The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil (5 page)

Himmler, Heinrich

Born October 7, 1900, the son of a Roman Catholic schoolteacher, Himmler served in a reserve battalion during the First World War. This meant that he never saw actual combat. (His brother Gebhard, on the other hand, received the Iron Cross for his conspicuous bravery on the infamous Western Front.)

Himmler then had a succession of jobs, including working as an apprentice chicken farmer. He suffered all his life from poor health, particularly stomach complaints.

Dissatisfied with his appearance (which was somewhat different to the strapping Aryan stereotype he so admired), Himmler also had a habit of covering his chin in photographs – with his hand, in an effected ‘thoughtful’ pose – as he considered that it looked ‘weak’.

By the time Himmler joined the Nazi Party, in August 1923, his diary entries were reflecting his growing anti-Semitism. Rejecting his parents’ religious faith, he instead immersed himself in German mythology, and an interest in the occult.

Himmler succeeded in becoming head of the
Schutzstaffel
(‘SS’) in 1929. Under his direction, the SS grew from having less than 300 members (originally, it was intended only to serve as Hitler’s personal bodyguard) to being a powerful group with its own military.

After Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933, Himmler (by now as rabidly anti-Semitic as anyone in the Nazi Party) created Dachau, the first concentration camp.

Himmler visits Dachau concentration camp, pictured here beside an inmate.

It was Himmler who was the mastermind of the propaganda machine created in a bid to provide seemingly ‘just cause’ for the September 1, 1939 German invasion of Poland.

For months previously, the German public was ceaselessly informed of how the Poles were conducting what almost amounted to an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of all Germans living in Poland.

Then – in the final stage of what was actually called ‘Operation Himmler’, such was the
Reichsführer
’s influence in its creation (
Reichsführer
had by now become Himmler’s official title, and one which meant he was answerable only to Hitler) – German soldiers donned Polish military uniforms before conducting various mock ‘attacks’ on buildings along the German-Polish border. They left behind ‘Polish casualties’ – actually former concentration inmates who’d first been gassed, and then shot for ‘appearance’.

Himmler was instrumental in creating
Endlosung
, the ‘Final Solution’. As Germany invaded more countries, and the resettlement of Germans in captured territory was planned, Himmler observed dispassionately:

‘…
It is a matter of existence, and so it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply
…’

He also used men from captured countries to swell the numbers of his
Waffen
SS units – in particular from Lithuania, who provided some 50,000 soldiers.

Although Himmler could talk quite freely about the proposed extermination of millions of people, he did not have the stomach to observe such ‘actions’ close up. Left nauseated after witnessing the shooting of some hundred Jews at Minsk in August 1941, he wondered about the mental trauma such shootings would have on his SS men. It was then that the idea of gassing was seriously considered.

As the defeat of Germany became certain, Himmler attempted to conduct ‘peace talks’ with the Allies. Furious, Hitler had his former favorite stripped of all his powers. (In fact, outside of ‘official business’, Hitler and Himmler were never very close. They rarely saw each other socially, with Hitler going so far as to call Himmler’s beliefs in the occult ‘absurd’.)

Himmler committed suicide, by biting on a cyanide pill, while in custody, May 23, 1945. He was buried in an unmarked grave, the precise location of which remains unknown.

Hoess, Rudolf

‘
…I was in command of Auschwitz until December I, 1943. By a rough estimate, approximately 2,500,000 victims were executed there by gassing and burning; another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000…

Born into a strict Catholic family, Hoess’s father intended for him to enter the priesthood. While in his teens, however, Hoess found himself questioning his belief in religion.

He fought in the First World War, serving in Baghdad and Palestine aged just fifteen; and refusing to accept the Versailles Treaty, following Germany’s defeat, became a member of the
Freikorps
(‘Free Corps’), volunteer military units, committing acts of sabotage against Friedrich Ebert’s government. (Ebert was the first president of Germany.)

Such activities saw Hoess arrested and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. While confined Hoess had a nervous breakdown, ‘talking’ with his deceased parents and rediscovering (albeit only temporarily) his belief in God.

In 1928, after six years, Hoess was suddenly released due to a political amnesty. Joining the Nazi Party in 1932, he succeeded in making a strong impression on
Heinrich Himmler
, who consequently got him a coveted position (with an excellent salary) at the Dachau concentration camp.

The ill-treatment of the prisoners there caused Hoess some initial discomfort, and he later confessed to turning ‘hot and cold’ upon witnessing a screaming prisoner being flogged.

Hoess soon learnt to ‘mask’ such feelings, such was his total obedience and belief in the Nazi Party. Posted to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in 1940 he was informed that he was to become Commandant at a camp currently being constructed in a somewhat remote and swampy area of Poland. The name of this camp – Auschwitz.

Like
Hermann Göring
, Hoess did not possess any particular, possibly
innate
dislike for the Jews.

‘…
I would like to stress that I have never personally hated the Jews. But I did view them as being the enemy of our nation
…
In any case, the actual feeling of hatred is not in me…
’

Instead, Hoess viewed the proposed, systematic destruction of the entire Jewish race with almost scientific detachment – merely an order to be obeyed and carried out with absolute efficiency. So he was able to live, with his wife and five children, at a villa situated a short walk from Auschwitz’s crematoria.

Said Hoess at his trial, concerning the thousands of inmates gassed and otherwise murdered at Auschwitz on a weekly basis:

‘…
None of us actually
cared
for this sort of work, of course, and yet you became desensitized to it…
’

Hoess on the gallows, April 16, 1947.

Following Germany’s defeat, Hoess went into hiding as a farm worker, but was soon discovered. He was arrested in 1946 by the British Field Security Police.

Before his inevitable conviction and execution for war crimes, Hoess wrote his autobiography. It is strangely ‘mechanical’ document, with pages painstakingly describing the various complexities of running a concentration camp the size and scale of Auschwitz, accompanied with periodic complaints concerning the endless bureaucracy and ‘red tape’.

Although the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert – who conducted extensive interviews with Hoess (along with other Nazi war criminals) during the former camp Commandant’s trial – referred to Hoess as being basically ‘psychotic’, Hoess nevertheless made the following statement shortly before his execution:

‘…
It is a tragedy that although I am by nature a gentle and good-natured person, I became a terrible destroyer of human beings… Someone who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what
..
.
’

Mengele, Josef (the ‘Angel of Death’)

The eldest of three children, Mengele was born March 16, 1911. His father was a prosperous manufacturer of farming implements. Academically gifted, Mengele studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Munich, gaining his Ph.d in physical anthropology.

He then concentrated on the study of genetics, in particular with regard to such abnormalities as cleft lips and chins.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Mengele (a member of the Nazi Party since 1937) volunteered for service in the
Waffen
SS. He was awarded the Iron Cross, saving two German soldiers from a burning tank.

Seriously wounded in 1942, and thus declared unfit for further active service, Mengele applied to join the ‘concentration camp service’ upon his recovery. In such a way, he realized, could he continue his research into genetics.

His application was accepted, and he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camps. Here, Mengele was made
Standortartz
(SS garrison physician), but was soon much better known among the inmates as the ‘Angel of Death’.

While whistling and smiling, he supervised the ‘Selections’, where new arrivals at the camp – disembarking from the hideous cattle-trucks in which they’d been crammed for days or even weeks on end – were divided into two groups.

These two groups comprised those whom Mengele and the other doctors deemed fit to work at Auschwitz – and those who were sent straight to the gas chambers.

The latter group usually included the elderly, the sick, pregnant women and young children. But often Mengele saved what he termed ‘beautiful specimens’ for his experiments: young twins, dwarfs and those with an ‘interesting’ disability or abnormality.

To those children he selected for his experiments, he initially displayed smiley affection, ensuring that they were comfortably housed in a block removed from the other prisoners, and bringing them sweets and clothing. The children were encouraged to call him ‘Uncle Mengele’.

But the experiments he performed, however, (on children as well as adults) pass beyond the realm of nightmare. Limbs and organs were removed without anesthetic; men were castrated and sex-change operations attempted; chemicals injected into the eyes in a bid to change the color of the iris (Mengele had a particular fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which an individual’s irises are of a different color); inmates burnt with phosphorus to see how such injuries might best be treated…

Two Russian POWs, kept naked in an ice-bath to judge the effects of such exposure, pleaded ‘Won’t you just kill us at last?’ Mengele ‘sewed’ two young Roma gypsy twins together, back to back, in an attempt to ‘create’ conjoined twins. The children died from gangrene after several days of agony.

None of the above caused Mengele the slightest concern. As anti-Semitic as any Nazi, he also held the usual contempt for ‘Slavs’, gypsies, homosexuals and all those others deemed ‘undesirable’ by the Nazis.

All his experiments, he claimed, were focused only on establishing Aryan racial superiority. If in doing so he was required to personally kill fourteen sets of young twins in just one evening, by a chloroform injection to the heart, then so be it. Afterwards he would leave his ‘research laboratory’ whistling, cigarette in hand.

U.S poster offering a reward for Mengele’s capture, following the end of the Second World War and his escape from Germany.

Mengele managed to evade the Allied forces at the end of the war, and after working as a farmhand under an assumed name, he fled Germany on April 17, 1949.

With a passport which gave his name as ‘Helmut Gregor’, he went to Buenos Aires, where he worked in a succession of jobs, from carpenter to part-owner of a pharmaceutical company.

Famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal finally tracked Mengele down. (The Allies had stated several times, during the Nuremberg Trails, that they firmly believed the Auschwitz doctor to be dead). Mengele thus fled to Paraguay

In failing health, Mengele drowned after suffering a stroke while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil, February 7, 1979.

For several years afterwards, rumors persisted that he was still alive. But the location of his grave was discovered (some friends revealing its location under police interrogation), and it was exhumed, the remains tested and declared to almost certainly be those of Josef Mengele. (This was conclusively confirmed through the checking of DNA evidence in 1992.)

Until his death, therefore, Mengele had evaded capture for thirty-four years.

The dead doctor’s infamy only spread further when, in 1978, ‘he’ became a leading character in the bestselling novel (and subsequent movie)
The Boys from Brazil
, in which ‘Mengele’ creates clones of Adolf Hitler in a laboratory in Brazil.

In February 2010, a 180-page volume of Mengele's diary sold at auction for an undisclosed sum to the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.