Nazi Hunter (41 page)

Of all the hundreds of thousands of ‘cases’ that Mengele moved through Auschwitz-Birkenau, the one that moves Wiesenthal the most is the saga of Ruth Eliaz, who did not look pregnant
when she arrived there in December 1943. By May 1944, however, she had
read the writing on the barbed wire and heard from the camp grapevine that, in the wake of Allied
bombings, some healthier inmates would soon be sent to Germany to clear the rubble. More than four decades later, Ruth Eliaz recalled her struggle for survival with the immediacy of the present
tense:

‘I am in the seventh month. I am told that pregnant women are sent to the gas chamber. I am only twenty years old. I want to live. Friends succeed in placing my number on the Transport to
Germany list. We young stronger workers are brought to the women’s camp. Now there is further selection. This time, Doctor Mengele will personally make the selection. We are naked and must
march like geese past Doctor Mengele. A few young women have decided to place me in their midst and thus try to direct the attention of Mengele to themselves. We never get near to him. Is it
possible? Doctor Mengele doesn’t notice me. I may live? And the new life stirs within me.’

She is sent to Hamburg, where more perceptive authorities take one look at her shape and ship her back to Auschwitz. Perplexed by his oversight, Mengele singles her out for special care in his
hospital. When the baby, a girl, is born, Mengele binds her mother’s breasts with bandages to keep her from nursing. Ruth Eliaz remembers:

‘My child is crying from hunger. She wants to be fed. I chew a tiny piece of bread and place it in my child’s mouth. My breasts are full of milk. I am swollen from it up to my neck.
Every day, Doctor Mengele comes to enjoy himself by looking at this spectacle.’

Sympathetic nurses smuggle the baby tea, but it is not enough for the starving infant. On the eighth day, Mengele tells the mother: ‘Be ready tomorrow morning with your child. I am coming
to get you.’

On what she believes to be her last night on earth, Ruth Eliaz clings to her dying daughter until a woman inmate doctor comes to her and says, ‘I will help you. Here is a syringe with a
strong dose of morphine that will kill your child. It cannot survive. It is starved. Already it has hunger edema.’
⁴⁰

Ruth Eliaz tells the woman to go ahead, but she refuses: ‘I am a doctor. I cannot be the one to kill the baby. Look, it has not much more life, but you are twenty years old. You will
survive. You will
have children. Can you look so on this baby and choose to die with her? Please do it!’

After two hours of soul-searching, she kills her daughter.

The next morning, Mengele asks: ‘Where is your child?’

‘Died during the night,’ she responds listlessly.

‘I want to see the corpse,’ he says. Satisfied, he tells her: ‘You are lucky. You leave for the work camp this morning.’

In early 1985, to observe the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Mengele ‘trial in absentia’ was held in Jerusalem only a few weeks before
his remains surfaced in Brazil. The panel of ‘judges’ included historian Yehuda Bauer, Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, and Simon
Wiesenthal.

As Ruth Eliaz testified – telling how her daughter had died slowly, ‘very close tome. I can still hear her last breath, her last groan’ – Wiesenthal was struck
speechless. When he found words, he turned to the other ‘judges’ and said, ‘Please, no questions.’

Later, Ruth Eliaz came up and kissed him for his eloquent plea for silence, which, she felt, honoured her martyred child as no words could. ‘I have three children,’ she told him,
‘three beautiful children, and they thank you.’

Reflecting upon that encounter soon after his return to Vienna, Wiesenthal remarks: ‘You can imagine that I am taking with me not only what happened to me in the camps, but what
happened to all those witnesses. Some emotions are so mixed that, for me, this was my baby that she killed. You know, after so many years of listening to such stories, people think I should be made
from stone. I am not! When people are coming and telling me what happened to them, they start to cry and I cry with them. I feel it. I see it. For only a little while, I can forget. I tell myself
that this is 1985 and that was 1944. But then I remember.’

Quivering, then shuddering, Simon Wiesenthal begins to sob.

22

In the beginning, there was a swamp. Early in 1940, a former Düsseldorf businessman named Richard Glücks discovered it in the fork of the Vistula and Sola rivers in
the portion of Poland that Germany devoured after Hitler and Stalin invaded and dismembered their neighbour the previous September. For Glücks’ purposes, this was an ideal industrial
site. Not far from the city of Cracow, it had its own community, Oswiecim, with a small hotel and a population of 12,000 potential workers. It was accessible to Vienna, Warsaw, Berlin, and several
other key German cities. Most important of all, it bordered on an important railway junction. In his report back to his chief, Glücks described the swamp and its surroundings as a
‘suitable site’.

Richard Glücks was Nazi Germany’s new Chief Inspector of Concentration Camps. The superior to whom he reported was Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Germany. And the
‘suitable site’ for their largest Polish enterprise, Oswiecim, later became known by its German name, Auschwitz.

In the summer of 1941, Himmler summoned Captain Rudolf Höss,
⁴¹
the first commandant of Auschwitz – by then a year-old slave-labour
camp with factories belonging to Krupp, I. G. Farben,
Siemens, and other German manufacturers – and told him that the Führer had ordered a final solution to the
Jewish problem and the SS must enforce it. Höss returned to Poland from Berlin and, a few days later, Adolf Eichmann joined him.

Höss, a former guard at Dachau and chief warder at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, had a more criminal past than most SS designated exterminators. In his early days as a Nazi, he had
served five years of a ten-year prison sentence for the 1923 vengeance killing of a suspected informer named Walther Kadow in a forest where, after beating him within an inch of his life with clubs
and branches, his abductors cut his throat and finished him off with two revolver shots. Kadow had been an elementary schoolteacher, and one of his former pupils, Martin Bormann, was convicted as
an accomplice of Höss and sentenced to a year in jail. Bormann later became Hitler’s secretary and Höss’s protector.

Höss was hanged in the Auschwitz camp on 7 April 1947, from a gallows erected beside the comfortable house where he and his wife and five children resided from 1940 to 1943. At his trial
before a Polish military tribunal, he testified that Eichmann discussed with him various methods of extermination and the probable sequence of lands that would lose their Jews: first Russia,
Silesia, and Poland; then Germany (including Austria), Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, and Holland. (Hungarian Jews, still protected by a pro-Axis regime, were not yet on the timetable of the
Final Solution.) Höss and Eichmann agreed that shooting and hangings, executions and massacres, which prevailed in the East, were unsuitable for Auschwitz, which was expected to process
hundreds of thousands of Jews. Nor could they rely on carbon monoxide, used in the euthanasia programme and the extermination empire ‘the savage Christian’, Captain Wirth, was setting
up in the east of Poland. (Chelmno was already in operation, soon to be followed by Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.) Cost-effective analysis showed carbon monoxide expensive to produce in quantity
while killing too few at a time.

‘We did not come to any decision at that time,’ Höss testified. ‘Eichmann was going to find out about some gas which would be easy to come by and not require a big
apparatus.

‘I drove with Eichmann through the neighbourhood of Auschwitz to look for the most suitable place . . . We found a farm which suited the purpose . . . It was situated a little out of the
way, hidden
by a little forest, and was close to the railroad. The corpses were to be buried in a nearby field in wide deep trenches. We calculated that, with the right gas,
we could kill 800 Jews at one sitting. This calculation later proved to be correct.’

There were actually two farmhouses on the land Höss showed Eichmann. The Germans called them the White House and the Red House, but they belonged to the Harmatas and Wichajs, two peasant
families that had intermarried and shared the land. They were evicted and their homes transformed into bunkers for experiments with the new wonder gas, Zyklon B. Under SS supervision, prisoners
from Auschwitz, less than two miles away, dug trenches for the disposal of bodies. The first Jews were gassed in the White House in January 1942, shortly before the twentieth of the month, when the
Final Solution was formalized at Wannsee.

On 17 and 18 July 1942, Heinrich Himmler, who had visited Auschwitz the year before, came back to look at the new nearby transit-and-extermination camp which was sprouting on the two firms. He
liked what he saw and told Höss to expand and speed up the operation by combining gas chamber with crematorium in one all-purpose building. Four such death centres were built in the
mushrooming new camp, which had 175 hectares (432.5 acres) of land at Nazi disposal; a fifth was built back in Auschwitz, where the whole camp was only eight hectares (not quite twenty acres) in
area. There, the first Zyklon B gassings had been tried in the basement of barracks 11, ‘the Death Block’, on 3 September 1941. The gas chamber at Auschwitz would be used for prisoners
who rebelled or were punished, who were too sick to work, or were weeded out for other reasons. The other four, on the former farmland of the Red and White Houses, were mostly for new arrivals
deemed unfit or who were not needed to work themselves to death for the Third Reich.

At first, the new camp was called Auschwitz II, but then, thanks to a cluster of birch trees that had been its only distinguishing feature in the beginning, it was christened Birkenau. Together,
Auschwitz and Birkenau formed what the Polish Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Resistance and Martyrdom (in conjunction with UNESCO) calls ‘the world’s biggest battlefield,
where four million people died in World War II.’

On Tuesday, 17 January 1945, with Red Army artillery booming
in his ears, Dr Josef Mengele had packed two boxes of files on
his
big projects
– the experiments with twins, cripples, gypsies, and dwarfs – and loaded them into a waiting car which took him and several other Auschwitz doctors to the Gross Rosen concentration
camp, some 200 miles to the north-west in Silesia. There, they were expected to continue their ‘scientific’ work.

Thus, the first feasible encounter between political prisoner no. 127371, Diploma Engineer (in architecture) Simon Wiesenthal, and Nazi Party member no. 5574974, Josef Mengele, MD and PhD (in
anthropology), would have been in early 1945 at Gross Rosen. Along his 1200-mile death march from the Janowskà and Plaszow camps to Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Wiesenthal’s short stay
in Gross Rosen overlapped Mengele’s for a few days. Fortunately for history, however, Dr Mengele’s and Engineer Wiesenthal’s paths didn’t quite cross at that time.

At Gross Rosen, where bacteriological experiments on Soviet prisoners of war had been going on for three years, Mengele stayed until 18 February. As the Red Army neared Gross Rosen, he flew
westward through a landscape littered with corpses and clogged with refugees. Hooking up with a retreating German army unit, he exchanged his SS uniform for a
Wehrmacht
(regular army)
officer’s. The soldiers stayed in central Czechoslovakia for a couple of months until the Red Army drove them to the west.

At Saaz in the Sudetenland on 2 May, they encountered a motorized German field hospital – one of whose doctors, Hans Otto Kahler, had been a close friend of Mengele’s in the Third
Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt before the war. Even though Kahler had one Jewish great-grandparent, his twins research was so important to
Professor von Verschuer, the director, that Kahler survived Nazi Party efforts to remove him from the staff and eventually was commissioned a
Wehrmacht
officer.