Josef Mengele: Angel Of Death

Josef Mengele (Angel of Death)
During The Holocaust, Nazi doctors forcefully performed a number of painful, and often deadly, medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. These experiments were created to collect research on topics such as hypothermia, treating of illnesses and injuries, twins, and how people of different races responded to disease1. Josef Mengele was a SS physician, infamous for the brutal experiments he conducted on prisoners in Auschwitz between May 1943 and January 19452.
Pre-Nazi Party and Education
Mengele got his PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich, and begun working with Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1937. He assisted von Verschuer in his experiments on identical and fraternal twins, and

grew an interest in the field. Mengele earned his medical degree in 19383.
Nazi Party
Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937 and joined the SS a year later. In the summer of 1940, he was drafted for the army, and joined the medical service of the Waffen-SS. He returned to Germany in January 1943, after having been injured, and began working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics. In April of the same year, Mengele was promoted, and became an SS captain shortly before being placed to work in Auschwitz on May 30th, 19434.

Auschwitz
While in Auschwitz, Mengele kept his focus on twins but also a developed particular interest for people with physical disabilities, dwarfs, and people with two different coloured eyes5.

Mengele was also involved in the selection process, often being the one to decide who would live to work, and who would be sent to their deaths. Because of his participation in this process, he is well known as the “Angel of Death”6. He performed many inhumane experiments and is responsible for the deaths of an unknown number of victims.
Children: The majority of his experiments were performed on Roma and Jewish children who knew him as “Uncle Mengele”. They were kept separated from the rest and were given more food, better living quarters than the other prisoners. Some even attended a school Mengele had set up7.
Twins: The procedures he performed on twins included the removal of limbs, deliberate infections, blood transfusions, and on at least one occasion, attempting to sew the two together to create conjoined twins. After the tests were conducted, the twins were often killed and used for dissections9. Approximately 1,500 pairs of twins were experimented on during this

time10.
Dwarfs and People with Disabilities: Mengele would take physical measurements, pull healthy teeth, sample blood, and unnecessarily drug and x-ray patients. After a few weeks, he would send the patients to the gas chambers, and ship their skeletons away for further studies11.
Eye colour: Mengele conducted various trials in attempt to change living prisoners’ eye colours by chemical injections, and was also known to kill people with different coloured eyes, remove them, and send them away to be studied12.
After Auschwitz
In January of 1945, Mengele fled to the west to avoid capture by the Soviets, and unknowing that he was a wanted war criminal, the Americans didn’t arrest him. Between 1945 and 1949, Mengele worked as a farmhand under a false name in Bavaria. He then traveled south and settled in Argentina, where he stayed for over 10 years. In 1959, West Germany released a warrant for his arrest, and, after the recent capture of Adolf Eichmann, Mengele was panicked. He fled to Paraguay and then Brazil, where he suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned on February 7th, 1979. His body was buried in a grave marked “Wolfgang Gerhard”. In 1985, German police located and exhumed his grave, and identified his body using DNA evidence in 199213.
Importance
Mengele’s ruthless experiments often had little scientific basis, but served as brutal methods of torture14. The enormous number of people he was responsible for killing, as well as the method in which he used, shocked the world. The thought that a highly educated person who seemed to have had such a normal upbringing could commit such terrible acts proved to be a massive wakeup call to many, regarding human cruelty.