Third Reich Period

The Third Reich Period appears as more than a span of Nazi rule: it is a political order whose racial doctrines were taken up by professionals and institutions, and whose crimes continued to shape lives after its defeat. Josef Mengele’s work at Auschwitz makes that order concrete, while postwar testimony and his own defenses expose the distance between its claims of scientific duty and the persecution it enabled.

Ideology and professional life

The account traces Mengele’s commitment through his own account of his career. He said that he joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and entered the association of Nazi doctors and the SS the following year. After military service, he volunteered for the Waffen-SS and served in the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in occupied Poland, before postings on the Eastern Front. In recalling this record to Eberhard Fritsch after the war, he emphasized military service and a rescue he said he had carried out, but did not identify Auschwitz by name. His presentation shows how a professional and military résumé could be recited while its most consequential work was withheld.

Nazi racial thinking was not confined to official doctrine in the book’s account. Josef Mengele later described social Darwinism and racial hygiene as popular among academics, doctors, and wider society in the 1930s. He also told his associates that prisoners in camps had been exploited by major industrial firms, including as subjects for pharmaceutical research. This is his retrospective description of a social system in which scientific authority and commercial interests could coexist with the persecution of people marked as outsiders; it is not treated as a neutral explanation of the crimes.

Auschwitz: selection and experimentation

At Auschwitz, where he served from May 1943 to January 1945, Mengele became known as the Angel of Death. The account describes him standing on the arrival platform as deportation trains brought Hungarian Jews to the camp and directing people toward different fates. The scale of those arrivals forms the backdrop to his role: selection was not an abstract administrative task but part of the process by which people were sent to forced labor or killed.

Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor forced to work for Mengele, later recorded the experiments and the conditions under which he was made to assist. His testimony describes repeated medical procedures imposed on twins and dwarfs, and states that Mengele required twins to die together so that he could compare their bodies. Some research material was sent to the institute directed by Otmar von Verschuer in Berlin. The institutional connection matters: the camp’s violence was linked to a wider research network, even as Nyiszli’s account makes clear that the work depended on coercion and the abuse of prisoners.

Nyiszli also recalled Mengele’s sustained attention to research files and laboratory work in the camp’s final months. In one instance, Mengele noticed a faint grease mark on a dossier cover and reproached Nyiszli for carelessness. That detail sits uneasily beside the purpose of the records: meticulous attention to documentation existed within a system that treated prisoners as material for selection, experimentation, and death. When scarlet fever appeared in barracks occupied by Hungarian Jews, Nyiszli reported that Mengele arranged for all three barracks to be taken to the crematorium. His testimony therefore connects routine administration and research to the camp’s machinery of mass killing.

Competing accounts of responsibility

After the war, Mengele framed his actions in the language of duty, German science, and racial purification. When his son Rolf asked what he had done at Auschwitz, Mengele argued that he had selected those able to work and claimed that this had saved lives. He presented the murder of those deemed unfit as an unavoidable consequence of war and said that he had obeyed the policies of the Führer. He further described himself as one cog in a larger system and denied responsibility for its excesses. These were his defenses, not findings that his conduct was innocent.

Rolf did not accept the explanation as an answer to his question. He listened without contradicting his father, then turned away. The exchange brings the period’s ideological language into a postwar family encounter: Mengele continued to explain Auschwitz through categories of biological community and national duty, while his son’s refusal to engage signaled the failure of that vocabulary to account for the crime.

Testimony and the period’s aftermath

Survivor testimony gave a different account of Mengele’s work. Decades after Auschwitz, former prisoners who had been twins, dwarfs, or otherwise subjected to his experiments publicly called for justice. At a mock trial held at Yad Vashem in 1985, witnesses described experiments and the treatment of children and mothers in the camp. Their accounts were broadcast internationally and helped renew pressure for Mengele’s arrest. The testimony does not merely revisit the past: it challenges the perpetrator’s postwar self-description with accounts from those who experienced his authority as prisoners.

The postwar escape network described in the book further complicates the end of the period. Nazi sympathizers in Argentina offered fugitives contacts and protection, while Perón’s government organized routes that enabled Nazi officials and collaborators to enter the country. In 1959, after West German authorities issued an arrest warrant and sought extradition, Mengele obtained Paraguayan citizenship with the help of supporters. These later events are not part of the Third Reich itself, but they show how its personnel and political loyalties survived its defeat, and how jurisdictional barriers and personal networks obstructed accountability. The period’s legacy is therefore measured both in the crimes committed under Nazi rule and in the long, contested effort to name responsibility and bring perpetrators to justice.