Israel Visions of Hell

The horrific stories kept pouring out, each more grisly than the last. One survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland described how he had had one of his testicles removed on order of Nazi Medical Researcher Josef Mengele. Another recalled that the doctor had taken two toddler twins and sewed them together as Siamese twins. In one Auschwitz lab, said Vera Kriegel, a wall was covered with human eyes, extracted by Mengele and “pinned up like butterflies.” Said Kriegel: “I thought I was dead and was already living in hell.”

Twenty-nine Auschwitz survivors appeared last week in Jerusalem before a six-member panel to give evidence against Mengele. Though the tribunal had no judicial status, it recorded the proceedings on film, which could be used if Mengele, the most wanted Nazi still at large, is ever brought to trial. Known as the “Angel of Death,” he is held responsible for the deaths of at least 400,000 victims; his particular brand of infamy involved using Auschwitz inmates as human guinea pigs for his genetics research. In Mengele’s presence, wrote a former assistant, “the SS themselves trembled.”

Born to a well-to-do family, Mengele received degrees in medicine and anthropology before arriving in 1943 to work as an SS doctor at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps. As cattle cars of Jewish captives arrived, he committed the “unfit” to the gas chambers and chose others for his experiments. He injected serum into children’s eyes in an effort to change their color and killed victims with drugs in order to perform autopsies on them. His special interest, however, was in twins and dwarfs. When Mengele found seven dwarfs among her Hungarian theater family, Elizabeth Moskovitch recalled from a wheelchair last week, he exclaimed delightedly, “Now I have 20 years’ worth of material to study.” The final witness was Ruth Eliaz. After she bore a child, she reported, Mengele strapped her breasts with tape and settled down to see how long it took an unfed infant to die. When the emaciated child was reduced to a whimper, Eliaz was given a syringe and some morphine by a female Jewish doctor. Then, she recalled, choking back tears, “I murdered my own child.”

At the end of last week’s three-day hearings, the panel exhorted every government and international body to find and bring to trial the 73-year-old doctor. U.S. Attorney General William French Smith promised a U.S. Justice Department investigation into Mengele’s whereabouts and allegations of U.S. complicity in his escape. Mengele, last known to be living in Paraguay, has slipped through the fingers of his pursuers on at least four occasions.