist looked confused, and after a pause, Mengele told him, “Yes, I dissected
them.” He’d later explain such actions to a friend, saying, “It would be a sin, a crime . . .
and irresponsible not to utilize the possibilities that Auschwitz had for twin research.”
In perhaps the most horrific experiment, he tried to sew a pair of twins
together. According to Eva Mozes Kor, a twin herself at the camp, a pair of Gypsy twins
had their blood vessels and organs connected. In her own words, she said, “Mengele
had attempted to create Siamese twins by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins
screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.”
On June 8, 1961, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann - who we will get to soon -
a survivor named Vera Alexander testified. This is how some of the dialogue went:
Presiding Judge: What did you witness? Witness Alexander: There was a set of
twins, Gypsies, whom he took away one day from the block where I was - that was the
Zigeunerlager - the Gypsy camp. Some days later, he returned them, with veins in their
arms and their backs sewn together. Presiding Judge: I did not understand that.
Attorney General: He sewed them. Presiding Judge: Sewed the veins together?
Witness Alexander: Yes. Presiding Judge: Did he turn
them into Siamese twins? Witness Alexander: He sewed their arms together -
they were already full of pus, and full of wounds. Some media, including the New York Times,
have aired doubts over whether the twin experiments happened, but Alexander, who
cared for 50 sets of twins at the camp, said it did. In another widely published
statement, available to see in a book called The World Must Know published by United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she said: “I remember one set of twins in particular:
Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned,
they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins.
Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I
remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the
children in order to end their suffering.” On 26 January 1945, just before the camp was
liberated, survivor Vera Kriegel said the guards “were in a big panic. So, they poured petrol
over the barracks and tried to destroy all the evidence.” Not long after, the Soviets arrived.
One of the first things the liberators did was to ask the kids at the camp to show
the numbers tattooed on their arms. A Red Army soldier named Georgii
Elisavetskii later said of the adults, “They rushed toward us shouting, fell on their
knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.” The soldiers then looked around in utter
disbelief. They eventually found eyeglasses weighing a staggering 88 pounds. They discovered
around 44,000 pairs of shoes and warehouses stacked to the roof of people’s belongings.
The Germans had killed most of the Jews who’d been forced to work in the gas chambers. They’d
set fire to most of the documents concerning the horrors that happened there. And as they left,
they took thousands of prisoners on what turned out to be death marches for many to other camps.
One of the 9,000 that remained at the camp was the girl we’ve already talked about,
Eva Mozes Kor, someone who would never forget those medical experiments.
But where was Dr. Mengele? Was he going to suffer the same fate as Rudolf Höss, the
officer who was Auschwitz’s commandant? In 1947, this guy was hanged close to the Gestapo
office at Auschwitz. Indeed, Mengele would certainly have suffered a similar fate had he
not been a fairly accomplished escape artist. Now we come to part two of this show.
Prior to leaving the camp, he gathered as many materials as he could concerning
his medical experiments. He took with him all the specimens he thought were precious to
medical science, and then he ended up at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, about 20 days
after the Red Army arrived at his former camp. He then headed to Czechoslovakia. His fake
documents said he was an officer in the army, not a medical doctor for the Nazis.
Around this time, he handed many of the most important medical papers to a
nurse he’d been in a relationship with. But it was now only a matter of time until he was
caught, and that happened when he was picked up by the Americans in June, now a few months after
the liberation of the camp. They had him, finally. But due to some miscommunication or lack of
information, or both, the Americans didn’t know the man they had on their hands was one
of the worst Nazi war criminals of them all. He also didn’t have an SS blood group tattoo,
which would have let the Americans know what kind of man they had on their hands.
In July, they just let him go. They couldn’t possibly hold every German they
found. Soon Mengele got hold of documents that stated his name was “Fritz Ullman”,
which he later changed to “Fritz Hollmann.” The chase was on, and by
God, it would be a long one. He got a job in Bavaria as a farmhand under
that name, only returning once to what were now dangerous areas for him to recover those
camp documents he treasured so much. He was well aware that if they got hold of him again he’d
end up hanging by the neck as a war criminal. On April 17, 1949, he finally got out of Germany
and landed in Italy. This was no easy task, but with the aid of SS officers and escape routes
called “ratlines” he made it. There he used the International Committee of the Red Cross to
obtain a passport with the name “Helmut Gregor.” In July that year, he sailed
across the ocean to Argentina, his wife not at his side. They later divorced. In
Buenos Aires, he soon found work as a carpenter, and later with the help of a Nazi sympathizer, he
moved into a better area. Things were looking up, especially when he started making money
selling farming supplies for that company his father had founded, Karl Mengele & Sons.
He even traveled to nearby countries as a sales rep, and with cash in hand, he got himself
a pretty good apartment in downtown Buenos Aires. At this point, he wasn’t the only
Nazi war criminal hiding out in this country. It took many years for the Argentine
government to do anything about these people, even after Nazi hunters had identified them or the
German Government had asked for their extradition. Mengele wasn’t exactly the proverbial needle
in a haystack. In the 50s he’d gotten his real birth certificate from the West German embassy and
then he acquired a passport. Believe it or not, he actually used that passport to make trips back
to Europe. He even had the audacity to meet his son Rolf at a ski resort in Switzerland in 1956.
You’ll know soon how Rolf felt about his father. In ’58, he bought himself a house in Buenos Aires,
moving in with his new wife, Martha, and her son. The money was now coming in, not only from the
farming business but also from a pharmaceutical company he opened called Fadro Farm.
Then he and other Nazi doctors were rounded up by the Argentine authorities and accused
of practicing medicine without a license. Mengele knew this might bring attention to
his past activities, so he planned to move. We don’t need to tell you that
there were no computers back then, so it wasn’t as if his name flashed in red
lights on screens as a Nazi war criminal. His name popped up again and again during the
Nuremberg trials, but it was assumed he had died. But then more information was discovered by
Nazi hunters and in time, with more interviews of survivors, they knew that Joseph Mengele had
been one huge rotten egg in the stinking omelet that was Nazism. In 1959, the West German
authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Surely now the Angel of Death was
about to get stuck in his own web. But by the time the Argentinians had granted
the extradition, Mengele had moved again, this time to a small farmhouse over the border
in Paraguay. Still, just prior to this point, he was inches away from being caught.
In 1960, Mossad agents from Israel swooped into Argentina and basically kidnapped
the high-ranking Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. This was some catch, given that Eichmann was one
of the main orchestrators behind the Holocaust. He was hanged two years after his trial. It was this
man, who as a kid enjoyed playing the violin and running around the woods with his scout group,
who inspired that term “the banality of evil.” To get him, Mossad agents had to make a huge
sacrifice. That was, not capturing Mengele, who they also had an address for. They knew that
if they got Mengele this would alert Eichmann, and despite the doctor being one of the very worst,
in the grand scheme of things, Eichmann was just a bigger fish in that polluted pond of Nazism.
One of the agents later explained, “When I have a bird in my hand, I don't start looking for the
bird in the bush. I'll take the bird in my hand, put it in a cage, and then
deal with the one in the bush.” But as you know, that bird in the bush
spread its wings and fled. Now his name, photos and a list of his atrocities were in the
newspapers and there was a reward on his head. But with the help of Nazi sympathizers,
he managed to get to Sao Paolo, Brazil. There he met two Hungarian expatriates
who allowed him to stay on their farm, with the condition that he managed it for them. At
the time, they didn’t know who Mengele really was, and even invested with him in a coffee
and cattle farm in Brazil’s Serra Negra. Those Mossad agents were again hot on his tail, and now that Hungarian couple knew who
they had done business with. They also understood the risks involved with harboring a
fugitive as wanted as Mengele. At the same time, the German government issued yet another
extradition order and this time for Brazil. Mengele was now in a constant state of stress,
never knowing who would just turn up one day and send him back to be executed. He chewed his
mustache at the sides, bit his fingernails, froze whenever he saw a car approaching his farm.
He got sick, notably after all that hair he’d chewed off had blocked up his intestines. Times
were tough, but this man never changed his ways in terms of how he felt about a superior race.
He wrote a lot in his diaries, once condemning another Nazi leader who after being caught
had showed remorse: “He diminishes himself, showing repentance, that is lamentable.”
One time he wrote about being broke, saying, “What's going to happen? Now I feel lonely, or
rather abandoned, more painfully than ever.” In another entry, he wrote, “Right now I’m
having dreams of a double-edged guillotine.” Not once in the diaries did he show any remorse.
In fact, he once wrote, “I gave life in Auschwitz, I did not take it.” Then he wrote that Jewish
people should not be able to “mix their blood with others” and his true colors were seen.
He explained more, saying: “It is to be expected that the process
of interbreeding, at least in Europe, lends itself to the neighboring races. In other
continents, there are occurring important and convincing experiences. I can affirm that the
results have been very agreeable. Apartheid is a very efficient way to discontinue interbreeding.”
His prediction was that 90 percent of humans would die because of this mixing of races, what he
called human stupidity. Those diaries, by the way, were later sold to a Jewish-American grandson of
a Holocaust survivor for $245,000. The collection held something like 4,000 pages in total
describing the twisted thoughts of the monster. In the early 1970s, his depression got
worse after the Hungarian couple decided to split up from the Nazi. They left and
Mengele wasn’t invited, but they did at least rent him a slum house in Diadema in São Paulo.
It was there in 1977 that he met his son Rolf, who he’d not seen since that ski resort
trip in Switzerland many years ago. Rolf later told the American media that he could
never find it in himself to give his father up, after all, that would be killing him. Still,
he said he was shocked when he saw his pop was totally unrepentant. He was still a
full-fledged Nazi. The world had moved on, but his father was still clinging to and embracing
the most shameful period in German history. Rolf was later asked if he believed
his dad had done all those horrific things, to which he replied:
“I have to agree that the witnesses are telling the truth, and you can imagine
that it is not very easy to believe it, but, there is so much evidence and, so I really have
to believe it…he, thinks he is not responsible for it because he did not invent the concentration
camp. He thought he is on duty. It is an order.” Rolf said he tried talking about the subject
with his father in 1977, and when he told him what he did was brutal, absolutely inhumane, his
father just said, “I did what I was told to do.” Rolf said he pitied his father, and when he saw
him for the last time, he saw a broken man. He was living in a hut in a slum. He had dangerously
high blood pressure. He’d just had a stroke. Then on February 7, 1979, while Josef Mengele
was at a coastal resort in Brazil’s Bertioga, he had another stroke while in a swimming pool.
The cause of death was drowning, but some people later questioned whether he really had died
and not just run off again. But it was true, as DNA evidence showed many years later, and
just as Rolf had said. The big bad wolf of medicine was dead, and no one mourned
the loss outside of his close family. We’ll finish with the words of a
survivor, words we should never forget. Pearl Pufeles once said in reference to her
ignorance when she was a kid in the camp, “He was kind to us. And how could you
hate him, when he was so handsome?” That’s just it, in the sphere of the banality
of evil, this monster of a man was also human, all too human. Evil people don’t
have horns. They usually have ambition and like pleasing their bosses. Tyranny
doesn’t present itself as tyranny. It never has, and won’t again in the future. Keep
your eyes wide open and don't let your heart fool you. Peace out.
Now you need to watch something very interesting in “Why Hitler's Nephew Was
His Worst Enemy.” Or, change the subject with something amusing in “Gorilla vs Bear
- Who Would Win? - Animal Comparison.”
