Miklos Nyiszli: Unreliable Witness Part Two

Part 1, Part 3

In part one I established that Miklos Nyiszli is an unreliable witness. To further cement that we will be dissecting more of Nyiszli’s claims.

To begin I’d like to talk about this exchange on Twitter (X):

My regular readers will know that hypothermia experiments are not evidence of the Holocaust, the Holocaust being the deliberate, continent-wide genocide of Jews and homicidal gas chambers. What this exchange does show, however, is that the alleged medical experiments are propagandistically used to cement the lie that Nazis were the pinnacle of human evil, which causes people to not question the larger claims about genocide and gas chambers. This is merely a misplaced sense of association inculcated by a lifetime of anti-Nazi propaganda.

Interesting side note: there is no evidence outside of witness testimony of Dr. Mengele performing unethical medical experiments in Auschwitz. However, there is documented evidence of Dr. Sigmund Rascher doing unethical hyperthermia experiments in Dachau. Rascher had joined NSDAP in 1933 and began his unethical experiments in 1942. He actually was a bad guy and was even arrested for abducting children—interesting how we never hear about him.

I did an informal poll and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the overwhelming majority have heard of Mengele but not Rascher. Why is a guy who they have no hard evidence of wrongdoing a household name as the preeminent evil doctor, but almost no one has heard of the actual evil Nazi? I encourage you to read this article about Rascher and think about that question for yourself. I believe that Rascher is not part of the Holocaust cinematic universe simply because he was not widely known by the Jewish inmates and therefore not a part of the witness testimony mythos like Mengele was. There is also the matter of Rascher’s research being utilized by the Allies:

Now I must admit that was a bit of a digression, as out of all the false accusations against Mengele, freezing experiments were not one of them. But this was something I learned while researching this article and I found it too interesting not to include. One must remember that the testimony of Miklos Nyiszli is the foundation of Mengele’s reputation as the “Angel of Death.”

What Mengele is famous for is the alleged twin studies. About this Nyiszli says:

Here each day every medical test that can be done on living humans is performed. Blood tests, spinal taps, blood transfusions between twins, and innumerable other tests, all of them painful and exhausting. (source, page 44)

What strikes me about this statement is how he says “innumerable other tests.” It’s almost like Nyiszli wants the reader to imagine all sorts of painful and barbaric experiments to further intrench the idea of Mengele being an twisted doctor of death and a force of cosmic evil. In part one I pointed out that Nyiszli claimed he was a doctor, not a writer that would present his testimony objectively without exaggeration. However, little tricks like this make me think otherwise.

Now I will present you with an example of Nyiszli changing his story. The following is from Nyiszli’s deposition given on July 28, 1945:

In the laboratory next to the autopsy room there were 14 twins under SS guard, sobbing bitterly. Without saying a word, Dr. Mengele prepared a 10-cm³ and a 5-cm³ syringe. From a container he took out Evipan, from another he took 20-cm³ chloroform vials and put them on the table. Then the first twin was brought in, a girl of around 14 years of age. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress her and place her on the autopsy table. Then he administered an intravenous injection of Evipan into the right arm. After the child lost consciousness, he palpated for the left ventricle and injected 10 cm³ of chloroform. The child died after a convulsion, and Dr. Mengele had her taken to the morgue. The murder of all 14 twins happened in the same way that night. (source page 136)

But in Nyiszli’s book, I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the Auschwitz Crematorium (published in 1946), the injection of chloroform became a monumental discovery of a dark secret that made Nyiszli’s knees shake and caused him to break out in a cold sweat:

(…)With tweezers I pull the blood clot apart, sniff it. The characteristic, powerful smell of chloroform hits my nostrils. The child received a chloroform injection to the heart! For no other purpose than that the blood in the left ventricle if the heart should coagulate due to the injected chloroform and, depositing against the heart valves, provoke immediate cardiac arrest.

My knees shake with excitement. I have discovered the Third Reich’s darkest medical secret [Felfedeztem a III. Birodalom orvostudomanyának legsötétebb titkát]. So they kill people here not just with gas, but also with injections of chloroform administered to the heart! Sweat bathes my forehead. It is fortunate that I am alone. In front of others I would scarcely have been able to conceal my emotion. I finish the autopsy.(…) (source page 47)

Spoiler: Nyiszli, a supposed witness to Mengele’s hideous crimes, was never killed. Despite claiming, “I have no doubt that I am a dead man walking. Is it conceivable that Dr. Mengele or the Berlin-Dahlem
Institute should allow me to live?” Even though the Germans had plenty of warning about the inevitable Soviet liberation of the camp and supposedly destroyed all the documental evidence, no one bothered to liquidate Nyiszli—or the 7,000 other prisoners that the Soviets found when they liberated the camp.

Besides Nyiszli, most of the twins also survived the war. From Carlo Mattogno’s book on Nyiszli (page 389):

The three documents mentioned above, the list of the CANDLES organization, the list compiled by Kubica and the Soviet list of 1945, in addition to the Soviet list of inmates liberated at Birkenau, 425 permit the compilation of a list of 543 twins having passed through Auschwitz (see Table 2). Of these, 376 survived until the liberation of the camp; four died in the following months, one died on the evacuation transport on January 27, 1945, and twelve perished during the existence of the camp. Nothing is known of the remaining 154.

CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors) was formed in 1984. The founders were able to locate 122 twins living in ten countries and four continents.

When it comes down to it, Nyiszli is demonstrably a liar and his testimony should be disregarded. If you are not convinced of Nyiszli’s status as an unreliable witness at this point then continue on to part three!