He also turned over a large number of photographs, letters and other items exclusively to the West German weekly magazine Bunte. Occasionally, though, his detachment could give way to outbreaks of rage and violence, especially when he encountered resistance to his sense of ''the rules.'' In this process, each part-self behaved as a functioning whole: the Auschwitz self enabling him to function in that murderous environment and to exploit its human resources with considerable efficiency; the prior self enabling him to maintain a sense of decency. After his death in 1959, his son Alois, one of Josef's younger brothers, took over the business. '', He was also intent upon gaining personal recognition as a scientist. For Mengele has long been the focus of what could be called a cult of demonic personality. (According to the Mossads file, the organization was aware that it was helping a Nazi criminal escape justice.) He would operate on children without anesthetics, infect twins with tuberculosis and spotted fever. In July 1977, the cabinets security committee secretly approved a proposal from Begin to instruct the Mossad to renew its search for Nazi war criminals, in particular Josef Mengele. All people are capable of psychic numbing, a diminished tendency or inclination to feel. . In the hospital blocks where medical treatment was given to prisoners in order to maintain the workforce, there was another kind of ''selection'' process. But it was so crude that Mengele was forced to cross borders without relying on documents, the magazine says. THOUGH USUALLY COOL IN HIS CONDUCT OF SELEC-tions, Mengele was passionate in pursuing his ''scientific research.'' He opposes renaming the street that honors Mengele's father, arguing that that would hold all members of the family responsible for doctor's crimes he considers that guilt by association. Shortly before the Red Army reached Auschwitz in January 1945, Mengele fled to Germany and hid under a false name near Gnzburg. he was very playful. . Today, four decades after his death, this is a lesson for the new generations born since World War II. And there is no lack of present-day enemies who did and apparently always will. The Mossad was still a young agency, short of resources and manpower. At the time, Rolf said he had a strong bond to his stepfather, his mother`s second husband, whom he regarded as his father. He also said he had met secretly with his father once in Switzerland in 1956 and once in Sao Paulo in 1977. ''In many ways it was a relationship like that to a stranger, or an outside person.''. Like other SS doctors there, Mengele had the task of ''selecting'' prisoners for the gas chamber - the vast majority - and for the slave labor force. Why are we still having these debates? By that time, the elder Mengele had moved on to southern Bavaria, finding refuge in the home of a German pharmacist who, Rolf says, was a fellow member of the SS. Still raging, he ordered that all the people from that transport whom he had previously selected as workers be sent to the gas chamber. Don't you think he has lived long enough?'' Several family members still live in the Bavarian city of Guenzburg, where Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911. Mengele "could have been born anywhere," said Kppler, who is 83. A new revelation was that after the war, Joseph Mengele concealed blood and cell samples from his Auschwitz experiments, recovering them and taking them with him when he fled to Argentina in 1949. . In 1982, the agency even considered abducting a 12-year-old boy and threatening to take his life unless his father, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a devoted Nazi and a childhood friend of Mengeles, gave them the information that could lead to his capture. That professor, she said, stressed ''the biological foundation of [the] social environment'' and the delineation of ''racial types.'' Many children died during these experiments; others were deliberately killed. We were always sitting together - always nude. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Caregiver accused in Manhattan Beach child sexual abuse case believed to be in Philippines, Prosecution presents closing arguments in Alex Murdaugh murder trial, Intel agencies say theres no sign adversaries were behind Havana syndrome, Spain approves menstrual leave, teen abortion and trans laws, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Shocking, impossible gas bills push restaurants to the brink of closures, 19 cafes that make L.A. a world-class coffee destination. Born in 1911, Mengele drowned off the coast of Brazil in 1979, just shy of 68 years old a fact that his family kept secret. Zofka believes that the doctor was motivated by a "boundless cynicism" that allowed him to see his victims not as human beings, but as "material that is already dead. They dealt with physical characteristics and abnormalities and, in each case, emphasized the role of heredity -an emphasis in keeping with trends in German and international scholarship at the time. The business is one of the largest West German farm equipment makers, with annual sales of $83 million. However, it has since suffered losses because of the effects of some European Community farm-policy decisions and the April 26 Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Jaumann told the newspaper. ''By marrying the widow of his brother, Josef Mengele may have taken possession of his share in the company.''. Indeed, during recent weeks he had already begun to fall from grace as a symbol of pure evil. But his superiors were worried by his eagerness, ordered him back to Israel and replaced him. After one little twitch the child was dead, whereupon Dr. Mengele had it taken into the corpse chamber. He made that clear in an early meeting with Yitzhak Hofi, who was then the director of the Mossad. That kind of sadism was manifest in his smiling enthusiasm at selections. And survivors tell of Mengele's proclaiming on Tisha B'Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the first and second temples, ''We will have a concert.'' '', For many of the twins, the strength of their warm feelings toward Mengele was such that they found it impossible in later years to believe the evil things they heard about him. The German daily newspaper Die Welt has reported that Rolf visited his father in Brazil in 1977 or 1978. The firms business amounted to $110 million in 1984. In it, he offered ''his deepest sympathy'' to the Auschwitz victims and their relatives and explained that the reason for his silence was to protect the people who had aided his father and thus might be vulnerable to prosecution. When the judge commented, ''Mengele cannot have been there all the time,'' the witness answered: ''In my opinion, always. (In the end, Rudel died before the Mossad decided whether to go through with the operation.). He was ''Clean, clean, clean!'' ", From the "Guilt without atonement" series, a project of DW's Polish department, the Interia portal and the Wirtualna Polska media group. He could quiet his fears of death in that death-dominated environment by performing the ultimate act of power over another person: murder. An inmate radiologist told of a pair of gypsy twins, ''two splendid boys of 7 or 8, whom we were studying from all aspects - from the 16 or 18 different specialties we represented.'' Viewed in this light, Josef Mengele emerges as he really was: a visionary ideologue, an efficiently murderous functionary, a diligent careerist - and disturbingly human. FRANKFURT, West Germany (AP) _ Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele has a son who works as a lawyer in the Black Forest region of West Germany, while other relatives run a prosperous farm machinery company in Bavaria. Rolf Mengele is a lawyer in the southern German city of Freiburg. . His main interest was the study of twins, but he carried out a variety of projects with different groups of human subjects. In the end we decided that we would focus on one more target, Mengele, but Begin, who was a very emotional man, was disappointed, Hofi said. What is more, he could exercise total control over them. ''Angel of Death'' kept silent, shielding the secret that protected one of the most infamous Nazi fugitives. Photostatic copies were sent to all members of the Mengele family, which owns a prosperous farm machinery business in Guenzburg, Bavaria. The world watched in fascination as scientific examination seemed to confirm that these were the right bones. Prisoners were struck by the stark contrast between his calm, playful manner and the horror of what he was doing. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress the girl and put her on the dissecting table. Being a twin gave one a much better chance to survive. By 1943, he held the rank of Sturmbannfhrer, the equivalent of a major, and was transferred to Auschwitz, where he worked as camp doctor. Dr. Josef Mengele was born in 1911. My new research sheds light on a time when realism and maturity shaped the agencys priorities, rather than an understandable desire to spill Nazi blood. This moral obligation also was a motive for him, he said, to offer his cooperation so the past would not be swept under the rug but diagnosed down to its spiritual and historic origins. A statue to honor the doctor and the children he cared for was erected in Gnzburg in 2003. . Such characteristics can be assumed to be genetically determined in other people as well. ''Instinctively, I would recommend, as you probably would too, that everything be burnt up at once,'' he continued. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE man who arrived in Auschwitz in May 1943 is not especially remarkable. His father, Rolf relates, was delighted and eager to join the military. To Alois, they were the hands of someone who had never worked before, an officer`s hands perhaps, not the hands of a soldier. The man said he was a career soldier and an East German refugee from Goerlitz. Yet, as far as we know, he had neither killed nor maimed prior to Auschwitz, and had in fact functioned in a more or less integrated way. 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