Secret diaries of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele offer glimpse into twisted mind

30 Jul 2011 00:01

HE was dubbed the Angel of Death – the Nazi doctor who tortured and killed thousands of children in grisly experiments at Auschwitz.

German Nazi doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele (Pic: Getty Images)

HE was dubbed the Angel of Death – the Nazi doctor who tortured and killed thousands of children in grisly experiments at Auschwitz.
Evil Josef Mengele spent the rest of his life on the run after the Second World War but, while holed up in South America, he kept a chilling secret diary.
Some 3,300 pages of his handwritten notes, poems and drawings were sold to an anonymous Jewish buyer for £185,000 at auction on Thursday.
And the hardbacked journals offer a glimpse into one of the most terrifyingly twisted minds of the 20th century.
His brutal work for Adolf Hitler resulted in the death of millions of Jews, including 1.5 million children, in the quest for an Aryan “super race”.
And his diaries show how his views had changed little on the run.
He writes: “Mixing Italians, Austrians and Slavs into one race proves ignorance.”
Mengele – who fled to Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil – commented on how South Americans used lipstick and make-up and indulged in sexual promiscuity.
He said it has led to a “dreadful mixing of the races with the northern Europeans – when you start mixing the races, there is a decline in civilisation”.

Handwritten book signed by Nazi Josef Mengele (Pic: Getty Images)

Mengele acknowledged that the Nazi experiment on race had failed but drastic measures still had to be taken to combat what he perceived as the planet’s “overpopulation”.
“Humans must make a decision on how to survive in modern times,” he warned. “Eugenics has not succeeded in the short-run. Must find a solution.
“If overpopulation continues, the intelligent beings will die out.”
And he added: “It is absolutely necessary that the German people forget their past or there is no going forward.”
Born in 1911 in the Bavarian village of Gunzburg, Mengele was the eldest of three sons. He was apparently refined, intelligent and popular and studied philosophy at Munich and medicine at Frankfurt University.
In 1937 he joined the Nazi party, and in 1938 went to the SS. Four years later he was wounded while serving at the Russian front and was pronounced unfit for duty.
It was in 1943, at the age of 32, when he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
He initially gained notoriety as an SS physician who eagerly supervised the selection of arriving prisoners.
Mengele would determine who would be killed and who would become a forced labourer and worked to death.

Children prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp (Pic: AFP)

He then made the fateful move into “experimentation” – and is believed to be directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews.
While his diaries show how Mengele found plenty of time to pontificate on life, there is no mention of his stomach-churning experiments.
He once injected chemicals into ­children’s eyeballs in an attempt to change their colour.
He was also hugely fascinated by twins and once sewed Gypsy children together to create Siamese twins.
Notes of his operations were destroyed but it is thought that at least 3,000 twins were subjected to his experiments and thousands more killed.
He once ordered his assistant to round up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep.
He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins’ bodies.
Bizarrely, many of the camp survivors recall Mengele as a gentle, affable man who befriended them as children and gave them chocolates.
Since many had immediately been separated from their families upon entering the camp, Mengele became a sort of father figure.
But the children were acutely aware that they could be killed at any time.
He once drew a line on the wall of the children’s block about 5ft 2in from the floor. All those whose heads could not reach were sent to their deaths.
He was also capable of sudden bursts of extreme violence. Author Robert Jay Lifton, in his book The Nazi Doctors, reports how one terrified mother did not want to be separated from her 13-year-old daughter.
She bit and scratched the face of the SS man who tried to force her to her assigned line, so Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and the child.
With the comment “away with this s***” he then sent to the gas chambers all the people from her transport who had previously been selected for work.
One survivor also recalled that one block was infected with lice – and Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.
In 1945, as Hitler’s empire began to crumble and the Soviets advanced, Mengele went on the run.
He escaped the Red Army and, incredibly, was released twice from American detention camps when they failed to realise he was a wanted war criminal.
After four years of hiding on a farm in southern Germany, his wealthy family bought him the help of former Nazis so he could flee to South America.
Details gradually emerged of his horrific regime and he became one of the most wanted Nazi criminals.
He lived first in Argentina, only fleeing when fellow Nazi Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Israeli security forces and taken for execution. Then he went to Paraguay, where the regime was sympathetic to him, before moving to Brazil.
There he lived out the final years of his life as a fugitive in a bungalow in a slum suburb of São Paulo.
Mengele became a compulsive writer and journalist, spending most of his time tending his garden, making furniture, hiking and studying plants and animals.
In 1977, he was visited by his only son, Rolf, who is now 66 and a retired lawyer in Germany. He has changed his name to Jenckel.
Rolf found an unrepentant Nazi who claimed that he “had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life”.
Mengele’s health had been deteriorating for years and he died on February 7, 1979, aged 67, when he accidentally drowned or possibly suffered a stroke while swimming in the Atlantic off Brazil.
As much as 95% of the auctioned material – understood to have been donated by a Mengele family member – has not been translated.
The diaries take the form of 31 ­manuscripts detailing his time in Paraguay and Brazil from 1960 to 1975.
Mengele speaks of himself in the third person, or uses a pseudonym, “Andreas”.
He talks about meeting girls and refers to his fear of getting one pregnant while musing about the problem of controlling the number of births.
He also complains about the number of unemployed in Germany from 1929 to 1932, the “shameful” peace after the First World War, how his ideology developed and that taxes were too high.
He also explains that there couldn’t be any mistrust between himself and his son, since his son has no Jewish blood.
Details emerge of a man tormented from an early age.
He states he was immature and alone as a youngster and claims: “It would have been different if I lived with good families. Would it have been different to have lived with people who were educated themselves, and would it have been different if they would have taken care of me?”
A spokesman for Alexander Historic Auctions, which sold the diaries in Connecticut, said: “This archive, the vast majority of which has never been published or perhaps even viewed, offers an in-depth view into the cruellest mind of the 20th century. These are intensely personal writings of a desperate man, not penned over a single evening but over 15 years as he fled his pursuers.
“They illustrate a remorseless, angry, narcissistic, vain, pseudo-intellectual murderer seeking to leave his mark on the world. In these writings, Mengele describes himself – it is our hope these writings will also describe Mengele.”

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