If you ask what the evilest event in history is, many would say the Holocaust
Ask who the most monstrous figure was, and Josef Mengele – nicknamed the “Angel of Death” – often tops the list
The more you learn about Mengele, the more horrifying & sadistic he gets
1. Josef earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. He followed this by working in genetics with some of the leading medical minds of Germany & and he earned a second, medical doctorate
Mengele was a dedicated Nazi & joined the SS around the same time he earned his medical degree. When World War II broke out, he was sent to the eastern front as an officer to fight the Soviets. He earned an Iron Cross Second Class in 1941.
2. In early 1943, Mengele was assigned as one of several SS doctors to Auschwitz. He was given freedom to conduct his experiments first on Romani people & then Jewish inmates.
Mengele injected dye into the eyeballs of inmates to see if he could change its color. He deliberately infected inmates with horrible diseases to document their progress. He injected substances such as gasoline into the inmates, condemning them to a painful death, just to watch the process.
He liked to experiment on sets of twins and always separated them from the incoming train cars, saving them from immediate death in the gas chambers but keeping them for a fate which was, in some cases, far worse. It is estimated that during his year and a half at Auschwitz, he experimented on 3,000 twins – only 200 of whom survived.
3. The “selection” process at Auschwitz involved observing new arrivals at the camp. Those who were deemed unfit to perform hard labor were often sent to the gas chambers. Others became Auschwitz prisoners.
Whereas most doctors at the camp seemed to find the selection process to be depressing, Mengele was known for showing up all the time, even when it wasn’t his shift, and taking great delight in deciding who lived & died.
In one case while standing on the selection line, a woman who was about to be separated from her child bit a Nazi officer. Mengele responded by shooting the woman and child to death, then ordering that everyone in the line be sent to the gas chambers.
4. When an outbreak of noma – a gangrenous bacterial disease of the mouth and face – struck the Romani camp in 1943, Mengele initiated a study to determine the cause of the disease and develop a treatment. He enlisted the assistance of prisoner Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician and professor at Prague University.
The patients were isolated in separate barracks and several afflicted children were killed so that their preserved heads and organs could be sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz and other facilities for study. This research was still ongoing when the Romani camp was liquidated and its remaining occupants murdered in 1944.
5. Mengele’s research subjects were better fed and housed than the other prisoners & temporarily spared from the gas chambers. His research subjects lived in their own barracks, where they were provided with a marginally better quality of food and somewhat improved living conditions than the other areas of the camp.
When visiting his young subjects, he introduced himself as “Uncle Mengele” and offered them sweets. A former Auschwitz inmate doctor said of Mengele:
‘He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire … And then, next to that, … the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay.’
6. In his twin experiments, Mengele generally ordered the twins to undertake weekly physical examinations. Then, he would subject them to a variety of procedures, including amputating healthy limbs, deliberately infecting them with diseases such as typhus, and transfusing the blood of one twin into another.
Many died during the procedures, and those who survived were often killed and dissected for comparative post-mortem reports.On one occasion, Mengele killed 14 twins at the same time by injecting their hearts with chloroform.
Mengele sewed two Romani twins together back to back in an attempt to make them into conjoined twins. Their hands became badly infected and they died of gangrene after suffering for days.
7. Renate, her twin brother, Rene, and their German-Jewish parents lived in Prague. Just before Renate turned 6, her family was sent to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadtghetto. There, she became #70917.
She was separated from her brother and mother and taken to a hospital where she was measured and X-rayed; blood was taken from her neck. Once, she was strapped to a table and cut with a knife. She got injections that made her throw up and have diarrhea.
While Renate was ill in the hospital after an injection, guards came in to take the sick to be killed. The nurse caring for her hid her under her long skirt and she was quiet until the guards left.
Renate and her brother survived and were reunited in America in 1950. They learned that as one pair of the “Mengele Twins,” they had been used for medical experiments.
8. When he conducted selections of arriving Jews, Mengele looked for people with physical abnormalities. These people included dwarfs, people with gigantism, or persons who had a club foot. Mengele studied these people and then had them murdered. He sent their bodies to Germany for study by researchers.
9. In 1945, as the Soviets moved eastward, it became apparent that the Germans would be defeated. By the time Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945, Mengele & other SS officers were long gone.
Mengele was briefly taken prisoner by Americans in June of 1945, but was soon released & obtained false documents with a new identity.
He hid out in Germany for a while, finding work as a farm laborer under an assumed name. It wasn’t long before his name began appearing on lists of most-wanted war criminals and in 1949 he decided to follow many of his fellow Nazis to Argentina. He was put in contact with Argentine agents, who aided him with necessary papers and permits.
10. Mengele found a warm reception in Argentina. Many former Nazis and old friends were there, and the Juan Domingo Perón regime was friendly to them. Mengele even met President Perón on more than one occasion.
Josef’s father Karl had business contacts in Argentina, and Josef found that his father’s prestige rubbed off on him a bit (his father’s money didn’t hurt, either). He moved in high circles and although he often used an assumed name, everyone in the Argentine-German community knew who he was.
By 1950, two names were at the top of every Nazi hunter’s wish list: Mengele & Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was snatched off a Buenos Aires street by a team of Mossad agents in 1960.
11. Mengele lived his final years in poverty, moving around in Paraguay & Brazil, staying with isolated families where he frequently wore out his welcome due to his acrimonious nature. He was helped by his family and an ever-dwindling circle of Nazi friends.
He became paranoid, convinced that Nazi hunters were hot on his trail, and the stress greatly affected his health. He was a lonely, bitter man whose heart was still filled with hatred. He died in a swimming accident in Brazil in 1979.
DNA investigations of the skeleton’s remains were compared to DNA from living relatives—Mengele’s son was still alive at the time and blood samples were drawn from him. That provided additional supporting evidence that the exhumed remains were Mengele’s.
Identifying Mengele’s remains was one of the earliest uses of the process of forensic identification in the prosecution of war crimes
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