Third Reich

The Third Reich is presented not as a closed historical episode but as an ideological and institutional order that survived its defeat in the memories, justifications, and ambitions of its former adherents. Through Josef Mengele’s conduct at Auschwitz concentration camp, his postwar defenses, and the delayed testimony of survivors, the narrative links Nazi racial doctrine to organized violence and to the struggle over who would be held responsible afterward.

Political ideals and the imagined return

In the late 1940s, Juan Perón’s government promised national renewal through social reform, public services, and state control of strategic industries. Eva Perón became a public emblem of that project, visiting hospitals and factories, distributing assistance, and addressing crowds. The government also tightened control over universities, the press, and public institutions. Its mass politics and authoritarian measures form a political contrast to the exiled Nazis’ own outlook; they do not make Peronism and the Third Reich equivalent.

The exiles gathered around a different imagined national future. At a Buenos Aires rally in August 1951, two Nazi observers, Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Gregor, watched the crowd acclaim Eva Perón’s candidacy for vice president. They dismissed the spectacle as evidence of a comic-opera dictatorship, while an illness rumor about Eva Perón led Rudel to warn that Perón’s position might be in danger. Their contempt for the rally sits alongside their own continuing attachment to authoritarian politics.

A circle known as the Dürer men’s club rejected the postwar democracy imposed on Germany and expected Nazism to return. Its members followed German news and the journal Der Weg, believed that the population had not repudiated the regime, and treated defeat as an interruption of Germany’s ascent. Gregor presented the Nazi era as a society-wide project: academics and doctors had welcomed radical reforms, social Darwinism and racial hygiene had broad appeal, and industry had profited from prisoners’ forced labor. The group’s account did not amount to remorse. It converted complicity into an argument for renewed political struggle, while casting West Germany’s integration with the United States and western Europe as a betrayal.

Auschwitz: ideology enacted as policy

The account of the Third Reich becomes concrete in Miklós Nyiszli’s testimony. A Jewish doctor compelled to work for Mengele, Nyiszli belonged to the Sonderkommando and later recorded his experiences in a book published in Hungary in 1946 and in France in 1961. He described Mengele’s regular presence at the selection ramp, where he directed deportees toward death or forced labor, and presented the decisions as a patriotic duty. The narration places that language beside the scale of the deportations, exposing the distance between official justification and human consequence.

At Auschwitz, Mengele’s medical authority served both selection and experimentation. Nyiszli described tests imposed on twins and dwarves, the collection of specimens, and the transfer of organs to the institute in Berlin directed by Otmar von Verschuer. The routine of research continued even as Germany was losing the war. Nyiszli recalled Mengele’s close attention to the dossiers he had assembled, including his reproach over a grease mark on one file. The detail makes the contrast stark: meticulous concern for records coexisted with the destruction of the people those records classified.

The camp system also joined state violence to institutional and commercial benefit. The account names IG Farben and Krupp as companies using camp labor, and describes drug testing by Bayer and research funded by Schering Laboratories. In his later recollections, Mengele railed that industrialists and politicians had profited while he was left to bear the consequences. That complaint is his own self-interested framing; the evidence of corporate participation does not absolve him or turn his grievance into an admission of responsibility.

Postwar defenses and continuities

Mengele continued to explain his work through the Nazi vocabulary of racial purification, biological community, and duty. When Rolf asked what he had done at Auschwitz, Mengele described selection as military necessity and claimed that he had saved those able to work. He invoked obedience, legality, and German science, denied responsibility for the killing system, and cast himself as one cog among many. Rolf did not accept the explanation as understanding; he turned away rather than continue listening. Their exchange makes the postwar defense visible as a struggle over the meaning of the past, not as a neutral account of what happened.

Mengele’s recollections also expose the persistence of the professional world around Nazi racial research. He resented that many former academics, doctors, and participants in the T4 program had returned to family and professional life. He remembered Eugen Fischer’s retirement and publications, and Otmar von Verschuer’s appointment at the University of Münster and later leadership of a major genetic research center in West Germany. Mengele had sent von Verschuer material from Auschwitz; after the war, von Verschuer destroyed correspondence and incriminating archives and did not answer Mengele’s letters from Argentina. Neither he nor Fischer was prosecuted. The contrast between their postwar careers and Mengele’s fugitive life sharpens the book’s account of uneven accountability.

In Brazil, the past remained part of Mengele’s domestic and political routine. During television evenings with the Stammer family, he praised military dictators, approved of the Soviet intervention in Prague, and condemned student protests in 1968 as mistaken ideas of freedom. He also invoked the Third Reich’s anti-smoking campaigns when lecturing Geza Stammer about smoking. These recurring references show that the regime persisted for Mengele not merely as memory, but as a standard by which he judged contemporary politics and daily conduct.

Survivor testimony and historical afterlife

On the fortieth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation in January 1985, survivors—including twins, dwarves, and people with disabilities who had been subjected to Mengele’s experiments—called publicly for his capture. A mock trial followed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Over three days, witnesses described the experiments and their effects; their testimony was broadcast internationally. The proceeding brought the experiences of survivors into direct opposition with Mengele’s claims of duty and scientific purpose.

The testimony had immediate political consequences. Before the mock trial ended, the United States attorney general called for the case file to be reviewed and for Mengele’s arrest. A disputed memorandum suggesting that American authorities had held him in 1947 triggered public controversy, while the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Israeli authorities, and West German officials pressed for renewed pursuit. The testimony could not undo the crimes or guarantee an arrest, but it changed the public terms of the story: the former fugitive’s own defenses were no longer the only account in circulation. The Third Reich’s afterlife, as the narrative presents it, lies both in the institutions and careers that survived and in the survivors’ insistence that its crimes be named.