Josef Mengele
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Josef Mengele
March 16, 1911(1911-03-16) – February 7, 1979 (aged 67)

Josef Mengele
Nickname Beppo
Place of birth Günzburg, Germany
Place of death Bertioga, Brazil
Allegiance Nazi Germany
Service/branch Schutzstaffel
Rank Hauptsturmführer, SS
Commands held General
Battles/wars World War II
Awards Iron Cross First Class
Black Badge for the Wounded
Medal for the Care of the German People

Josef Mengele (March 16, 1911– February 7, 1979) was a German SS
officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-
Birkenau. He gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who
supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners,
determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced
laborer, and for performing human experiments on camp inmates, amongst
whom Mengele was known as the Angel of Death.

After the war, he first hid in Austria under an assumed name, then
escaped and lived in South America, first in Argentina (until 1959)
and finally in Brazil, in the cities of Serra Negra, Moji das Cruzes,
and then died in Bertioga, where he drowned in the sea after suffering
a stroke. His identity was confirmed by forensic experts from UNICAMP
(Campinas University) using DNA testing on his remains.[1]

Contents
1 Early years and career
2 Auschwitz
2.1 Human experimentation
3 After Auschwitz
4 Mengele in South America
5 The manhunt for Mengele
6 See also
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links

Early years and career
Mengele was born in Günzburg, Bavaria, eldest of three sons of Karl
Mengele, and was brought up mostly by his mother, who was very
protective of her sons. His brothers were Karl (1912–1949) and Alois
(1914–1974)[2].

In 1930, Mengele left Günzburg gymnasium. He studied medicine and
anthropology at the University of Munich where, in 1935, he earned a
doctorate in Anthropology (Ph.D.) Under the supervision of Professor
Theodor Mollison, he wrote a thesis on racial differences in the
structure of the lower jaw.

He later assisted Otmar von Verschuer at the Frankfurt University
Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. It was there in
1938 that he obtained a doctorate in medicine (M.D.) with a
dissertation called "Genealogical Studies in the Cases of Cleft lip,
Jaw and Palate."

His belief in the Nazi racial ideology was evident in his academic
research [3]. Both the Universities of Munich and Frankfurt revoked
his degrees in 1964.[2]

In 1931, at the age of 20, Mengele joined the nationalist group
Stahlhelm, a paramilitary organization, which was incorporated into
the SA in 1933. He resigned shortly after, citing health problems. He
applied for Nazi party membership in 1937 and in 1938 joined the SS.
[4] In 1939, Mengele married his first wife, Irene Schönbein, with
whom he had one child, a son named Rolf.

In 1940 he was placed in the reserve medical corps, following which he
served with the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking. In 1942 he was
wounded at the Russian front and was pronounced medically unfit for
combat, and was then promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer
(Captain).

Auschwitz
In 1943 Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi
extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24, 1943, he became medical
officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp." In August 1944, this
camp was liquidated and all its inmates gassed. Subsequently Mengele
became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau.
He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior
to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths.[5]

During his 21-month stay at Auschwitz, Mengele earned the moniker
"Angel of Death" for the cruelty he visited upon prisoners. Mengele
took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting
incoming prisoners at the ramp, where it was determined who would be
retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers
immediately.[6] The Angel of Death fed his legend by dramatizing
murderous policies, such as his drawing a line on the wall of the
children's block between 150 and 156 centimeters (about 5 feet or 5
feet 2 inches) from the floor, and then sending those whose heads
could not reach the line to the gas chamber. (Lifton, p. 346.)[7]

Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers and their
crematoria. "He had a look that said 'I am the power,'" said one
survivor. When it was reported that one block was infected with lice,
Mengele had all the 750 women assigned to it gassed.[8] Mengele was,
at the time, 32 years old.[9]

Human experimentation

Block 10 - Medical experimentation block in AuschwitzMengele used
Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity,
using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly
interested in identical twins; they would be selected and placed in
special barracks. He also recruited Berthold Epstein, a Czech
pediatrician. As a doctor, Epstein proposed to Mengele a study into
treatments of the disease called Noma, this was noted for particularly
affecting children from the camp.[10]

While the cause of Noma remains relatively unknown, it is now known
that it has a higher occurrence in children suffering from
malnutrition and a lower immune system response. Many develop the
disease shortly after contracting another illness such as measles or
tuberculosis. Mengele tried to prove that Noma was caused by racial
inferiority.[11]

Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among
the arrivals at the concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably
the Ovitz family - the children of a Romanian artist, of whom seven of
the 10 members were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation they toured in
Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. He often called them "my dwarf
family;" to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of "the
abnorm."

"Mengele occupied his time with other numerous acts of the most base
cruelty, including the dissection of live infants; the castration of
boys and men without the use of an anesthetic; and the administering
of high-voltage electric shocks to women inmates under the auspices of
testing their endurance. On one occasion Mengele even sterilized a
group of Polish nuns with an X-ray machine, leaving the celibate women
horribly burned."[12]

Mengele's experiments also included attempts to change eye color by
injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs
and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in
Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners
around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls,
performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims
died, either due to the experiments or later infections. Once
Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the
night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and
put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their
hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and
meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies.[13]

At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies. After the
experiment was over, these twins were usually murdered and their
bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Gypsy
children were sewn together to create Siamese twins; the hands of the
children became badly infected where the veins had been resected.[14]

The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than
ordinary prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas
chambers.[15] When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself
as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember
that despite his grim acts, he was also called "Mengele the
protector."[16] On several occasions he killed subjects simply to be
able to dissect them afterwards.[3] Mengele was almost fanatical about
drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. He is reported to
have bled some to death this way.[17]

The book Children of the Flames by Joe E. White chronicles Mengele's
notorious medical experimental activities on approximately 3,000 twins
who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during WWII until its
liberation at the end of the war. Only a few of the twins survived; 60
years later, they came forward about the special privileges they were
given in Auschwitz owing to Mengele’s interest in twins, and how as a
result they have suffered, as the children who survived his medical
experiments and injections.[18]

Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said "I have never accepted the fact
that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work — not from the
slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power.
Mengele ran a butcher shop — major surgeries were performed without
anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was
removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another
time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It
was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the
power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die?
Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to
do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his
part."[19]

After Auschwitz
When the SS abandoned the Auschwitz Camp on January 17, 1945, Mengele
transferred to Groß Rosen camp in lower Silesia, again working as camp
physician. Groß Rosen was dissolved in the end of February when the
Red Army was close to taking the camp[20]. Mengele worked in other
camps for a short time and on May 2, joined a Wehrmacht medical unit
led by his former colleague at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and
Racial Hygiene, Dr. Hans Otto Kahler, in Bohemia. The unit hurried
west to avoid being captured by the Soviets and were taken as POWs by
the Americans. Mengele, initially registered under his own name, was
released in June 1945 with papers giving his name as "Fritz Hollmann."
From July 1945 until May 1949, he worked as a farmhand in a small
village near Rosenheim, Bavaria, staying in contact with his wife and
his old friend Hans Sedlmeier, who arranged Mengele's escape to
Argentina via Innsbruck, Sterzing, Merano, and Genova. Mengele may
have been assisted by the ODESSA network.[21]

Mengele in South America
In Buenos Aires, Mengele at first worked in construction, but soon
came in contact with influential Germans, who allowed him an affluent
lifestyle in subsequent years. He also received money from his family
and from Sedlmeier. Mengele practiced medicine specializing in illegal
abortions and was detained on one occasion for the death of a patient.
[22] He also got to know other Nazis in Buenos Aires, such as Hans-
Ulrich Rudel and Adolf Eichmann. In 1955, he bought a 50 percent share
of a pharmaceutical company, the same year he divorced his wife,
Irene. Three years later, he married Martha Mengele, the widow of his
younger brother Karl Jr.; she then went to Argentina with her then 14-
year-old son, Dieter. Mengele lived with his family in a German-owned
boardinghouse in the Buenos Aires suburb of Vicente Lopez from 1958 to
1960.[23]

Mengele's home in Hohenhau, Paraguay.Although he was doing well in
South America, Mengele feared being captured so he left Argentina in
1962 and moved to Paraguay after managing to get a Paraguayan passport
in the name of "Mengele José". Mengele escaped to Paraguay from
Argentina weeks before the May 1960 Israeli Mossad operation that
abducted Adolf Eichmann. Mengele was a secondary objective of this
operation, but was never found.[24] Mengele hoped that Paraguay would
be safer for him, as dictator Alfredo Stroessner was of German
descent. Among other locations in Paraguay, he lived on the outskirts
of Hohenhau, a German colony north of Encarnacion in the department of
Itapúa. His anxiety, however, haunted him, especially after he heard
of the Mossad's abduction of Eichmann and the trial and execution in
Israel. Using the identity of "Peter Hochbichler," he crossed the
border to Brazil in 1960 and lived in São Paulo with the Austrian-born
neo-Nazi Wolfgang Gerhard, who was a member of Hans-Ulrich Rudel's
"Kameradenwerk."

Mengele has an illegitimate daughter born to an Australian woman of
German lineage; this liaison occurred when the woman, her mother and
brother visited a German colony in Paraguay in mid-1960. The child was
born in Melbourne, Australia on March 10, 1961. She was adopted
privately.[25]

The same year, Mengele moved to Nova Europa, about 300 kilometers (186
miles) outside São Paulo, where he lived with the Hungarian refugees
Geza and Gitta Stammer, working as manager of their farm. In the
seclusion of his Brazilian hideaway, Mengele became depressed,
egomaniacal and aggressive, always fearing capture. In 1974, when his
relationship with the Stammer family was coming to an end, Rudel and
Gerhard discussed relocating Mengele to Bolivia where he could spend
time with Klaus Barbie, but Mengele rejected this proposal. Instead,
he lived in a bungalow in a suburb of São Paulo for the last years of
his life. In 1977, his only son Rolf, never having known his father
before, visited him there and found an unrepentant Nazi who claimed he
"had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life."[26]

Mengele, whose health had been deteriorating for years, died on
February 7, 1979, in Bertioga, Brazil, where he accidentally drowned
or possibly suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea. He was buried
in Embu das Artes under the name "Wolfgang Gerhard," whose ID-card he
had used since 1976.[27]

The manhunt for Mengele
Mengele was listed on the Allies' list of war criminals as early as
1944. His name was mentioned in the Nuremberg trials several times,
but Allied forces were convinced that Mengele was dead, which was also
claimed by Irene and the family in Günzburg. In 1959, after suspicions
had grown that he was still alive, given his divorce from Irene in
1955 and his marriage to Martha in 1958, an arrest warrant was issued
by the German authorities. Subsequently, German attorneys, such as
Fritz Bauer, Israel's Mossad, and private investigators like Simon
Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld followed the trail of the "Angel of
Death". The last confirmed sightings of Mengele placed him in
Paraguay, and it was believed that he was still hiding there,
protected by Hans-Ulrich Rudel and possibly even by president Alfredo
Stroessner. Mengele sightings were reported all over the world, but
they turned out to be false.

In 1985, the German police raided Hans Sedlmeier's house in Günzburg
and seized address books, letters and papers hinting at the grave in
Embu. Mengele was exhumed 6 June 1985 and identified by forensic
experts from UNICAMP. Rolf Mengele issued a statement saying that he
"had no doubt it was the remains of his father".[28] Everything was
kept quiet "to protect those who knew him in South America", Rolf
said. In 1992, a DNA test confirmed Mengele's identity. He had evaded
capture for 34 years and was the subject of Ira Levin's best-selling
novel The Boys from Brazil. (In the film adaptation, he was portrayed
by Gregory Peck).

After the exhumation, the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine
stored his remains and attempted to repatriate them to the remaining
Mengele family members. The bones have remained in the custody of Dr.
Rubens Maluf owing to the family's refusal to accept them.[1]

On September 17, 2007, the U.S. Holocaust Museum released photographs
taken from a photo album of Auschwitz staff, which contained eight
photographs of Mengele. The eight photos of Mengele are the first
authenticated pictures of him at Auschwitz, museum officials said.[29]

See also
Nazi human experimentation
Nazi eugenics
Unit 731 Imperial Japan biological and chemical warfare research unit,
also notorious for their human experimentations

References
^ a b Remains of Mengele Rest Uneasily in Brazil - New York Times
^ a b http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blmengele.htm
About Biography
^ a b The Holocaust history project
^ Mengele's CV at Simon Wiesenthal Centre
^ Eduard Wirths
^ Essay by Robert Jay Lifton
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ (2008-07-12). Mengele - The Final Account [Documentary]. New York
City, United States: History Channel.
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ http://www.holocaust-history.org/lifton/LiftonT296.shtml Page
296-297
^ German article at shoa.de
^ Dr. Josef Mengele, ruthless Nazi concentration camp doctor - The
Crime Library on truTV.com
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ Nyiszli, Miklos (1993). Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.
^ Lagnado, Lucette Matalon; Sheila Cohn Dekel (1991). Children of the
Flames.
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ Josef Mengele, Angel of Death
^ Dr. Josef Mengele, ruthless Nazi concentration camp doctor - The
Crime Library on truTV.com
^ How Josef Mengele Cheated Justice, Chicago Tribune Magazine, May 18,
1986
^ Ulrich Völklein: Mengele - Der Arzt von Auschwitz. Göttingen, 2001
^ Nathaniel C. Nash (1992-02-11). "Mengele an Abortionist, Argentine
Files Suggest", New York Times. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
^ Harel, I: "The House on Garibaldi Street", page 194. Viking Press,
1975
^ Harel, I: "The House on Garibaldi Street", page 194. Viking Press,
1975
^ Births and Adoptions records (1961). Department of Births, Deaths
and Marriages, Victoria, Australia. Obtained under FOI Act, 1991
^ Ulrich Völklein: Mengele - Der Arzt von Auschwitz. Göttingen, 2001
^ "Scientists Decide Brazil Skelton Is Josef Mengele.", New York Times
(July 22, 1985). Retrieved on 2008-03-21. "American, Brazilian and
West German scientists announced jointly today that a skeleton
recently exhumed from a graveyard near here was unquestionably that of
Dr. Josef Mengele. A separate report by American experts concluded
that the bones were those of the long-sought Nazi death-camp doctor
'within a reasonable scientific certainty.' ..."
^ Ulrich Völklein: Mengele - Der Arzt von Auschwitz. Göttingen, 2001
^ Collections | Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi
leadership at the camp

Further reading
Mengele - the complete story, Gerald Posner and John Ware, McGraw Hill
Book Company, New York, 1986 ISBN 0-07-050598-5
Miklos Nyiszli's At Last the Truth About Eichmann's Inferno Auschwitz
and Auschwitz—A doctor’s eyewitness account describes his experience
working involuntarily for Mengele.
The book Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold
Story of the Twins of Ausch by Lucette Matalon Lagado and Sheila Cohn
Dekel is a collection of witness accounts pieced together in a
biography of sorts about Dr. Mengele and his experiments.
The Boys from Brazil, a novel by Ira Levin, Bantam, 1991 ISBN
0553290045 — filmed, starring Gregory Peck as Mengele
The "Last" Nazi - The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele, Gerald
Astor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1985 ISBN 0 297 78853 1

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