Nazi Hunter (42 page)

That night, Mengele asked Kahler if he could stay with the field hospital, which specialized in internal medicine. Kahler put in a word with the commanding officer and Mengele was invited to
join the staff. Soon after, he had an affair with a German nurse, to whom he entrusted his research files, for nurses were seldom imprisoned or searched by the Allied armies.

He knew his notes were incriminating, even though he didn’t
yet know how incriminated he was. Ever since Auschwitz had been liberated on 27 January, his name had
recurred in survivors’ testimony to American, British, French, Russian, Polish, Yugoslav, and Czechoslovak authorities. Starting in April, his name had appeared high on the lists of major war
criminals compiled by the US Office of Special Investigations, the fledgling United Nations’ War Crimes Commission, and the Allied High Command in Paris as wanted for ‘mass murder and
other crimes’. But neither Mengele nor his colleagues had access to such publications, though, on 3 May, the day after he joined the field hospital, his wife Irene heard an Allied broadcast
listing the charges against him.

While Kahler knew Mengele was an SS doctor wearing a
Wehrmacht
uniform, he never told anyone. A senior physician in the unit, Colonel Fritz Ulmann, suspected the truth because every day
at roll-call, Mengele gave a different name. Though the war in Europe ended on 8 May with Germany’s unconditional surrender, Ulmann’s and Kahler’s and Mengele’s field
hospital was trapped for six weeks in a twenty-mile no man’s land in a forest of Saxony (now in eastern Germany) between the American and Russian lines, while the Allied commands worked out
who had jurisdiction. Finally, in mid-June, their unit simply formed up as a medical convoy and passed through the American lines, making their way through several road-blocks into northern
Bavaria.

Safe from the Russians, they were apprehended by the US Army in the town of Weiden when their gas supply ran out. They were interned there, but, as anticipated, Mengele’s nurse girlfriend
was released in a few hours and she headed home to Gera, in the Russian zone, with his research files intact. The officers would have to linger longer while their records were checked.
⁴²
When Mengele started to give his name as Memling, this was too much for Kahler, an art-lover, who told his colleague this was dishonourable. So Mengele gave
his real name.

Even though he was in American custody for eight weeks, nobody ever checked his name against the lists of wanted criminals. The
early days of occupation were so chaotic
that it is quite possible none of the lists filtered down to the camps he was in. One other detail literally saved his skin: back in 1938, when he’d joined the SS, his vanity had made him
evade the tattooing of his blood group on arm or chest. Flaunting his expertise as a physician, he’d persuaded the SS that any competent surgeon would cross-match blood types before giving
transfusions rather than rely on tattoos. In 1945, the SS tattoo was the first clue American investigators looked for and a soldier without one was considered relatively clean.

Nonetheless, throughout his stay in American hands, Mengele worried that he might be unmasked. He fell into what Dr Kahler diagnosed as clinical depression and asked Dr Ulmann, who was a
neurologist, to treat him. Ulmann voiced his suspicions to Mengele, who broke down and confided just a little of what he had done at Auschwitz. Closing ranks the way the medical profession so often
does, Ulmann not only treated Mengele’s anxiety, but assuaged it by offering to obtain a second identification for him to use once he was released or if he escaped. Ulmann, whose own release
was imminent, was working at camp headquarters, where he was able to obtain an extra set of his own separation papers. Once outside, Mengele was welcome to become Fritz Ulmann.

Believing he was ‘clean’, the Americans released Mengele at the end of July, and a truck deposited him in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt on the Danube. He decided to head for nearby
Donauwörth, where an old school chum, Albert Miller, was a veterinarian. Borrowing a bike from a friendly farmer, he pedalled to Dr Miller’s door and rang the bell.

‘Good day, Dr Mengele,’ was how Mrs Miller greeted her uniformed caller, who was taken aback to be recognized so readily. She invited him in and, when her husband came home, prepared
dinner, during which Mengele told his hosts: ‘All the things you will be hearing about me are lies. Don’t believe a word of them. I have done nothing wrong.’

Mengele asked the Millers to let his family know he was alive, safe, and free. They invited him to stay the night, but he decided against it when American troops arrived after dinner to arrest
Dr Miller for questioning about his wartime Nazi activities. Mengele hid in a back room and, later that night, set out for East Germany to retrieve his precious files.

During Mengele’s perilous three-week journey through Russian lines, Dr Miller (who was quickly released) and his wife passed the news of his visit on to the Mengele
family in Günzburg. The doctor’s wife, Irene, who had moved to a cottage in nearby Autenried after their son Rolf was born in 1944, was relieved to hear she wasn’t a widow. On 11
June 1945, three American military policemen had driven up, looking for her husband. Mrs Mengele, who hadn’t heard from him all year, had told them with some certitude that he was
‘probably dead’.

Bearing Fritz Ulmann’s good-conduct certificate from the Americans, Mengele made his way back to Bavaria and knocked on the door of a pharmacist in Munich who had served with him in combat
on the eastern front in 1942. The druggist and his wife were friends of the chief pharmacist at Auschwitz, who had told them what went on there and the role Mengele played. They welcomed him to
their apartment, where he stayed four weeks and insisted: ‘I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz and I did my best to help. One could not do everything.
There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent. . .’

‘You’re crazy!’ the pharmacist told him. ‘It’s impossible for you to get a fair trial. If you turn yourself in, you’ll either be shot on the spot or else
you’ll be tried and then hanged. Forget this nonsense about proving your innocence. We must find a place to hide you.’

German medicine closed ranks around its blackest sheep once again. The pharmacist happened to know the real Dr Fritz Ulmann’s brother-in-law and his wife, both doctors too. They offered to
look for work for the fake Fritz Ulmann on isolated farms in eastern Bavaria, whose young men had been so decimated in the war that few, if any, questions were asked of hired hands. Out of
gratitude, Mengele volunteered to alter a few letters which changed the name on his document from
U
lmann to
Hol
lmann.

With Mengele, the Ulmann kin drove around Mangolding, an Alpine farm area near the Austrian border. After being turned down twice by farmers, they were welcomed by the Georg Fischer family, who
farmed twenty acres of potatoes and wheat, milked a dozen cows, and needed an extra hand. Mengele was introduced as ‘Fritz Hollmann’, a refugee from Görlitz in East Germany on the
Polish border. The Fischers were sitting down to eat and invited their
visitors to join them. Georg’s younger brother Alois remembers that Hollmann ‘ate as though
he didn’t get much to eat in the war. He didn’t say a word – he just ate an enormous amount of food. My brother told him: “If you work as much as you eat, then you’re
my man. We will try you.”’

Fritz Hollmann, alias Dr Josef Mengele, signed on as a farmhand on Tuesday, 30 October 1945, for ten marks a week.

In a 1987 visit to the scene of Mengele’s crimes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found only a handful of traces of his deathly work: a detailed packing list (signed by him)
which had accompanied the head of a twelve-year-old gypsy boy that was shipped on 29 June 1944 to a research institute in Germany for further analysis; a photo of four gypsies he’d castrated;
several pages of his handwritten ‘anthropological measurements’, and a letter of recommendation from the SS garrison commander at Auschwitz to the Chief Doctor’s Office. Dated 19
August 1944, it notes that:

The report concluded by recommending Mengele for promotion, but it was too late in the war for it to be acted upon.

In the Auschwitz archive, I listened to a tape-recording of the disembodied electronic voice of a twin named Emil Reichenberger telling of two years of injections and experiments by Mengele that
cost him his larynx, among other parts. ‘But I am the lucky one,’ the voice concluded. ‘My brother died in the same experiments.’

There are only two pictures of Mengele in the archive: SS identification portraits, neither of them from Auschwitz. For all his
vanity, he rarely let anyone photograph him
because he knew he would one day be held responsible for his crimes against the human race.

23

Upon learning in late July 1945 that her husband was alive, Dr Josef Mengele’s ‘widow’, Irene, kept the good news to herself. In 1946, she started taking the
train to Rosenheim on weekends whenever farmhand ‘Fritz Hollmann’ could take time off from the Fischer family to visit his ‘girlfriend’ in Rosenheim. After making sure she
wasn’t followed, Irene would walk up the road to Mangolding, encounter ‘Fritz’, and spend the night with him at an inn on a Bavarian lake called the Sinnsee. Back home in
Autenreid and in her husband’s family stronghold, Günzburg, she continued the deception by telling friends she was sure she would never see her husband alive and even wearing black
widow’s weeds to church and asking the priest to pray for the repose of her late husband’s soul.

Her father-in-law, Karl Mengele Snr, did his bit by twice telling denazification investigators his son was missing in action and, the third time, that he was dead. Apparently, both he and Irene
convinced the authorities, for, when Dr Giselle Perl, his Hungarian Jewish prisoner gynaecologist at Auschwitz, denounced Mengele to the Americans in 1947, she elicited this reply from Brigadier
General Telford Taylor, chief US counsel to the Nuremberg war crimes trials, who informed Washington a year later: ‘We wish to advise that our records show Dr Mengerle [sic] is dead as of
October 1946.’

Back on the Fischer farm in Bavaria, ‘Fritz Hollmann’ was still remembered in 1985 as ‘a very obliging farmhand who never started a fight and was always in a
good mood’, as Maria Fischer put it to Dr Günther Deschner, a Munich historian on the trail of the late
Dr Josef Mengele. Her brother-in-law Alois told Deschner
that Mengele ‘was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but always very controlled and disciplined . . . Only once was there a small dispute. He was supposed to work as a labourer, but he gave me
an order that I should take the hay down from the threshing fork. I told him he should do it himself. Then he got very angry, only for a short moment, but very, very angry. He looked at me with
such fury I actually thought he would attack me. But then he completely controlled himself and such a thing never happened again’ during ‘Hollmann’s’ thirty-four months in
the Fischers’ employ from October 1945 to August 1948.

Toward the end of his days as a farmhand in Bavaria, the ‘great selector’ of Auschwitz tried to teach the Fischer family to perform ‘scientific selection’ of their crop
in order to breed medium-sized potatoes. Even though the Fischers didn’t take Mengele’s theories seriously, he found that ‘in this way, my mind was kept active.’