Waffen-SS

The Waffen-SS is presented through the wartime histories of its volunteers and the consequences of their service. One account follows Josef Mengele from frontline duties in SS Division Wiking to work in occupied Poland and Auschwitz; another places Willem Sassen, a fellow SS volunteer, alongside him in postwar Argentina. Read against the testimony of Miklós Nyiszli and survivors, these careers expose a sharp divide between the language of military duty and the realities of persecution and mass murder.

Service and career pathways

Mengele’s military record is first recited under the name Gregor, before he discloses his identity to Sassen. He tells Eberhard Fritsch that he joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and entered the association of Nazi doctors and the SS the following year. After service in the Tyrolean Alpine Hunter Corps, he says, he volunteered for the Waffen-SS. His account then moves across distinct roles: medical expert in the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in occupied Poland, followed by service as a medical officer with SS Division Wiking on the Eastern Front.

The record places him in the campaign following Operation Barbarossa, in Ukraine and the Caucasus, and near Rostov-on-Don and the Siege of Bataysk. He emphasizes that he received the Iron Cross First Class and recounts rescuing two tank crewmen from a burning vehicle. To Fritsch, he mentions transfer to a prison camp in Poland but avoids naming Auschwitz. His account thus presents military service as a credential while withholding the part of his history that would most alter its meaning.

Volunteers and battlefield identity

Sassen provides a parallel, though not identical, trajectory. Like Mengele, he volunteered for the SS; he fought in a Dutch squadron on the Russian front, advancing into Soviet territory and the Caucasus, where he was badly injured. After the war, he was arrested and sentenced to prison in the Netherlands. He escaped twice, eventually reached Ireland, and sailed from there to Argentina. The juxtaposition connects volunteer service to a postwar network of former collaborators without making their individual paths interchangeable.

For Mengele, the appeal of the military past is also personal. In Buenos Aires he laments exile, the distance from his homeland, and the loss of the uniform. The career he recounts to Fritsch gives him a way to speak of himself as a soldier and decorated veteran while leaving his Auschwitz history unspoken. The distinction between what he includes and what he omits is central to the account of how military identity serves his postwar self-presentation.

Auschwitz and the language of duty

Nyiszli’s testimony supplies a stark counterpoint to that self-presentation. A Jewish doctor and Sonderkommando prisoner forced to work under Mengele, he describes the physician’s role in selections and in experiments on prisoners, including twins. His account records that Mengele continued his work in the dissection room even in autumn 1944, when Germany had already lost the war. The detail of his painstaking attention to the twins’ dossiers stands in disturbing contrast to the suffering inflicted on the people those files represented.

When Rolf later asks his father what he did in Auschwitz, Mengele calls it military duty in the name of German science. He describes selection as an effort to protect a biological community, claims that he saved lives by designating prisoners fit to work, and portrays the killing of others as unavoidable. He also invokes obedience, Germany, and the authority of the Führer, while disclaiming responsibility for the camp’s machinery of murder. Rolf does not accept the explanation: he turns away rather than continuing to listen. The exchange makes clear that the language of service and science is Mengele’s defense, not a neutral account of what occurred.

Testimony and historical significance

The record of Auschwitz is also carried by survivors. At the 1985 mock trial in Jerusalem, former prisoners testified about Mengele’s experiments and the treatment of families and children; their accounts were broadcast internationally and intensified demands for his arrest. Their testimony, alongside Nyiszli’s earlier account, reverses the perspective offered by the service record: it centers the people subjected to the power Mengele had described as professional responsibility.

The Waffen-SS therefore functions in these passages not as a complete institutional history but as the beginning of a documented career and a contested postwar identity. Combat service, an award, and claimed bravery could furnish a polished account of the self; testimony from Auschwitz exposed what that account left out. The movement between military credentials and later rationalizations is the book’s central measure of the distance between a perpetrator’s language of duty and the consequences borne by his victims.