Second World War

The Second World War, as represented in the book, is the setting in which Nazi racial ideology became an administrative and economic system of persecution and mass murder. Auschwitz stands at its centre: selections, forced labour, and experiments were conducted there as part of a wider project that linked state policy, professional expertise, and commercial interests. The war’s end did not end the consequences; survivors’ testimony and the later pursuit of perpetrators repeatedly return the narrative to what happened during it.

Ideology and wartime society

The book places the crimes committed during the war within a political culture that treated racial hierarchy and racial hygiene as legitimate principles of social organization. In a postwar conversation recalled by Gregor, the Dürer circle presents the wartime regime not as an aberration imposed on an unwilling public but as a system that had enjoyed broad support. Its account points to academics and doctors welcoming radical reforms, the popularity of social Darwinism and racial hygiene, and the absence of public protest as Jews were persecuted and disappeared. The circle’s conclusion—that defeat had interrupted rather than extinguished Nazism—serves its own political ambition to restore Germany to its former power; it is also evidence of how these men recast wartime complicity after the defeat.

The narrative makes clear that such claims are not an excuse for individual conduct. When Rolf later asks Josef Mengele what he did at Auschwitz, Mengele describes his work as a duty to protect a biological community and purify its blood. He portrays selection as a necessary sorting of those able to work from those he deemed unfit, and claims that his decisions saved lives. He also invokes orders, German patriotism, and the structure of the camp to deny responsibility. Rolf does not accept this explanation, and turns away rather than allowing his father’s account to stand as an answer to the question.

Auschwitz: selection and killing

In the summer and autumn of 1944, Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor imprisoned at Auschwitz and forced to assist Mengele, witnessed the camp’s medicalized violence from inside its procedures. His account describes Mengele spending long periods at the Judenrampe, where four to five trainloads of deported Hungarians arrived each day. Mengele directed arrivals toward forced labour or death; Nyiszli’s testimony makes the selection process a repeated, consequential act rather than an impersonal mechanism.

Nyiszli also records experiments on twins and dwarves in the camp’s experimental barracks. The tests included blood work, spinal procedures, and transfusions between twins. His testimony describes how the research could culminate in the deaths of the subjects, after which organs were sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem. The preparations continued in the autumn of 1944, when Germany had already lost the war. Mengele’s attention to the dossiers he had collected—including his reproach over a grease stain on one folder—sets bureaucratic care and scientific classification against the human purpose of the work.

The narrative also records the broader machinery of killing around the experiments. When scarlet fever spread through barracks occupied by Hungarian Jews, the people in all three barracks were taken to the crematorium. Nyiszli describes Mengele returning to the dissection room after selections and directing further examinations. In the book’s account, the continuity of this work, even in the war’s final months, shows that the camp’s medical activity was not separate from its system of extermination.

Research and the institutions of war

Mengele’s work at Auschwitz was connected to a network beyond the camp. Nyiszli’s account says that organs were sent by mail to the institute directed by Otmar von Verschuer, with packages marked as urgent war material. The wording placed research specimens inside the language of wartime priority and logistical necessity. The book later recalls that Mengele had sent von Verschuer marrow, eyes, blood, organs, and the skeletons of children from Auschwitz.

This relationship acquires a stark postwar contrast. Von Verschuer, who had admired Hitler’s attention to biological inheritance and racial hygiene, later held a professorship in human genetics at the University of Münster and led a major genetic research centre in West Germany. Mengele wrote to him from Argentina, but received no answer; von Verschuer had destroyed their correspondence and incriminating records after the war. Neither he nor Eugen Fischer was prosecuted. Their subsequent careers, set beside the wartime transfer of research material, show how institutions and professional reputations could outlast the regime that had enabled their work.

Labour and commercial profit

The camp economy extended beyond medical research. The book states that, before Mengele arrived, Auschwitz prisoners were already producing synthetic rubber for IG Farben and arms for Krupp. Prisoners’ labour was exploited to exhaustion, while goods made from materials taken from victims entered wartime supply chains. A factory bought women’s hair from the camp authorities and made socks for submarine crews and tubing for railways. The account also names Schering Laboratories and Bayer in connection with experiments conducted on prisoners.

Mengele later rages that industrialists and other powerful figures profited from Auschwitz and resumed comfortable lives after the war, while he was left to bear the consequences. His complaint is self-serving: it presents him as abandoned rather than as a perpetrator. Yet the contrast he invokes points to a real distinction in the narrative between the camp’s many beneficiaries and the uneven postwar consequences they faced. The wartime system joined medical research, industrial production, and state violence, but its participants did not share the same fate afterward.

Testimony and the war’s afterlife

Nyiszli’s witness account, first published in Hungary in 1946 and later in France in 1961, carries the wartime experience beyond the camp’s destruction. Decades later, survivors—including twins, dwarves, and people with disabilities—gave testimony at a mock trial held at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in February 1985. Their accounts of experiments and the treatment of families brought the wartime crimes before an international audience and intensified pressure to arrest Mengele. The later proceedings do not replace the evidence of those who lived through Auschwitz; they make that evidence newly public as the last witnesses grow older.

The book’s wider temporal arc sets these testimonies against the postwar evasion of justice. It recalls how former camp doctors and researchers returned to professional life, while Nazi fugitives could continue to rely on allies, money, and official delays. The Second World War therefore remains more than a past setting in the narrative: its institutions and choices persist in postwar careers, family defenses, and the struggle to secure recognition and accountability for survivors.