Josef Mengele – the Creation of a Myth
 
 
Published: 2017-04-22
 
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May I ask my dear reader whether he or she recognizes any of the following names:

 

Fritz Klein, Heinz Thilo, Bruno Kitt, Erwin von Helmersen, Werner Rohde, Hellmuth Vetter,

Horst Schumann, Carl Clauberg, Hans Wilhelm König, Franz Lucas, Alfred Trzebinski,

Oskar Dienstbach, Siegfried Schwela, Franz von Bodmann, Kurt Uhlenbroock,

Eduard Wirths, Hans Münch, Johann Paul Kremer, Horst Fischer, Friedrich Entress?

Unless you’re an expert in the field, you probably have no clue who these people are.

The only name I would recognize, if I were to turn off my expert knowledge, is Clauberg,

and that only because that was the name of my high-school art teacher (first name unknown).

 

All the men listed above were at some point or other SS physicians at the infamous Auschwitz Camp.[1]

I omitted one name from the list, and that for a good reason, because that name would give it all away:

Josef Mengele.


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SS officers at Auschwitz. From left to right: Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, Josef Kramer, Rudolf Höss

(From the so-called Höcker Album, USHMM Archive)

 

Why is it that we all recognize this one name, but have no idea about all the others? And with

all, I am not just referring to any of us. This all also includes Auschwitz survivors. If we read

or listen to the many testimonies of the thousands of Auschwitz survivors, there seems to

have been only one evil person in that entire huge camp: Josef Mengele. Almost every

survivor mentions him as an evil SS doctor sending people either to the gas chambers or

subjecting them to some cruel, senseless, torturous experiments. Just as Auschwitz has

become the symbol for the Holocaust in general, so does Mengele symbolize the

evil of Auschwitz. They are synonymous.

 

Why is that so?

 

Mengele Hysteria

 

Most of the above-listed individuals were arrested after the war at some point and either

committed suicide while incarcerated or were sentenced to death or to extended prison terms.

Mengele escaped. He was never caught. In 1985, years after his death in 1979 in his

South-American exile, however, his former whereabouts were revealed, his remains

eventually exhumed and identified.[2]

 

Mengele wasn’t the only Auschwitz physician who managed to escape, though. Hans Wilhelm König

was even better than Mengele. König disappeared without leaving a trace.

But no one has ever heard that name, or have you?

 

We get an idea what the basis of the “Mengele Myth” is if we listen to one of the

most-determined Nazi hunters of the world, the Israeli Efraim Zuroff. While hunting

for Josef Mengele during the 1980s, he stumbled upon the remarkable fact that survivors

immediately after the war did not describe Mengele as the same evil criminal as he was

portrayed in the 1980s or even later. Sifting through newsletters published right after

the war by and for “survivors,” he came across the (false) news that Mengele had been

arrested in early 1947. On that occasion, survivor newsletters asked their readers for

incriminating testimonies against Mengele, and such testimonies were then even published.

But, as Zuroff summarizes:[3]

 

“The content of these articles proved quite surprising because they clearly indicated

that the Mengele of 1985, who had become a symbol of evil and the personification

of the perversion of science, did not enjoy the same notoriety in 1947. […Zuroff noted]

that Mengele was not considered a very high-ranking criminal [in 1947], nor was his

supposed arrest regarded as an event of exceptional significance. […] This notice

was, in effect, the first indication that the status of the infamous ‘Angel of Death’ had

grown by leaps and bounds over the years. […Mengele was], in a certain sense,

not the same person who was simultaneously hunted for in South America.”

 

Of course, memories are more accurate a short time after an alleged event than decades later,

so the image survivors had of Mengele in 1947 was most certainly more accurate as well.

 

In 1986, shortly after the hunt for Mengele had been over, the Czech-German historian

Zdenek Zofka wrote these memorable lines about how Mengele had become the center of

attention of the Holocaust Industry:[4]

 

“After the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and after the ‘Mengele Tribunal’

had been staged on occasion of that anniversary in Jerusalem, the search for Mengele

was intensified drastically. The reward leading to his capture was increased by the

government of the German state of Hesse from 40,000 to one million deutschmarks,

and the reward finally reached the staggering height of ten million deutschmarks due

to private donations. Along with the intensified search for Mengele, the media’s

interest in the case escalated as well. The ‘Angel of Death of Auschwitz’ offered perfect

opportunities for an incessant flood of sensational news, and increasingly cruel and

shocking crimes committed by Mengele were revealed with reference to witnesses.

The mass murderer Mengele turned into the evil incarnate as such, the outright

superhuman demon, as Robert Lifton writes.”

 

Zofka’s aim with his paper was an attempt to “correct the image of Josef Mengele, which

has been distorted and exorbitantly exaggerated by the sensational media.” He admits that,

when trying to assess the crimes allegedly committed by Mengele, there is basically no

documentary evidence to rely on, and that relying on witness accounts in such an

atmosphere of hysteria is problematic, to say the least. He continuous by stating:

 

“All too often, it is impossible to be sure that their [the witnesses’] recollections really refer

to Mengele at all. It is all too often possible to show that Mengele has been confused with

other SS physicians. Almost all the inmates state that they were selected by Mengele on

the ramp [to be sent to the gas chamber]. But camp physicians performed the selections

in shifts; Mengele performed no more selections than any of the others.” (ibid., p. 246)

 

This underscores the point I made earlier.

 

When assessing Mengele’s purported crimes, we have to distinguish three different sets:

  1. Selecting inmates for the gas chambers.
  2. Experiments with twins.
  3. Random medical experiments.

Let’s discuss all three of them here briefly, with reference to further reading for those who

want to learn more. Let’s start with the last one first, because it can be dealt with rather swiftly.

 

 

Random Medical Experiments

 

There is “eyewitness” testimony galore about utterly senseless, cruel experiments

allegedly performed by Mengele, like changing eye colors by injecting dye into an eye,

transplanting limbs and organs to random places in the body, and other nonsense. While

studying hundreds of “survivor” testimonies, I’ve come across a good share of these

insults to the intellect, so insulting, indeed, that I will not waste my time listing them here.

Google the net, and you’ll stumble across these Halloweenish horror stories all over the

place. People evidently like to gawk at guts and gore, so the survivors, protected from

scrutiny by their aura of sainthood, cater to that need. Interestingly, the alleged victims of

these experiments, quite frequently the very witnesses telling these tales, show no signs

whatsoever of these cruel procedures. And it goes without saying that there is not the slightest

proof for any of it: no documents, no autopsies, no medical examination on survivors proving it. Nothing.

It’s all a pack of lies, sweet and simple.

 

Twins

The alleged cruel experiments Mengele is said to have performed with twins deported to

Auschwitz were so lethal that most of the twins he had enrolled in his research not only

survived the war, but were even able to form an association in 1984, toward the peak of

the Mengele hysteria, which was meant to lobby for their and their descendants’ interests:

Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors (CANDLES). Read and

rethink the association’s name: How can deadly lab experiments have any survivors?

 

In fact, as Italian historian Carlo Mattogno has shown in his paper on Mengele’s twin research,

[5] there are three facts which clearly prove that Mengele did not commit any crimes on those twins:

 

  1. All the surviving paperwork clearly shows that his research was limited to anthropological
  2. and behavioral studies, but did not include any surgical or other intrusive procedures.
  3. All the twins enlisted for his research were enrolled in that program for months on end, with none of them ever dying.
  4. Most of those involved – the twins as well as Mengele’s inmate assistants – survived Auschwitz and the war.

Separately, think of that: Children are not supposed to have gotten beyond the camp’s

railway ramp. Since they were obviously unfit for labor, the Holocaust orthodoxy has it that

they were sent to the gas chamber straight away, but that’s evidently not

what happened, not just with Mengele’s twin children, but in general.

 

For the long list of twins and children at Auschwitz who survived the camp, see Mattogno’s paper.

 

Gas-Chamber Selections

 

Which brings me to the final point: The selections at the railway ramps near the Auschwitz Camp

and (later) inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp. There can be no doubt that these selections

took place. They happened at Auschwitz, and they happened at other German wartime

camps as well. They were usually performed by physicians, and it is safe to say that Mengele,

as one of the many Auschwitz physicians, was ordered to do them as well.

 

But what were they about? Did those in charge, Mengele among them,

decide who got to live and who was to die in the gas?

 

To answer this question comprehensively would require the analysis of tens of thousands

of documents that survived the war. I’m not going to do this here, most importantly because

there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Others have done that already, and I’ll point the

reader to them.

 

The issue boils down to two questions:

 

  1. Are there any documents indicating that homicidal gas chambers existed at Auschwitz?
  2. What do the documents reveal about the purpose of selection(s) made?

Regarding a., let me quote from an article published in late 2016 in the conservative mainstream

periodical Taki’s Magazine. It was written by Jewish activist David Cole, who in the 1990s

was dabbling for a while in Auschwitz research. In this Taki article, Cole, who believes in all

other aspects of the orthodox Holocaust narrative, explains why he has problems with Auschwitz:[6]

 

David Cole

 

“Ah, Auschwitz. Yes, here’s where we still have a problem. […] there are genuine

problems with what is commonly claimed to be part 3 [of the Holocaust]—that in

1943 Auschwitz-Birkenau was ‘renovated’ to become an ultra-super be-all end-all

extermination facility. To me, the evidence just isn’t there, and the evidence that does

exist calls that claim into question. […Orthodox historians] backed themselves into a

corner by putting Auschwitz, with its phony, postwar tourist-attraction ‘gas chamber’

and its complete lack of documentary evidence supporting a killing program, front and

center as the heart of the Holocaust. They’re in so deep at this point that they can’t back off.

 

It’s surprisingly easy to get the leading lights of anti-denial to admit as much one-on-one.

Rick Eaton has been the senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for thirty years.

He’s as major a player in the fight against Holocaust denial as anyone on earth. Two

years ago, I corresponded with him (under a pseudonym, of course… he’d never speak

directly with the likes of me!) regarding the Auschwitz problem. I explained my thesis

to him, that Auschwitz, having various ‘issues’ that call the credibility of extermination

claims into question, should not be used to represent the Holocaust. He agreed […].

 

Keep in mind that even though I was using a pseudonym, I was not falsely claiming to

be anyone of note. In other words, Eaton made that admission to a complete nobody,

a total stranger. One gets the feeling that many of these experts are secretly longing

for the day when they can be open about the ‘Auschwitz problem’ and move past it […].”

 

Fact is that challenging the orthodox Auschwitz – and Mengele – narrative is a crime in

many countries, and in those countries where it is not, doing so will still turn challengers

into social pariahs. Hence, you won’t hear a word from any mainstream scholar about

the fact that “the evidence just isn’t there.” When scientists have to act under the threat

of legal or professional penalty, we can neither trust them nor their research results.

 

All that remains are the studies of those who don’t bend to the pressure; who literally risk

loss of life, limb and liberty when publishing their iconoclastic research results. I may point

out two of those studies which can give the reader a good overview as to why we have an

“Auschwitz problem”:

 

1. The Real Case of Auschwitz by the already-mentioned Carlo Mattogno.[7] This thick

volume of some 750 pages thoroughly discusses all the relevant documentary evidence

on those buildings which are said to have contained homicidal gas chambers. This is the

main foundation upon which Cole based his conclusion that the evidence for the existence

of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz “just isn’t there,” and that “the evidence that does exist

calls that claim into question.”

 

2. The Chemistry of Auschwitz, by, well, myself.[8] This 440-page book summarizes the

documentary situation succinctly (which saves you having to read the 750 pages of the

first book mentioned) and forensically evaluates various kinds of material evidence of the

purported crime scene.

 

There are many more studies that could be listed, but the interested reader

can learn about them when perusing the two works just mentioned.

 

The upshot of all these studies is quite simply that there cannot have been any homicidal

gas chambers at Auschwitz. The forensic and documentary evidence positively refutes even

the possibility of their existence.

 

This brings us to Point b. If the selections where not designed to send people to the gas

chambers, what purpose did they serve? Well, if a camp received hundreds of inmates

in one swoop, what was the SS supposed to do? Just let those deportees walk in and do

whatever they pleased? Some kind of admission procedure had to be in place where it was

figured out which deportee was to be lodged in which building in which part of the camp, or

who of them will even be sent to another camp. Such an admission procedure happens in

every prison and camp in every country. That wasn’t any different at Auschwitz. Having

physicians involved to assess the health of incoming deportees makes sense, too. A detailed

analysis of the surviving documentation clearly shows in this regard as well that

there was nothing sinister or unusual about those selections at Auschwitz.[9]

 

Witnesses

Cover art for an upcoming study of the testimonies of one of

the key witnesses propping up the orthodox Auschwitz narrative.

 

But what about all those witnesses? Well, if we look into witnesses who testified about their

experiences with Dr. Mengele right at the end of the war, before memories got corrupted

by the Mengele hysteria starting at the late 1970s/early 1980s, there is really only one witness

saying anything of substance: the Jewish physician Miklos Nyiszli from Hungary, who for

several months of his incarceration at Auschwitz was the assistant of Dr. Mengele, if we are

to believe him.

 

The late German mainstream historian and expert of Third Reich history Prof. Dr. Werner Maser

said about Nyiszli simply that he “lied excessively.”[10] He didn’t justify this harsh assessment,

however, because that would have required citing the writings of heretics, which Maser didn’t

want to do to prevent getting himself in trouble (so he admitted to me). In his above-quoted paper

on Mengele, Mattogno gave a brief summary of the main reasons why Nyiszli was indeed an

imposter and excessive liar. The reader interested in a thorough, 300-page critique of Nyiszli’s

various tall tales in English will have to wait until later this year, though, when a study dedicated to this key

witness is slated to appear.[11]

 

The Legacy

A drawing of a prisoner showing Dr. Wirths, garrison physician at Auschwitz between September

1942 and early 1945, as a knight in shining uniform battling against lice infestation and thus typhus

 

Mengele is special, so special, indeed, that this is the only uncommon German last name my

English spell checker doesn’t complain about. Like blitzkrieg and Auschwitz, this term

has become a fixed part of the English language. What a proud legacy of a reviled

concentration-camp physician!

 

In Mengele’s case, however, it is safe to say that this isn’t his fault. As Wikipedia writes

correctly, quoting the one book that was most influential in cementing the Mengele hysteria:[12]

 

“Rolf [Mengele, Josef’s son], who had not seen his father since the ski holiday in 1956,

visited him there [in São Paulo, Brazil] in 1977 and found an unrepentant Nazi who

claimed he had never personally harmed anyone and had only done his duty.”

 

Mengele was a deputy of the Auschwitz garrison physician Dr. Eduard Wirths. Wirths,

in turn, was celebrated by hundreds of Auschwitz inmates as a hero, as the “Angel of Auschwitz”

saving the lives of tens of thousands of them with his selfless efforts to improve their lot and

to battle the epidemics reaping a gruesome harvest at Auschwitz.[13] Mengele was Wirths’s

right-hand man – in the battle to save as many lives as possible of those whom the

authorities of the Third Reich had recklessly and irresponsibly deported to Auschwitz.

 

Mengele was not just innocent of the crimes he is accused of. Together with Eduard Wirths

and the other physicians at Auschwitz, his tireless efforts saved the lives of ten thousands of inmates.

 


[1] See the list of all known Auschwitz SS personnel at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_im_KZ_Auschwitz.
[2] For the orthodoxy’s story, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele.
[3] E. Zuroff, Occupation Nazi-Hunter: The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust, KTAV, Hoboken, N.J., 1994, pp. 127f.
[4] Zdenek Zofka, “Der KZ-Arzt Mengele zur Typologie eines NS-Verbrechers,” in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1986) pp. 245-267, here p. 245f.; www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1986_2.pdf.
[5] Carlo Mattogno, “Dr. Mengele’s ‘Medical Experiments’ on Twins in the Birkenau Gypsy Camp,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2013); http://codoh.com/library/document/3223.
[6] David Cole, “OY VEY! Denial Is Dead,” Taki’s Magazine, Sept. 29, 2016; http://takimag.com/article/denial_is_dead_david_cole.
[7] Carlo Mattogno: The Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2015; www.holocausthandbooks.com/dl/22-trcfa.pdf.
[8] Germar Rudolf, The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers. A Crime-Scene Investigation, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2017; www.holocausthandbooks.com/?page_id=2.
[9] See C. Mattogno, Healthcare in Auschwitz: Medical Care and Special Treatment of Registered Inmates, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2016; www.holocausthandbooks.com/dl/33-hia.pdf.
[10] Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin, Olzog, Munich 2004, p. 348.
[11] Carlo Mattogno, Miklos Nyiszli, An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Account: The Tall Tales of Dr. Mengele’s Assistant Analyzed, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, in translation; www.holocausthandbooks.com/?page_id=37; an older, shorter study is available only in Italian: C. Mattogno, “Medico ad Auschwitz”: Anatomia di un falso, Edizioni La Sfinge, Parma 1988.
[12] Gerald L. Posner, John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, New York 1986, pp. 2, 279.
[13]

See Christoph M. Wieland, “Eduard Wirths, M.D., Garrison physician of Auschwitz – a Key Witness to the Holocaust!?,” in: C. Mattogno, Healthcare in Auschwitz, op. cit. (Note 9), pp. 219-269.

 

 


 
 
 
 _______________________________
 
 
Rudolf, Germar
Germar Rudolf January 2010
 

Germar Rudolf was born on October 29, 1964, in Limburg, Germany. He studied chemistry

at Bonn University, where he graduated in 1989 as a Diplom-Chemist. From 1990-1993 he

prepared a PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State research in conjunction

with the University of Stuttgart. Parallel to this and in his spare time, Rudolf re-examined

Auschwitz, Birkenau and other installations and buildings, testing brick and mortar samples

of delousing chambers and alleged gas chambers for traces of Zyklon B. Following the

pioneering work of Fred Leuchter, he put the final forensic nail into the coffin of the

Auschwitz story with his 1993 expert report The Rudolf Report. Even though this book on

Auschwitz was scientific in nature and utterly apolitical, Rudolf's home and office were raided

thrice, his computers and papers seized etc. In 1994/1995 he was charged and tried in

Germany for his expert report. As a scientist, he found the "gassing" claims to be scientifically

untenable. Rudolf was found guilty and convicted to 14 month imprisonment. As a result,

the University of Stuttgart denied him to pass his final PhD exam, relying on a 1939 Hitler

law still valid today which permits withholding or withdrawing academic degrees in

case of “unworthiness.”

 

Rudolf tried to avoid serving this prison term by going into British exile with his young wife

and two babies. There he started a small revisionist outlet for German language material,

Castle Hill Publishers, and the multilingual website www.vho.org, which within a few years

outgrew other revisionist websites by size and traffic. In early 1999, due to the permanent

persecutorial pressure, his wife filed for divorce and returned to Germany with their two babies.

 

When Germany wanted to have Rudolf extradited from Britain in 1999, he fled to the U.S.,

where he applied for political asylum. While his case wound its way through the U.S.

legal system, Rudolf expanded his publishing activities into English language material,

for instance by launching the ambitious “Holocaust Handbooks Series.” In 2004 Rudolf

married again, this time a U.S. citizen, and soon became the father of a young baby daughter.

Immediately after this marriage was recognized as genuine by the U.S. Immigration Services

in October 2005, and at a time when a hearing of his asylum case was just being scheduled

by a U.S. Federal Court, the U.S. government had Rudolf arrested and deported to Germany.

Hence his asylum hearing which took place in absentia a few months later was nothing but a

farce. In Germany Rudolf was duly arrested and put on trial again for his revisionist publishing

activities abroad. Although Rudolf’s activities had been perfectly legal both in the UK and the U.S.,

Germany nevertheless applied German censorship laws and sentenced Rudolf to another

30 months imprisonment.

 

On July 5, 2009, Rudolf was released from prison. After a legal battle against the U.S.

government lasting almost two years, Rudolf finally succeeded in obtaining an immigrant

visa for the U.S. He has been reunited with his wife and daughter since August 2011.

 

Visit his homepage at www.GermarRudolf.com.

 

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