Josef Mengele: Serial Killer

When most people think of infamous serial killers, the most common names are often Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or possibly even Ed Gein. All three of these men are notorious for their crimes, but none could possibly surpass Josef Mengele. Josef Mengele is the true embodiment of malevolence, cold heartedness, and pure evil. While Josef Mengele may not be as well known, or covered by the media, he truly surpasses most people’s idea of a serial killer.
Josef Mengele was born in Bavaria, Germany, in the year 1911. His parents were named Karl and Walburga Mengele. Josef Mengele had two siblings, named Alois Mengele, and Karl Jr Mengele. Josef Mengele did not have a hard time in school growing up, and his family was well off on a monetary sense.

Unlike most serial killers, Josef Mengele’s killings cannot be attributed to his childhood. By the year 1930, Mengele had finished high school, and transferred to Goethe University in Frankfurt to study medicine. In 1935, Mengele received his PhD in anthropology, (the studies of human societies) this would give him insight into the workings of people, and allow him to commit mass murder much more efficiently. During his years in college, Mengele gained the reputation of being a cool, professional man. Because he was both successful and very promising in the medical field, in the year 1937, Mengele was inducted into the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1937, joining the army and becoming a medical expert throughout his service. In 1943, Mengele was promoted to Captain and transferred to Auschwitz by 1943.
It was in Auschwitz that Josef Mengele’s horrendous crimes began. Being in charge of a Gypsy camp, Mengele was the deciding factor in who lived or died. Sending thousands of Jews to their deaths each week, Mengele had already committed mass murder, while it may not be him filling the gas chambers, he made the call. Within a month of arriving at Auschwitz, he had sent thousands of Gypsies and hundreds of women to their early graves. Then he began to experiment on twins. His experiments began out of pure curiosity but progressed to a need for closure. In these experiments, Mengele would intentionally give the twins various diseases, amputate various limbs, and even attempted to alter eye color by injecting dye into their eyes. Many pairs of twins died from these experiments, and many others were left maimed for life. While Mengele was conducting these experiments, it was clear that his true interests remained in the twins, for he indiscriminately killed all others. It is easy to see why Josef Mengele is known as the Angel of Death, never before had a man been able to kill with no consequence on a scale this large. Mengele had the cunning of Ted Bundy, with the viciousness and crazed organization of something straight out of Hell. Mengele had the blood of thousands on his hands, and he still kept himself focused on his cruel experiments.
Josef Mengele continued his research and experimentation on the twins with no clear intention on stopping.

As time progressed Mengele took to other horrifying experiments, such as intentional freezing, intentional burning, and internal irrigation. For the first experiment, Mengele would place his victims in extremely cold places like a frozen room with an ice bath, or simply tie them to a stretcher naked and leave them outside in the snow. This was to measure what the human body could withstand, and how to revive them. This idea of revival led to the next experiment, intentional burning. Burning was used to “reheat” the body back to normal temperatures. This caused the victims organs to rupture or simply quit functioning. The third experiment was the most cruel. Mengele would heat water to its boiling point, and then he would forcibly irrigate it into the subject’s body. The subjects internal organs would quickly shut down, and the victim was burnt alive from the inside out. The most horrifying part of all of the experiments that Mengele was conducting was that nobody was stopping him. There was no code of conduct that could cause Mengele to lose his license, and I do not believe that Hitler would have truly wanted anything other than what Mengele was already doing. This was a dark time for science, with the Nazi party constantly growing in size and constantly bringing people back to Josef Mengele to conduct his experiments on. Josef Mengele was a mission oriented serial

killer, all of his experiments were in the name of creating a superior race, from gassing thousands of jews to sowing twins together to create a superhuman.
As the war came to an end for both Hitler and his Nazi regime, Mengele had finally run out of luck. His experimentation could go on no longer, but Josef Mengele was not going to be caught without a fight. On January 17th in the year 1945, Mengele fled to his hometown in Gunzburg, assuming a fake identity and attempting to live out his life quietly , and he managed to live without being caught for 34 years. In 1949 Mengele left Gunzburg and went to nearby Argentina. Josef Mengele lived out the rest of his days hiding away from society as a small farmer, where he fell in love with a housekeeper. In 1985, a group of German police tracked one of Mengele’s best friends down, and discovered that Mengele had died from a drowning accident years before.
Josef Mengele was a true embodiment of evil. Most people think evil is the ability to kill without remorse, but evil is almost always countered by a sense of justice. This was not the case for Mengele and his wrongdoings. This story was not one of eventual justice, Mengele was a monster and killed thousands of people with no reprimand at all, and that is why he truly is the embodiment of pure evil. Mengele’s actions were horrendous enough to be considered the most dangerous serial killer of all time.