Mother Tells of Killing Her Newborn Baby at Auschwitz : Mock Trial of ‘Angel of Death’ Ends in Israel

A mock trial of Nazi Josef Mengele ended Wednesday with the testimony of a woman who killed her newborn baby to survive the Auschwitz death camp and a demand that the “Angel of Death” be found and tried.

After hearing 28 witnesses speak of Mengele’s sadistic, pseudo-medical experiments at Auschwitz, a six-man tribunal called for renewed efforts to bring him to trial for mass murder and “acts of brutality against the bodies and souls” of the camp’s inmates.

Mengele, who would be 73 now and was last reported living in Paraguay, is the most important Nazi war criminal still at large. West German authorities have offered a million-mark ($315,000) reward for information leading to his arrest.

He is said to have personally ordered 400,000 people sent to gas chambers between May 30, 1943, and Dec. 31, 1944. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz in January, 1945.

The final witness was Ruth Eliaz, 60, who said Mengele ordered her breasts bandaged immediately after she gave birth in Auschwitz so he could “see how long a newborn can live without food.”

Eliaz, who now lives in Israel, said she gave her daughter partly chewed bread and let her suck on linen dipped in coffee and soup, but within days the baby was little more than a skeleton and had no strength to cry.

Told to ‘Get Ready’

A week after she gave birth, Mengele came to her at night and told her to “get ready” the following morning. She understood she and the baby were to be killed, she said.

A Jewish doctor who also was a prisoner urged her to kill the baby before daybreak and gave her a fatal dose of morphine to administer.

“She told me, ‘You are young and can live. The baby cannot live,’ ” said Eliaz, who believed Mengele might lose interest in her if the baby were dead.

The doctor talked to her softly. “She talked and talked until I did it. I murdered my own child, “ Eliaz told the panel and a stunned audience of 300, including Ambassador Neils Hansen of West Germany.

In three days of testimony, survivors painted a portrait of Mengele as a tall man with a sarcastic gap-toothed smile who sometimes lulled his victims with small gifts of chocolate and other small kindnesses.

Mengele studied twins and dwarfs in primitive research into genetic engineering to try to produce purer Aryans. His subjects were repeatedly given blood tests and eye drops as Mengele searched for a way to change eye coloring.

His pathology laboratory sent thousands of eyes, blood samples and deformed skeletons to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin for further study, said tribunal member Arno Mutolski, a University of Washington genetics professor.

Mutolski said Mengele “was a sadistic killer” whose research was scientifically worthless.