Josef Mengele, was born on 16 March, 1911, in the small town of Gunzburg in Bavaria. His family were the prosperous suppliers of agricultural implements. But Josef had no desire to follow in their foosteps, he was determined to be doctor. A handsome young man and very ambitious he was from an early age political and when still aged only 20  he joined the right-wing proto-fascist Stalhelm organisation. In 1935, he graduated from the University of Munich with a Ph.d in physical anthropoogy, two years later in January, 1937, he joined the Institute of Heriditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. That same year he joined the Nazi Party. There seemed to be little doubt that he was a young man who was going places.

Following the outbreak of war he was drafted into the army and in 1940, joined the Waffen SS Viking Division. It wasn’t long before he was sent to fight on the Eastern Front and he impressed his comrades with his commitment and courage but his time as a front-line soldier was short-lived. Wounded, awarded the Iron Cross and promoted to Captain, he was deemed no longer fit to serve. He immediately requested to be able to continue his research into the nature, cause, and effects of hereditary. 

Mengele was a man who entirely endorsed Nazi racial theories. He believed in the superiority of the Aryan Race and was determined to prove it scientifically. His aim was to eradicate inferior genes, develop master race characteristics, and secure racial purification. He would achieve this through a study of genetic anomalies and birth defects. On 24 May, 1944, he was assigned to the Birkenau Gypsy Camp, when this was liquidated in August he became Chief Medical Officer at Auschwitz. 

Auschwitz

Though there were more than 30 Medical Officers at Auschwitz, it was Mengele who would be most remembered by its inmates. A handsome man, always immaculately dressed, smiling, relaxed, and aristocratic in manner, dressed in his long white coat he would stand on the ramp to greet incoming prisoners, as they alighted from the train he would indicate with his arms, those to the right for a work detail, those to the left to the Gas Chamber. It earned him the soubriquet Der Weisse Engel (the White Angel). At he selection process and in the laboratory he wielded the power of life and death. It was a power he relished and he exercised it with a sense of theatre.

Mengele was a ubiquitous presence in the Camp always on the prowl looking for suitable specimens for his research. He was particularly interested in the children especially dwarfs and identical twins. Those who were fortunate enough to be chosen would be saved from the Gas Chamber. This bizaarely earned him the reputation as a protector. As one survivor, Eva Mozes Kor, said, ” to be on Mengele’s list was better than to be on no list,” and the children were well treated. He would smile, stroke their hair and pat them on the cheeks. They would be provided with clean clothes, given sweets, and be transported around the Camp in his personal staff car. He liked them to refer to him as Uncle. But they were terrified of his violent temper. Once, when a mother refused to hand over her daughter to him and started to scream he ordered that the entire trainload of recently arrived inmates be taken away and gassed immediately. On another occassion when it was reported that a block needed to be de-loused he ordered that the 750 female prisoners who inhabited it be taken straight to the Gas Chamber, and it was to be no accident that his laboratory had been built next to the Crematorium.

Mengele’s laboratory was an antisceptic chamber of horrors. Here he would carry out his peculiar and increasingly unscientific experiments. These included injecting chemicals into the eyes of his victims to alter their pigmentation, burning prisoners in giant ovens to see how burns developed, immersing them in freezing water to see its effect on the skin, confining them in sub-zero temperatures to see how long they could survive, sewing together twins to make them co-joined, and carrying out live operations without anaesthetic including the removal of organs. Those who survived under his knife he would despatch with an injection of chloroform into their veins.

It is unbelievable to imagine that Mengele ever thought his work would be accepted as valid medical research by future generations. Yet he documented everything and maintained copious notes. But it was his power that he was wielding, the madness of a scientist who had turned his laboratory into a macabre toyshop, who could do whatever he wished because no one ever questioned him.

Auschwitz was abandoned on 27 January, 1945, but Mengele simply transferred to other Camps, first Gross-Rosen and then Matthausen where he continued his anthropological studies. Wherever he went he was accompanied by trucks carrying his research material. As more and more Camps fell to the advancing Soviet army, Mengele was forced to flee west where he eventually had to abandon his research (which was destroyed on the orders of his superior) and joined a Wehrmacht Medical Unit. Desparate not to be taken prisoner by the Russians he surrendered to the American army at the end of May, 1945. Despite registering as a prisoner under his own name the Americans believed him to be a private soldier and released him in July. Sheltered and protected by his family he resided in the small village of Rosenheim in Bavaria where he worked as a farmhand. Feeling that it was getting too hot for him in Germany he fled, with the assistance of the ODESSA, to Argentina in May,1949.

At first, to make ends meets, Mengele was forced to work as an unlicensed doctor carrying out illegal backstreet abortions. But in time he met other ex-Nazi’s in Buenos Aires, including Adolf Eichmann, and began to prosper. Successful in business he felt confident enough to live openly in the city and invite his wife and son to come and live with him. This all changed when his friend Eichmann was abducted by agents of Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency. He didn’t realise how lucky he had been. The people who had abducted Eichmann had also known of Mengele’s presence and had considered abducting him also, but not wanting to endanger their capture of Eichmann they had given him a pass.

Mengele fled to Paraguay and changed his name. He later moved to Brazil where he lived in a suburb of Sao Paolo. It has been suggested that whilst there he continued his experiments, the municipality of Candido Godoi  has an unprecedented birth-rate of twins, one-in-five, many of whom are born with Nordic features. But there is little evidence to show that this is anything but an anomaly.

Though he had been incited as a war criminal as early as 1944, no special effort was ever put into apprehending him. On 7 February, 1979, whilst swimming in the sea off the coast of Bertioga, Brazil, he drowned. He remained until the end an unrepentant Nazi insisting that he had never done anything wrong and bemoaning the fact that his research had never been taken seriously. When the Brazilian Authorities offered to repatriate his remains to his family they refused to accept them.

Some have suggested that living a life in constant fear, of always having to look over his shoulder and unable to trust anyone he met, was punishment enough. But that is not punishment that is merely an inconvenience. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, escaped justice.