Josef Mengele had a 10-day head start on the Red Army when he joined the growing exodus of German soldiers heading west. By the time the first Russian scouts entered the gates of Auschwitz and Birkenau at 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945--and discovered corpses of the 650 prisoners killed by looting SS men -Mengele had arrived at another concentration camp 200 miles to the northwest. This was Gross Rosen, in Silesia, where bacteriological-warfare experiments on Soviet prisoners had been conducted since the beginning of 1942. [Mengele had been officially transferred to Gross Rosen together with several other Auschwitz doctors. Even during the final spasms of the war, the SS attempted to keep its killing machines operating and fully staffed.] But Mengele's stay was short-lived. By February 18 he was on the run again to avoid the advancing Russians, who liberated the camp eight days later.
As Mengele fled Gross Rosen, the man who had. secured his posting to Auschwitz moved quickly to cover his own tracks. Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verscheur, the geneticist who became both mentor and friend when Mengele joined his staff in 1937, shipped out two truckloads of documents from his research institute in Berlin, taking care to destroy all of his correspondence with Mengele.
Mengele fled westward, where he joined a retreating unit of Wehrmacht [regular army] soldiers. He stayed with them for the next two months, exchanging his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht officer's. Mengele and his newfound unit remained in central Czechoslovakia, hoping that the tide might turn against the Russians.
Read Full Article »