Joseph Mengele

Josef Mengele (AFI: [ˈjoːzəf ˈmɛngələ]; Gunzburg, March 16, 1911-Bertioga, 7 February 1979), was a German officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS), physician, and war criminal during World War II. He is essentially remembered for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners, and was a member of the group of doctors who selected victims to be executed in the gas chambers. He became known as the Angel of Death (German Todesengel).

Before the war, Mengele had earned doctorates in anthropology and medicine and launched a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. At the start of World War II he was assigned as a battalion medical officer, but in early 1943 he transferred to concentration camp service and was posted to Auschwitz. There he had the opportunity to perform genetic experiments on humans, often on twins, without regard for the well-being and safety of his victims. Due to the Red Army's advance into Poland, Mengele was moved 280 km west to the camp of Gross-Rosen concentration on January 17, 1945, ten days before the arrival of Soviet troops at Auschwitz.

After the end of the Second World War, on May 7, 1945, he fled to South America with the help of a network of former SS members who facilitated the sea voyage to Argentina in July 1949. At first he lived in and around Buenos Aires, and later fled to Paraguay in 1959 and Brazil in 1960, persecuted by the Federal Republic of Germany, Israel, and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, who wanted to put him on trial. Despite extradition requests from the West German government and clandestine operations by Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, Mengele avoided arrest. He drowned after suffering a stroke while swimming on the beach in the Brazilian town of Bertioga in 1979 and was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard. His remains were exhumed and identified by forensic examination in 1985.

Early years and education

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in the Bavarian city of Gunzburg; he was the eldest of the three children of Karl and Walburga (née Hupfauer) and his brothers were named Karl and Alois. His father was the founder of the company Karl Mengele und Söhne, which produced agricultural machinery. Josef was a good student who liked music, art and skiing. He finished secondary education in April 1930 and began studying medicine and philosophy at the University of Munich, a city that was the stronghold of the Nazi party, the fascist political organization led by Adolf Hitler. In 1931 Mengele joined the Steel Helmets, a paramilitary organization which was absorbed in 1934 by the Nazi militias Sturmabteilung.

In 1935 Mengele obtained a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Munich and in January 1937 left the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt as an assistant to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a genetics research scientist with an interest in particular in twin brothers. There Mengele focused on the genetic factors that gave rise to the appearance of cleft lip and chin, and his thesis on this subject was qualified with a cum laude which earned him he was awarded a medical doctorate from the University of Frankfurt in 1938. In a letter of recommendation, von Verschuer praised Mengele's reliability and his ability to explain complicated concepts very clearly. American writer Robert Jay Lifton notes that Mengele's publications were not dissimilar to mainstream science at the time and would probably have been valued as valid scientific endeavors even outside the realm of Nazi Germany.

Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met in Leipzig while working as a resident physician, on 28 July 1939. Their only son, Rolf, was born in 1944.

Military service

Nazi ideology amalgamated elements of antisemitism, racial hygiene, and eugenics and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of achieving greater Lebensraum —living space— for the Germanic peoples. Nazi Germany tried to get that space with the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as the deportation and murder of the Jews and Slavs who lived there, who were considered inferior to the Aryan superior race.

Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He received basic training with the mountain infantry and was drafted into the Wehrmacht—the German armed forces—in June 1940, a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War. He immediately volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS, where he served with the rank of Untersturmführer —ensign/second lieutenant— in a battalion from the medical reserve until November 1940. He was then assigned to the SS Office of Race and Resettlement in Poznan, where he evaluated candidates for Germanization.

In June 1941 Mengele was posted to the Ukraine, where he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. In January 1942 he joined the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking as a battalion medical officer. He rescued two German soldiers from inside a burning tank, an action for which he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Wounded Medal and the Medal for the Care of the German People. He was seriously wounded in an action near Rostov-on-Don in the summer of 1942 and was declared unfit for further active service. Once recovered, he returned to the Office for Race and Resettlement in Berlin. He also resumed his association with von Verschuer, who was then working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. In April 1943 Mengele was promoted to Hauptsturmführer —captain— of the SS.

Auschwitz

In early 1943, at the encouragement of von Verschuer, Mengele applied for a transfer to the concentration camp service, where he hoped to have the opportunity to conduct genetic research on humans. His application was accepted and he was assigned to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where Eduard Wirths, chief medical officer, appointed him medical director of the Zigeunerfamilienlager — a camp for Roma families — in the Birkenau compound.

Selection of prisoners in Auschwitz II-Birkenau (May-June 1944). Those who sent to the right were assigned to forced labour, those on the left went to the gas chambers.

In late 1941, Hitler decided that the Jews of Europe should be exterminated. For this reason, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which was originally supposed to house slave workers, became a combination of a labor camp and an extermination camp. Prisoners from all over German-occupied Europe arrived there daily by train. In 1942 the SS already carried out "selections", which consisted of segregating able and incapable Jews: those who could work were admitted to the labor camp and those who could not, were immediately sent to death in the gas chambers. In the groups of those who were to die, which normally numbered three-fourths of all who arrived, were almost all children, women with their babies, pregnant women, all the elderly, and those whom the doctors considered, after a brief and cursory inspection, who were not completely healthy.

Mengele, a member of the group of doctors doing this human selection, was not required to perform this task, but participated in the hope of finding subjects for his experiments. He was particularly interested in finding twin brothers, and unlike others Doctors, who found the task stressful and horrifying, Mengele performed it with total ease, with extravagant airs, often smiling, highly groomed, or whistling a tune.

Richard Baer (comandante de Auschwitz), Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höß (former commander of Auschwitz). Auschwitz, 1944, picture of Karl Hocker.

Mengele and the other SS doctors did not treat the inmates, but rather supervised other prisoner doctors who were forced to work in the camp medical service. Mengele visited the hospital barracks weekly and sent the chamber gas to prisoners who had not recovered after two weeks in bed. He was also part of the group of doctors responsible for administering Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used to kill prisoners in the chambers. Birkenau gas. Specifically, he carried out this task in the chambers located in crematoria IV and V.

When an outbreak of noma — a bacteriological disease that gangrenes the mouth and face — broke out in the gypsy camp in 1943, Mengele began a study to determine the cause and develop a treatment. He took prisoner Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician and professor at the University of Prague, as his assistant. Mengele isolated the patients in a separate barracks and murdered several seriously ill children in order to send their heads and organs to the SS Medical Academy in Graz for study. The investigation was still ongoing when the gypsy camp was liquidated and its occupants murdered in 1944.

In response to a typhus epidemic in the women's camp, Mengele sent the six hundred occupants of a barracks to the gas chamber. The building was then cleaned and disinfected and the occupants of a nearby barracks were showered and given new clothes before being transferred to the clean barracks. This process was repeated until all the barracks were disinfected. This type of disinfection was carried out again when outbreaks of scarlet fever and other diseases broke out, but in those cases all the prisoners were sent to the gas chamber. For his "efforts," Mengele received the Military Merit Cross—Second Class with Swords—and was promoted in 1944 to first camp medic at Birkenau.

Human Experiments

Block 10, the "medical" Pavilion of Mengele in Auschwitz.

Mengele used his stay in Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his anthropological studies and his research on genetic inheritance using concentration camp prisoners to experiment on humans. These experiments had no regard for health, safety or suffering. physical and emotional condition of the victims. Mengele was especially interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia—different-colored eyes—dwarfs, and subjects with physical anomalies. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft—German Foundation for Research—was awarded a grant requested by Von Verschuer, to whom Mengele sent periodic reports and various samples. The money he was awarded was used to build a pathology laboratory attached to Crematorium II at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish pathologist who arrived at Auschwitz on May 29, 1944, performed dissections in this new laboratory and prepared the specimens for shipment. Mengele's research on the twins was designed in part to demonstrate supremacy of genetic inheritance on the environment and thus reinforce the premise of Nazism that defended the superiority of the Aryan race. Nyiszli states that the studies on twins were also motivated by a desire to improve the reproduction rate of the German race through through increased fertility and opportunities to father twins from racially desirable subjects.

The prisoners Mengele used in his experiments were better fed and housed than other inmates in the camp, and were also less likely to end up in the gas chamber while under investigation. games for the children with whom he carried out the tests and for all the gypsy children under six years of age, where they lived in better conditions than the rest of the prisoners in the concentration camp. When he visited the children he himself introduced himself as the " Uncle Mengele" and offered them candy. Despite this, he was responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of victims that he himself killed through lethal injections, shooting, beatings, and through deadly experiments. Lifton describes Mengele as a sadistic, unsympathetic and extremely anti-Semitic man who was convinced that the Jews were an inferior and dangerous race that must be completely annihilated. Mengele's only son, Rolf, said that his father never showed any remorse for his actions. activities during the war.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele's experiments. These children were released from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945.

The twins were subjected to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes by Mengele or some of his assistants. The experiments carried out by the doctor included unnecessary limb amputations, intentional inoculations with typhus and other diseases to one of the twins. twins and blood transfusions from one sibling to another. Many of the victims died in the course of the procedures. After the tests were complete, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. Nyiszli recounts that one night Mengele personally killed fourteen twins by injecting chloroform directly into their hearts. If one of the twins died of the disease he had been inoculated with, Mengele would kill the other brother for comparative post mortem reporting.

Mengele's experiments with the eyes included attempts to change the color of the iris through the injection of chemicals and the murder of people with heterochromia to remove their eyeballs and send them to Berlin for analysis. To the dwarves and of people with physical abnormalities he took body measurements, extracted blood and sound teeth, and administered unnecessary drugs and X-rays. Many victims were sent to the gas chamber and then their skeletons were sent to Berlin for further processing. investigations. Mengele sought out pregnant women, performing experiments on them before sending them to the gas chamber. Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two gypsy twins from behind in an attempt to create conjoined twins, but both died from the effects of gangrene after several days of suffering.

Evasion

Mengele and other Auschwitz doctors were transferred on January 17, 1945, to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia. There he took two boxes of specimens and the records of his experiments with him, while the rest of the camp's medical documents were destroyed by the SS. The Red Army captured Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Mengele fled Gross-Rosen. on February 18, a week before the Soviets arrived, and traveled west disguised as a Wehrmacht officer to Saaz—present-day Žatec. There he temporarily entrusted his incriminating Auschwitz documents to a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He and his entire unit then rushed west to avoid falling into the hands of Soviet troops and in June ended up being taken prisoner of war by the Soviet Union. us army. Mengele was initially registered under his real name, but due to Allied disarray with German most-wanted lists and the fact that he did not have the usual SS blood group tattoo, he was not identified as one of the names on the list of major war criminals. He was released at the end of July and obtained false documents under the name "Fritz Ullman", documents which he later altered to change his name to "Fritz Hollmann".

After several months on the run, in which he had time to venture into Soviet-controlled territory to retrieve his Auschwitz files, Mengele found work as a farmer near Rosenheim. Fearing capture, trial, and the death sentence, Mengele he fled Germany on April 17, 1949. Aided by a network of former SS members, which also included flying ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Mengele traveled to Genoa and obtained a passport under the alias "Helmut Gregor", fake member of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He sailed to Argentina in July, but his wife refused to accompany him and the two divorced in 1954.

In South America

Photograph of the Argentine identity document of Mengele, 1956.

In Buenos Aires, Mengele worked as a carpenter and lived in a pension in Vicente López's party. After a few weeks he moved to the house of a Nazi sympathizer in the well-to-do Florida neighborhood and later worked as an agent business for his family's farm machinery business. Since 1951 he made frequent trips to Paraguay as a sales representative in that country.In 1953 he began to live in an apartment in Buenos Aires and that same year he used money from his family to buy a part of a carpentry company. The following year he rented a house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Olivos.

In 1956, Mengele obtained a copy of his birth certificate through the West German embassy and was granted a residence permit in Argentina under his real name. With this document he obtained a West German passport, also bearing his real name, and undertook a trip to Europe. He vacationed in Switzerland with his son Rolf—who called his father "Uncle Fritz"—and his sister-in-law widow Martha, plus a week in her family home in Gunzburg. After returning to Argentina in September, Mengele continued to live under her real name. Martha and her son Karl Heinz joined him in the American country a month later and the three of them settled together. Josef and Martha were married during a vacation in Uruguay in the city of Nueva Helvecia in 1958 and bought a house in the Argentine capital. Their businesses then included part ownership of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical company. Also in In 1958, Mengele and other doctors were questioned and later cleared on suspicion of practicing medicine without a license after a teenage girl died during an abortion. Concerned that this case would expose his Nazi past and his activities during the war, he undertook a long business trip to Paraguay and in 1959 obtained Argentine citizenship under the name of José Mengele. He returned to Buenos Aires several times to attend to business and visit his family. Martha and Karl Heinz lived in a boarding house in the city until they returned to Germany in December 1960.

Mengele's name was mentioned several times during the Nuremberg trials, but the Allied nations were convinced he was dead. His first wife Irene and her family also said he was dead. However, in Germany Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Hermann Langbein were collecting witness information about the activities of the Auschwitz doctor. During a search in public archives, Langbein came across Mengele's divorce certificate and a Buenos Aires address, so he and Wiesenthal contacted the West German authorities on June 5, 1959 to issue a warrant. arrest and the extradition process will begin. Argentina initially rejected the request because the fugitive no longer lived at the address indicated in the documents and by the time the extradition was approved on June 30, 1960, Mengele had fled to Paraguay, where he was living on a farm near the Argentine border.

Attempts by Mossad

In May 1960, Iser Har'el, director of the Mossad, the intelligence service of the state of Israel, personally led the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. His hope was to locate Josef Mengele as well and bring him to trial in Israel.In interrogation, Eichmann gave the address of a pension in the Argentine capital that several Nazi fugitives had used as a safe house. The Israelis put the house under surveillance, but neither Mengele nor any of his family showed up. The neighborhood postman told them that although he continued to receive mail under his real name, Mengele had moved without leaving a forwarding address. Har & # 39; el's investigations in a mechanical workshop that the German had co-owned did not provide any clues to his whereabouts either, so they gave up.

When West Germany offered a reward for his capture and the press reported on his wartime activities—along with photos of himself—Mengele decided to change residence once more. Rudel put him in contact with Nazi sympathizer Wolfgang Gerhard, who helped him cross into Brazil, he lived with Gerhard on his farm near São Paulo until they found a more comfortable home with Hungarian expatriates Geza and Gitta Stammer. This couple bought a farm in Nova Europa, partly with money that Mengele himself invested, and later put the former doctor in charge of the farm. In 1962 the three purchased a farm with cattle and coffee plantations in Serra Negra, a property Mengele owned half of. Gerhard initially told the Stammers that Mengele's name was "Peter Hochbichler", but they discovered his true identity in 1963. Gerhard persuaded them not to reveal the location of the German doctor to the authorities, telling them they might get in trouble for harboring a fugitive. West German authorities were suspicious of Mengele's new residence and expanded his extradition request to Brazil in February 1961.

Meanwhile, Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents involved in Eichmann's successful arrest, has been placed in charge of a team of agents tasked with finding Mengele and bringing him to trial in Israel. The investigations in Paraguay did not bear fruit and they were not able to intercept the correspondence between Josef and his wife Martha, who was living in Italy at the time. The agents who were watching Rudel did not discover any leads either. Aharoni and his team followed Gerhard to a rural area near São Paulo and there they located a European who they mistook for Mengele. They informed Harel, but the complicated Logistics required for the capture, budget cuts, and Israel's need to focus on deteriorating relations with Egypt forced the Mossad chief to end this operation in 1962.

Last years and death

Mengele and the Stammers bought a house on land near Caieiras in 1969, for which the German paid half. When Wolfgang Gerhard returned to Germany in 1971 seeking medical treatment for his wife and son, both seriously ill, he handed over their identity papers to Mengele. The Stammers broke off their relationship with Mengele in 1974 and bought a house in São Paulo to which the German was not invited. Later, the couple bought a bungalow in Eldorado, near São Paulo, and rented it to the German doctor. Rolf, who had not seen his father since vacations in Europe in 1956, traveled to Brazil to visit him in 1977 and He encountered an unrepentant Nazi who claimed that he had never harmed anyone and had only done his duty.

Mengele's health had been steadily deteriorating since 1972, and in 1976 he suffered a stroke. He suffered from high blood pressure and an ear infection that caused him to feel dizzy. During a visit to his friends Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert in the coastal town of Bertioga on February 7, 1979, Mengele suffered another stroke while swimming in the sea and drowned. He was buried in the Brazilian municipality of Embu das Artes with the name "Wolfgang Gerhard", the false identity he had been using since 1975.

Exhumation

Brazilian forensic anthropologists examining Mengele's skull in 1986.

Meanwhile, there have been reports of alleged sightings of Josef Mengele in various parts of the world. Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed him on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960, in Cairo in 1961, in Spain in 1971 and in Paraguay in 1978, eighteen years after leaving that country. In 1985 Wiesenthal continued to believe that Mengele was alive and in 1982 had put up a $100,000 reward for his capture. from Mengele's experiments. Shortly thereafter, the governments of West Germany, Israel, and the United States coordinated efforts to try to locate the Auschwitz doctor. The Israeli and German governments, The Washington Times newspaper and the Simon Wiesenthal Center offered various rewards for his arrest.

On May 31, 1985, following a tip received by the West German prosecutor's office, police searched the home of Hans Sedlmeier, Mengele's lifelong friend and head of sales for the family business in Gunzburg. There they found an address book with encrypted addresses, copies of Mengele's letters and another letter in which Bossert informed Sedlmeier of the death of the former Nazi doctor. The German authorities contacted the São Paulo police and they located Sedlmeier. the Bosserts. The interrogation revealed the place where Mengele had been buried. The remains were exhumed on June 6, 1985, and the forensic examination focused on his teeth, which showed a noticeable gap—interdental space—in the upper incisors., a characteristic feature of Mengele, which led to the ruling that there was a very high probability that it was Mengele's body. On June 10, his son Rolf released a statement admitting that it was his father's body and that news of his death had been kept quiet to protect the people who had helped hide him for more than three decades. In 1992 a genetic test verified Mengele's identity. The family refused to repatriate the remains to Germany. and these remain stored at the Legal Medical Institute of São Paulo, where they are used by forensic medicine students.

Legacy

The life of Josef Mengele was the inspiration for a book and film titled The Children of Brazil, in which a fictional Doctor Mengele, played by actor Gregory Peck, creates clones of Adolf Hitler in a clinic in Brazil. In 2007 the US Holocaust Museum received as a donation the Höcker Album, a collection of photographs of the SS members who managed Auschwitz, taken by Karl Hocker. Mengele appears in eight of the photos. In 2013, the Argentine film Wakolda was released, based on the novel of the same name, directed by Lucía Puenzo and which deals with Mengele's supposed stay in San Carlos de Bariloche.

In February 2010, a grandson of a Holocaust survivor bought Mengele's 180-page diary at auction for an undisclosed sum of money. Its previous owner, whose identity is unknown, took possession of the documents in Brazil and appears to have been someone close to the Mengele family. An organization of Holocaust survivors regarded this sale as "a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals". Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center was pleased that the diary ended in the hands of a Jew, saying, "At a time when Ahmadinejad's Iran denies the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is back in vogue, this acquisition is especially significant." In 2011 the same auction house again sold, also, amidst various protests, another 31 volumes of Mengele's diaries that were purchased by an anonymous collector who paid $245,000.

Summary of his career in the SS

• SS Number: 317 885
• Nazi Party Number: 574 974
• Principal level: SS-WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Department), doctor in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
• Service Waffen-SS:
  • Medical Equipment Officer, Medical Inspection Waffen-SS (1940)
  • Medical Officer, Battalion Pionero N.o. 5th Panzergrenadier SS Wiking Division (1941–1943)
  • Medical Officer, Battalion «Ost», 3.a SS Division Totenkopf (1943)

Dates of promotions

Awards

• Iron Cross (First and Second Class)
• War Merit Cross (Second Class with Swords)
• Eastern Front Medal
• Medal of wounded (Negra)
• Social Welfare Decoration
• German Sports (Bronce)
• Honorary horse of the old guard