Auschwitz appears not simply as a site of mass murder but as a system in which deportation, selection, forced labor, and medical experimentation served overlapping purposes. The account follows its operation through the testimony of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish physician forced to assist Josef Mengele, and through survivors’ later demands for justice. It also traces the camp’s afterlife: industrial and academic connections persisted beyond the war, while public testimony repeatedly challenged the perpetrators’ claims that their actions had been ordinary duty or science.

Selection, forced labor, and profit

In the summer and autumn of 1944, Nyiszli, himself a prisoner and one of the Sonderkommando prisoners, witnessed the arrival of deported Hungarians. He describes Josef Mengele spending long stretches at the railway ramp, where four to five trainloads arrived each day. Mengele directed arriving people toward forced labor or immediate death; the routine made a brief gesture part of a process deciding the fate of entire transports. His later defense to his son—that he had tried to select as many people fit to work as possible—recasts this power as an effort to save lives, but the account places that claim beside the lethal function of the selection itself.

The camp’s economy linked imprisoned labor to major industrial interests. Before Josef Mengele arrived, prisoners were already producing synthetic rubber for IG Farben and arms for Krupp. Women’s hair was collected and used in manufacturing, including socks for submarine crews and tubing for railways. Schering Laboratories supported experiments in in vitro fertilisation, while Bayer tested typhus drugs on prisoners. These details situate Auschwitz within arrangements that converted coerced labor and captive bodies into industrial and research resources; the benefits extended beyond the camp even as prisoners bore the costs.

Medical research and the camp apparatus

Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins and dwarves were conducted in the camp’s experimental barracks. Nyiszli describes painful tests and procedures carried out on living people, with twins sometimes killed so that their bodies could be examined together. Organs and other specimens were sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem, Berlin, where Otmar von Verschuer directed research. Packages containing material from prisoners were marked for urgent delivery as important war material. The route from barracks to research institute makes visible the institutional connections behind experiments later represented as scientific work.

Nyiszli’s account also records Mengele’s intense attention to research files. Even in autumn 1944, when Germany had already lost the war, Mengele spent long hours in the dissection room and laboratory reviewing the records of twins. He reprimanded Nyiszli over a faint grease mark on one dossier cover. The attention to the appearance of a file stands in stark contrast to the violence and deaths that produced the research it documented: orderliness and professional concentration did not restrain the camp’s brutality but helped organize it.

Mengele was not the only physician implicated in medical crimes there. The account names Horst Schumann, Carl Clauberg, Victor Capesius, Friedrich Entress, and August Hirt among the doctors and medical personnel whose actions included forced sterilisation, theft, lethal treatment, and research on prisoners. Their different methods belonged to a wider medical presence in the camp, rather than an isolated aberration. The narrative thereby connects individual choices to a professional and institutional world in which prisoners were treated as instruments of research and policy.

Perpetrator accounts and postwar impunity

In later years, Josef Mengele described his work at Auschwitz as military duty performed for German science. He claimed that selection protected the biological community, that he had saved those capable of labor, and that the twins owed their lives to him. He also insisted that he had obeyed orders and was only one part of a larger system. These are presented as his postwar justifications, not as an account that resolves his responsibility. His language of duty and science sits against Nyiszli’s testimony about selections, experiments, and deaths.

The camp’s economic and professional networks also sharpen the account’s contrast between wartime participation and postwar life. In 1964, after the universities of Frankfurt and Munich withdrew Josef Mengele’s medical and anthropology doctorates for violating the Hippocratic oath and committing murders at Auschwitz, he reacted with bitterness rather than remorse. He resented being stripped of the qualifications he prized and blamed the reversal on a society that had once treated biological thinking and eugenics as respectable foundations of public life. He also complained that industrial leaders who had profited from Auschwitz were living comfortably while he was in exile. His grievance exposes the self-pity of a perpetrator who measured injustice by his own losses, even as the wider question of responsibility remained unsettled.

That impunity forms part of the camp’s postwar history. The narrative recalls that many professionals who had participated in Nazi programs were not prosecuted and returned to families and careers. In Buenos Aires, a Nazi circle treated reports about camp crimes with disbelief and expected Nazism to return; this denial stands against the evidence preserved by survivors and witnesses. The distance between the camp and the postwar world did not erase its connections to people and institutions that continued to function.

Testimony and the return of Auschwitz

On 27 January 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, survivors—including twins, dwarves, and people with disabilities who had been subjected to Mengele’s experiments—called publicly for his capture. Their appeal carried the camp’s history into international news. In February, a mock trial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem heard testimony over three days. Witnesses described experiments on twins and the treatment of mothers and newborns. Their accounts made the consequences of Mengele’s research and authority public again, not as abstractions of wartime policy but as testimony from people who had survived it.

The proceedings prompted renewed pressure for action. Before the mock trial ended, the United States attorney general called for a review of the complete file, while the Simon Wiesenthal Center publicized a declassified memorandum that incorrectly claimed American authorities had held Josef Mengele in 1947. The error provoked questions about how he had escaped capture. On 8 February, Israel announced that it would resume the hunt and offered a one-million-dollar reward; further rewards from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Washington Times, and West Germany raised the stated total to $3.4 million. The search gave Auschwitz’s survivor testimony immediate political consequences, even as the capture it sought remained unresolved in this account.

The narrative also frames Auschwitz through later art. At the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Jean Tinguely’s Mengele-danse macabre incorporates the skeleton of a large Mengele threshing machine among machine sculptures made from burned and twisted materials. The work does not reproduce the camp; it brings the name of its perpetrator into an image of machinery and destruction. Beside Nyiszli’s testimony and the survivors’ public appeals, this reference underscores how Auschwitz persists in the book as both a historical site and a continuing problem of memory, responsibility, and representation.