Schutzstaffel (SS)

The Schutzstaffel (SS) is presented as both a career-making institution and an instrument through which racial ideology acquired administrative and medical force. Josef Mengele joined it in 1938, served in its medical apparatus and on the Eastern Front, and later worked at Auschwitz. The book follows the consequences of those roles beyond the war: into Mengele’s self-justification, the concealment that enabled his escape, and the testimony of survivors who sought justice decades later.

Membership, Training, and Wartime Roles

Mengele’s SS career began alongside his entry into the Nazi Party and the association of Nazi doctors. When he later recounted his service to Eberhard Fritsch, the publisher of Der Weg, he described himself as a medical expert in the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in occupied Poland. He had also volunteered for the Waffen-SS and served with SS Division Wiking after the invasion of the Soviet Union, including on operations in Ukraine and the Caucasus. He emphasized military service and an award for bravery, presenting his record as that of a decorated soldier while omitting Auschwitz by name.

The distinction between an institution’s official roles and Mengele’s own account matters in the book. He could describe assignments, campaigns, and honors as a coherent service history, yet leave out the camp work that defined his crimes. The narrative also notes his refusal to receive the blood-group tattoo required of SS members. After the war, when American military police arrested him, the absence of that identifying mark helped him pass as an ordinary soldier; he was released after a few weeks. A small act of evasion thus became consequential in the collapse of his wartime identity into a false postwar one.

Auschwitz: Medical Authority and Camp Operations

At Auschwitz, the SS role shown here joined medical status to the power to decide who would be selected for forced labour and who would be sent to immediate death. Mengele stood on the arrival ramp as transports of Hungarian Jews reached the camp and directed people to one side or the other. His work did not end with selection: he used prisoners, including twins and dwarfs, as subjects for experiments intended to advance racial and reproductive research. The book sets these actions against his earlier ambition to serve German racial policy, exposing how the language of medicine and scientific purpose accompanied decisions that destroyed lives.

Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor forced to assist Mengele, provides a survivor’s account of this work. His testimony describes Mengele’s sustained attention to research and the records he kept on twins, even late in 1944, when Germany’s defeat was approaching. Nyiszli’s account also makes clear that his own medical work took place under compulsion: he performed examinations and dissections at Mengele’s direction. The SS setting was therefore not simply a backdrop to individual research. It gave Mengele access to prisoners, enforced his authority over them, and allowed him to treat human beings as material for an ideological project.

Mengele was not the only SS doctor associated with this system. The book recalls twenty SS doctors assigned to Auschwitz and names Horst Schumann, Carl Clauberg, Victor Capesius, Friedrich Entress, and August Hirt among other perpetrators. Their conduct differed, but the examples include coercive sterilization practices, experiments, theft from victims, and racialized research. This context places Mengele within a wider group of professionals who brought medical or technical expertise to the camp. It also prevents his crimes from being framed as an isolated aberration detached from other SS personnel and the institutions in which they operated.

Escape, False Identity, and Postwar Continuity

The SS appears after the war not as a functioning wartime organization in the scenes described, but through former members and the identities they continued to use. In Argentina, Perón’s government organized routes for Nazi fugitives and sent Carlos Fuldner, a former SS captain, to Europe. Fuldner helped coordinate escape networks that carried war criminals to South America. When Mengele sought help from Fritsch, he introduced himself through his military record and rank, while concealing the most incriminating part of his service. The former officer could still find people willing to offer practical help and a community of sympathizers.

Years later, during a visit from his son Rolf in Brazil, Mengele defended his Auschwitz work as a military duty undertaken for German science. He described selection and the removal of those he deemed unable to work as necessary to protect a racialized biological community, and insisted that he had obeyed orders and lacked a choice. Rolf did not accept the explanation, though he let his father continue speaking in the hope that he might acknowledge guilt or regret. Instead, Mengele’s account reworked SS service into a defense: policy became duty, murder became selection, and personal responsibility was displaced onto orders and the institution. The scene shows the persistence of the ideological vocabulary associated with his service, even after the regime that had empowered him was gone.

Survivor Testimony and Accountability

The book returns to the SS’s crimes through the testimony of people who survived Mengele’s experiments. At the fortieth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, survivors—including twins, dwarfs, and people with disabilities—called for his capture. Their appeal led into the 1985 mock trial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where survivors testified over three days about Mengele’s treatment of prisoners and families. The accounts challenged the image of the camp as a place where medical authority could be separated from violence: they described decisions and experiments made under SS power, and named the consequences for those subjected to them.

The testimony reached audiences around the world and intensified the pursuit of Mengele. The United States, Israel, and West Germany renewed their efforts, and rewards for his capture rose sharply. In this account, the SS is therefore present not only in the wartime chain of authority that enabled Mengele’s actions, but also in the later struggle to make those actions publicly legible and legally answerable. The survivors’ testimony counters the perpetrator’s language of duty with evidence of individual choices, institutional power, and enduring harm.