Dr. Mengele Comes to Quebec, 1949

These photos from a yearbook published in 1949 by Hopital Saint Michel Archange in Quebec city, were sent to me by a friend in Ontario. I believe the man on the left in the first photo, bending down to examine a boy in a wheelchair, is Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, who had interned in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig.

My friend Jane obtained the yearbook from the daughter of a Duplessis orphan who lives near Ottawa. It lay in a trunk for years. I'm extremely grateful to the women involved in bringing these images to light.

The other two images, from the same section of the yearbook, show recent achievements at that hospital in the field of neurology at the time.

Saint Michel Archange Hospital is notorious as a place where many Duplessis orphans disappeared in secret experiments. Its 1949 yearbook is festooned with dedications and photos of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, then Canadian Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent, and various dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church including Cardinal Leger. This is not entirely surprising, since Dr. Mengele escaped Europe in 1948 with the help of the Vatican "Rat Line" which brought him safely to Argentina. From there, he moved to Brazil, Paraguay, and points beyond -- including, some have said, Montreal.

There is a stunning similarity between these photos, and my 2004 interview with Duplessis orphan Silvio Day who worked as an orderly in 1960 at another Quebec hospital, where he transported bodies of children murdered in Nazi-style medical experiments from the operating room to the "Locker Room of the Dead" and burial behind the hospital. The scenes he describes from memory – of nuns and orderlies in a zombie-like state, working together with doctors in experiments on young orphans – are perfectly illustrated in these photos taken ten years earlier. It's also interesting that a man bearing a strong resemblance to Dr. Mengele appears in both Day's account, and the yearbook photos.

A bizarre discovery – but is it proof?

I went to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre with the photo of Dr. Mengele examining the boy in the wheelchair, and they quickly dismissed it for predictable reasons: the vast quantity of bogus Mengele sightings, and the poor quality of the jpeg image I produced.

On the other hand, these experts could not prove it is not Mengele. The white-coated man in the photo appears to be exactly the right age (late 30s), slim build, and general appearance (note the hairline) as Dr. Mengele who was 38 in 1949, had escaped from Europe that same year and gone into hiding in South America. Mengele is known to have used various aliases, as well as his own name, and to have travelled around North America and Europe during the Cold War years when he allegedly worked for the US Department of Defence and even (for a time) McGill University.

His sponsors at the Vatican were high officials and member of the P-2 Lodge, which helped many leading Nazis escape prosecution for war crimes. Quebec’s Prime Minister, Maurice Duplessis was known for his pro-Nazi sympathies, and had corresponded with Hitler's Foreign Minister, Von Ribbentrop, before WW2, when the Nazis offered to send some of their young scientists to Quebec.

"So what if it's Mengele?" asked one of the Holocaust experts -- a question that had not occurred to me.

My guess is, the hospital published this yearbook, and included these photos, to demonstrate that it was making progress with the secret program laid out in 1944 at the Quebec Conference, the year Maurice Duplessis, re-elected as Quebec premier, sat at the table with Roosevelt, Churchill, MacKenzie King and Allen Dulles, to iron out details of a clandestine agreement by which Quebec’s orphan population would be placed at the disposal of the British and American military in their top secret program of chemical and biological warfare weapons development, some of which was based downriver at Grosse Ile. Some of these experiments involved psychosurgery, e.g. lobotomies, which witnesses like Silvio Day say were performed on orphans. Mengele’s work at Auschwitz involved Trauma-Based Mind Control would become the basis of the covert MKULTRA program in 1953, signed into effect by Allen Dulles in 1953, a few months before thousands of Quebec’s institutionalized orphans were relabelled “mental patients” and transported to hospital like Saint-Michel Archange in Quebec City, where many disappeared in drug trials and other criminal experiments.

Fascist-leaning Maurice Duplessis would have been happy to allow Mengele enter Quebec, in return for a place at the table of the Secret Government. So goes the “conspiracy theory” that explains how Canadian officials sold out a generation of children in order to profit from illegal weapons research

Below are photos of Mengele, probably taken in the late 1930s when he was graduating from medical school.