The Holocaust



Nazi Doctors & Other Perpetrators of Nazi Crimes

Excerpts from:

I was Doctor Mengele's assistant
By Miklos Nyiszli

Published by Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 
Printed in Krakow, Poland. (no date)

The blue italicized comments have been added to highlight the key parallels with "learning" and control in American schools and churches as well as around the world. For more background information read 

This is not comfortable reading. It will shock and grieve you. But in our times -- when history books are set aside and utopian visions idealize the nature and potential of mankind -- we need to remember these recent atrocities. They didn't occur back in the Middle Ages in primitive lands, but civilized and highly educated Europe. May we never forget our human capacity for evil and our desperate need for Jesus Christ -- His wisdom, His strength, His love and His very life! [See Ban Truth; Reap tyranny]

Chapter 1
A hot May afternoon. The stench from the brimming buckets and the ninety unwashed, sweating bodies, crammed together inside a freight car with only one tiny barb-wired window, was becoming increasingly unbearable. The train of deportees was made up of forty such boxcars [4000 people]. It was the fourth day of our journey -- having traveled first through Slovakia.... This was the first transport of Hungarian Jews sentenced to be exterminated....

An hour after leaving Krakow, our train stopped at a larger station... called 'Auschwitz'. The name meant nothing to us....

I looked around at my fellow travelers.... 26 physicians, eight pharmacists, our wives and children and a few elderly men and women -- my colleagues' parents.... [page 8]

The padlocks were unlocked and the doors slid open with a clatter. Then the first order was yelled out: 'Leave your suitcases and packages behind, just take your hand luggage!'... We were immediately made to line up in front of the wagons.

Before us stood a young SS officer with shiny knee boots and golden rosettes on his epaulettes.... His name: Dr. Mengele, the chief physician of Auschwitz concentration camp, who was present on t he ramp whenever a new transport arrived, fir he was in charge of carrying out the selections.

The SS-en hurriedly separated the men from the women and children. Anyone under fourteen was to remain with their mothers.... The guards answered our questions in calm voices:
'There's no need to be alarmed... You're going off to be bathed now, and disinfected... And then you'll all be reunited with your families.' ... [page 9]

In the time it took to separate a group of four thousand people, I was able to have a look around... The first thing that caught my eye... was a huge redbrick chimney.... It was part of a formidable two-story edifice, also of red brick and looking like some kind of a factory....
To my astonishment, it was spewing out a column of fire a few meters into the air. ... It was a crematorium! A bit further on I noticed another. Then I spotted a third.... My nostrils filled with the nauseous pungency of burning hair and meat. ... [page 10]

Some Red Cross vans collected the seriously ill, the very old and inform, and the mentally handicapped. ... The motorized column moved out first... [straight to the gas chambers and crematorium]

Then Dr. Mengele ordered all physicians from this group to step forward. .... He... said he was looking for someone who ... had expert knowledge of carrying out post-mortems and was familiar with forensic medicine. ...

No one was coming forward.... I broke away from the rest to stand in front of Dr. Mengele.... My colleagues were ordered to rejoin the rest of the group on the right.... Though I did not yet know it.... a few minutes after setting off the group of the left passed through a gate leading to one of the crematoria.... 11

One of the prisoners pulled up my left sleeve and ... proceeded to very skillfully and quickly perforate innumerable times the skin on my forearm... Blue spots spread out from the points... So Dr. Miklos Nyiszli had ceased to exist. I was now merely number A 8450. [page14]

Chapter 3
At a concentration camp a green triangle meant that the bearer was a criminal category prisoner. He explained to me the system of marking prisoners. A red triangle meant the wearer was a political prisoner; lilac colored triangles we worn by Bible Readers.... Vagabonds and prostitutes had black triangles. Pink was for homosexuals....
He had extremely valuable insights into the whole, complex, organizational structure of this concentration camp. ... He knew the prominents; prisoners who had special privileges and special functions. ... Auschwitz concentration camp was not a labor camp but the Third Reich's largest extermination factory. ... 16

Tens of thousands of prisoners wren concentrated in barracks, in confined areas which would be even too small to cage animals. These people were allowed only a little sleep resting on each others heads, backs and legs, in terrible misery.
Night silence ended at three in the morning, just before dawn. Functionary prisoners woke their wretched fellow inmates with truncheons. They were all driven out of the barracks and made to stand in rank and file. Thus began one of the most inhuman items on the concentration camp's daily schedule: roll call.... 17

The block overseer was usually a servile lackey of the SS. At almost every block the post was held by a thug with a green triangle. .... If anyone from the block had died -- there were usually five, or six or sometimes even ten corpses -- they were also included in the roll call. ... Sometimes, when there was a particularly large number of prisoner deaths, the man-pulled cart collecting the bodies wouldn't turn up for two or three days. Then the corpses had to be present at every roll call until they were eventually removed..... 18

"These physicians were fully aware of the atrociousness, hopelessness of their own fate. Yet ... they tried to help others where were about to die. ... You had to be really seriously ill to end up in a concentration camp hospital... skin and bones weighing no more than 30 kilograms, virtual skeletons; the bodies covered with extensive phlegmons, lips swollen from hunger, yellow-skinned shadows of men suffering from interminable diarrhea -- such were the camp hospital patients. 19

Chapter 7
[Preparing for another "transport" of thousands of Jews too old, young or weak to serve in the labor camp for some months before dying of starvation, beatings or illness]
The noise was coming from the furnace room: they were preparing to receive the transport. Then came the murmur of generators and the whirr of huge ventilators starting up: the temperature in the ovens was being raised to the maximum level. .... The place where the corpses were burnt was vast, with a concrete floor... and ... light coming in from very large, barred windows....
The column entered the courtyard in fives. No one else in the world knew what was about to happen next, for no one who had crossed the threshold ever returned. The road taken by the left column led to the crematorium, and not to 'the rest camp for the infirm, aged and very young,' as the Germans had told those who had been deemed fit for work.... 34

The children, half asleep, clung onto their mothers' dresses.... The newly arrived immediately noticed the taps in t he courtyard. They broke ranks and swarmed around them with their pots and pans in order to quench their terrible thirst.... they had had virtually no water for the past five days.... 35
The transport entered spacious, whitewashed, brightly lit changer.... Around the benches, numbered coat hangers. Everywhere there were notices in various languages informing the newly arrived that they had to tie their clothes and shoes up in bundles, hang them on the hooks and memorize the coat hanger numbers.... This was indeed all done for the sake of order so that citizens waiting in the Reich did not get shoes that were mixed up....The same concerned the clothes.... 35-36

There were 3000 people in the room.... Then the SS soldiers entered. The command was immediately given: 'Everyone is to undress."... The old, the children, husbands, wives all stood transfixed.... Perhaps they had misunderstood.... But the order was repeated. The voice was now impatient and menacing.... 36

A loud command rang out: 'SS and Sonderkommando [prisoners working in the crematoria] to leave the room. ... in the courtyard one could hear the roar of an engine. A deluxe Red Cross ambulance arrived. An SS and an SDG officer... got out. The latter held four green tins. ... One of the tins was opened with a special patented device... and its contents -- greenish pellets the size of beans -- was poured down the shaft. The crystals fell down the metal conduit into the underground shower room. .... This was Zyklon B. On contact with air it immediately began to vaporize. ... Within a few seconds it filled the chamber crammed full of people. Within five minutes the whole transport was dead. 36-37

The two executioners who had delivered the lethal gas... lit up cigarettes and climbed back into the ambulance. They had just murdered three thousand people!

Another of the Sonderkommando squads, equipped with rubber hoses, entered the chamber wearing gas masks. ... The prisoners entering it encountered a ghastly sight.
The bodies did not lie scattered on the floor but were tangled, one on top of the other, in an incredibly tall, macabre pile. The gas emitted from the green crystals spread at ground level and then proceeded to rise higher and higher. Thus these unfortunates instinctively clambered up on top of one another to avoid inhaling it. Those highest up were the last to die. 38

The bodies were winched up to the crematorium.... Now ensued the next act of profiting from murder. The Third Reich had already appropriated their clothes and footwear. But hair was also a valuable commodity and could be used in the delayed-action detonators of bombs.... Thus the corpses heads were shaved. ...

There were eight members of the 'Dentist' Kommando' standing in front of the ovens. Each held two instruments... in their hands: a chisel and a pair of pliers. ... They pried open the mouths and crudely broke off... all the bridgework and gold teeth. ... My rough estimate was that every day each crematorium collected 8-10 kilos of gold.... 39

Once the last gold tooth had been extracted, the victims were handed over to the Kommando in charge of the ovens. ... The prisoners pushed the stretchers toward the opening, tipped the corpses into the white-hot interior and immediately retreated....

It took twenty minutes for a body to incinerate. The crematorium had fifteen ovens, all working at once. The daily output of a crematorium was five thousand human bodies. All four crematoria had the same output. Every day twenty thousand people entered the gas chambers and eventually ended up in one of the ovens.... The human ashes were loaded onto lorries and driven two kilometers to be dumped into the flowing waters of the Vistula (the beautiful river flowing through Krakow). 40