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Josef Mengele 1 Josef Mengele Josef Mengele 1 Josef Mengele Josef Mengele Birth name Josef Mengele Nickname Angel of Death (German: Todesengel) Born 16 March 1911 Günzburg, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire Died 7 February 1979 (aged 67) Bertioga, São Paulo, Brazil Allegiance Nazi Germany Service/branch Schutzstaffel Years of service 1938—1945 Rank SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Service number NSDAP #5,574,974 SS #3,177,885 Commands Human medical experimentation performed on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, and selection of held prisoners to be gassed at Auschwitz Awards Iron Cross First Class Black Badge for the Wounded Medal for the Care of the German People Signature Josef Mengele (German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈmɛŋələ] ( ); 16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He qualified for scientific doctorates in Anthropology from Munich University and in Medicine from Frankfurt University. He became one of the more notorious characters to emerge from the Third Reich in World War II as an SS medical officer who supervised the selection of victims of the Holocaust, determining who was to be killed and who was to temporarily become a forced laborer, and for performing bizarre and murderous human experiments on prisoners. Surviving the war, after a period of living incognito in Germany he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal. Early life and family Josef Mengele was born the eldest of three children on 16 March 1911 to Karl and Walburga (Hupfauer) Mengele in Günzburg, Bavaria, Germany. His younger brothers were Karl Jr and Alois Mengele. Mengele's father was a founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company, a company that produced farm machinery for milling, sawing, and baling.[1] In 1935, Mengele earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Munich. In January 1937, at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he became the assistant to Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was a leading scientist mostly known for his research in genetics, with a particular interest in twins.[2] In addition, Mengele studied under Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who had been involved in medical experiments on the Herero tribe in South-West Africa, now Namibia.[3] As an assistant to von Verschuer, Mengele's research focused on the genetic factors resulting in a cleft lip and palate, or a cleft chin.[4] His thesis on the subject earned him a cum laude doctorate. Had he continued his focus on academic matters, Mengele would have probably become a Professor.[5] His mentor and employer seemed suitably Josef Mengele 2 impressed by the young academic. He wrote a letter of recommendation which praised the reliability of Mengele and his ability to present "difficult intellectual problems" in a clear manner.[6] Robert Jay Lifton notes that Mengele's published works were "full of charts, diagrams, and photographs", with which the young man sought to bring science into the service of the "Nazi vision". In Lifton's view, the works did not deviate much from the scientific mainstream of the time, and would probably be seen as respectable scientific efforts even outside the borders of Nazi Germany. On 28 July 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met while studying in Leipzig. Their only son, Rolf, was born in 1944. Five years after Mengele fled to Buenos Aires in 1949, his wife Irene divorced him. She continued to live in Germany with their son. On 25 July 1958, in Nueva Helvecia, Uruguay, Mengele married Martha Mengele, widow of his deceased brother Karl. Martha had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1956 with her son, Karl-Heinz Mengele. Military service In 1937, Mengele joined the Nazi Party. In 1938, he received his medical degree and joined the SS. Mengele was conscripted into the army in 1940 and later volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, where he distinguished himself as a soldier. Nazi Germany declared war against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Later that same month, Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for service at the Ukrainian Front. In January 1942, while still serving with the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking he rescued two German soldiers from a burning tank and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, as well as the Wound Badge in Black and the Medal for the "Care of the German People". After being medically evacuated from the Eastern Front with wounds sustained in action with the rank of Captain, he was, after recovery, transferred to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin. Whilst here Mengele resumed an association with his mentor, von Verschuer, who was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin. Just before he was transferred to Auschwitz, Mengele was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) in April 1943. Auschwitz In May 1943, Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On 24 May 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's Zigeunerfamilienlager ("Gypsy Family Camp"). In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all of its inmates were gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz, though: his superior was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths. During his 21-month stay at Auschwitz, Mengele was referred to as "der weiße Engel" ("the White Angel") by camp inmates because when he stood on the platform inspecting and selecting new arrivals his white coat and white arms outstretched evoked the image of a white angel. Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the camp, where it was determined who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. He also appeared there frequently in search of twins for his experimentation. He would wade through the incoming prisoners, shouting "Zwillinge heraus!" ("Twins out!"), "Zwillinge heraustreten!" ("Twins step forward!") with, according to an assistant he recruited, "such a face that I would think he's mad".Wikipedia:Quotations Because he "brought such flamboyance and posturing to the selection", he was the individual best remembered for the process. He drew a line on the wall of the children's block 150 centimetres (about 5 feet) from the floor and children whose heads could not reach the line were sent to the gas chambers. "He had a look that said 'I am the power,'" said one survivor. When it was reported that one block was infested with lice, Mengele ordered that the 750 women who lived inside the dormitories be gassed. Josef Mengele 3 Human experimentation Mengele 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 recruited Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician, and Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish pathologist, to assist with his experiments. As a forced-labor prisoner under Mengele's direction, Epstein proposed a study into treatments of the disease called noma that was noted for particularly affecting children from the camp. While the exact cause of Block 10 – Medical experimentation block in noma remains uncertain, it is now known that it has a higher Auschwitz 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 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, seven of whom were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation, they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. Mengele's experiments also included attempts to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other surgeries such as kidney removal, without anaesthesia. 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 forced sterilization and electroconvulsive therapy. Most of the victims died, because of either the experiments or later infections. Once Mengele's assistant rounded up fourteen pairs of Romani twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each piece of the twins' bodies. At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of studies on twins. After an experiment was over, the twins were usually killed and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Romani children were sewn together to create conjoined twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resected; these twins soon died of an uncontrolled gangrene infection. In another "experiment", he connected a 7-year-old girl's urinary tract to her colon.[7] 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, although many experiments resulted in more painful deaths. 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". Mengele also sought out pregnant women, on whom he would perform vivisections before sending them to the gas chambers.[8] Former 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.
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