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Josef Mengele (AP file -- undated)
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| By Associated Press January 28, 2005 |
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An Israeli newspaper published previously unseen excerpts of post-World War II letters written by Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who conducted cruel experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths.
In the papers, written in South America, where he hid after the war, Mengele does not mention his horrific past, except to express his longing for the Fatherland. Instead the letters describe the banal everyday existence of the man known as the "Angel of Death," his complaints about his lazy Brazilian housekeeper and the berries he would pick for desert.
The publication of Mengele's papers came Thursday as the world marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
A complete article about the excerpts, obtained by The Associated Press, is to be published by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot on Friday. Yediot printed a small preview Thursday.
Six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease. Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
Mengele was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 prisoners at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II and for using inmates as guinea pigs in barbaric medical experiments.
He eluded pursuers after the war ended and lived secretly in South America, most of the time in Brazil, from 1949 until his death.
"How is the Fatherland, is she still the Fatherland?" Mengele wrote to a friend in a letter dated Nov, 1972 and published in Yediot.
The Yediot letters come from 85 documents obtained by the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo in November. The papers, some in Mengele's handwriting, came from the files of Brazil's federal police, which investigated Mengele after his death in 1979. The Brazilian paper published only some of the documents.
The documents printed in Brazil show that Mengele never regretted his crimes and died convinced of the superiority of the Aryan race. He also praised the apartheid regime that governed South Africa until 1994.
But the Yediot letters focus on the daily life of the war criminal living as a fugitive in Brazil.
"Tomorrow Luis will come early," Mengele writes in a letter dated Feb. 1976, describing his routine with his gardener.
"Then we will start to work in the garden. He weeds the lawn, rakes, moves plants, trims the creeper on the wall and anything else growing wild. The berry bushes still provide me with most of my desserts and prick my fingers with their gentle thorns," he wrote.
The first published papers detailing the life of "the Angel of Death," were printed in 1985 in the German weekly magazine Bunte, coming from family documents supplied by Mengele's son, Rolf Mengele.
Those excerpts portrayed a bitter fugitive in constant fear of apprehension, plagued by nightmares and sleeplessness, but defiant about Germany's murderous Nazi period.
At Auschwitz Mengele was responsible for the "selection," choosing who was fit for slave labor and who was to go to the gas chambers. He also carried out horrific experiments on children, twins and dwarfs.
"He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him 'uncle,' 'uncle Mengele' and sometimes give them a sweet -- and in the same tone of voice that he said 'I'm uncle Mengele,' he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection," Martha Weiss, a survivor of his experimental ward told the AP recently.
However, the Yediot letters show a man concerned with his banal life.
"Once or twice a week, in the afternoon, I go into town to post a letter, to pay the electric bill, to buy something from the German bookstore and finally to eat a few pieces of strudel at the German bakery," Mengele wrote. "These are the small pleasures that I very much enjoy."
In another letter Mengele, filled with self pity, complains about his lazy Brazilian housekeeper whom he cynically refers to as his "pearl."
"Sometimes she comes only after I have made myself breakfast, sometimes she doesn't even come," he wrote. "So I want to find a new pearl. My current one is off sick too often I feel like I am my own housekeeper ... Maybe one day I will find the real pearl."
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