The hunt for Auschwitz ‘doctor’ Josef Mengele
World
The Terrible”; the OSI also kicked out a fascist Romanian cleric, Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who in 1941 incited a pogrom against Jews in Bucharest in which over 100 died.
I confronted — and filmed — both Demjanjuk and Trifa in the US. I also spent several weeks in Santiago, Chile, looking for Walter Rauff, the SS colonel who pioneered the use of mobile gas vans whose engine exhaust was diverted into an hermetically sealed rear compartment killing between 100200,000 Jews. I eventually found Rauff walking his dog. “You’re a lucky man to still be enjoying your freedom,” I said to him, sticking a camera in his face. “Ja” he replied, smiling, totally unphased by the ambush. Six months later he was dead.
Now, en route to Gunzburg, I was hoping that someone in the wider Mengele family might talk to me
Unspeakable cruelty: Mengele about their fugitive relative.
To the world, Mengele had become the surviving symbol of Hitler’s “Final Solution” and the incarnation of its monstrosity. To his family he’d been misunderstood. I wanted to ask them why they thought this.
My drive to Gunzburg ended in tears — quite literally. Answering the door of the Mengele family home was a middle-aged woman who began to sob right there on the doorstep when I gently asked her if she might sit down with me.
It was hopeless, of course, and as I left, I noticed a man leaning on the adjoining fence, staring at me hard. I recognised him as the man who’d been identified in the press as the suspected go-between for the Mengele family and Josef some 6,000 miles away.
His name was Hans Sedlmeier, a childhood friend of Josef and now a Mengele company executive.
What I didn’t know then but learned in 1985, when researching a biography of Mengele, was that in October 1977, Sedlmeier had arranged for Mengele’s only son Rolf to secretly visit his father in his Brazilian bolthole. The correspondence between Mengele, his son and Sedlmeier in planning the trip — and its outcome — was disclosed by Rolf to me and my co-author, Gerald Posner.
Rolf was then a 33-year-old solicitor who’d become the black sheep of the formidable Mengele dynasty. A product of 1960s anti-establishment attitudes, the wealth and power of his cousins, aunts and uncles, whose engineering factory was Gunzburg’s largest employer, never much appealed to
Child survivors photographed on the day of the liberation of Auschwitz
Rolf. In fact, he regarded them as bourgeoise and rather petty; he thought they enjoyed local patronage yet took their power for granted.
Weary of trying to resolve the conflict between the horrific allegations against his own flesh and blood and his family’s doubts about the truth of them, Rolf decided to settle the matter for himself by travelling to Brazil to confront his father in person.
Rolf had met his father only once previously, when he was 12, on a fleeting visit from South America to the Swiss Alps. He was introduced to him not as his father but as his long-lost uncle “Uncle Fritz” and only learned of “Uncle Fritz’s” real identity when he was 16.
The questions soon followed and grew only louder in his head with every story published about his father. By the 1970s, the West German Prosecutor had gathered witness statements culminating in 78 separate indictments against Josef Mengele.
One can only wonder at the anguish this must have caused Rolf because the sheer volume of this official testimony extended well beyond the crime with which Mengele is typically associated: his infamous “selektions” at the Auschwitz railhead where trains carrying thousands of Jews crammed into cattle trucks arrived up to five times a day, including at night.
Of all Auschwitz’s cadre of SS doctors, the one most often witnessed