Josef Mengele was a doctor of medicine and philosophy, an assistant to Prof. Otmar von Verschuer in the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, member of the Nazi Party and the SS. In Auschwitz, he was the chief physician in the Roma and Sinti Family Camp in Birkenau,...

Prisoners of Auschwitz were able to send various types of illegal messages—both within the camp and outside the barbed wire fences. Some were short letters addressed to family members; others were messages and reports for underground resistance organizations. Dr. Wojciech Płosa, the head of the...