DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (5 page)

My twin brother and I were marching with our mother toward the gas chambers when she told us,

“Children-go to the Germans. Run back to where they are taking the twins.”

Her instinct, I guess, told her we would be safer if we left her.

While our mother and little brother continued marching in the direction of the crematorium, we ran back toward the selection lines.

There was Dr. Mengele, standing at the head of the line.

My first impression of Mengele was that he was so nice-looking very nice-looking.

Young Beppo’s elite group of friends adopted a favorite hangout, the fashionable Cafe Mader in the ceziter of town. They spent most Saturday nights there, whiling away the late hours, sipping coffee, and chatting, thoroughly indifferent to the blandishments of a rabble-rouser named Adolph Hitler whose influence was just beginning to be felt in the late 1920s. Mengele’s crowd was completely uninvolved with Gunzburg’s burgeoning Nazi circle, caring much more about expensive cars than politics.

But Mengele and many of his friends did become active in a group known as the Grossdeutscher Jugendbund, or Greater Germany Youth Movement.

The young people’s branch of the Stalhelm or

“Steel Helmets” party, it was an intensely nationalistic and patriotic organization that urged its young members to strive for a return to the Deutschland of old, the Volk-basic values of the earth and

“Mother Germany.” In some ways, the group resembled the back-to-the-land groups such as the kibbutzim of Palestine. The old veterans of World War I who formed the original Steel Helmets recruited many young people to perpetuate their goals.

Josef became a local leader, preparing papers and giving eloquent speeches.

According to Zofka, the author of a doctoral dissertation on the political allegiances of Gunzburg’s population before the war, dozens of young men, many of them sons of the town’s elite, also gravitated toward this movement. The upper-middle-class German youth of that era volunteered for the Grossdeutscher Jugendbund almost as reflexively as their American counterparts were signing up for the Boy Scouts.

Mengele’s strong allegiance to the Volk movement continued past his adolescence. He officially joined the Stalhelm in 1931, when he was a first-year student at the University of Munich, and his brothers followed suit.

Beyond the nationalistic ideals of the Stalhelm, however, young Josef seemed to have had no other clear political allegiances, and certainly none to Nazism. His closest childhood friend, Hermann Lieb, insists that Mengele was much more interested in dances, girls, and swimming parties in the Danube than in the political movements of the day.

Deeply ambitious, Mengele desired to make a name for himself -not simply to inherit his father’s. Although an indifferent student, Mengele knew he wanted to escape a life in the farm-equipment factory.

The family business held no long-term interest for him. He would strike out on his own, away from Gunzburg and the shadow of his competent father and his domineering mother. Though his grades were uniformly poor, his goal was lofty-he would become a doctor and pursue studies in anthropology and genetics. With chilling prescience, he told a friend at the Gymnasium,

“One day, my name will be in the encyclopedia.”

Since bad grades were not a deterrent to entering German universities, in the autumn of 1930 Mengele left Gunzburg to begin his studies at the University of Munich. The townspeople of Gunzburg were genuinely sorry to see him go, as were the workers at his father’s factory. Of the three Mengele sons, Beppo was their favorite. He had been, as they liked to put it, “the best of the Mengeles,” the friendliest and the most humane.

The university was worlds apart from what Mengele had known in provincial Gunzburg and his stuff boyhood Gymnasium. Munich was a bustling, cosmopolitan city, filled with cultural outlets. Mengele, a longtime lover of opera and classical music, had his pick of concerts to attend. There were also elegant shops, fine restaurants, art galleries, and the Pinakothek, one of the best museums in the world.

Mengele’s freshman year, 1930, was also a time when Hitler was beginning to find fertile ground for his most radical ideas. With millions unemployed due to the economic depression, vast crowds were gathering at his rallies. Mengele could not have been oblivious to the speeches that were luring so many of his countrymen, filled as they were with promises of a new Germany, cleansed of all elements that had led to its decline, and so powerful it would conquer the world.

The centerpiece of Hitler’s speeches was a call for “racial purity,” an idea that was to become the driving force of Mengele’s existence.

The future dictator beguiled his audiences with his dream-a country populated by blond, blue-eyed supermen and super women a vision that would be achieved through a strict program of “racial hygiene.”

Hitler called for the elimination of all “inferior” races, especially the Jews.

As Hitler gathered strength, the traditional academic disciplines began to mirror his obsession with race. Even as Hitler and his supporters pressed the need to stop the “contamination” of Germany with Jewish blood, Munich university professors expounded similar notions in the classrooms with great shows of profundity. Subjects such as genetics, biology, history, and anthropology were all being taught with a markedly antiSemitic slant.

Mengele’s chosen fields of anthropology and genetics were especially influenced by the racist theories of Nazi dogma. While the Brownshirts and storm troopers tried to realize Hitler’s dream of a new Germany through violence and terror in the streets, genetic scientists were hard at work inside their laboratories, buttressing his theories on the racial inferiority of Jews.

At the University of Munich, Mengele metamorphosed from a carefree bon vivant into a serious student of ideas. It was in Munich that Mengele first exhibited the obsessive attention to work that would mark his later years. At twenty, Mengele displayed more ambition than ever before, as the influence of his hard-driving father-and self denying mother-increasingly revealed itself. At the university, Mengele was discovering an outlet for his burning need to succeed. His university records suggest that he worked very hard and carried a heavy course load compared to his peers. Friends from the period also recall how diligent Mengele was. Whenever they dropped in to see him at his apartment, he would greet them with a book in hand. Indeed, the ideas Mengele was so anxiously absorbing in his studies were precisely the ones that would propel him down the road to Auschwitz. HIS apprenticeship as a mass murderer formally began not on the selection lines of the concentration camp but in the classrooms of the University of Munich.

As his autobiographical writings indicate, Mengele was beguiled by the notion of creating a superior race; it was the catalyst for his decision to become a eugenic scientist, in addition to obtaining a medical degree. To improve his credentials as a racial doctor, he sought a Ph.D. in anthropology, and wrote a lengthy dissertation. The possibility of molding a perfect breed of Aryan gods struck a responsive chord in the boy from Bavaria with the aristocratic pretensions. The vanity and sense of superiority had always been there, even in the genial Beppo of Gunzburg. What the villagers and the workers at his father’s factory had seen as friendliness and bonhomie were cut from the same cloth as the deceptively charming demeanor Mengele would maintain throughout his life, right up to his apotheosis as the

“Angel” of Death.

Early on in his studies, Mengele had been introduced to the work of the social Darwinists, who nearly a half-century earlier, in Victorian England, had argued that “biology is destiny.” The social Darwinists had believed that nearly all personal and social problems were inherited. Alcoholism, insanity, even poverty and left-handedness, were the result of bad genes. The social Darwinists espoused a program of active intervention to ensure that only the “best” people survived.

They wanted to encourage the genetically fit to have more children, while those of questionable stock would remain childless.

The theories of the social Darwinists evolved and gained credence, so that by the 1920s several countries, including Germany and the United States, were fostering a eugenics movement. In Washington, for instance, as Congress was considering new immigration laws, several members advocated the need to limit entry of Eastern European refugees on the grounds they would “contaminate American blood.”

While arguing for passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, some lawmakers maintained that Latin Americans, Slavs, and even the Irish were “mentally and morally inferior to” There was an idealistic component to the eugenics movement, which flourished in Germany long before Hitler.

German scientists were not that diflerent from their American and English counterparts in promoting their programs of “racial hygiene.”

Eugenicists everywhere saw themselves as visionaries, idealists working for a better world through the human gene. They were to create a Utopia, a world free of poverty, illness, and all other physical and mental handicaps. The Germans, however, carried racial science further than did theorists of other nations, and their eugenics movement was above all else distinguished by its extreme antiSemitic component.

The messianic quality of social Darwinism seems to have appealed to the young Mengele. His writings suggest that he was especially struck by their use of the phrase “the fate of mankind.” From his youthful encounter with their distorted ideals, to his old age, a weary and broken exile, Mengele would continue to feel a personal allegiance to the social Darwinists. At the university, the question of the “biological quality of mankind” may have been esoteric to most of Mengele’s classmates. But for him, it was apparently a clarion call.

His account of that period suggests he was deeply upset by the fact that the lower classes were having many children, while those of impeccable genetic stock were too busy even to marry.

In 1935, the year Mengele prepared to graduate, the Nazis laid down the cornerstone of their racial program, the Nuremberg Laws.

The laws introduced complex, ostensibly scientific criteria to determine who was a true German and who was not. According to those laws, Jews were no longer German citizens-citizenship in the Reich being an honor conferred only on the “racially pure.” Marriages and sexual relations between Jews and “people of German blood” were now forbidden and carried severe penalties, including lengthy jail terms.

Jews were expelled from all professions, including academia. They could not even employ German servants.

Many of Germany’s top scientists and research centers joined forces with the Nazis and actively helped to implement the Nuremberg Laws.

But none did so with more fervor than the University of Frankfurt’s Professor Otmar von Verschuer, possibly the most acclaimed racial scientist of his day. Since the early 1930s, Verschuer had been receiving generous financial support from the Nazis to build his lavish new Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity, which specialized in racial studies. Under his able leadership, the Frankfurt Institute, with its impressive staff that included a chief doctor, two medical assistants, and several technicians, did as much work to advance Nazi political aims as it did genuine scientific research. Doctors and scientists from the institute were used by the Nazis as “expert witnesses” in court to prosecute anyone who broke the Nuremberg Laws in their dealings with Jews.

At twenty-five, Mengele graduated from Munich with the highest honors, summa cum laude. Now both physician and Doktorfater, he contemplated his next step up the academic ladder. That would have to be Verschuer’s institute at the University of Frankfurt. He promptly applied for and was given a position working as an assistant to Verschuer, the rising star of Germany’s eugenics movement.

Frankfurt in the 1930s was a showplace for the administration of the new Nazi regime. The city’s ministry of health set up a special unit just to investigate its residents to determine whether any of them were secretly tainted with Jewish blood or carried any other “genetic disease.

“Nearly half the citizens of Frankfurt were on file, their dossiers bulging with detailed information on their personal backgrounds.

One of Mengele’s duties at the institute was to help in this evaluation of the “racial fitness” of Frankfurt’s citizens-really to determine whether their Aryan ancestry was pure. Under the Nuremberg Laws, even individuals with distant Jewish relatives were considered Jewish.

Mengele joined his institute colleagues in helping to assist the judicial investigations into violations of the law by determining whether a person charged was indeed a Jew. Even in the years before deportations to the camps began, a determination by Mengele that individuals were racially Jewish could jeopardize their life in Germany, by stripping them of their livelihood as well as depriving them of their standing and security. Within a few years, Mengele’s judgments as to who was and was not a Jew, combined with the thousands of dossiers compiled by other Frankfurt bureaucrats, would prove most useful to the Nazis when they were seeking out all those with Jewish ancestry for deportation to the death camps.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: It was like a nightmare when we arrived. We could see the chimneys, and the flames pouring out of these chimneys. My father turned to my mother and said,

“You see, Rosie, the Germans are taking us to burn us.”

I was ten years old when my family was deported to Auschwitz.

Just one week before, my twin sister, Ruthie, and I had celebrated our tenth birthday inside the Cluj Ghetto.

I grew up in a middle-class family. I was born in Brassov, a small town in Transylvania. My father worked as a clerk. My mother, Rosie, was a housewife. Ruthie and I were their only children; we were identical twins.

Mother’s entire life was centered around us. She adored Ruthie and me-especially Ruthie, who was the livelier twin.

In May 1944, all the Jews in our town were taken to Cluj and forced to live inside a ghetto. We went straight from this ghetto to Auschwitz.