Vanity Helped Mengele Escape Being Identified

Vanity allowed Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele to slip through the hands of the U.S. Army shortly after World War II, his son says.

Munich-based Bunte magazine, which was given stacks of letters, notebooks, diaries and photographs by Mengele’s son Rolf, published an interview with the son and more excerpts from the documents in its latest edition, which goes on sale Thursday.

According to Bunte, the simple subterfuge of an alias and a quirk attributable to extreme vanity helped Mengele avoid detection by American soldiers who interned him for several months in 1945.

Rolf Mengele said his father, who liked to stand for long periods before a mirror admiring his made-to-measure clothing, defied the rule that Nazi SS officers should have their blood group tattooed in an armpit. Allied investigators often identified SS personnel after the war by the tattoo.

The older Mengele wrote in a diary: “At the war’s end, my unit was in Czechoslovakia. On the night of the cease-fire, we pulled back to the west. In the vicinity of the nearest city (Nuremberg) we were taken to a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. We were transferred to many camps and then released in the American zone.”

Hiding in Bavarian Forest

Bunte said Mengele’s discharge papers bore the name Fritz Hollmann, one of many aliases he was to assume in the next 34 years.

By September, 1945, Mengele was hiding in a forest near his home in Bavaria, receiving food from his family. Two U.S. officers questioned farmers in the area about the whereabouts of a Josef Mengele. They also asked his first wife, Irene, who told them she did not know.

Bunte said Mengele never forgot his macabre “experiments” on Auschwitz inmates in which he sought to prove his theories about racial superiority.

He made plans to resume his work and hid microscopic slides with blood or tissue samples, presumably from Auschwitz, for the day he could acquire a laboratory, Bunte said.

The magazine quoted Rolf Mengele as saying that he felt relief when he learned in March, 1979, that his father was dead but that he would never have betrayed him.