“Monsters of Nazism” brings together the darkest characters of the Holocaust and countless gruesome little-known details of the “greatest and most horrendous crime in the history of humanity.”
By René Salomé
[”Monsters of Nazism” can be downloaded for free at Bajalibros by clicking here]
El Nazism, protagonist of one of the darkest chapters in the history of humanity, was plagued by macabre and sinister characters. Some better known, like their leader Adolf Hitler -of which, however, there are still largely ignored data, such as the incestuous relationship with his young niece or the execution of his own men to consolidate his power - and others not so much, such as the Nazi leader who wanted to be a priest and ended up hanging o Hitler's brother-in-law whom the Führer himself ordered to be executed.
But without a doubt, of all the characters who had fundamental roles in “the greatest and most horrendous crime in the history of humanity,” as he defined Winston Churchill al Holocaust, one of the darkest was Josef Mengele, the doctor known as the “Angel of Death” which, in the name of science, carried out the most sadistic experiments at Auschwitz.
"He injected different chemicals into the eyes of thousands of boys because I wanted them to change color and take on Aryan blue (…) He used thousands of human beings as guinea pigs, whom he discarded by sending them to the gas chambers (…) He amputated the limbs of hundreds of prisoners to try grafts that ended in gangrene and death (…) He injected phenols, chloroform, insecticides, gasoline into the veins of his guinea rabbits, just to find out what would happen,” writes the Argentine journalist Alberto Amato en Monsters of Nazism.
In this book, edited by Leamos and which can be downloaded for free at Bajalibros, there is a meticulous record of “the darkest and most sinister characters” of Nazism, as well as countless lurid little-known details, from the origins of the National Socialist German Workers Party to the last hours in Hitler's bunker, going through the German soldiers who fled to South America and they had the support of some political figures of the time.
“Monsters of Nazism” (fragment)
"Monsters of Nazism", edited by Leamos, can be downloaded for free at Bajalibros.
Atrocious “experiments”: the doctor who injected chemicals into children's eyes and gasoline into adults' veins (by Alberto Amato)
He injected different chemicals into the eyes of thousands of boys because he wanted them to change color and take on Aryan blue, the color of perfection of the race that was going to dominate the world. He used thousands of human beings as guinea pigs, whom he discarded by sending them to the gas chambers of that industrial factory of death that was Auschwitz. He amputated the limbs of hundreds of prisoners to attempt grafts that ended in gangrene and death. He submerged thousands of Jewish, Gypsy, and Soviet captives in icy waters to test human resistance to the cold, and thus provide some therapy to the German pilots who were shot down in the waters of the North Sea. He injured healthy bodies and covered the wounds with glass, dirty rags, excrement, rotten earth and water to recreate the conditions of the front and study the evolution of these wounds, with the idea of relieving wounded German soldiers. He injected phenols, chloroform, insecticides, gasoline into the veins of his guinea rabbits, just to find out what would happen.
The horror of war, almost as a defense, always brought scientific and medical advances. But Josef Mengele was the human horror that took advantage of war. A monster honored as a doctor before the war and unleashed as a criminal in the Nazi camps. Everything at the service of Tercer Reich. John Steinbeck, in his unforgettable East of Paradise, defines types like Mengele when describing one of the characters in his novel. He says that just as there are human beings who are born physically crippled, a condition that is easily detectable, there are other human beings who are born “mentally crippled,” conditioned by that injury, by that hidden, arcane, indecipherable “mental amputation.”
Mengele He was a fan of genetics and had an obsession with twins.. When the trains of deported Jews arrived at Auschwitz, and on the wide platforms of the camp, called “The Courtyard of the Jews”, those who were going to live and those who were going to be gassed immediately were selected, generally three quarters of The prisoners made up of women, pregnant women, elderly people and children, Mengele walked around with a whistle on his lips, perhaps a tune from distant Germany, and asked: “Twins, twins…”. He was especially interested in identical twins and in prisoners with heterochromia, different colored eyes. His research on the twins was intended to demonstrate the supremacy of genetic inheritance over the environment, thereby reinforcing the Nazi premise that proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan race and to generate a greater number of soldiers in the future for Hitler's Reich.
It ended with a typhus epidemic in the camp in a drastic way: he sent sixteen hundred prisoners of the gypsy ethnic group, men, women and boys, to the gas chambers, to then disinfect the barracks in which they were housed. He did the same during epidemics of scarlet fever and other contagious diseases. In all cases, the infected were sent to the gas chambers. Typhus inoculation also included Mengele's experiments with twins: he injected the bacteria, transmitted by fleas, into one of the twins and then performed blood transfusions from one to the other. Many of his victims died in the tests. If, however, one of the two twins died, Mengele killed the other brother to carry out post-mortem comparative studies. In all cases the bodies were dissected. One of the assistants in that horror, Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner, related that one night Mengele personally killed fourteen twins with a direct injection of chloroform into the heart..
He also carried out mass spay and neuter experiments in men and women. His biographer, Gerald Astorstated in Mengele, the last Nazi, that the doctor of Auschwitz threw live children into the fire of the crematoriums neighboring the gas chambers. In the trial that the Allied courts followed in absentia, they never arrested him, the Jewish doctor imprisoned in Auschwitz, Vexler Jancu He described: “I saw a wooden table. On it were samples of eyes. They were pale yellow, to light blue, green and violet. The eyes were pricked like butterflies. I thought I had died and that I was already in hell".
After World War II, Josef Mengele fled to South America and lived comfortably in Argentina and Brazil, where he died.
He said something similar Eli Rosembaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice: “We were completely overwhelmed by its monstrosity. The most important thing is to see that his mind operated like that of a scientist who concentrated on his studies and experimented while leaving his feelings aside. I don't think Mengele had any remorse for what he did.. I think that in his scientist's mind, he justified everything he did.” To Rosembaum's relief, Mengele's only son, Rolf, said that his father had never expressed any remorse for his wartime activities.
Mengele was never alone. In “Block 10” of Auschwitz, the feared “medical ward,” that award-winning medical doctor did whatever he wanted with thousands of human beings along with thirty other professionals, all under the command of the SS medical captain. Edward Wirths. Mengele was only the most famous monster, the most sadistic too, but not the only one. In that “medical pavilion” the first vaccines against malaria and typhus, developed by the then main German laboratories, were tested on humans.
If today the useless memory of Mengele returns from horror, it is because it is forty-three years since his death, a gesture of God, drowned on a beach in Brazil after a stroke collapsed him in the waters, almost a month before. turning sixty-eight years old. He died under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard, without ever having been tried for his crimes. He was a skillful eternal fugitive, protected, perhaps pampered, by the authorities of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil., where he lived since he fled the Europe that was in his footsteps.
Josef Mengele was born in Günzburg, Bavaria, on March 16, 1911. He began studying medicine and philosophy at the University of Munich in 1930, at the height of Nazism. At the age of twenty-four, he was a doctor in anthropology from that University and, in January 1937 he graduated from the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, as assistant to his mentor and protector, Otmar von Verschuer, who was already investigating the genetics of twins. That same year he joined the Nazi party and, the following year, the SS. On July 28, 1939 he married Irene Schoenbein, his son Rolf would be born in 1944. In June 1940, in the middle of the war, he volunteered in the SS medical service, assigned to Ukraine in 1941 where he won two Iron Crosses, second and first class, and was seriously wounded near the Don River in the summer of '42. Unable to serve at the front. He returned to Berlin to work in the Office of Race and Resettlement and, together with Von Verschuer and at the prestigious Kaiser Wilheim Institute, in the department of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics.
At the beginning of 1945, with the Russians on their heels and on their way to Berlin, Mengele and other doctors from Auschwitz were assigned to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where he took two boxes with specimens and the medical records of his research. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on January 27, and Mengele and his men fled Gross-Rosen on February 18. Then began the long and successful escape from mental disability that Steinbeck did not even imagine. He ended up a prisoner of the Americans who registered him under his real name. Who knew Mengele then? His name was not on the list of wanted SS men and he did not even have the traditional, and ritual, armpit tattoo with his identification number and blood group. He was released at the end of July and managed to obtain a false document in the name of Fritz Ullman, which later changed to Fritz Hollman.
He spent four years in Germany, until the Nuremberg trials and its aftermath of judicial processes placed him in the list of most wanted war criminals. He left Germany on April 17, 1949 with a goal set as a paradise for escaped Nazis: Argentina. His wife refused to follow him. They divorced in 1954. Mengele's path to Buenos Aires was similar to that of Eichmann: a new identity, with the consent of the religious hierarchy of northern Italy, thanks to the good offices of the bishop Alois Hudal, very close to the then secretary of the Pope Pius XII, cardinal John Montini who, over the years, would be His Holiness Paul VI. With his new, false but legal identity, Mengele obtained a “Carta d'Identitá” from Italy, number 114, with the name Helmut Gregor. Eichmann got his with number 131 as Riccardo Klement. Four books are essential to follow that route through time: The real Odessa y Perón and the Germans, Uki Goñi, the historian and journalist who best unraveled the Nazis' escape to Argentina, Eichmann before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth, and Escape route, Philippe Sands.
Mengele embarked to Buenos Aires on May 25, 1949 on the English ship “North King”. He arrived on June 22, stayed in a boarding house on Paraguay Street, in Palermo, until He was sheltered by the active Argentine Nazi community, who had planted a major spy network protected in some way by the government of Juan Perón. Later she lived in Florida, in the house of Gerhard Malbranc, manager of the German Transatlantic Bank and “one of the front men of the Nazi money sent to the country during the war,” as she revealed. Jorge Camarasa, another researcher who died in 2015, in his book The Angel of Death in South America.
Mengele felt so safe in Buenos Aires that he began to use his real name, as one of his friends, the businessman, revealed. Robert Mertig, owner of the Orbis company. In 1956, once Perón had been overthrown, the Civil Court of First Instance number 9 ruled that Helmut Gregor and Josef Mengele were the same person, so the Federal Police issued him identification number 3.940.484. Mengele dedicated himself to commerce, made toys, founded a company, Laboratorios Wander and was a majority partner in the company Fadrofarm (Pharmaceutical Drug Factory). He was also the representative in South America of the agricultural machinery company that had belonged to his father. As a commercial agent he traveled several times to Paraguay and Brazil, while taking the opportunity to establish safe contacts and an eventual, yet another, escape route.
A very curious piece of information puts it in contact with Perón. The story was told to Uki Goñi by the journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, which reported in depth on Perón in his exile in Spain, in 1970. Goñi says that Tomás Eloy Martínez revealed to him that Perón had told him that, in the 50s, he visited the Quinta de Olivos (which was then a weekend residence of the presidents, the official residence was on Austria Street, where the National Library stands today) a German “specialist in genetics”, who used to tell him about his supposed and strange scientific experiments.
That man had gone to say goodbye to Perón because a Paraguayan rancher was going to pay him a fortune to improve his livestock. “He showed me,” said Perón, “the photos of a stable that he had there near Tigre, where all the cows gave birth to twins", says Goñi in The real Odessa. Tomás Eloy, who smelled news in the distance, wanted to know who that mysterious German was. And Perón: “Who knows…? He was one of those well-established, cultured Bavarians, proud of his land. Wait, if I'm not mistaken, his name was Gregor. “That's right, Dr. Gregor.”