| Dr. Auschwitz: Josef
Mengele |
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nice-looking man with a stick [riding crop] in his hand
… [who] looked at the bodies and the faces [for] just a couple of seconds
[and said], … ‘Links [“left”], … Rechts
[“right”], Links, Rechts. ’” And another observant inmate
contrasted Dr. Franz Lucas’s deliberate manner on the ramp with
Mengele‘s “graceful and quick movement” (see pages 194-95).
Some described a quality of playfulness in his detachment, his
“walking back and forth … [with a] cheerful expression on his face,
… almost like he had fun, … routine fun. … He was very
playful.” But observant survivors could see that he was playing a role;
noted the prominence with which he displayed at least one Iron Cross, and the
intensity with which he seemed to wish to contrast his own elegance with the
prisoners’ barely human state; and spoke of him as “like a Hollywood
actor,” “like Clark Gable,” or “a Rudolph Valentino
type.”
At the same time, prisoners were struck by the contrast
between what he looked like and what he was. One survivor, describing him as
“good-looking, … very cultivated,” declared that “he really
didn’t look like a murderer,” but immediately added, “He hit my
father with his stick on his neck and sent him in a certain direction [to the
gas chambers].” Or, “He was brutal but in a gentlemanly, depraved
way.” For Mengele’s studied detachment could be interrupted by
outbreaks of rage and violence, especially when encountering resistance to his
sense of the Auschwitz rules. For instance, an arriving teenager, directed by
Mengele to the right while her mother and younger sisters were sent to the
left, “begged and wept” because she did not want to be separated from
them: “[Mengele then] grabbed me by the hair, dragged me on the ground,
and beat me. When my mother also tried to beg him, he beat her with his cane
[riding crop].”
In another, similar case in which a mother did not
want to be separated from her thirteen- or fourteen-year-old daughter, and bit
and scratched the face of the SS man who tried to force her to her assigned
line, Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and the child. As a blanket
punishment, he then sent to the gas all people from that transport who had
previously been selected for work, with the comment: “Away with this
shit!”16
He could also express
cruelty and violence in response to signs of orthodox Judaism. A woman
described how he ridiculed her mother’s wig (the Scheitel worn by orthodox
Jews) and “picked it [off her head] with his stick.” And there were
endless stories of his smooth deceptions: a promise to a woman, who asked to do
her father’s work for him, that “father would be very well and the
air would make him healthy”: “In that same night my parents were
gassed.” And deadly sarcasm to a man asking for “light work”:
Mengele answered, “You’ll get light work,” and sent him to the
gas chamber.17
He could occasionally
break his own rules, on what appeared to be a whim: saving, for instance, a
mother and eleven-year-old daughter because he was struck by their beauty, and
reportedly commenting, “That |
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