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Sup­ple­ment­ing a large body of For The Record research deal­ing with Nazi sci­en­tific projects, this pro­gram explores aspects of Third Reich research that impinge on events long after the close of World War II. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the muta­genic tran­quil­izer thalido­mide, the broad­cast high­lights recent research from two dif­fer­ent books indi­cat­ing that the drug was orig­i­nally devel­oped by the Nazi IG Far­ben chem­i­cal com­pany and per­haps tested on con­cen­tra­tion camp inmates.

Next, the pro­gram reviews the IG Far­ben devel­op­ment of methadone, orig­i­nally devel­oped by the Third Reich as a syn­thetic mor­phine to treat casu­al­ties and–according to for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tor Joseph Borkin– named “dolophine” named in honor of Adolph Hitler. Of course, methadone is used to treat heroin addic­tion. Heroin was also devel­oped by an IG Far­ben company—Bayer, the devel­oper of aspirin.

Most of the pro­gram deals with “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele’s research on twins. An Argen­tine author claims that a Brazil­ian town with an unusu­ally large num­ber of twins was the site of research by Men­gele in the 1960’s. Infa­mous for–among other things–his bru­tal research on twins at Auschwitz dur­ing World War II, Men­gele suc­cess­fully escaped Europe and per­pet­u­ated his career as part of the Under­ground Reich in Latin America.

Gen­er­ally viewed as iso­lated and an aber­ra­tion, Mengele’s Auschwitz work with twins was the direct out­growth of main­stream eugen­ics research. Long pre­oc­cu­pied with the study of twins, eugeni­cists cel­e­brated the Nazi dic­ta­tor­ship for its abil­ity to use coer­cion to achieve their objec­tive of detailed, inten­sive research of the subject.

Lav­ishly funded by the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion well into the tenure of the Third Reich, the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tutes were the pri­mary focal point of eugen­ics research on twins. Men­gele con­ducted his bru­tal, lethal research at Auschwitz in con­junc­tion with the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tutes and his intel­lec­tual men­tor at that insti­tu­tion, Dr. Frei­herr Otmar von Verschuer.

Con­clud­ing with exam­i­na­tion of the alleged death of Nazi fugi­tive Dr. Arib­ert Heim, the pro­gram notes the fail­ure of his Amer­i­can cap­tors to pros­e­cute him for his deadly exper­i­ments in the con­cen­tra­tion camps. Is it pos­si­ble that Heim may have par­tic­i­pated in post­war research for the U.S. under Project Paper­clip? (Paper­clip was the pro­gram under which the Amer­i­cans recruited top Nazi scientists–many of them SS offi­cers and/or war crim­i­nals of the first order.)

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Nazi muta­genic research; the pos­si­bil­ity that thalido­mide might have been uti­lized in con­junc­tion with that muta­genic research; doubts among Nazi hunters that Heim was actu­ally dead; exam­i­na­tion of the Rock­e­feller Foundation’s aware­ness of the true nature of the Nazi regime dur­ing the time it con­tin­ued to fund the Kaiser Wil­helm Institutes.

1. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of Nazi chem­i­cal giant I.G. Farben’s influ­ence in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal busi­ness, the pro­gram accesses infor­ma­tion about the tran­quil­izer thalido­mide. When pre­scribed for preg­nant women in the early 1960’s, it led to hor­ri­bly deformed babies. A new book claims that the drug was actu­ally invented by the Nazis and tested in con­cen­tra­tion camps dur­ing World War II.

“The morn­ing sick­ness drug thalido­mide, which caused preg­nant women to give birth to babies with­out arms and legs, was first devel­oped by the Nazis, prob­a­bly as part of their chem­i­cal weapons pro­gramme, accord­ing to new research.

Two sep­a­rate aca­d­e­mics have revealed the dis­cov­ery of doc­u­ments indi­cat­ing that the drug did not orig­i­nate with Chemie Grunen­thal, the post-war Ger­man chem­i­cal firm, as has always been claimed.

If, as their research sug­gests, thalido­mide was first devel­oped by sci­en­tists work­ing in wartime Ger­many, it could have impli­ca­tions for the lia­bil­ity of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment. So far it has given com­pen­sa­tion only to Ger­man vic­tims, although the drug was dis­trib­uted in 46 countries.

Thou­sands of the drug’s vic­tims are still bat­tling for increased finan­cial aid to help them cope with its legacy. There are 457 thalido­miders remain­ing in the UK; 2,700 in Ger­many; and a total of up to 6,000 worldwide.s

Moth­ers pre­scribed it between its launch in 1957 and 1961, when it was removed from the mar­ket, gave birth to chil­dren who lacked proper arms, legs, hands and feet. Some had also suf­fered brain dam­age and other disabilities.

Dr Mar­tin John­son, direc­tor of the Thalido­mide Trust which pro­vides help for sur­viv­ing vic­tims in the UK, has writ­ten a paper detail­ing evi­dence sug­gest­ing that the drug had been devel­oped before Grunen­thal secured a patent in 1954.

The com­pany has always main­tained that thalido­mide was cre­ated by chance in 1953 by sci­en­tists who had tried to cre­ate an anti­his­t­a­mine but ended up with a tranquillizer.

John­son sus­pects that it was actu­ally first pro­duced as a pos­si­ble anti­dote to nerve tox­ins such as sarin, which was devel­oped by Otto Ambros, a Nazi sci­en­tist who joined Grunen­thal after the war.

‘It is now appear­ing increas­ingly likely that thalido­mide was the last war crime of the Nazis,’ said Johnson.

One doc­u­ment unearthed by the Thalido­mide Trust shows that Grunen­thal appar­ently pur­chased the trade name of the drug — Con­ter­gan — and there­fore prob­a­bly the sub­stance itself, from a French firm, Rhone-Poulenc, which was under Nazi con­trol dur­ing the war years.

A con­fi­den­tial let­ter sent from Astra, which held the Swedish licence to dis­trib­ute thalido­mide, to its Nor­we­gian sub­sidiary in 1958 states: ‘Unfor­tu­nately we can’t use the name Con­ter­gan in the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries, since Grunen­thal obtained the name exclu­sively for the Ger­man mar­ket through an agree­ment with Rhone-Poulenc.’

From 1942 onwards Rhone-Poulenc reg­is­tered 14 sim­i­lar drugs, all end­ing with the same ‘ergan’ suf­fix, a char­ac­ter­is­tic unique to the firm. Many of the drugs shared prop­er­ties with thalido­mide, such as affect­ing the ner­vous system.”

“Thalido­mide ‘Cre­ated by Nazis’” [TimesOn­line]; The Aus­tralian; 2/08/2009.

2. Next, the broad­cast sets forth an inter­est­ing piece of the his­tory of I.G. Farben’s history.

“Bayer’s phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ven­ture was even larger [than that of Hoechst]. Out of its lab­o­ra­to­ries emerged aspirin, the world’s most famous home rem­edy for pain and fever. Bayer was also respon­si­ble for the intro­duc­tion of heroin, which it sold as a cure for mor­phine addic­tion and as a cough sup­pres­sant, espe­cially effec­tive in chil­dren. Later the Bayer lab­o­ra­to­ries devel­oped methadone, in prepa­ra­tion for World War II, as a syn­thetic sub­sti­tute for mor­phine. It was orig­i­nally named Dolophine, in honor of Adolf Hitler. Today, methadone is used prin­ci­pally in the treat­ment of heroin addiction.”

(The Crime and Pun­ish­ment of I.G. Far­ben; Joseph Borkin; Copy­right 1978 [HC] by The Free Press [a divi­sion of MacMil­lan]; ISBN 0–02-904630–0; pp. 6–7.)

3. A remark­able account from Brazil alleges that Josef Mengele–Auschwitz’s infa­mous “Angel of Death”–may have influ­enced the fact that a town with a large Ger­manic pop­u­la­tion has a remark­able num­ber of twin births.

“The steely hearted ‘Angel of Death’, whose mis­sion was to cre­ate a mas­ter race fit for the Third Reich, was the res­i­dent medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in Jan­u­ary 1945.

His task was to carry out exper­i­ments to dis­cover by what method of genetic quirk twins were pro­duced – and then to arti­fi­cially increase the Aryan birthrate for his mas­ter, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a his­to­rian claims, Mengele’s noto­ri­ous exper­i­ments may have borne fruit.

For years sci­en­tists have failed to dis­cover why as many as one in five preg­nan­cies in a small Brazil­ian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But res­i­dents of Can­dido Godoi now claim that Men­gele made repeated vis­its there in the early 1960s, pos­ing at first as a vet but then offer­ing med­ical treat­ment to the women of the town.

Shut­tling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he man­aged to evade jus­tice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi mas­ter race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Men­gele: the Angel of Death in South Amer­ica, the Argen­tine his­to­rian Jorge Cama­rasa, a spe­cial­ist in the post-war Nazi flight to South Amer­ica, has painstak­ingly pieced together the Nazi doctor’s mys­te­ri­ous later years.

After speak­ing to the towns­peo­ple of Can­dido Godoi, he is con­vinced that Men­gele con­tin­ued his genetic exper­i­ments with twins – with star­tling results.

He reveals how, after work­ing with cat­tle farm­ers in Argentina to increase their stock, Men­gele fled the coun­try after fel­low Nazi, Adolf Eich­mann, was kid­napped by Israeli agents.

He claims that Men­gele found refuge in the Ger­man enclave of Colo­nias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make reg­u­lar trips to another pre­dom­i­nantly Ger­man com­mu­nity just over the bor­der in Brazil – the farm­ing com­mu­nity of Can­dido Godoi.

And, Mr Cama­ras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

‘I think Can­dido Godoi may have been Mengele’s lab­o­ra­tory, where he finally man­aged to ful­fill his dreams of cre­at­ing a mas­ter race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans,’ he said.

‘There is tes­ti­mony that he attended women, fol­lowed their preg­nan­cies, treated them with new types of drugs and prepa­ra­tions, that he talked of arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion in human beings, and that he con­tin­ued work­ing with ani­mals, pro­claim­ing that he was capa­ble of get­ting cows to pro­duce male twins.’

The urbane Ger­man who arrived in Can­dido Godoi was remem­bered with fond­ness by many of the townspeople.

‘He told us he was a vet,’ said Aloisi Fin­kler, a local farmer inter­viewed by Mr Cama­rasa. ‘He asked about ill­nesses we had among our ani­mals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cul­tured and dig­ni­fied man.’

Another farmer, Leonardo Bou­fler, said: ‘He went from farm to farm check­ing the ani­mals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion of cows and humans, which we thought impos­si­ble as in those days it was unheard of.’

But the Nazi eugeni­cist did not con­cen­trate on ani­mals alone.

A for­mer mayor and town doc­tor, Anen­cia Flo­res da Silva, set out to try to solve the town’s mys­tery. He inter­viewed hun­dreds of peo­ple, and dis­cov­ered one char­ac­ter who crept on crop­ping up: an itin­er­ant medic call­ing him­self Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: ‘In the tes­ti­monies we col­lected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had vari­cose veins and gave them a potion which he car­ried in a bot­tle, or tablets which he brought with him. Some­times he car­ried out den­tal work, and every­one remem­bers he used to take blood.’

The peo­ple of Can­dido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war crim­i­nal was an inad­ver­tent guest of theirs for sev­eral years in the early 1960s. The town’s offi­cial crest shows two iden­ti­cal pro­files and a road sign wel­comes vis­i­tors to a ‘Farm­ing Com­mu­nity and Land of the Twins’. There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

While the twins birthrate varies widely in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, it is typ­i­cally about one in 80 preg­nan­cies – a sta­tis­tic that has left Mr Cama­rasa cer­tain in his claim that Men­gele was suc­cess­fully pur­su­ing his dreams of cre­at­ing a mas­ter race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.

‘Nobody knows for sure exactly what date Men­gele arrived in Can­dido Godoi, but the first twins were born in 1963, the year in which we first hear reports of his pres­ence,’ he said.”

“Nazi Angel of Death Josef Men­gele ‘Cre­ated Twin Town in Brazil’” by Nick Evans; Telegraph.co.uk; 1/23/2009.

4. Pro­vid­ing detail on the eugen­ics community’s long and fun­da­men­tal focus on the study of twins, the broad­cast notes the Rock­e­feller Foundation’s lav­ish fund­ing of the Kaiser Wil­helm Institutes–the lat­ter a foun­da­tional ele­ment of eugen­ics research and, as we will see, Mengele’s work on twins at Auschwitz.

“Rock­e­feller money con­tin­ued to stream across the Atlantic. The 1933 finan­cial books of the Insti­tute for Anthro­pol­ogy, Human Hered­ity and Eugen­ics reflected the foundation’s con­tin­u­ing impact. Page four of the bal­ance sheet: Rock­e­feller paid cler­i­cal costs asso­ci­ated with research on twins. . . . The Rock­e­feller Foundation’s agenda was strictly bio­log­i­cal to the exclu­sion of pol­i­tics. The foun­da­tion wanted to dis­cover the car­ri­ets of defec­tive blood–even if it meant fund­ing Nazi-controlled insti­tu­tions. More­over, Rock­e­feller exec­u­tives knew their money car­ried power, and they used it to ensure that the most tal­ented sci­en­tists con­tin­ued at the var­i­ous Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tutes, fre­quently shield­ing them from peri­odic Nazi purges. . . .

With each pass­ing day, the world was flooded with more Jew­ish refugees, more noisy anti-Nazi boy­cotts and protest marches against any sci­en­tific or com­mer­cial exchanges with Ger­many, more pub­lic demands to iso­late the Reich, and more shock­ing head­lines doc­u­ment­ing Nazi atroc­i­ties and anti-Jewish leg­is­la­tion. Still, none of this gave pause4 to America’s eugeni­cists. Cor­re­spon­dence on joint research flowed freely across the Atlantic. Amer­i­can eugeni­cists, and their many orga­ni­za­tions and com­mit­tees, from New York to Cal­i­for­nia and all points in between, main­tained and multi­u­plied their con­tacts with every ech­e­lon of offi­cial and semi­of­fi­cial Ger­man eugen­ics. As the Reich descended into greater depths of depraved mis­treat­ment and impov­er­ish­ment of Jews, as well as ter­ri­to­r­ial threats against its neigh­bors, these con­tacts seemed all the more insu­lated from the human tragedy unfold­ing within Europe. Eager and coop­er­a­tive let­ters, reports, telegrams and mem­o­randa did not num­ber in the nun­dreds, but in the thou­sands of pages per month.

While con­cen­tra­tion camps, pau­per­iza­tion and repres­sion flour­ished in Nazi Ger­many, and while refugees filled ships and trains telling hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ries of tor­ture and inhu­man­ity, it was busi­ness as usual for eugenics. . . .”

The War Against the Weak; Edwin Black; Four Walls Eight Win­dows Press; Copy­right 2003 by Edwin Black; ISBN 1–56858-258–7; pp. 302–303.

5. Next, the broad­cast sets forth the pri­mary posi­tion of the study of twins in eugen­ics research.

“Hered­i­tar­i­ans sought twins of all ages–not just children–for proper study. The fam­ily tree of a New Eng­land fam­ily of twins, includ­ing one pair ninety-one years of age, fas­ci­nated eugeni­cists. Geneti­cists exca­vated old jour­nals to dis­cover even ear­lier exam­ples, such as s sev­en­teenth cen­tury Russ­ian woman who gave birth twenty-seven times,m each time pro­duc­ing twins, triplets or quadru­plets, yield­ing a total of sixty-nine children.

Race and twins quickly became an issue for Amer­i­can eugenicists. . . .

Diag­nos­tic and phys­i­o­log­i­cal devel­op­ments in twin stud­ies from any sec­tor of the med­ical sci­ences were of con­stant inter­est to eugenic read­ers. So Eugeni­cal News reg­u­larly sum­ma­rized arti­cles from the gen­eral med­ical lit­er­a­ture to feed eugeni­cists’ unend­ing fas­ci­na­tion with the topic. In 1922, when a state med­ical jour­nal reported using stetho­scopes to mon­i­tor a twin preg­nancy, it was reported in Eugeni­cal News. When a Ger­man clin­i­cal jour­nal pub­lished a study of tumors in twins, this too was reported in Eugeni­cal News. When a Ger­man clin­i­cal jour­nal pub­lished a study of tumors in twins, this too was reported in Eugeni­cal News.

With each pass­ing issue, Eugeni­cal News ded­i­cated more and more space to the topic. The list of such reports became long. By the early 1920’s, arti­cles on twins became increas­ingly instruc­tive. One typ­i­cal arti­cle explained how to more pre­cisely ver­ify the pres­ence of iden­ti­cal twins using a cap­il­lary micro­scope. Jour­nal of Hered­ity also made twins a fre­quent sub­ject in its pages. . . .

Every lead­ing eugenic text­book included a sec­tion on twins. [Paul] Popenoe’s Applied Eugen­ics explained that iden­ti­cal twins ‘start lives as halves of the same whole’ but ‘become more unlike if they were brought up apart.’ . . .

In a sim­i­lar vein, most inter­na­tional eugenic and genetic con­fer­ences included pre­sen­ta­tions or exhibits on twins–their dis­par­ity or sim­i­lar­ity, their sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to tuber­cu­lo­sis, their likes and dis­likes. R.A. Fisher opened one of his lec­tures to the Sec­ond Inter­na­tional Con­gress of Eugen­ics with the phrase: ‘The sub­ject of the gen­e­sis of human twins. . .has a spe­cial impor­tance for eugenicists.’ . . .

The quest for a supe­rior race con­tin­ued to inter­sect with the avail­abil­ity of twins. In the July-August 1935 edi­tion of Eugeni­cal News, Dr. Alfred Gor­don pub­lished a lengthy arti­cle enti­tled ‘The Prob­lems of Hered­ity and Eugenics.’ . . .

There were so few twins to study that sur­geons in the eugen­ics com­mu­nity passed along their lat­est dis­cov­er­ies, one by one, to advance the field’s com­mon knowledge. . . .”

Ibid., pp. 350–351.

6. With the ascen­sion of the Hitler regime, the scarcity of twins for eugen­ics study was alleviated.

“All that changed when Hitler came to power in 1933. Ger­many surged ahead in its study of twins. . . Twins were now increas­ingly sought to helpo com­bat hered­i­tary dis­eases and con­di­tions, real and imag­ined. [Otmar Frei­herr von] Verschuer’s book, Twins and Tuber­cu­lo­sis, was pub­lished in 1933 and received a favor­able review in 1933 and received a favor­able review in Jour­nal of Hered­ity. . . .

But many more twins would be needed to accom­plish the sweep­ing research envi­sioned by the archi­tects of Hitler’s mas­ter race. In early Decem­ber of 1935, Ver­schuer told a cor­re­spon­dent for the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion that eugen­ics had moved into a new phase. . . . The arti­cle went on to cite Verschuer’s view that mean­ing­ful research would require entire families–from chil­dren to grand­par­ents. In plain words this meant gath­er­ing larger num­bers of twins in one place for simul­ta­ne­ous investigation. . . .”

Ibid.; p. 352.

7. The Nazi regime proved to be an ideal vehi­cle for the phys­i­cal col­lec­tion of twins for the pur­pose of eugen­ics research.

“Amer­i­can eugeni­cist T.U.H. Ellinger was in Ger­many shortly after the decree to visit with Fis­cher at the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute for Anthro­pol­ogy, Hered­ity and Eugen­ics. In a Jour­nal of Hered­ity essay on his visit, Ellinger flip­pantly reported to his col­leagues, ‘Twins have, of course, for a long time been a favorite mate­r­ial for the study of the rel­a­tive impor­tance of hered­ity and envi­ron­ment, of nature and nur­ture. It does, how­ever, take a dic­ta­tor­ship to oblige some ten thou­sand pairs of twins, as well as triplets and even quadru­plets, to report to a sci­en­tific insti­tute at reg­u­lara inter­vals for all kinds of record­ings and tests.’

When twins did report to the Insti­tute for Anthro­pol­ogy, Human Hered­ity and Eugen­ics, they were often placed in small, specially-constructed exam­i­na­tion rooms, each lined with two-way mir­rors and motion pic­ture cam­era lenses cam­ou­flaged into the wall­pa­per. The staff proudly showed Ellinger all of these facil­i­ties. How­ever, eugeni­cists at the insti­tute could only go so far with mere observations.

Reich sci­en­tists needed more if they were to take the next step in cre­at­ing a super race resis­tant to dis­ease and capa­ble of trans­mit­ting the best traits. Autop­sies were required to dis­cover how spe­cific organs and bod­ily processes reacted to var­i­ous exper­i­ments. Ver­scuer needed more twins and the free­dom to kill them. The high­est ranks of the Hitler regime agreed, includ­ing Inte­rior Min­is­ter Frick, who ran the con­cen­tra­tion camps, and SS Chief Hein­rich Himm­ler. Mil­lions of dis­pens­able human beings from across Europe–Jews, Gyp­sies and other undesirables–were pass­ing through Hitler’s camps to be effi­ciently mur­dered. Among these mil­lions, there were bound to be thou­sands of twins.

Shortly after Ver­schuer took over for Fis­cher at the Insti­tute for Anthro­pol­ogy, Human Hered­ity and Eugen­ics, he pro­posed a Zwill­ingslager or ‘twins camp,’ within Auschwitz. . . . The camp was approved and was bureau­crat­i­cally filed under the key­word ‘Twins Camp.’

At the end of May 1943, Men­gele arrived in Auschwitz, where he took con­trol of the ramps where Jews were brought in. Ver­schuer noti­fied the Ger­man Research Soci­ety, ‘My assis­tant, Dr. Josef Men­gele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Haupt­sturm­fuhrer [cap­tain] and camp physi­cian in the Auschwitz con­cen­tra­tion camp. Anthro­po­log­i­cal teswt­ing of the most diverse racial groups in this con­cen­tra­tion camp are being car­ried out with per­mis­sion of the SS Reichs­fuhrer [Himmler].’

Nazi Ger­many had now car­ried eugen­ics fur­ther than any dared expect. The future of the mas­ter race that would thrive in Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lay in twins. For this rea­son, there would now be a spe­cial class of vic­tims of Auschwitz. There would be a spe­cial camp, spe­cial med­ical facil­i­ties and spe­cial laboratories–all for the twins. . .”

Ibid.; pp. 354–355.

8. Although Mengele’s ghastly work with twins at Auschwitz became fairly well-known after the war, few real­ize that this endeavor was an exten­sion of the eugen­ics work at the Kaiser Wil­helm Institutes–recipients of lav­ish Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion funding.

“While evi­dence of mass mur­der in the trenches of Rus­sia and the gas cham­bers of Poland was sys­tem­at­i­cally destroyed, Mengele’s mur­ders were enshrined in the pro­to­cols of sci­ence. Mengele’s ghastly files did not remain his pri­vate mania, con­fined to Auschwitz. Every case was metic­u­lously anno­tated, employ­ing the best sci­en­tific method pris­oner doc­tors could muster. Then the files were sent to Verschuer’s offices at the Insti­tute for Anthro­pol­ogy, Human Hered­ity and Eugen­ics in Berlin-Dahlem for study.

An adult pris­oner, cho­sen to help care for the youngest twins, recounted, ‘The moment a pair of twins arrived in the bar­rack, they were asked to com­plete a detailed ques­tion­naire from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Insti­tute in Berlin. One of my duties as [the] ‘Twins’ Father’ was top help them fill it out, espe­cially the lit­tle ones, who couldn’t read or write. These forms con­tained dozens of detailed ques­tions related to a child’s back­ground, health, and phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics. They asked for the age, weight, and height of the chil­dren, their eye color and the color of their hair. They were promptly mailed to Berlin.’

Nyis­zli, who had to fill out volu­mi­nous post­mortem reports, recalled Mengele’s warn­ing: ”I want clean copy, because these reports will be for­warded to the Insti­tute of Bio­log­i­cal, Racial and Evo­lu­tion­ary Research at Berlin-Dahlem.’ Thus I learned that the exper­i­ments per­formed here were checked by the high­est med­ical author­i­ties at one of the most famous sci­en­tific insti­tutes in the world.” [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

The reports, coun­ter­signed by Men­gele and sent to Berlin were not just received and ware­housed, they were care­fully reviewed and dis­cussed. A dia­logue devel­oped between Verschuer’s insti­tute and Men­gele. Another pris­oner assis­tant Men­gele ‘would receive ques­tions about the twins from the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute in Berlin, and he would send them the answers.’ . . .”

Ibid.; pp. 359–360.

9. In light of the appar­ent inven­tion of the muta­gen thalido­mide and its pos­si­ble test­ing in the con­cen­tra­tion camps, it is inter­est­ing to con­tem­plate the pos­si­bil­ity that its gene-altering char­ac­ter­is­tics had been dis­cov­ered dur­ing the war. The Nazis had per­formed exten­sive species-altering exper­i­ments with mutagens.

” ‘Quite a few of them [Nazi researchers] were busy treat­ing or rather mis­treat­ing the sex cells of ani­mals and plants in order to pro­duce new vari­eties. I was intro­duced to all kinds of extra­or­di­nary crea­tures pro­duced in that way, mice with­out toes or with corkscrew tails, flies that vio­lated the very def­i­n­i­tion of a fly by hav­ing four wings instead of two, funny-looking moths, and strange plants. Radi­a­tion, espe­cially with X-rays, is the prin­ci­pal means of pro­duc­ing such new kinds, or rather mon­sters, of ani­mals and plants.’  . . .”

Ibid.; p. 415.

10. The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of the “death” of Dr. Arib­ert Heim. In light of his seem­ingly unam­bigu­ous guilt, one won­ders if this doc­tor, like so many other war crim­i­nals, found work for the allies and/or the U.S., per­haps in Project Paperclip.

” . . . He later joined the Waf­fen SS and was assigned to Mau­thausen, a con­cen­tra­tion camp near Linz, Aus­tria, as a camp doc­tor in Octo­ber and Novem­ber 1941.

While there, wit­nesses told inves­ti­ga­tors, he worked closely with SS phar­ma­cist Erich Wasicky on such grue­some exper­i­ments as inject­ing var­i­ous solu­tions into Jew­ish pris­on­ers’ hearts to see which killed them the fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an Amer­i­can Mil­i­tary Tri­bunal in 1946 and sen­tenced to death, along with other camp med­ical per­son­nel and com­man­ders, Heim, who was a POW in Amer­i­can cus­tody, was not among them.

Heim’s file in the Berlin Doc­u­ment Cen­ter, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was appar­ently altered to oblit­er­ate any men­tion of Mau­thausen, accord­ing to his 1979 Ger­man indict­ment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the con­cen­tra­tion camp, he was listed as hav­ing a dif­fer­ent SS assignment.

This “can­not be cor­rect,” the indict­ment says. “It is pos­si­ble that through data manip­u­la­tion the short assign­ment at the same time to the (con­cen­tra­tion camp) was concealed.”

There is no indi­ca­tion who might have been responsible.

The U.S. Army Intel­li­gence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime and post­war activ­i­ties, and is among hun­dreds of thou­sands trans­ferred to the U.S. National Archives. But the Army’s elec­tronic for­mat is such that staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these don’t include the file requested by the AP. . . .”

“Con­cen­tra­tion Camp Doc­tor Heads List of Top 10 Wanted Nazis” by David Ris­ing [AP]; FoxNews.com; 4/29/2008.

11. There are doubts about the accu­racy of reports of Heim’s death.

“The Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter has expressed doubts about a report that Arib­ert Heim, one of the most-wanted Nazi crim­i­nals, died in Egypt in 1992.

‘There’s no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave,’ Efraim Zuroff, the center’s lead­ing Nazi hunter, told AP agency.

On Wednes­day, Germany’s ZDF TV reported that Heim died in Cairo, say­ing it had found his pass­port and other documents.

Heim is accused of killing hun­dreds of inmates at a con­cen­tra­tion camp where he was a doc­tor dur­ing World War II.

On Thurs­day, Mr Zuroff said the report about Heim’s death raised ‘more ques­tions than it answers’.

‘We can’t sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible expla­na­tion,’ he said.

‘Keep in mind these peo­ple have a vested inter­est in being declared dead — it’s a per­fectly crafted story; that’s the prob­lem, it’s too per­fect,’ Mr Zuroff told the AP.. . .”

“Nazi Hunters’ Doubt over ‘Death’”; BBC News; 2/5/09.