The atrocities that Dr. Mengele committed in Auschwitz chill the blood in our veins to this day. However, he himself - like many Nazis - maintained that he was only following orders. Ba! He argued that he saved thousands of people from death ...
Josef Mengele's "selections" of prisoners from transports to Auschwitz have decided to "be or not to be" for countless people. The experiments he carried out in his laboratory on the "lucky ones" chosen by him led to the death - in torment - of others.
Nevertheless, he himself - as well as some of his friends and family members - claimed that the accusations against him were exaggerated, and that he himself did not bear the reality of the camp and did the best he could, taking into account the conditions in which he worked ...
A small cog in a big machine
Josef Mengele was never open to reflecting on his responsibility for the crimes he had committed against the prisoners of the camp. Years later his son Rolf recalled:
He told me confidently that Auschwitz existed before it went there and that it was just a little cog in a big machine. When I replied that I considered Auschwitz one of the greatest expressions of bestiality and brutality, he replied that I did not understand.
He said went there because he had to do duty and follow orders. Everyone had to do it in order to survive, the basic self-preservation instinct was activated . He said he couldn't think about it. He did not feel personally responsible for what happened in the camp.
Josef Mengele was convinced of his own innocence. In his opinion, he did not condemn people to death, but ... he saved them from death. He argued that when a doctor in a field hospital during the war chooses which of the badly wounded soldiers to operate in the first place, he leaves the rest to his fate, but thus he will save at least one of them.
The article was inspired by Christopher Mack's latest book, "The Confession of Doctor Mengele", published by Bellona Publishing House.
He perceived his role during the selection in Auschwitz in a similar way - selecting prisoners who were "fit to work" out of the transports, he helped them to the extent of limited possibilities ... "What was I to do when people hit the ramp? They were sick, half-dead "- he asked his son, whom he unsuccessfully tried to convince to his arguments.
Mengele maintained that he had tried to label as "fit" as possible as "fit" and had thus managed to give a chance for survival to thousands of people. His life was also due to his twins, on whom he carried out brutal experiments (as he explained, he gave them extra portions of food, clothes, and even sweets. So what if he later sewed them together, infected them with deadly diseases or killed them in front of their mothers ...). "He swore he didn't personally hurt anyone," said Rolf.
"Zoo" of the Angel of Death
Survivors' accounts contradict this. They cited hundreds of examples of the exceptional cruelty of a doctor, not without reason called the "Angel of Death from Auschwitz". In this respect, Mengele was second to none, though he could be endearingly polite and sometimes even gallant to his victims. He especially charmed unsuspecting children, whom he later subjected to terrible experiments. Gerald Posner describes:
As part of his research, he performed primitive surgeries and painful tests, almost always without anesthesia. He performed unnecessary amputations, lumbar punctures, injected typhus and deliberately inflicted wounds to compare the reactions.
He injected a solvent under his scalp to change the color of his hair from dark to light, and applied dyes to his eyes to make the brown irises blue. (...) He used electroshock equipment to test the inmates' endurance, which for most ended in death or coma . He used X-ray machines to sterilize women.
He did not forgive his victims even after death - he sent the results of the autopsy, fragments of skeletons and body parts to the Third Reich, wrapped in thick paper as "war research material". His crimes are all the more shocking because most of his "guinea pigs", which he kept in special barracks (he himself affectionately called them his "zoo"), were children under 12 years of age ...
Find out more:A sick ideology - the terrifying experiments of the Germans during World War II
Playing God
Anyway, even if Mengele's fault was limited only to conducting selections, it would be difficult in his case to speak only of "obeying orders". While most of his colleagues genuinely hated the obligatory changes at the ramp, he was out to them. Well, it happened that he volunteered for additional shifts!
Playing God and deciding who will live and who will die gave him a great deal of satisfaction. Dressed in an impeccable SS uniform, shiny black shoes, with a cheeky lopsided officer's cap and white gloves, when selecting prisoners "fit for work", he whistled his favorite opera arias under his breath. It is estimated that 400,000 people died as a result of his selections.
Many Jews were sent to the gas chambers directly from the trains, so today it is difficult to precisely define the number of victims of the camp.
It is difficult to say how many people he directly applied to his death. It is known, however, that until the end of his autumn he spent the fall undisturbed by anyone in South America (he died during a holiday trip, taking a sea bath ...), he did not feel guilty. Christopher Macht in his book "The Confession of Dr. Mengele" puts the following words into his mouth:
A good starting point would be if I ever felt guilty at all. I wouldn't call it a remorse. Rather, they never bothered me in my career so far, because I was following a clearly defined path.
Everything I did was done with the development of medical research in mind. It is not my fault that I found myself in a place where the conditions were perfect for conducting individual research.
In this confession - though fictionalized - there is a gloomy truth about the Angel of Death. This is best evidenced by the opinion of his son Rolf after his meeting with Mengel in Brazil:“I wanted to hear that the allegations were untrue, or to find out that my father also has a human face that I had not noticed before. No, I didn't get anything. He was unrepentant. (...) He did not understand that just being in the camp made him an instrument of evil ”. And yet - as we know well - he did much more there…