New book reveals previously unknown East German Holocaust crimes
By Eldad Beck
Israel Hayom
April 6, 2021
The Stasi emblem
East Germany's intelligence agency deliberately withheld information that incriminated Nazi criminals, including infamous Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, a new book by German historian Henry Leide revealed.
In Auschwitz und Staatssicherheit, Leide explained that the agency, called the Stasi, buried in its archives the testimony of Dr. Horst Fischer, a German doctor who also worked at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which could have otherwise aided the capture of Mengele, who fled to South America after World War II.
Fischer was arrested by East German investigators in 1965 for heading the selection process at Auschwitz and the Monowitz concentration camps. Stasi officials were looking to get information from the doctor on Nazi criminals who had not yet been brought to justice, and Fischer, who was facing a death sentence, provided them with detailed testimony in hopes to ease his punishment.
Fischer thought his cooperation would help spare his life, but eight weeks later, he was executed in Leipzig on July 8, 1966.
The testimony he gave to Stasi incriminated Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, who performed horrific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, particularly twins
Dr. Josef Mengele, the 'Angel of Death'
Instead of using Fischer's testimony to track down Mengele, Stasi stacked it away in its archives on the Nazi era, which was set up in Berlin, next to its headquarters.
The document was not used at all, despite efforts by West Germany, Israel, and Nazi hunters to track down Mengele. East Germany pretended to lead the struggle against fascism, but in reality, it only hindered efforts to bring Mengele to justice.
In his testimony, Fischer spoke of the first time he met Mengele in the summer of 1941 when he served as a doctor in the SS Wiking division that participated in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany.
"During our first meeting, which was very superficial and short, Mengele gave the impression of a humble man, very closed and composed," Fischer said.
The next time they met in Auschwitz, Fischer returned to Germany from the war after having contracted tuberculosis. He was appointed as a doctor at the Monowitz camp and the IG Farben chemical company, which produced the Zyklon B cyanide-based pesticide that the Nazi regime used in its gas chambers to murder millions of Jews.
Fischer was also responsible for the selection process of Jews who were transported to Auschwitz. He called the shots as to who was declared able-bodied and was sent to the concentration camps and who was sent to their deaths.
According to Fischer's testimony, he and Mengele had a good relationship. "We often met outside of work hours and attended celebrations with other SS doctors," he said. "Contrary to my initial impression, in Auschwitz Mengele was full of confidence and took the lead in conversations. Of all of us, he was the most convinced of the need to exterminate the Jews."
This was especially evident when it came to his explanation as to why the Jews of Galicia had to be killed as part of the Final Solution, even though they could not have been responsible for the war in Germany, Fischer explained.
Nazi propaganda claimed that it was the Jews who were responsible for Germany's defeat during World War I, which lead to the outbreak of WWII.
"Mengele argued that it is precisely among these Jews [from Galicia] in whom "Western and degenerate Judaism" is being renewed biologically, and therefore must be included in the Final Solution," Fischer said in his testimony.
He also explained that the "ramp duty" originally worked round the clock, but due to an overwhelming amount of trains arriving from Hungary, shifts were shortened from 24 hours to 12, so that officers could rest.
Mengele was among those who supported the change "because it allowed him to devote time to his work as the camp doctor at Birkenau. Mengele also demanded that we put aside twins from the selection for the purpose of his twin research," Fischer explained.
"Mengele spoke with enthusiasm about his scientific work in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In private meetings, he would show us photographs with special characteristics of gypsies and twins.
"He said, among other things, that a pathological anatomy unit was set up in Crematorium 2 of the Birkenau camp, where a doctor and a taxidermist worked for him. I myself saw in the fall of 1944 body parts kept in glass containers in the basement of the Auschwitz 1 detention building.
"Mengele told me he had ordered [his staff] to prepare for him preserved organs and body parts of twins. To that end, twins were killed, unknown as to how many, for the purpose of preserving their body parts."
Fischer also revealed that in 1944 Mengele received instructions from the chief SS doctor at the time, Dr. Eduard Wirths, to select inmates with "anthropological and racial characteristics" to preserve their bodies for future studies at a research institute.
He also said, "I remember [one time] the doctors were talking about the selection to the inmates' brothel. Mengele was responsible for making sure that the selected inmates had a thorough medical check-up."
Towards the end of the war, as the Red Army was approaching, the SS officers who were tasked with destroying the crematorium fled, Fischer explained. "Mengele took care of the blowing up [of the crematorium] himself."
"I wanted to look at how East Germany related to the Auschwitz trials that were taking place in West Germany in the 1960s, and it turned into an entire research," Leide told Israel Hayom.
"I looked at how East Germans actually dealt with Auschwitz criminals, beyond the propaganda and beyond the way the party's institutions were presenting things.
"East Germany always stood by the Soviets, who won the war. The communist regime did not deal with personal responsibility during the Nazi era at all. Instead, it shifted all blame to West Germany and Poland, claiming that East Germany had nothing to do with those crimes.
"There was complete lack of guilt. Someone other than us was responsible for what happened, West Germany or others, not our grandparents [they would say.] They made life easy, and saw themselves as victims of the Nazis because they were communists. The question of whether that matched what actually happened did not interest them."
The subject of the Holocaust reappeared on the East German agenda only in the 1980s, when the regime wanted to gain the support of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the United States to be added to a list of countries that received preferential status in trade relations with the US.
"Until the very last day of East Germany, in 1990, no reparations were paid to any Holocaust survivors," Leide said. Instead, "the government in East Berlin preferred to support Israel's hostile neighbors and all its enemies, not only ideologically," but also financially.
"East Germany's complete disregard for the Holocaust has been passed on to future generations: much of what we see today in areas that used to belong to East Germany is based on that collective "exemption" from guilt."
Leide was born in East Germany in 1965 and personally experienced the evasion of responsibility that prevailed in the region, which ran contrary to how German history books described the Nazi era. As a teenager, he began to rebel against the regime and was forced to flee his home country shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"I spoke to my grandparents about the time before 1945," he recalled. "They told me many things. My maternal grandfather was a soldier in [the] Wehrmacht [forces,] a truck driver in Poland and Italy. He told me of horrible things.
"My grandmother [his wife] could join him every time he was stationed somewhere for a longer period of time. Both of them experienced awful things in Poland. For example, in a Polish coastal city, they saw SS men smash a child's head against the wall. They were fairly young back then, and they kept their distance.
"My paternal grandfather was in the SS. My father once visited him in a concentration camp. In 1942 my grandfather was killed in Russia. I do not know if he was wanted for any crimes during the Nazi era because he was killed quite early in the war."
Leide played a key role in the takeover of the central Stasi archives in Berlin in 1990, when the agency set out to destroy the documents in order to cover up its activities.
In 1992, having completed his academic studies, he was recruited to work at the Stasi Records Agency, set up by former German President Joachim Gauck, an opponent of the communist regime. Leide currently works at the agency's office in the northern port city of Rostock, which is one of 13 offices across Germany that used to be Stasi headquarters.
"I've always been interested in WWII. When I was recruited to the agency, I began to study the files that the Stasi collected about the Nazi era. I was the only one who was working on this, and even today, I am, in fact, the only one who researches this matter in depth.
"East Germany was a communist dictatorship, and it distinguished itself from West Germany in terms of its anti-fascism. Officially it was thought to only consist of anti-fascists.
"So it is true that many senior members of the ruling communist party, the SED [East German Communist Party,] were indeed persecuted by Nazis in the past, but if you look at the broader picture, the situation was different: in the Russian-occupied territories, that later became East Germany, there was a large number of Nazi criminals and collaborators. East Germany tried to deny what actually happened and shifted all of the blame to West Germany.
"Schools taught the myth about the founding of East Germany and focused on the communist opposition to the Nazis. Other victims, Jews, gypsies, and more, were pushed aside. Although they knew that six million Jews had been murdered, they did not bother to delve deeper into the subject. For them, the Holocaust was a quest for the myth of Nazi opposition."
Away from the public attention, the Stasi collected nearly 11 kilometers (6 miles) worth of documents from the Nazi period in a special archive housed in an old villa in Berlin, Villa Heike. "All the documents they found and stole were kept there," Leide said.
"Very few people knew about it, and almost no one had access to the place, except for a handful of Stasi officials. They were the ones who decided who gets the information from these documents and who doesn't. They made none of these documents available, neither to the East German legal system and prosecution nor to any academic research institutions.
"Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did it become known that they had all these documents about the Nazi period. In addition to original documents, there were also millions of microfilms of Nazi documents there, from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The people who worked at the archive went through the archives of the countries of the Eastern Bloc and photographed that which they found interesting."
Q: Why?
"The Stasi wanted to know everything about everyone. They especially focused on gathering information on people who held positions in West Germany. Various government offices and universities there employed people who had a Nazi past, and East Germany used this information as propaganda material against West Germany.
"The thing is, the situation in East Germany was not very different. High-ranking positions were of course given to those who fought in the underground during the war and opposed the Nazi regime, but middle-ranking positions were filled with Nazis."
It is estimated that approximately one and a half million former members of the Nazi party lived in East Germany, having integrated into various systems, just like in West Germany. Only leadership roles were reserved to ardent communists.
"Data was collected for the purpose of extortion as well. For example, people that worked in Auschwitz became informers for the Stasi. It was a regular part of the Stasy work repertoire."
Most of the Nazi criminals that were captured in East Germany were prosecuted in the early 1950s, shortly after the end of the war. At the same time, Nazis were integrating into various government institutions, the same way it happened in East Germany. Authorities chose to turn a blind eye to their past for the sake of the greater mission of rebuilding the countries.
According to Leide's research, about a third of all civil servants in Easy Germany in 1954 were former members of Nazi organizations. Some 14% of senior officials at the Interior Ministry used to be members of the Nazi party, 1% of them were former SS members. About a quarter of all members of the communist party used to be in the Nazi party or in organizations that it ran.
And so, it was not difficult for Nazi criminals to integrate into East German society. Dr. Horst Fischer, for example, initially evaded prosecution by the Allies and worked as a physician in a small town in East Germany without ever needing to hide his identity.
East Germany was on a quest at the time for international recognition, and it did everything in its power to present itself as "the New Germany" and portrayed West Germany as the continuation of the Nazi Reich.
It achieved an important international milestone when its political leader, Walter Ulbricht, was invited for the first visit to a non-communist country, Egypt.
Ulbricht reciprocated by making anti-Israel statements, accused the Jewish state of imperialism, and his words laid the ground for the official policy of East Germany.
East German anti-fascism became the driving force of anti-Semitism, similar to Nazi propaganda. After East Germany received diplomatic recognition from Egypt, West Germany counteracted and established diplomatic relations with Israel.
In 1965, East Germany published Braunbuch, German for "The Brown Book" (brown was the color of the Nazi party,) that listed names of more than 1,800 senior Nazis and war criminals that were appointed to various positions in West Germany, in an attempt to prove that West Germany did not persecute Nazi criminals in its territory, but instead integrated them into its society.
With tensions between East and West Germany rising, the Stasi decided to draw attention to Fischer, whose name had been mentioned in the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, when senior officers who had served in the labor and extermination camps were prosecuted.
Stasi agents were listening to Fischer's phone calls with relatives in West Germany and tracked the letters he sent to them. The surveillance revealed Fischer's sympathetic feelings toward West Germany and led the Stasi to gather information on him, and an inspection of the secret archive at Villa Heike revealed that he had served in Auschwitz.
The Stasi arrested Fischer on June 11, 1965. According to Leide, the arrest did not stem out of a sincere desire to prosecute a senior Nazi official, but purely from propaganda motives: East Germany wanted to publicly criticize West Germany for wishing to place a statute of limitations on Nazi crimes ahead of the second round of Auschwitz trials (that were scheduled for December that year,) and, most importantly, improve its own international standing out of the desire to be accepted to the UN.
In February 1996, Fischer was convicted of participation in the Final Solution in the Monowitz concentration camp, as well as several other camps, for overseeing the selection process of Jews brought to Birkenau, and taking part in the gas extermination process in the camp.
Fischer was in charge of the selection process
Fischer's trial began on March 10, 1996, and foreign journalists were invited as well. Two of the judges and the attorney general were Nazi persecutors, who themselves had been imprisoned in camps. Fischer did not deny the allegations against him and occasionally even incriminated himself.
Two weeks later, Fischer was sentenced to death for having committed crimes against humanity. The prosecution denied all pardon requests.
In his book, Leide revealed that in its internal correspondence, the Stati elite ruled that "Fischer showed no mercy to his many victims. Implementing the sentence is carries special national and international significance to West Germany, as a warning to all those who intend on committing such crimes again."
A spectacle-like execution worthy of a spectacle of a trial.
The trial was clearly a show: East Germany was eager to let the world know that it was much stricter than its neighbor in persecuting Nazi criminals. While West Germany did not have the death penalty and gave its criminals short prison sentences, which were cut short most of the time, East Germany executed 24 Nazis for crimes they had committed.
The death penalty was abolished in East Germany in 1987.
"East Germany claimed it had prosecuted all Nazi criminals by 1950 and that all subsequent trials were the result of accidental findings," Leide said. "I mean, the official version was that there were no more Nazis in East Germany and that all the Nazis were in West Germany. But that version had to be true to reality, that is, they had to make sure that the situation on the ground matched the propaganda.
"And therefore, the Nazi-era archives were given to the Stasi, which provided them with the ability to decide what to do with the Nazis mentioned there, whether to arrest and prosecute them, or recruit them as agents or punish without a trial.
"The regime in East Germany did not feel any obligation to uphold the law, and as a result suspects did not necessarily go to court, rather the Stasi decided, based on its political needs, how each case should be handled."
Q: What was the coexistence like between former Nazis and Jews persecuted by them during the war?
"It was not simple. "It was not easy. The Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in East Germany protested the [favorable] treatment of former Nazis, but its activities were banned in 1953, and it became the Committee of Antifascist Resistance Fighters, with members of the ruling party appointed to various positions.
Q: So West Germany decided they needed the former Nazis to rebuild the country, just like it happened in East Germany?
"Officials of the ruling party made such statements publicly. They made it clear that not all those with a criminal past could be exposed, that the regime aims to build a new society and needs them to do so.
"t was communicated to them that as long as they are loyal to the new society, the ruling party, and the USSR, nothing will happen to them. That was the offer, and they accepted.
"Many members of the Nazi party and collaborators regained in the new dictatorship that which they had before 1945: there were many similarities, at least external ones, to the Nazi regime.
"On the other hand, they were "immigrants" who returned to East Germany from the USSR after 1945 and sought to carry out Stalin's will. They controlled the Germans who survived the war and implemented Moscow's policy."
Some 4,000 Jews remained in East Germany after the war. As a result of the regime's anti-Semitic persecution in the early 1950s, most of them moved to West Germany.
At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, only about 400-500 Jews lived in East Germany. There were, however, Jews that achieved high-ranking positions in the ruling party, Leide noted.
"They believed in the goodness of communism. I suppose they were shocked by the developments in West Germany, where Nazis officially occupied senior positions in the judiciary system, police, and other areas.
"Moreover, they felt more communist and German than they did Jews. Their Judaism played a role only when they fell victim to the Stalinist regime."
Nany of the Stasi documents also included information on the Israeli Nazi-hunter Tuviah Friedman's efforts to locate Mengele and the obstacles that were put in place by East Germany.
Friedman was a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel and founded the Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes in Haifa.
The institute was run by Friedman alone and operated solely on donations, without any government assistance. Friedman was in contact with officials in East Germany, which had no diplomatic relations with Israel. The Stasi were convinced that the institute was run by the Mossad with the goal of causing problems for East Germany.
In 1972, prosecutors in West German asked East Germany to question Felix Amann, a political prisoner who used to be a kapo at the Birkenau disinfection chambers and worked directly under Mengele.
Amann had testified at the first Auschwitz trial, but West Germany needed detailed evidence against Mengele to launch legal proceedings to have him extradited. Mengele was then believed to have found refuge in Paraguay.
The testimony Amann gave to Stasi officials in East Germany indicted Mengele, but authorities decided not to pass the information to West Germany as a result of a request they received from Friedman.
On Jan. 4, 1973, Friedman sent a letter to East Germany's chief prosecutor, Josef Streit, saying that it would be better if Mengele was extradited to East Germany rather than West Germany because the communist regime still had the death sentence in place.
"Please let me know if East Germany is interested in bringing Dr. Mengele to trial," Friedman wrote. "There should be a legal basis for this procedure, as Auschwitz is located closer to Berlin than to Frankfurt, and Mengele has also operated in other concentration camps in territories that belong to East Germany."
He also asked if East Germany would help fund a monetary prize for those who would capture Mengele.
The letter raised suspicions among Stasi officials that the Mossad was about to carry out another ostentatious and illegal capture as they did with Adolf Eichmann.
East Germany was close to joining the UN, and Israel could have undermined that achievement. The generally accepted opinion in East Berlin was that any support for Mengele's capture would bring about unwanted diplomatic complications.
The Stasi did not respond to Friedman's letter.
"We do not know the goal of Israel, Friedman, and other political groups," Rolf Wagenbreth, head of the Stasi's disinformation department, said. For all we know, they "could brings us a fake Dr. Mengele, or kidnap Mengele and claim it had been done at our behest."
Stasi decided to bring the Mengele case to Poland's attention. They informed the director of the High Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, Czesław Pilichowski, about Friedman's letter and asked whether Poland was going to request Mengele's extradition since his crimes were committed on Polish territory.
Although unsure of the Polish response, the East Germans informed Friedman that the Polish government would request the extradition and that East Germany would support it.
The Poles did nothing. They did not give any answer to East Germany. Poland preferred to work with West German, which, unlike the communists, provided them with a great deal of information.
In 1978, the East German authorities had to deal with Mengele's case again. This time, following a letter sent by the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, Marvin Hier, to the East German ambassador to the UN, Peter Florin. Hier asked the ambassador to assist in West Germany's efforts against Paraguay to extradite Mengele.
The request was futile, to begin with, as Paraguay did not recognize East Germany and therefore couldn't have complied with its extradition request.
East Berlin decided not to respond to Hier's letter, even though the communist regime was eager to please Jewish-American organizations at the time.
Mengele committed his crimes in Poland, and therefore East Germany is not responsible for them, Stasi correspondence stated. "Moreover, it cannot be legally argued that 14 years after Dr. Fischer's trial, an arrest warrant can be sought against Mengele on the basis of Fischer's testimony," it said.
East Germany's contribution to the efforts to capture Mengele amounted to two of his photographs as a result of a lawsuit in Frankfurt and the US Department of Justice in 1982. American officials also received Mengele's personal files at Waffen-SS.
In 1985, the chief prosecutor in Frankfurt turned to East Germany with another request to question Nazi victims and to be provided with documents on Mengele's case.
East Berlin did not send him Fischer and Amann's testimonies. That same year they learned that Mengele had spent his last years in Brazil, where he drowned in February 1979.
In the end, the two Germans did almost everything to avoid prosecuting the Nazi criminals on their territory.
According to leide, the information
gather by Stasi could have aided in Mengel's capture, but East Germany
decided not to share the information due to its quest to bridge reality
and its anti-fascist global image. In the end, both East and West
Germany did their best to avoid prosecuting Nazi criminals that presided
in their countries.
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