DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (16 page)

We were very religious, and the Communists didn’t want religion.

My twin and I attended a Jewish school, just as we had before the war.

We worked very hard.

But the Communists closed down our Jewish school. They forced us to attend classes on the Sabbath.

It was awful. It brought back the terrible years before the war, when there had been so much antiSemitism.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I felt the antiSemitism at school very keenly. At first, I attended a Jewish school, and was protected. Then, the Communists engineered what they called an “educational reform.” They shut down the Jewish schools.

In my new school, nobody wanted to be my friend. The Christian boys and girls would have nothing to do with me.

I felt all alone.

As the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg continued its grim business, and as death-camp survivors emerged from the shadows to testify, Mengele’s name began to appear on the wanted lists of more and more countries. Perhaps the Nuremberg Tribunal, concerned as it was with statesmen and generals, would not have been the proper forum to try Mengele even had he been captured. But Mengele would have made an ideal defendant fur the British-run Belsen trials. Held in Luneberg, site of the old Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, these trials took place at the end of 1945, at the same time as Nuremberg was getting under way.

Many of the Luneberg defendants had served both at Auschwitz and at Bergen-Belsen; among them were many of Mengele’s old cronies, including some SS doctors. One of them, Dr. Josef Kramer, had been a high-ranking physician at Auschwitz-Birkcnau. According to former inmates, the imperious, thuggish Kramer was one of the few men at Auschwitz-perhaps the only man-that Dr. Mengele feared.

However, the “star” defendant of the Belsen trials was not Kramer but Irma Grese, Mengele’s old sidekick.

After the fall of Auschwitz, Irma had sought to continue her death camp career at Bergen-Belsen. There, too, she had quickly distinguished herself for her wanton cruelty. She would beat prisoners with her own hands, sometimes until they fell unconscious and died. Only at the end, amid rumors that British troops were about to overrun the camp, did Grese make an about-face and treat prisoners with a semblance of kindness. She even dared ask them to put in a good word for her. But her entreaties did not help. When the British entered Bergen-Belsen and saw the mounds of dead and dying, Grese was rounded up with other Nazis.

During the trial, prosecutors wondered how such “a very young girl” could have committed acts of such “very great savagery and cruelty.”

When Irma took the stand, she seemed curiously subdued.

She readily admitted to many of the accusations leveled against her.

In her own defense, she only pointed out that she had acted with the approval of higher authorities-most notably, Dr. Josef Mengele. She had “always” accompanied Mengele; he had been her boss.

Mengele’s fair companion was hanged, along with Dr. Kramer.

Luneberg was the first, but by no means the last, of the many war crimes trials from which Mengele would be conspicuously absent. The proceedings did establish early on a record of his crimes at Auschwitz.

By the end of the Luneberg trial, much was already known about his actions as an SS camp doctor. Even amid the panoply of Nazi horrors, Mengele stood out for the sheer magnitude of his crimes.

TWINS’ FATHER: I was shocked when I was reunited with my sister, Magda. We met after I had l Munkacs and settled in a different city, in Romania.

I worked as an accountant, and someone told my brotherin-law where I was.

My twin sister had been such a beautitul girl before the war. But she was completely changed, and in a terrible way. She had a beard all over her face-a real man’s beard.

It was horrifying to look at her, and to remember how she had once been, so radiant and happy with her young son-the little boy Mengele sent to the gas chambers.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: I was very broken down after the war, very sick.

I was able to locate my husband, and we were quickly reunited.

He had spent the war in labor camps all over Russia. We decided to settle in Czechoslovakia.

I missed my son. I wanted a child very much. But I did not have my periods. I was very frightened. I didn’t know what they had done to me at Auschwitz-nobody knew.

I went to many doctors. They told me,

“Wait.”

After a long time, I started functioning normally again. I became pregnant, and gave birth to another boy.

But I continued to think about Auschwitz. I was always having nightmares about the camp.

The Nuremberg and Belsen trials only intensified the Allied powers’ desire to punish the criminals of the Third Reich. As new, exhaustive manhunts got under way, Mengele was forced to remain in hiding under his alias of

“Fritz Hollman.” Despite the security Mangolding offered, Mengele was unhappy at the Fischer farm, where the work was tedious and exhausting. He could not get used to the harsh regime of physical labor and developed severe shoulder pains. His main distraction continued to come from books. And whenever he could, he visited his friend, Dr. Ulmann’s brotherin-law, where the two discoursed on everything from medicine to the affairs of the day -specifically, the Nuremberg trials-and even talked about Mengele’s future hopes.

Unbelievably, he somehow still thought he could resume a normal life and become a university professor, like his old mentor Verschuer.

Mengele’s cunning old patron was faring considerably better than his former assistant. Although he had been the force and the inspiration behind Mengele’s deadliest experiments at Auschwitz, Verschuer never had to hide out on an isolated farm. On the contrary, he was highly visible as he sought to get his old job back as head of the reconstituted Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute being formed at the University of Frankfurt.

Verschuer was as much an opportunist after the war as he had been under Nazi rule. In February 1945, as the Russians were approaching Berlin, he had fled to his hometown of Solz, taking the institute’s entire library with him. This included eighty-eight cases of books on heredity and racial science, along with fifteen cases of books from his personal collection, most of which he hid in small inns around Solz.

It is also believed that Verschuer hid or destroyed any evidence that could be used against him, including his voluminous correspondence with Mengele at Auschwitz. As news surfaced of what his protege had done at the death camp, Verschuer feigned surprise and indignation. He claimed to the press that he had no knowledge of selections and gassings, grotesque experiments and mass murders. Certainly, he had no idea how Mengele had gathered the grisly twins’ specimens that had been sent to him personally at the Berlin Institute. Verschuer said he had assumed that the slides and tissue samples, organs and skeletal remains, had come from people who had died “of natural causes.

In order to make sure he got his old job back, Verschuer made Mengele the scapegoat, passing off responsibility for any scientific excesses onto his protege; just how Mengele felt at seeing himself blamed by his former idol is unknown: There is no apparent reference to Verschuer in any of his papers. But Verschuer also resorted to many other lies to regain entry into the academic fold. For example, he told the mayor of Frankfurt, who was overseeing the opening of the university, that he was close to developing a vaccine for tuberculosis. It was an ingenious idea: In the postwar months, an epidemic was raging throughout Germany, and there was an all-out search for a vaccine or a cure.

Forced like thousands of other Germans to undergo

“Denazification,”

whereby former Nazis were probed for the extent of their involvement with the Reich, Verschuer was able to con the Americans who presided over the procedure into thinking he had been little more than a victim.

If the Denazification authorities had found him to be an active Nazi, criminal charges would have been filed; as it was, Mengele’s mentor was declared to have been only a “hanger-on” of the Nazi regime, and fined the trifling sum of six hundred marks. His appeal was also helped by the accolades of his former colleagues at the University of Frankfurt, who heartily endorsed his efforts to regain his former chair.

Like his favorite student, Otmar von Verschuer had no regrets about his commitment to eugenics, or about what he had done in the name of science. In years past, he had raised the pitch of his scientific preachings to appeal to the Nazi rulers. Now, Verschuer knew exactly how to soft-pedal his views to gain the trust of the postwar establishment.

By the end of 1945, while the fugitive Mengele was sorting potatoes and cleaning stables, his teacher was on his way to attaining his former prominence. Versehuer was able to slip, chameleon like into the protective coloration of an innocent academician who has been trapped in evil surroundings. While men who had been far less influential in the Nazi regime than he now feared for their lives, Otrnar von Verschuer worried only about restoring his lost reputation.

Verschuer’s self-serving technique was useful to other ex-Nazis as well. Mengele rapidly became the scapegoat not only for his old professor, but also for many of the theorists of racial science. They pretended the Auschwitz doctor was an aberration who had distorted the “ideals” of eugenics. Despite the fact that their theories had been used to justify the killing of millions of “inferior” human beings, they chose not to condemn these theories, but only the man who had best put them into practice. They rejoiced when Mengele was thrust into the limelight, for it meant their own actions would remain obscured.

Verschuer’s attempts to return to the University of Frankfurt, which were going so smoothly in 1945, ran into trouble in 1946. Two of his more ethical former colleagues, upon hearing of his possible read pointment, published a lengthy article on May 3, 1946, in the Neue Zeitung, a Frankfurt daily, describing Verschuer’s activities during the war. The two scientists, who had worked with Verschuer for many years, exposed the fact that he had corresponded with Mengele and knew exactly what was going on at Auschwitz. They charged that he had known about the layout, functions, and activities of the death camp, and was well aware of the source of the “specimens” he regularly received from Auschwitz: Jews put to death by Mengele. As an intimate of the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, Verschuer knew about the Final Solution, had advocated killing Jews as a eugenic measure, and, the doctors claimed, also knew precisely how the exterminations were being carried out, since they believed he himself had visited Auschwitz.

The scandal that resulted from the publication of the Neue Zeitung article aborted Verschuer’s plans to resume his career in Frankfurt.

More significantly, the ensuing brouhaha brought both Verschuer and Mengele to the attention of U.S. authorities at Nuremberg. As the international military tribunals were winding down, plans were being made to conduct additional trials. There was to be a special proceeding for individuals who had worked in the death camps.

At the Berlin office of the U.S. Counsel for War Crimes, a young investigator named Manfred Wolfson was assigned to look into the bizarre affair of Doctors Mengele and Verschuer. Despite the large backlog of cases, Wolfson began digging into the two men’s backgrounds.

He interviewed their former colleagues from Kaiser-Wilhelm and quickly grasped that Verschuer was as important a target as the more notorious Auschwitz doctor. As Wolfson probed Verschuer’s past, he discovered the professor had consistently used his position as a racial scientist to enhance his ties with the Nazis. He also noted the frequent antiSemitic, pro-Hitler references in articles

“Verschuer had published in the thirties and early forties.

In a 1946 report Wolfson carefully prepared for his superiors, he made it clear that most of the horrors for which Mengele was becoming famous had been perpetrated under the aegis of Verschuer. Wolfson wrote that even Mengele’s passion for experimenting on human eyes could be traced back to Verschuer. His old professor had been studying the development of pigmentation in eyes, and had a keen interest in different-colored or hetero chromatic eyes. To satisfy Verschuer’s needs, Mengele would gas inmates who possessed this unusual trait, then ship the eyes to him in Berlin.

These gruesome discoveries prompted Wolfson to recommend that “Verschuer be “interrogated and tried.” Only after exposing Mengele’s mentor did Wolfson pursue his former protege. He cited witnesses who described Mengele’s obsessive interest in pseudo medical tests on inmates. He noted the camp doctor’s fascination with the sterilization of women. And, of course, he described Mengele’s passion for young twins. “Twins and triplets, predominantly children, were kept in separate barracks so they could be experimented on properly,” one survivor had told Wolfson. This man recounted how his own twins had been placed in Mengele’s hands upon their arrival in Auschwitz in July 1944. He had asked Mengele whether he would ever see his children again. “Of course!” Mengele reportedly replied, cheerful as ever.

But as the grieving father moumfully observed,

“To date, I have not seen anyone, nor had any news.”

MENASHE LORINCzI: For one year after the war, we had no news about our mother. As refugees kept coming back, we would ask them if they had seen her: Was she here? Was she there? Finally, by talking to dozens of people, we were able to piece together what had become of her.

Mother had been part of a group of traveling women workers. She had spent some time working at Auschwitz, then had been transferred to several other labor camps around Poland.

At last, she ended up in Riga, a death camp in Latvia. What the Nazis couldn’t do at Auschwitz, they succeeded in doing in Riga: They simply killed everybody.

They put all the women and children on a ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea, and sank it. Everyone drowned.

My sister couldn’t accept the fact that Mother had died. Lea kept believing Mother had somehow survived. We both did.

We would think,

“Maybe she is still in Russia.”