Mengele and his colleagues he was very playful. Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Florida's statewide recount began Sunday morning after a three-hour delay amid a series of technical glitches with Broward County's counting machines. It was the coming together of the man and the place, the ''fit'' between the two, that created the Auschwitz Mengele. They lived in special blocks, usually within medical units. Then he injected the evipan into her right arm intravenously. He could try medications meant to prevent, treat or induce a particular illness on an individual twin, or both of a pair of twins. The Mengele family firm, Soehne Maschinenfabrik und Eisengiesserei GmbH und Co. of Guenzburg, Bavaria, specializes in agricultural machinery and is the largest of Reporters from all over the world flocked to Gnzburg, which was nicknamed "Mengele Town." This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. "like the Nazis did.". Sakowski appears confident that the material is genuine. Thank you Paul. Petra Kelly, deputy director of Germany`s Green Party who also was born in Guenzberg, indicated that Mengele may have made clandestine visits to the town in the early years of his exile. Though ordinarily a rare condition, it was common among gypsy inmates of Auschwitz. After countless injections, she was more dead than alive. In his television appearance, Rolf said it was not until 1960 that he learned his father was still alive. For Mengele has long been the focus of what could be called a cult of demonic personality. It all amounted to nothing. His father, he said, had shown no remorse, though Rolf had tried to discuss the Third Reich and World War II with him in letters they exchanged and later in nightlong conversations when he went to Brazil in 1977. The twin survivor also spoke of Mengele's supervising ''a lot of research with chemicals'' and of how Mengele's assistants ''might stick a needle in various places from behind,'' including the performing of spinal taps. He had no need or inclination to concern himself with ethical considerations, sharing as he did the general SS doctor's view that one was doing no harm since Auschwitz inmates, especially Jews, were in any case doomed. Read more:Remembering Himmler's 'Auschwitz decree' to exterminate Roma and Sinti, Zdenek Zofka, a historian from Gnzburg who published a book about the town during the Nazi era, writes that Mengele was neither a sadist nor a fanatic. ''the smallest slip of paper and all movable valuables,'' were being kept in the Bossert home, but he was ambivalent about what to do with it. His friend suggests something else special about Mengele: He had asked to be sent to the Auschwitz death camp because of the opportunities it could provide for his research. He made that clear in an early meeting with Yitzhak Hofi, who was then the director of the Mossad. Rolf Mengele, a 41-year-old lawyer in the city of Freiburg, on Tuesday released a statement saying that a body exhumed June 6 near Sao Paulo, Brazil, is that of his father. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Finally, Bossert said, ''our friend left us forever on a tropical beach. Inevitably, the spotlight of publicity would seek the surviving Mengeles, but the only son initially tried to avoid its glare, issuing a statement on June 11 from seclusion. The myth of Mengele's demonic stature was given added support by the often misleading rumors about his life after Auschwitz. Amit withstood pressure from many members of his staff who were Holocaust survivors or relatives of victims. Mengele formally relinquished his inheritance in the family business, which today has annual sales of $80 million. Mengele the eldest son of Karl and Walburga Mengele, who ran a farm machinery company in the town of Gnzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria With the Auschwitz self, Mengele's potential for evil became actual, even as he maintained elements of his prior self that included affection toward children. For the next 10 years, backed by Eshkol and his successors as prime minister, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, almost nothing was done about Mengele. Last week, on West German television, Rolf Mengele, a 41-year-old lawyer, spoke publicly for the first time about his decision, portraying himself as torn between the law and family loyalty in refusing to tell authorities where his father, Dr. Josef Mengele, could be found. Mengele brought such flamboyance and posturing to the selections task that it was his image inmates remembered. BONN In the nearly 40 years since Dr. Josef Mengele left West Germany, family members have lived under a ''monstrous shadow'' cast by the Nazi fugitive, running a farm machinery business and saying almost nothing of their infamous relative to the world. JOSEF Mengele had come to symbolize the entire Nazi killing project. In the end we decided that we would focus on one more target, Mengele, but Begin, who was a very emotional man, was disappointed, Hofi said. Twins had unique status. An inmate radiologist told of a pair of gypsy twins, ''two splendid boys of 7 or 8, whom we were studying from all aspects - from the 16 or 18 different specialties we represented.'' In the end, Rolf says, it was his mother who wanted to get out of the marriage. But the truth was that for years, the leaders of the government and the agency were simply not all that interested. She had believed he was treating prisoners at Auschwitz who suffered from typhoid and typhus fever. He would later tell his son that he hid in the forests around the town for weeks, fearing arrest. In this manner, all 14 twins were killed during the night.''. The Mengele family firm, Soehne Maschinenfabrik und Eisengiesserei GmbH und Co. of Guenzburg, Bavaria, specializes in agricultural machinery and is the largest of its kind in Europe. The man said he was a career soldier and an East German refugee from Goerlitz. Get the day's top news with our Today's Headlines newsletter, sent every weekday morning. I have conducted psychological interviews with 28 former Nazi doctors; a number of Nazi lawyers, economists and other nonmedical professionals, and also with more than 80 former Auschwitz inmates who were engaged in medical work in the camp. But his superiors were worried by his eagerness, ordered him back to Israel and replaced him. And they feared visits by the doctor Josef Mengele. '', Measurements were taken of the twins' skulls and bodies and various characteristics of the nose, lips, ears, hair and eyes. Lidia Maksymowicz was 3 years old when she and her family arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in December 1943, deported by Nazi Germany from the Minsk area in Belarus. Her brother-in-law, Alois Fischer, who shared a room with Mengele at the farm, was more skeptical. Jaumann was traveling Friday and could not be reached for comment on the newspaper report. The "Sepharad" term that Jews call Spain has no, 'Jews have never allowed to be exhumed to confirm the presence of these murdered Jews.' ''The burden we bear is not just Guenzburg`s but our entire people`s. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. . According to his friend, Mengele arrived at the camp with a special aura because he was coming more or less directly from the front. About. The need was to capture him and put him on trial, hear his confession, put him at our mercy. The US government ordered a fresh investigation into Mengele's disappearance. ''With great sorrow I am today complying with the painful duty to inform you and all family members of the passing of our mutual friend,'' Bossert wrote. Though much about his wartime activities was known, the German government had not requested his extradition, and even supplied him with documents clearing him of a criminal record. The man and the place were dramatically summed up by a survivor who did art work for him and spoke of herself as Mengele's ''pet,'' someone who was pleasant to have around. Josef Mengele, became known as the angel of death at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland during World War II and was blamed for the deaths of 400,000 Jews, Gypsies, Poles and others. After the war, business was even better. She is surely correct in her claim that an ordinary person is capable of extreme evil. '', He was also intent upon gaining personal recognition as a scientist. ( The Jewish Chronicle ) When Rolf Mengele, the son of Josef Mengele, finally got to meet his notorious father hiding out in Brazil in 1977, his father flatly denied He is thought to have drowned in Brazil in 1979, and a body fitting his description was exhumed there last year and subjected to extensive forensic tests. He said a management consultant was hired to save the firm from insolvency, and that several banks waived their demands on the firm, currently headed by Josef Mengele's nephews Karl-Heinz and Dieter Mengele. Now I feel lonely, or rather abandoned, more painfully than ever.". In another entry, apparently referring to having to buy the silence of friends, he wrote "everything in life has a price". Im the son of two Holocaust survivors. WebElena Lange, Clinical Social Work/Therapist, Asheville, NC, 28804, (828) 558-0086, Sometimes in life, we meet with experiences that prevent us from moving forward. In a statement last March, a nephew, Karl Heinz Mengele, told a German newspaper. dw.com/zbrodniabezkary. The world watched in fascination as scientific examination seemed to confirm that these were the right bones. FRANKFURT, West Germany (AP) _ Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele has a son who works as a lawyer in the Black Forest region of West Germany, while other relatives run a prosperous farm machinery company in Bavaria. The capture, trial and execution in the early 1960s of Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic organizer of the Holocaust, led many people to believe that the Mossad would next want to get its hands on Mengele. He went into hiding, first in Paraguay and then in Brazil. "Mengele," a woman said, answering the phone at the foundation. Those who are identified had previously made themselves known in books or other public documents.) Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz concentration camp, spent his last years in his Brazilian hideaway lonely, depressed and short of money, according to 86 letters, notes and diaries discovered filed away in a Sao Paulo police archive. Half a year later, Harel was replaced by Meir Amit, who ordered the Mossad to stop chasing after ghosts from the past and devote all our manpower and resources to threats against the security of the state. He mandated that the agency deal with Nazis only to the extent it is able to do so, in addition to its principal missions and as long as it doesnt impinge on the other operations.. When the judge commented, ''Mengele cannot have been there all the time,'' the witness answered: ''In my opinion, always. zone.''. We offer our comprehensive marcom His gruesome experiments on helpless inmates are the stuff of nightmares and he is considered by some to be among the vilest men in modern history. The letter was delivered to Rolf by Hans Sedlmeier, a former manager of the Mengele company. In 1974 Wolfgang Gerhard, writing from Austria, suggested that he should return to Europe for medical treatment for his pains, saying he should go before he got too old to travel - he was 63 - and that it would not be as difficult as he was imagining. Indeed, his Auschwitz friend told me that Mengele planned to use his research with twins as the basis for his Habilitation, the presentation necessary for a formal university appointment. Mengele even tortured and killed children with his medical experiments. In May 1933, Karl Mengele joined the Nazi Party. So, of course, I feel angry at the German governments lack of action in the early years after World War II and frustration at the Mossads failure to bring him to justice. As one recalled, they never forgot they were in Auschwitz where, starting in the summer of 1944, they could clearly see ''flames really coming up every day, every night'' from the open pits in which bodies were burned, and they could ''hear every evening a cacophony of screams'' and breathe in ''the unbearable smell. The modern Mengele family does not want to have anything to do with the past not even with projects that commemorate his uncle's victims. Rolfs sister-in-law, Sabine Hackenjos, has been acting as a spokeswoman for the family since Rolf Mengele broke years of silence about his father. with such a face that I would think he's mad.''. It was too late. In July 1977, the cabinets security committee secretly approved a proposal from Begin to instruct the Mossad to renew its search for Nazi war criminals, in particular Josef Mengele. almost like he had fun . When, finally, a warrant was issued in 1959, Mengele caught word. Dr. Josef Mengele, the cruel staff doctor at Auschwitz death camp, acquired a certain legendary quality even before his death in 1979. Mengele's fanatically brutal approach to his research can be understood mainly in terms of his combination of ideological zealotry and scientific ambition. . ''It`s all lies and propaganda,'' the Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted her as saying. The Nazi doctors were assigned, on a rotating basis, to stand on the ramp and select those prisoners who would live, as workers at the camp, and those who would be killed. Evil Josef Mengele spent the rest of his life on the run after the Second World War but, while holed up in South America, he kept a chilling secret diary. Moreover, as Aharoni later put it in testimony for the Mossads history department, When Isser began dealing with something, he dealt only with that. In addition, the agency had been blindsided, knowing nothing about the German scientists and the missiles they were building for Israels biggest enemy. He has been seen as the embodiment of absolute evil, a doctor pledged to heal who kills instead. Mengele, the notorious 'angel of death' doctor at Auschwitz camp whose body was believed found last year in Brazil, received payments from the family of between The evidence is that Mengele took his turn at the ramp, like everyone else, but he also appeared there frequently to make sure that any twins in a ''transport,'' as the trains were called, would be collected and saved for his research. They rebuffed the media by speaking irritably about ''an obsession with the past.''. Their heads were not shaved. They had been seized at the home of an Austrian couple, Liselotte and Wolfram Bossert, now dead, who befriended Mengele, and at the small house in the seaside resort of Bertioga, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, where he was living when he died from a heart attack in 1979. His impulse toward omnipotence and total control of the world around him were means of fending off anxiety and doubt, fears of falling apart - ultimately, fear of death. In 2005, Experimentelles Theater Gnzburg staged a play titled Zndeln oder Josef M. und Seinesgleichen (Playing With Fire or Josef M. and His Cronies). They include Josef Mengeles nephews Karl-Heinz, 40, and Dieter, 34, the sons of his brothers Karl and Alois. A headline in Britain's Daily Express newspaper called it "The Town Where Dr. Death Still Casts His Evil Shadow.". Who is Nigerias president-elect Bola Tinubu? AUSCHWITZ WAS BOTH AN ANNIHILA-tion camp and a work camp for German industry. Mengele, in fact, left one memory that was particularly warm, if now incongruous and tarnished. '', For many of the twins, the strength of their warm feelings toward Mengele was such that they found it impossible in later years to believe the evil things they heard about him. He might well have been unclear himself about his exact motivations, but we have reason to see in them a combination of distorted scientific claims and related ideological fantasies. But their conclusions uniformly reflect Mengele's commitment to bringing science into the service of the Nazi vision. And Mengele considered these views to be scientifically derived. The Mengele family firm, Soehne Maschinenfabrik und Eisengiesserei GmbH und Co. of Guenzburg, Bavaria, specializes in agricultural machinery and is the largest of its kind in Europe. Mengele had the same frenzied attitude in carrying out his research. At the time, Rolf said he had a strong bond to his stepfather, his mother`s second husband, whom he regarded as his father. The German daily newspaper Die Welt has reported that Rolf visited his father in Brazil in 1977 or 1978. But by the time he reached Brazil in 1960, after 10 years of hiding in Paraguay, his funds had dwindled. Old He could thereby obtain comparisons of healthy or diseased organs to show the effects of heredity. . Mengele was convinced that the boys were tubercular, but the various inmate doctors, including the radiologist, found no trace of that disease. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. He collected and studied dwarfs in an effort to determine the genetic reasons for their condition. New hurdles for rescuers at sea in the Mediterranean, Tunisia: Presidential scapegoating stokes fear and support, Canada Soccer president resigns amid equal pay dispute, Thousands of migrants have died in Southern Texas, Remembering Himmler's 'Auschwitz decree' to exterminate Roma and Sinti, Holocaust survivor celebrates 104th birthday with 400 descendants, Seventy-five years ago, the Nazis carried out the mass murder of Sinti and Roma people at Auschwitz, Remembering Primo Levi, the Holocaust writer born 100 years ago. But Mengele was already dead. He wanted his wife and son to join him later. What is more, he could exercise total control over them. In fact, he probably came to Auschwitz for that specific purpose - as a continuation of work he had done under Verschuer at the University of Frankfurt a few years earlier. ''It was an axiom,'' one of them told me, ''that Mengele is God. (In the end, Rudel died before the Mossad decided whether to go through with the operation.). He haunted my nightmares. The boys both had symptoms in their joints that, according to a belief at that time, could be linked to tuberculosis. Residents also installed a plaque to honor Mengele's victims in the courtyard of the historic Dossenbergerhaus, which today is an elementary school. ''Instinctively, I would recommend, as you probably would too, that everything be burnt up at once,'' he continued. Dr. Olga Lengyel, an Mengele was the chief doctor of Birkenau, an Auschwitz subcamp, but seemed to many inmates to have authority beyond his position. While many SS doctors did no more than what was required of them, Mengele was always on the move, busy with his work, initiating new projects. He would operate on children without anesthetics, infect twins with tuberculosis and spotted fever. It wasn't until 1985 that his death became known. "Gnzburg was not a Nazi stronghold," former Mayor Rudolf Kppler said, calling it a place neither worse nor better than other German towns. Abcarian: Mask mandates? Occasionally, Josef would return to Guenzburg, and his son would see him, this man he did not know, as the man walked with Rolf`s mother in the woods. He often sent prisoners with skin blemishes - even those with small abscesses or old appendectomy scars - to the gas chamber. . Karl-Heinz and Dieter run the Karl Mengele and Sons farm equipment manufacturing business. The family has owned a farm machinery manufacturing company in Guenzburg, a town near According to an inmate doctor, Mengele in his contacts with the children was ''as gentle as a father,'' talking to them and patting them on the head ''in a loving way.'' The twin children frequently called him ''Uncle Pepi.'' He continued to have the support and collaboration of his teacher, Verschuer, who convinced the German Research Society to provide financial support for Mengele's work. 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