They called him the 'angel of death': Who is Josef Mengele?

Josef Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazi doctors of World War II, conducted gruesome medical experiments on thousands of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mengele held unshakable faith in the unscientific Aryan theory of the Nazi race. This belief led to numerous inhuman tests on Jewish and Romani people.

From 1943 to 1945, Mengele became famous in Auschwitz with the nickname "Angel of Death". Mengele, like other Nazi doctors at the camp, was tasked with choosing which captives would be killed immediately and which would be sent to hard labor or kept alive for human-focused medical experiments. But many prisoners remembered that Mengele was certainly crueler than the other doctors.

Mengele was known not only for his cold demeanor where new arrivals to Auschwitz were received—he sent nearly 400,000 people to their deaths in the gas chambers—but also for his irrational brutality during human experiments. He saw his victims only as "guinea pigs alive" and happily embarked on some of the most gruesome "investigations" of war.

However, When World War II ended and Nazi Germany was certain to lose, Mengele managed to escape from the camp. But he was soon captured by American soldiers, worked on a farm in Bavaria, and somehow escaped to South America – never wanting to face justice for his crimes.

On June 6, 1985, the police in São Paulo in Brazil opened the grave of a man named “Wolfgang Gerhard”. Forensics and subsequent genetic data clearly proved that the remains actually belonged to Josef Mengele, who drowned while swimming in Brazil a few years ago.

This was the terrifying tale of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who terrified thousands of Holocaust victims and escaped all danger. Now let's talk about the detailed life of this person.

Interestingly, Josef Mengele has no gruesome background which we can specifically point out when trying to explain his infamous acts. Born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Germany, Mengele was a successful business owner at a time when the country's economy was collapsing, and he was also a wealthy child.

While everyone in the school loved Mengele, his educational success was also remarkable. When he graduated, no one doubted that he would achieve anything he set his mind to.

Mengele obtained his first anthropology doctorate from the University of Munich in 1935. According to the New York Times, a Nazi eugenicist at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, Dr. It was conducted under the leadership of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer.

Von Verschuer's work revolved around inherited effects on genetically inherited defects such as a cleft palate. Mengele was an ambitious assistant to von Verschuer and left the laboratory in 1938, obtaining both a brilliant roadmap and being the second doctor in medicine. Mengele conducted research on the effect of race on the formation of the lower jaw as the subject of his thesis.

Before long, however, Josef Mengele decided to go beyond writing about topics such as eugenics and the Nazi Aryan race theory.

Before working on the gruesome experiments at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele was successful as an SS paramedic.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 26-year-old Josef Mengele became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937 while working with his mentor in Frankfurt. In 1938 he was recruited into the SS and the reserve unit of the Wehrmacht. His unit was called up in 1940 and apparently volunteered to provide medical service to the Waffen-SS.

Mengele made a serious move between the capture of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, he initiated eugenics in Poland for the "Germanization" of Polish citizens or for the practice of race-based citizenship in the Third Reich.

In 1941, his unit was deployed to participate in combat in Ukraine. Josef Mengele would quickly establish himself on the Eastern Front. He was awarded several medals, once for rescuing the wounded from a burning tank by dragging them, and was repeatedly praised for his dedication to the Nazis.

But later, in January 1943, part of the German army surrendered at Stalingrad. And that summer, another German army was destroyed at Kursk. Between the two battles, during the Battles of Rjev ("Rzhev Meat Grinder") in Rostov, Mengele was seriously injured.

Mengele went to Auschwitz during a period of devolution. The camp had long been the place where prisoners of forced labor were held. But during the winter of 1942-1943, the camp was turned into a killing machine based in the Birkenau subcamp, where Mengele was appointed medical officer.

In addition to determining who would be gassed, Mengele directed an infirmary where patients were executed.

The reason he preferred identical twin children for genetic research was, of course, because they had the same genes. Hence, any differences between them were formed as a result of environmental factors. In Mengele's thinking, this made the twins the perfect "subjects." Because he would be able to isolate genetic factors by comparing their bodies and behaviors.

Mengele collected hundreds of pairs of twins and sometimes spent hours measuring various parts of their bodies and taking notes gracefully. He followed the disease, which often occurs by injecting unknown substances into a twin.

In 1944, because of his love and enthusiasm for Mengele's terrible profession, he obtained the position of manager of the camp.

By January 1945, the camp center at Auschwitz had largely disintegrated and the starving prisoners were forcibly marched (to be bombarded by the Allies) to Dresden. Josef Mengele collected his research notes and test samples, left them all with a trusted friend, and headed west to avoid capture by the Soviet army.

Josef Mengele managed to evade the victorious Allies until June when he was captured by an American scout. He was able to travel under his own name in the process. However, the list of wanted criminals was not effectively distributed, and so the Americans fled before they could detect him.

Using various nicknames and sometimes his own name, Mengele lived for decades without being caught. The fact that almost no one made an effort to search for him and that the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay were extremely sympathetic to the Nazis who took refuge in them also caused him to face no difficulties in his life.

Even in exile and with a world that would slip away if he was caught, Mengele wanted to continue his work. In the 1950s, he managed to open an unlicensed practice in Buenos Aires, where he would specialize in illegal abortion.

But this illegal workplace would cause him to be arrested because one of the patients died. However, according to a witness statement, a friend of his had come to court with an envelope full of money for his team of judges. The case was later closed.

Israel's plans to capture him were constantly changing direction. Their capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, and then the threat of war with Egypt, which completely distracted the Mossad, made it impossible to bring the most vicious Nazi to justice.

Finally, on February 7, 1979, 67-year-old Josef Mengele suffered a sudden stroke and drowned while swimming near São Paulo, Brazil. After Mengele's death, friends and family members gradually admitted that they always knew where he was hiding and that they had protected him from facing justice.

In March 2016, a Brazilian court authorized the exhumed remains of Mengele to the University of São Paulo. Later, it was decided to carry out medical research on these by student doctors.