German doctor Josef Mengele left an ironic legacy as one of the most horrific and meanest killers in history. By inhumane medical experiments on thousands of innocent Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Mengele became notorious as the “Angel of Death”.
Organic and pre-holocaust
The notorious Nazi doctor was born on March 16, 1911 in Günzburg near Ulm. Born with a silver spoon, Josef was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a successful German businessman engaged in manufacturing. Mengele grew up being naturally intelligent. His rich background made him very popular with his peers. An ambitious mind and a graduate of the University of Munich, Mengele received his doctorate in anthropology in 1935.
He continued his postdoctoral work at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt under the prominent Nazi scientist and eugenicist Dr. Otmar Baron von Verschuer. Mengele studied enthusiastically with von Verschuer, who was famous at the time for his research with twins, and after a year he received not only his second doctorate in medicine, but also a recommendation from the renowned scientist. While working with Verschuer, Mengele aroused curiosity about using twins for medical research.
Josef Mengele experiments that made him the angel of death
In May 1943 Mengele was transferred to Auschwitz, where he took over the management of the Birkenau concentration camp. Mengele’s enthusiastic character got the best of him at the Birkenau camp and also marked the beginning of his infamous tenure. The Nazi doctor, who seemed to be almost everywhere, always had a meticulous look and was always eager to complete any extra camp work that wasn’t technically assigned to him.
According to various survivor accounts, Mengele had a characteristically cruel demeanor in the camp and was often noticed looking for twins in the selection area when new prisoners were sent to Auschwitz. In addition to performing his normal daily duties in the camp alongside other Nazi doctors, Mengele also studied the influence of heredity on various physical traits. As part of his study, he also conducted and managed his own research using numerous inmates he carefully selected for his human experiment.
After assembling numerous pairs of twins, Mengele would turn one of the twins into his lab rat by injecting him/her with mysterious substances. If his subject died, the same fate would also befall the other twin, who would be instantly murdered with chloroform injected into the heart. He would then proceed to dissect the twins and perform autopsies for comparison. In addition, the Nazi doctor injected the children with dyes for pathological examinations in Germany.
Desperate to trace the genetic origins of various diseases, Dr Mengele eventually became famous for his experiment with twins and consequently became known by the monikers “Angel of Death” or “White Angel”. With his senseless and futile research efforts at Auschwitz, Mengele hoped not only to prove Nazi racial theories, but also to produce a second habilitation thesis that would pave the way for his admission to a German university as a professor.
Post War and Death
In January 1945, Dr. Josef Mengele fled the Auschwitz camp to avoid being captured by the Red Army. Although he was initially taken into custody by the US Army immediately after the war, he was soon released because US officials were unaware that his name was on the list of wanted war criminals and also the world’s most wanted Nazis at the time was standing .
From 1945 to 1949 with the help of his family, the Nazi doctor settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked farmland under false aliases. Before he became the world’s most wanted Nazi, Mengele and another Nazi bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann, topped the list. After the Nazi hunters captured and killed Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Mengele fled first to Paraguay and then to Brazil to avoid the authorities who were after him.
Mengele has lived in poverty and with isolated families near Sao Pãolo in recent years. Mengele’s health was declining, stressed by loneliness and the paranoia of being captured. After being shielded from justice by Nazi friends and family for more than three decades, on February 7, 1979, Karma brought Dr. He was buried in a suburb of Sao Pãolo under the pseudonym Wolfgang Gerhard.
In June 1985, after collecting several pieces of evidence over the years, investigators traced Mengele’s grave to that of the man buried as Wolfgang Gerhard. After the grave was excavated, forensic and genetic evidence conclusively proved that the remains actually belonged to Josef Mengele. In March 2016, it was revealed that a Brazilian court had ruled that Mengele’s remains would be used for medical research by student doctors at the University of São Paulo.