Dr. Mengele

The life story of Josef Mengele is one that is filled many twists and turns that play out like a suspense story with an ending that does not seem to fit what one would expect. The authors of the book Mengele: The Complete Story, Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, wrote this book largely with information taken from diaries and letters of Mengele’s, and interviews with those who knew him. It is a look into the life and times of a man whose nickname was “The Angel of Death.'; Josef’s life and post-mortem fate could be divided into three different chapters. His pre-war life and life during World War II was one of privilege and freedom to satisfy his perverse desire to perform bizarre and mostly useless medical experiments on unwilling participants in Nazi death camps. His post-war life consisted of being constantly on the run; a lonely and depressed fugitive wanted by countries worldwide for the atrocities he committed against Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and others during World War II. His lonely death by drowning, in Brazil, and humiliating post-mortem fate suited the man well. Although this report might seem to follow a chronological order, it is not simply a telling of a life story. It is a look into who Josef Mengele was, and how he changed over the years.

The authors underlying main theme, throughout the book, seemed to be to show that Josef Mengele was not who his infamous legend would dictate. It is true that he was a cold and ruthless killer who murdered thousands of innocent people. He earned the nickname “The Angel of Death'; for the way he would remain calm and composed while performing such torturous an act as a live dissection of a human being. He had a sick fascination with twins. He believed that twins held the secret to discovering how to perfect a master race. The following is a description by Vera Alexander, a witness of Mengele’s horrors, of a common experiment Mengele would perform on twins:

“One day SS men came and took two children away. They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino. One of them was a hunchback. Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state. They had been cut. The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too. There was a terrible smell of gangrene. The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.';(P.37 par...

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...t, he regretted not working harder to exterminate more people than he had. Mengele was presented as who he was. This makes it seem as though there is an unfair amount of negativity presented about him. Other than a few occasions where he showed compassion, such as with his son and cleaning lady, he really did not have many redeeming qualities. Mengele personified hatred, arrogance, and cruelty. Trying to keep a balance between the positive and negative of the man would have been impossible.

At the end of his life, Mengele was still the same man he always was. He had been humbled by his life of simplicity, yet the arrogance and bitterness he showed as a young SS doctor were still present. Although Mengele evaded capture and was never brought to trial, it does not mean he was never punished. If Mengele had been put to death, his life would have been over, without any further suffering. Mengele lived, and his life of loneliness, isolation, and alienation from his family and the ones he loved was much more painful than had he been put out of his misery years earlier. With his life a waste, all his aspirations dead, and his spirit weakened, Mengele’s life was his punishment.