If anyone embodies the archetype of the evil that was Auschwitz, it is surely Josef Mengele. Dubbed by the inmates and survivors of the camp the “Angel of Death,” the immaculate doctor — with a slight flick of the finger — would casually select those permitted to live and work and those destined to die in the gas chambers. Among those he selected to live were the subjects upon whom he conducted his infamous race-inspired medical experiments. His postwar escape to South America and prolonged successful evasion from capture (in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) only reinforced the fear and mystique of the man.
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Popular culture has perpetuated the demonic legend. Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play, “The Deputy,” featured a Mengele character with the stature of “absolute evil”; Ira Levin’s 1976 novel (and later film), “The Boys From Brazil,” portrayed the fiendish geneticist cloning Hitler; and none other than Charlton Heston played Mengele meeting his confused and ambivalent son, Rolf, in the 2003 film “My Father, Rua Alguem 5555.” His was a stubborn legend. Even when Mengele’s death had been definitively established, there was a refusal by many survivors and others to believe it. For them, the only fitting psychological and moral conclusion entailed live confrontation and subsequent just retribution.
As David G. Marwell notes in “Mengele: Unmasking the ‘Angel of Death,’” little in Mengele’s wealthy, respectably conservative, Catholic background helps to account for his Auschwitz career and his reputation as a monster. He was born in 1911, and his decision to study medicine, human genetics and physical anthropology in the 1930s was largely in tune with the scientific mood of the times. Given his driving professional ambition and increasingly Völkisch predispositions, he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1938, at which time he also joined the SS. He ultimately landed at the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, a research body closely aligned with official Nazi ideology. It was through this institute’s director and Mengele’s doctoral adviser, Otmar von Verschauer, that — after serving as a decorated medical officer in the Waffen SS Viking Division — Mengele was posted to Auschwitz in May 1943.
And it was there, apart from his selection activity (which was also conducted by other SS doctors), that Mengele perpetrated his criminal heredity experiments. Setting up an entire sophisticated research structure devoted to the nature of genetic and racial determinism, he variously experimented upon Roma, dwarfs and — most obsessively — twins. Although many of these deeds were indubitably cruel and cavalierly murderous, Marwell, like other biographers and scholars before him, insists upon stripping away the exaggerated aspects of the Mengele legend. Despite his innumerable crimes, Marwell writes, “what is known about Mengele’s time at Auschwitz is more trope than truth. … Mengele’s outsize reputation as a medical monster is in inverse proportion to what is known and understood about what he actually did.” Indeed, some prisoners claimed that they had never even heard his name. Survivor memory — perhaps suggestively nudged by Mengele’s subsequent notoriety — has not always been entirely accurate. Thus, a few survivors remembered being selected by Mengele before his arrival at the camp. Some reported that he spoke Hungarian, which he did not. Others regarded him as tall and blond — in fact, he was relatively short and dark-haired. Given his alleged omnipotence, grotesque and untrue accusations — that Mengele had attempted to create Siamese twins by sewing together a pair of twins, or that he had attempted to make boys into girls and vice versa — were circulated. Contrarily, and for inmates confusingly, to further the “integrity” of his research, he would at times even be kind to his subjects and provide better conditions for them.