Saturday, a day before the National Holocaust Remembrance, published de Volkskrant the moving story of Marie Stoppelman, a Jewish doctor who was liberated from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp at the age of 30. In that camp she had to work for the infamous doctor Josef Mengele.
A few years earlier, Marie had gone into hiding with her brother Theo on a farm in the Gelderse valley. There they were betrayed, after which the transport to Auschwitz followed, where they arrived on June 30, 1944. She would remain in the death camp for seven months.
Marie has to watch as Mengele has the most gruesome tests carried out on prisoners and how he – his hobby – selects the prisoners after each new train: the gas chamber on the left, the labor camp on the right. “I remember he always whistled tunes. Like he was having fun with it.”
The story of Marie, written in an exemplary manner by Ellen de Visser, is followed by a harrowing follow-up after she returns to the Netherlands. Her brother turns out not to have survived the camp. Marie throws herself into her work and specializes as a pediatrician. She does not talk about her war experiences, unless it is an official testimony. She gives such extensive testimony five times, including against the fugitive Mengele. “He was the greatest sadist I can imagine.”
After her retirement, she can no longer suppress the memories and confesses to a former colleague: “It’s so terrible, everything comes back up.” A few years later she poured out her heart devastated to a former pupil, a pediatrician in Groningen. She died in 1994 at the age of 80. She never married because she didn’t want to burden children with her trauma.
It may not be allowed, but reading this shocking account filled me with rather primitive feelings of revenge. How was it again with Mengele, I wondered, hopefully very bad after all? I didn’t know exactly anymore. I could remember the fate of Adolf Eichmann much better; if you get caught and tried, you get a lot more publicity. But Mengele had escaped – how could that happen?
Fortunately, there was enough written about him to get a good picture. In 2019, Ad Donker publishers reprinted a biography of Mengele by the Danish Jens Otte Stensager: Josef Mengele, Nazi doctor. He describes Mengele’s early years, his pernicious camp practices and successful flight from Germany to South America, first Argentina, a hotbed of Nazis thanks to the corrupt president Perón, then to Paraquay and finally Brazil.
That pleases the reader: Mengele often had to flee. Although he knew thanks to many bribes – often paid by his family – and a network of Alte Comrades to stay out of the hands of justice, but after a relatively quiet period in Argentina, he felt hounded to his death. He died lonely, depressed and brooding over suicide. In his old age he also got all kinds of difficult questions from a son. “He did not answer my questions (…). His arguments that some races were superior to others were completely unscientific.”
Mengele drowned in the sea on February 7, 1979, presumably from a brain haemorrhage.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 31, 2022