Mengele by David G. Marwell

 

Given Mengele’s ambition, his pursuit of his Habilitation , and his patronage from  Baron Otmar von Verschuer*,  it is clear he pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards ( and takwe advantage of unique ‘experimental opportunities’ for them.) Historian Massin writes, ‘Mengele is sometimes portrayed as the embodiment of the pseudoscientific SS physician, who, in complete isolation, carries out  his abstruse experiments. In fact, Mengele was very tightly connected to the scientific community.’ For this reason, he sought to ‘recruit’ the very best practitioners from the inmate population and kept, reportedly, comprehensive records of his scientific work. For the same reason, it is difficult to accept testimony about some of his experiments and their rationale, such as claims that Mengele attempted to create a Siamese twin by ‘sewing together’ two twins, or that he sought to ‘make boys into girls and girls into boys’ through ‘cross transfusions,’ or even connected the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon.’

The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something even more unsettling. Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. The science he pursed in Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with research carried out by others in what was considered a scientific establishment. That research was criminal –and monstrous – because of the absence of all barriers that ordinarily contain and regulate the temptations and ambitions that can push scientific research across ethical boundaries. Relegating Mengele and his research to the ranks of the anomalous and bizarre is perhaps more palatable than understanding that he was a product – and promise- of a much larger system of thought and practice. It is easier to dismiss an individual monster than recognize the monstrous that can emerge from otherwise respected and enshrined institutions. . .

A totem of regrettable inaction, unanswered-for crimes, and unfinished business, Mengele robbed both his victims and his pursuers of their day in court.

But shortly before his death, Mengele did have a sort of confrontation that so many had hoped for: with his son, Rolf, who pressed his father for answers about what he ha done. AS an adult, Rolf Mengele came face to face with his father only when he was thirty-three years old, the same age his father had been in the summer of 1944. The 1977 visit had been long planned, and it came after Mengele had suffered a stroke. It would be their first and likely last chance to meet as father and son and man to man.

Although Rolf had met Josef Mengele before, when he was twelve, Mengele had been known to him then as his entertaining and dashing ‘Uncle Fritz’ visiting from South America and not as his father, who – he thought – had been killed during the war. Not until the time of the Eichmann trial, when the name Mengele began to appear in the press, did his step father reveal to him the real identity of Uncle Fritz. It was a double shock. He learned that is father was not only alive but was charged with horrific crimes.

When Mengele learned that Rolf had been informed of his true identity, he wrote in his diary:

It is painful that I do not even have the faintest idea of R.s reaction to the ‘Enlightenment’  . . . If I imagine the middle-class and pseudo-cosmopolitan world in which my growing son now has to live, then I am dizzy at the thought of ‘Enlightenment’ at this time.

Rolf’s family told him that the accusations that his father was a murderer was not true. As he later explained to Gerald Posner, ‘It was not murder in the sense of murdering with his own hand personally . . .they just said to me that he was a cog in the system, in the machinery, and this time – I was 15, 16 – I accepted it.’ But of course the revelation took its toll on the young Rolf, who began an awkward correspondence with the man he now knew as his father, receiving and sending letters from a to Mengele trough the elaborate cutout system that Sedmeirer had devised with Mengele’s protectors in Brazil.

I got letters from him, and my mother forced me to answer his letters. I didn’t like it. So I wrote to him in a sense you write to someone who is a prisoner. I just wrote him . . . as my mother told me, to help him. You must have these human feelings somehow . . .it was an obligation for me.

[Born in 1944, Rolf grew up in a Germany that was consumed with understanding the past and its impact on the generation that came of age after the war spawned its own literary genre – Vaterliterature. Rolf and his story played an unanticipated role in one exemplar of this highly personal category. Peter Schneider, the German writer, after reading the five-part series that appeared in Bunte magazine in the summer of 1985 featuring Rolf ad his relationship with his father, wrote a novel that so mirrored  the circumstances and language of the Bunte story that Schneider was taken to court for plagiarism. Although no names were revealed, it is  absolutely clear that the novel deals with Josef Mengele and Rolf. Schneider even used the same literary  approach tat Mengele used in his own autobiographical novel as a vehicle to examine  larger, more universal themes. Schneider’s novel, in turn, became the basis for a 2003 feature film starring Charlton Heston, in his final role, as Mengele, and Thomas Kretschmer  playing Rolf. The film, My Father, Rua Alguem 5555, also includes a character, played by F. Murray Abraham, who appears to be a composite of Gerald Posner and Marvin Hier.]

In their correspondence, Mengele claimed a role in his son’s life, offering comments on life events, correcting grammar, opining on family relationships, and  providing updates on his health and the complicated relationships he maintained with his Brazilian friends and protectors.. With only one side of the correspondence, it is difficult to assess the full complexity between Mengele and his son. A leitmotif in Mengele’s letters was certainly his frustration at Rolf’s inattention, and one can see, increasingly, that Rolf seemed to be most interested in engaging his father about the past. In the latter half of 1975, perhaps to broach the subject of the Nazi period, Rolf mentioned in a letter to his father the newly published book by Albert Speer, Spandau Diaries. Mengele responded that he’d read Speer’s first book, Inside the  Third Reich, the year before, and launched with some bitterness into a critical review:

Concerning his memoirs, I’d like to say that it’s a pity that so little of the greatness of the time has stayed in the memory of a man who was allowed to play in the game in such a preferred position . . .

 

He made his contribution as an opportunistic technocrat, which is how he describes himself, but he gives a totally insufficient, at times, half-true and mostly falsified description of the epoch, which can be compared with that of Alexander the Great, Charles XII of Sweden, Fredrick the Great or Napoleon. . .

He takes on guilt which at times he isn’t even accused of, and then he believes, or so he hopes, that this can be amended by sitting in a prison for a few years, now that his head has been pulled out of the noose. But such ‘admissions of guilt’ should lead normally to different consequences. To be a ‘Schinkel’ of one’s times, one also simply needs  the qualities of a great artist and not just technical knowhow.

Mengele’s letters included long discussions into politics, history, economics, science, and occasionally – and carefully – his own experience, with no expression of remorse. . .

 

After much planning and a postponement, Rolf boarded a Varig Airlines jet in Frankfurt departing for Rio de Janeiro on October 10, 1977. To make the trip Rolf used the passport of a friend, Wilfred Busse, who bore close resemblance to him. He had swiped the passport earlier in the year, never revealing to Busse that he had done so or the reason why. Rolf traveled with another friend, who carried Rolf’s real passport should the need for it arise and, leaving him in Ro ‘to find girls on Copacabana beach, ‘ flew on to Sao Paolo. Upon arrival, taking three taxis to throw off any surveillance, he made his way to the Bossert’s home. Mr. Bossert then drove him to his father’s place, located not too far away.


Mengele tried to explain Auschwitz politically and sociologically, claiming that when he came there, he ‘had to do his duty, to carry out orders. Everybody had to do so to survive . . .He was not a shirker.’

From his point of view, he is not personally responsible for the incidents there. He didn’t ‘invent’ Auschwitz. It already existed. He couldn’t help anyone. On the platform, for instance. What was he to do, when half-dead and infected people arrived? It was beyond imagination to describe the circumstances there. His job was to clarify only: ‘able to work’ and ‘unable to work.’ He tried to grade the people ‘able to work’ as often as possible. He thinks he saved the lives of thousands of people that way. He hasn’t order extermination and he is not responsible. Also the twins owe their lives to him. He never harmed anybody personally.

Rolf described his father as getting very excited, angry, and even crying, asking whether ‘I –his son believe in lies told in the newspapers?’ At this point the conversation ended. There was nothing to be gained for either father or son in continuing. Rolf would not get the answers he needed from his father. There would be no admission of guilt or responsibility. Mengele must have realized that his son could not be convinced  that his actions had been justified or even understandable. A tense standoff replaced the raised voices and raw emotion. Rolf summed up what he believed his father felt about the visit:

He was proud of his son, like a soldier after a successful reconnaissance patrol. After all he was his son; even if different, pigheaded and spoiled by the post-war propaganda and by the step-fatherly home and education. All that will settle down.

At last the son had found the right wife. Soon he’ll become a grandfather. That visit gave a fresh impetus and hope to him.


Reclaiming the calm and dispassionate mien of the letter writer, Mengele wrote to Rolf after the visit:

 

In the weeks following your departure, I kept asking myself whether I am happier or, to put it another way, whether I can die more easily . . .On the basis of my worldview and my specific profession, I attach, more than most, of course, special meaning to the terms offspring, inheritance, son. On the other hand, I understand, as well, the power of environment. If the laws of heredity can produce a significant difference in psycho-physical characteristics between father and son, this dissimilarity can be intensified by a completely different milieu, especially during the period of development. A man of my fate, especially, tens to hope too much for the fulfillment in his son of all that he had failed to do. That may range from the simplest details of life to great professional and public success. Against this – and in our own case drastically so – is the disruption (encouraged by the Zeitgeist) of the father’s experience of the son. Apart from the material security provided by my paternal inheritance, there is nothing significant in my life that could have a favorable influence on your relationship with me. Not because such . . achievements were lacking, but because they were pushed into into obscurity by a larger event, and you could not recognize them. Inherited qualities, as well as education and environmental influences, force you to view the content of my life incorrectly, if not intentionally negatively. In and of itself, this does not bother me all that much since, given the circumstances, I can understand it, but where it should have objectively or subjectively impeded your material or spiritual progress, it causes me a tormenting pain.

If, on one hand, I cannot hope for understanding and empathy from you, on the other hand, I am not moved in the slightest  to ‘justify’ or excuse any decisions, actions, or behavior in my life beyond the objective explanation. I have already expressed this to you and others in unmistakable words. If you have recognized – even to your amusement – our only ‘inherited’ similarity in ‘unconditionally defending our respective positions and ideas,’ that’s not much. But perhaps it is the reality. My tolerance really has a limit, and that is where my tolerance rally has a limit, and that is where unquestionably traditional values are concerned and where I fear threats to those close to me or to my volkische community.

Among the last written words of his life, Mengele was unrepentant to the end and expressed no remorse. His Weltanschauung, or world view, was little changed from that summer day when he stalked the ramp at Auschwitz- Birkenau.

* Head of the genetics division of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics – supported by the Rockefeller Foundation -and the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt