The man known to history as Josef Mengele
was born on the 16th of March 1911 in the town of Günzburg in southern Germany. His father was Karl Mengele, an engineer,
who around about the time of Josef’s birth had become the proprietor of a foundry which
manufactured farming equipment for various purposes such as sawing, cutting and milling. There were seven men on the payroll of the
company in the early 1910s which meant that the Mengeles were one of the more affluent
families in the Günzburg area. Josef’s mother was Walburga Hupfauer, who
would subsequently give birth to Josef’s two younger brothers, Karl Jnr. and Alois. The young Josef grew up in a world which was
in the depths of total war. It was only in the recent past that Germany
had become a country at all. As recently as the 1860s its territory was
divided between over two dozen smaller states. However, in 1871, these united under Prussian
leadership to form the German Empire. This severely disrupted the balance of power
in Europe, and in the decades that followed the continent drifted towards war. Germany formed an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, while Britain, France and Russia allied to offset the rise of Germany. At first these powers confined their disputes
to proxy conflicts in Africa and the Balkans, but in the summer of 1914 a regional dispute
in the Balkans led to the outbreak of a general European war. It soon expanded to bring in countries such
as Japan. And so the First World War had commenced. It lasted for over four years, with Germany,
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire fighting Britain, France, Russia and Italy, with the
United States later joining on their side. The defeat of Germany brought the empire to
an end and a new German republic was created, named after the town of Weimar. More importantly a series of punitive peace
terms were imposed on Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and these would
have lasting repercussions. The infant Mengele might not have been entirely
unaware of these developments, as they had impacted substantially on the Mengele household. Karl left to fight in the German army shortly
after the conflict began, and Walburga was left to raise the children and attempt to
keep the business ticking over during the war. She did this with a steely determination and
successfully negotiated a contract with the German government to produce a type of army
vehicle for use on the warfront, known as a Fouragewagen. As a result the company prospered and when
Karl Mengele returned to Günzburg at the end of the war he was able to keep the company
moving forward. By the early 1920s it had become the third
largest producer of threshing machinery in the whole of Germany. Extended family members were called upon to
aid in the building up of the organisation and as a result the Mengele name is very common
in the Günzburg area to this day and Karl Mengele Strasse is one of the main streets
in the town, a curious contrast between the civic significance of the wider Mengele family
and the appalling crimes which Karl and Walburga Mengele’s eldest son would commit. More immediately, what this prosperity meant
for Josef in the 1920s was that he had the financial backing to engage in extensive studies. Mengele was a relatively successful student
in his teenage years. He excelled at art and developed wide interests
in music and in physical activity. He appears to have favoured skiing, the town
being not too far from the northern end of the German Alps. In April of 1930 Josef Mengele passed his
high-school exams with a decent, but hardly exceptional grade. Initially he seems to have considered becoming
a dentist, having noted there was not one dentist in the local area and that this would
be a promising trade to practice. However, he subsequently decided that this
was too specialised and opted for medicine, with an emphasis on anthropology and genetics. He was clearly ambitious and his correspondence
from this time indicates an individual who wanted to impress his family by becoming its
first medical scientist. And so it was that in October 1930 he left
the family home and headed east to the city of Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Here he enrolled in both the medicine and
philosophy departments, indicating an interest in both the hard science element of medicine
and broader speculation and inquiry. It was a mix of interests which would later
have terrifying results. Mengele arrived in Bavaria just as a new political
party was emerging in the area, and was beginning its ascent to power. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party
or Nazi Party had been founded a decade earlier and had quickly come under the control of
an Austrian firebrand called Adolf Hitler. In November 1923 this collection of disaffected
war veterans, whose main concern was to prevent the rise of leftist parties such as the Communists,
and to redress the overly punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought
the First World War to an end, had attempted a coup in Munich, but it was quickly suppressed. Thereafter they turned to constitutional politics
to achieve their ends, but initially floundered at the polls, until the autumn of 1929 when,
after a decade of rampant growth, the Wall Street stock exchange suffered catastrophic
losses and the world’s economy went into a tailspin. As individuals lost their jobs and life savings
throughout Germany, parties such as the Nazis and the Communists began to experience a surge
of support in elections. As the Great Depression, which followed the
Wall Street Crash, dragged on through the early 1930s Hitler and his associates would
become ever more popular with their message of xenophobia and resentment at Germany’s
position in the world. Mengele was soon involved in the political
torrents which were raging around him, although he would not become a member of the Nazi Party
itself for some time yet. In March 1931 he joined the Stahlhelms, an
ex-serviceman’s organisation which was named after the helmets worn by the German army
during the First World War. The Stahlhelms marched regularly and held
military style rallies. But the Nazis also had an early appeal to
the young Josef. In his autobiography written years later,
Mengele noted that “The students of the university, those who had already reached
the voting age, had contributed to this [Nazi] success. I was not then old enough to vote. My political leanings then were, I think for
reasons of family tradition, national conservative. . . . I had not joined any political organization. Though indeed I was strongly attracted by
the program and the whole organization of the National Socialists. But for the time being I remained an unorganized
private person. But in the long run it was impossible to stand
aside in these politically stirring times, should our Fatherland not succumb to the Marxist-Bolshevik
attack. This simple political concept finally became
the decisive factor in my life.” From this it appears that it was only a matter
of time before Mengele joined the Nazis.
Mengele’s early years in Munich witnessed the full rise of the Nazis. By 1932 Hitler and his associates were the
largest party in Germany and their support translated into 40% of the national vote in
the Reichstag elections which were held that year. This was still not enough to form a majority
government and Germany’s politics floundered in the second half of 1932. At stake was whether the country would lean
towards the Nazis or towards the Communists, the second largest political group in Germany
by this time. Whichever was to seize power would probably
spell the end of the Weimar Republic. Then, late in 1932 and into early 1933 the
political and business establishment made a Faustian bargain with Hitler and the Nazis,
agreeing to bring Hitler and several of his senior colleagues into the government in the
misguided belief that they would be able to control him and his party . It was a fatal
underestimation, and having allowed Hitler in, the Nazis quickly set about seizing absolute
power. A political emergency was concocted to warrant
the passage of an Enabling Act which effectively allowed Hitler, as Chancellor, to rule by
decree. Thus, in the course of just a few short months
in the first half of 1933 the Nazis seized absolute power throughout Germany and established
a one-party state, one which would hold power for the next twelve years. By 1934 Mengele was increasingly preoccupied
by his studies, though many of his contemporaries subsequently recorded that they never regarded
him as being a particularly accomplished student. Many, however, would note that he made up
for his lack of pronounced intellect with ambition and hard work. His ambition had driven Mengele to simultaneously
study for a doctorate and act as a practicing medic during the mid-1930s. It was during this time that the Stahlhelms,
which Mengele had been a member of for some time, were merged with the Sturmabteilung
or Brownshirts, the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing. Hitler had ordered the merger distrusting
the Stahlhelms fundamentally monarchist nature. A serious kidney complaint forced Mengele
to end his association with the organisation, leaving him more time for his studies. Overall, his studies did result in academic
rewards. In 1935 Mengele was awarded a PhD for a thesis
entitled “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups”. Here Mengele argued that it was possible to
determine the race of an individual by examining their jaw alone. However, it should be noted that at this time
Mengele’s findings were based on scientific principles and there was no overt racist or
Anti-Semitic sentiments expressed in the thesis. This is significant, for it suggests Mengele
had not been radicalised to the extent he later would be. Having finished his thesis and acquired his
doctorate, Mengele briefly spent a few months working as a junior resident doctor, a compulsory
service which was required for him to obtain a full medical licence. It was during this time, while working in
a hospital in Leipzig, that he first met Irene Schoenbein, whom he would subsequently marry
in 1939. Their only son, Rolf, would be born in 1944. However, while his personal life had prospered,
Mengele was not suited to the work of a resident doctor, with its long hours and ward rounds. And he was eager to resume his studies. To that end he sought and obtained a position
as a research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial
Purity at the University of Frankfurt in January 1937. Here he would study under Professor Otmar
Freiherr von Verschuer, an admirer of Hitler’s and an individual who professed to be an expert
on the ominously titled concept of ‘race hygiene’. It is to this period in his life that Mengele’s
more deplorable views and the corruption of his character can surely be traced. Until this point, while he had exhibited an
interest in race and genetics, his earlier thesis was not overtly racist. In Frankfurt he became steeped in Nazi racial
ideology and in May 1937 he finally applied to join the Nazi Party and was soon accepted
as member 5,574,974. In the course of the late 1930s Mengele worked
closely with Von Verschuer, often co-authoring reports for courts which the Nazi state was
convening to judge German Jewish people who were deemed to have violated the Nuremburg
Laws, a series of oppressive measures which had been introduced during the mid-1930s to
disenfranchise the Jewish population of the country. This involved rather perverse medical evidence. For instance, defendants were often brought
before the court to decide whether or not they actually had Jewish blood, and so would
consequently have breached one of the Nuremburg Laws. In some of these instances, Mengele and von
Verschuer would conduct physical examinations of the defendant, measuring his or her nose
and other features in order to determine if the defendant did in fact have Jewish ancestry. There is a definite shift here from Mengele. In Munich he had used legitimate scientific
methods in his research and produced work which historians and other scholars have generally
agreed was unproblematic even by modern standards. However, in Frankfurt in the late 1930s there
was a descent into unscientific racial theories based around Nazi ideology. Clearly his time at Frankfurt had brought
on a significant change of character. Whatever the nuances of his actual work, Mengele’s
role in Frankfurt was allowing him to progress rapidly in his career. Mengele was promoted by Von Verschuer to become
one of his assistant physicians after Mengele had been awarded his full medical degree from
Frankfurt in 1938. It is from this time that Mengele first began
to discuss the concept of individuals and races being ‘improved’ through appropriate
selection, a clear indication that he was fully involved in the Nazis’ racial ideology
by this time. And politically he was becoming more and more
mired in the regime. Several months after becoming a member of
the Nazi Party he applied for membership of the SS or Schutzstaffel, one of the paramilitary
wings of the Nazi regime, headed by Heinrich Himmler, and the one which would soon be placed
in charge of a network of concentration camps which proliferated across Central and Eastern
Europe. He would subsequently join the Waffen SS,
an elite sub-group of the SS, while his professional work and political life were bleeding into
each other as well, as he joined the Third Reich Institute and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute,
both institutions being to the fore of the study of eugenics in Germany, and as a result
effectively mouthpieces for pseudo-scientific Nazi racial ideology. As Mengele’s studies were continuing through
the 1930s the Nazis were pushing Europe towards war. It had always been the stated aim of Hitler
and his associates to overturn the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and reassert Germany’s
place as a European power. While the first years after the Nazis’ seizure
of power in 1933 did not see an overt effort to do so, from 1936 this aggression rapidly
escalated. In the spring of that year the German army
moved into the Rhineland, remilitarising a part of the country which had been expressly
forbidden under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Then in 1938 Austria was effectively annexed
into a greater Germany. And further annexations quickly followed,
first the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938, and then early in 1939
the conquest of Central Europe was effectively completed when Hungary and the rest of Czechoslovakia
were turned into puppet regimes. At this stage Britain and France had signalled
that their appeasing of German aggression would not continue any further, particularly
if Hitler tried to occupy Poland. And so it was that, when Germany did invade
its eastern neighbour on the 1st of September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany
on the 3rd of September. The Second World War had begun.
On the eve of the titanic struggle which would soon engulf the European continent Mengele’s
career had run into its first and only significant impediment under the Nazis. In the summer of 1939, he planned to marry
Irene after several years of courtship, but there was controversy in the run up to the
wedding, with some querying whether his wife-to-be had some traces of Jewish blood. Mengele enlisted the help of some well-connected
colleagues and friends who assured the panel which adjudicated on these matters that Irene
had ‘Very Nordic ways’. And yet a search through records for the extended
family as far away as the United States could not entirely resolve the matter. Consequently, while Josef was unable to comprehensively
prove that he was not marrying a woman who had a small amount of Jewish blood, he was
nevertheless able to sweep the question aside without having fully answered it. There is a dark irony here as the man who
would soon be deciding upon people’s lives based on racial purity, was prohibited from
being issued a certificate himself by the Nazi regime that would declare his own children
to be of pure Aryan blood. Mengele was pleased when the war broke out. His son Rolf would state many years later
that his father had told him that he viewed the war as a necessary struggle to reassert
the German nation after years of being trammelled and downtrodden following the First World
War. Mengele had enlisted straight away, however,
his old kidney ailment returned in late 1939 and made it impossible for him to enter service
until the summer of 1940, by which time the German Panzer divisions were conquering Western
Europe in a blistering military campaign. Mengele was originally stationed at a military
base in Kassel in Central Germany. He remained here only for a few weeks before
being reassigned to a combat position in his role as a member of the Waffen SS. As such he was given an officer’s title
of Untersturmfuhrer, a sub-lieutenant. And the next several months were spent in
occupied Poland where Mengele was attached to the Genealogical Section of the Race and
Resettlement Office, the goal of which was to assess the racial purity and thus suitability
of individuals who were being chosen to settle as German colonists in Eastern Europe. The idea here was to effectively remove non-Germans
from the new Lebensraum or Living Space which was being created in Eastern Europe. While Mengele was serving in Poland, the Nazi
state itself was meeting with success in its war effort. The initial invasion of Poland in September
1939 had seen that country quickly overrun and occupied. Thereafter a ‘phoney war’ of sorts followed
through the winter and early spring of 1939 and 1940, as Britain and France tried belatedly
to rearm themselves in preparation for a German attack on France. It was slow in coming and when Hitler did
make his move in the spring of 1940 it was to occupy Denmark and Norway. But then in the early summer a lightning attack
on France saw the north of the country and the Low Countries completely overrun in just
a matter of weeks. By the end of the summer of 1940 Britain stood
alone against Nazi Germany. Worse was to follow, with Benito Mussolini’s
Italy now joining Hitler’s Germany, and a campaign was commenced in North Africa to
try to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal from the British. In the summer of 1941 that possibility looked
imminent and other parts of Europe including the Balkans had also fallen to the Axis powers
of Germany and Italy. Thus, in mid-1941 the war effort looked very
bleak indeed for Winston Churchill and his government in London.
As the war turned in its favour, Nazi policy began to take on an even darker hue. Confident in the fact that they would soon
be masters of Europe and would not have to answer to international pressure from other
states, Hitler and the leaders of the Nazi party began contemplating a more stark approach
to their Anti-Semitic policies. In 1940 and early 1941 they were considering
the idea of forcibly removing millions of Europe’s Jews to the East African island
of Madagascar where they would live in a kind of open air prison, however when the North
Africa campaign stalled and the possibility of seizing the Suez Canal diminished a much
more drastic idea began to develop. This was the ‘Final Solution’, the idea
that Europe’s Jews would be forcibly rounded up and sent to the patchwork of several dozen
concentration camps which had been created across Central and Eastern Europe since the
inception of the war. Here a small number of the most able bodied
would be used as slave labour in factories to produce German war materials, but most
would be killed by exposure to gas within hours of arrival. This approach was ratified at the Wannsee
Conference north of Berlin in January 1942 and mass murder was soon occurring at camps
such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. Mengele would soon be posted to the latter. Mengele was to see some military action in
1941. After a protracted period in Poland in mid-1941,
he was reassigned to the Eastern Front. Flushed with success in 1940, Hitler had commanded
his generals to begin plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa as it became known would
be the largest land invasion ever undertaken by an army. When it commenced that summer, hundreds of
thousands of German troops swarmed over the border into the Soviet Union. At first the invasion met with enormous success,
as the Soviet forces melted away, and the German Wehrmacht advanced towards Moscow and
Leningrad. However, gradually Joseph Stalin and his generals
mobilised their troops in an effective fashion. But then the Russian winter set in. The German army was unprepared for the extreme
cold and had not been issued with adequate winter clothing. Consequently in the course of the winter of
1941 the tide of the war began to shift as the German advance stalled a short distance
from Moscow. Mengele served on this front in 1941, specifically
in Ukraine, during which action he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. Mengele continued to serve on the Eastern
Front even as the war was turning against Germany. In January 1942 he was appointed to the medical
corps of the Waffen SS’s Viking division. This crack unit would eventually penetrate
further into Russian territory than any other division of the German armed forces. However, Josef was kept away from the front
lines. As a medic attached to the division, he was
deemed of considerable value, and kept back towards the defensive lines, where the unit
was performing clearing up operations as opposed to leading at the front. In July the Viking unit was sent into action
around the towns of Rostow and Bataisk in a vicious battle of attrition which lasted
for five days. During this particular affray he received
the higher version of the Iron Cross, the Iron Cross Frist Class, as a result of rescuing
two wounded soldiers from a burning tank while under enemy fire. Having dragged the pair to cover Mengele had
performed first aid on them. He was also awarded the Black Badge for the
Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the German People. Thus it was that Mengele returned back to
Poland towards the end of 1942 as a considerably decorated veteran of the Eastern Front.
Mengele’s return to Poland was probably not a result of mere chance or a reward for
his performance in the field of battle. It is more plausible that he owed his recall
from the Eastern Front to his old mentor, Professor von Verschuer who had been appointed
as a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in early 1942. This institute was charged with overseeing
research in the Reich into the concept of racial purity and eugenics. With the decision to enact the ‘Final Solution’
and the expansion of the concentration camp system there was now a limitless supply of
individuals who could be studied at the camps as part of this research and with zero consequences
for the researchers as to the methods they employed in their so-called ‘research’. Already in the summer of 1942 Von Verschuer,
in making his plans for heading to the concentration camps, had stated that he planned to take
some of his former colleagues and students with him. Mengele was doubtlessly one of these and it
seems probable that Von Verschuer had secured Josef’s recall from the Eastern Front in
mid-1942 for this explicit purpose. Consequently by January 1943, after a brief
hiatus in Poland, Mengele was back in Berlin at the Institute. But he would soon be sent to the place with
which he has become synonymous: the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. While all of this was proceeding it was becoming
increasingly clear to any German who took a sombre look at the strategic situation that
the war effort was doomed. Following the German defeat at Stalingrad,
the Russians had gradually begun pushing the German armies back out of Russia. Moreover, in the spring of 1943 Britain, which
was now joined by the United States following its entry into the war in December 1941, had
defeated the combined Italian and German forces in North Africa. In the summer of 1943 a southern front was
now opened in Europe against the Axis powers when the western Allies commenced with Operation
Husky and invaded the island of Sicily as a preliminary to encroaching onto the Italian
mainland. Meanwhile the Russians continued to press
the Germans back into Ukraine and Poland, and in the summer of 1944 a western front
was also opened with the D-Day landings in Normandy in France. The defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies was
now inevitable, but what was open to question was the speed at which the retreat of Germany
would occur and which of the Allied powers would arrive to Berlin first. On that might depend much about how high ranking
members of the regime would be prosecuted In May 1943 Mengele, who by now had been promoted
to the position of Haupsturmfuhrer, a captain, received his posting to Auschwitz. The Auschwitz camp had started in a small
way shortly after Poland had been conquered, however by 1943 it had been expanded into
a vast complex under the direction of its commandant, Rudolf Höss. There were three camps. Auschwitz I was the original camp, and contained
the administrative centres, the guards’ quarters and some of the earliest built detention
facilities. Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau was effectively
an extermination or death camp. Here Jews and other individuals who were sent
here by the Nazi regime, including Roma gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were murdered
en-masse in shower rooms which were filled with the gas, Zyklon-B. The bodies were then
quickly burned in crematoria which were built on site. This factory of death was where over one million
people, most of them Jewish, would be killed between 1942 and 1945. A final camp, known as Auschwitz III or Auschwitz-Monowitz
was used as a slave labour camp, increasingly for the purposes of producing a synthetic
rubber manufactured by the IG Farben chemical company. It was to this vast complex that Mengele arrived
in the early summer of 1943.
When he arrived at Auschwitz, Mengele was appointed by Eduard Wirths, the chief medical
officer of the entire camp, to the position of chief physician of the Romani family camp. His role in the wider camp was varied and
brutal. The doctors at Auschwitz were central to what
was called ‘the Selection’. This was a process which occurred with new
arrivals to the complex. When the trains of thousands of Jews, Soviet
prisoners of war, Romani and other unfortunates arrived at the camp they were physically examined
on the gangway next to the train platforms. Little did the bewildered newcomers know,
but the doctors appraising them were handing out death sentences to most of them. They selected a small number of those who
were deemed physically fittest, and these were sent to the labour camps, while a few
others were selected for reasons relating to experimental research or some other reason,
but the remainder were all sent to the gas chambers and would be dead within hours. Mengele’s detachment from any emotional
response to this was strikingly clear. Some of the doctors at Auschwitz genuinely
disliked being put on ‘Selection’ duty, a process which involved effectively condemning
children and the elderly to death. By way of contrast, Mengele would sometimes
show up to do it, on his day off. Mengele was soon engaged in other activities
which point towards a total lack of any emotional response to the suffering of others. This began almost immediately at the Romani
family camp to which he was assigned upon first arriving there. Several weeks after he first reached Auschwitz
there was an outbreak of Noma within the Romani camp. This is an aggressive gangrenous process in
which body tissue dies due to both the initial infection and a lack of blood supply which
follows. It affects the mouth and lips in particular. A normal medical doctor’s first concern
would have been to treat his or her patients, however Mengele’s was to carry out experiments
into a disease, about which little was known at the time. Patients who exhibited symptoms were isolated
in separate locations to be studied. Most appalling, several children who had the
condition were killed, before their heads and organs were removed to be sent back the
SS medical institute in the Austrian city of Graz for later study. This macabre research was still ongoing months
later when a decision was taken to liquidate the entire Romani camp on the night of the
2nd of August 1944. There were other atrocities. The camps were riddled with diseases of all
kinds, the result of poor sanitation generally, and the fact that those who arrived at Auschwitz
were often carrying diseases already, a result of the cramped conditions of the trains which
transported them to the death camp. As a result, diseases such as typhus and scarlet
fever were often rampant. Mengele’s approach to dealing with such
outbreaks was viciously utilitarian. On one occasion of a typhus epidemic he simply
sent the entire populace of the barracks in which it had been detected, some 600 Jewish
women, to the gas chamber. This barracks was then sterilised before moving
hundreds of new occupants in, who were de-loused and given new clothes on arrival. The process was repeated with each barracks. Perversely, for his actions in this regard,
in stamping out outbreaks of disease at Auschwitz Mengele was awarded the War Merit Cross and
in 1944 was made the senior First Physician of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And this was not an isolated incident. There are many reports of Mengele sending
hundreds of people at one time to the gas chamber as a precautionary measure against
the disease. He was particularly ruthless towards the Romani
population of Auschwitz. But surely his most brutal action was in ordering
the liquidation of thousands of Jewish people towards the end of 1944 when the camp’s
ration supplies, which were a mere 700 calories a day for prisoners, could no longer be sustained.
While Mengele’s actions in combatting disease and ordering other mass deaths at Auschwitz
were brutal, he has become most notorious for the experiments he carried out at the
camp. Mengele treated Auschwitz as a giant laboratory
through which he could continue the research he had started back in the mid-1930s on heredity
and genetics. In this regard he treated the inmates of Auschwitz
as research material in much the same way as a chemist might treat the chemicals in
his lab; as something dispensable. He was particularly interested in people with
dwarfism and heterochromia iridum, the latter being the condition whereby an individual
has two different coloured eyes. His methods were often brutal. One experiment involved injecting chemicals
into the eyes of those with heterochromia iridum to see if he could change the colour
of the irises. Often after studying the subjects to the maximum
degree to which he felt it was possible, he would have them killed or killed them himself
with lethal injections so that their internal organs could be studied and their skeletons
preserved for later research. Perhaps the most shocking experiments involved
Mengele removing some subjects’ organs without anaesthesia. One man who had one of his kidneys removed
in this way was quickly sent back to work without painkillers. Mengele is particularly notorious for his
research into identical twins at Auschwitz, with whom he became obsessed for his study
of heredity and other characteristics. Often when ‘the Selection’ of new arrivals
was taking place on the gangway near the train station at the camp, Mengele was on the look-out
for twins for his research. These were typically twin children who often
arrived together, though there is evidence of a pair of twins who were nearly seventy
years old being examined by Mengele. Exactly how many sets of twins he examined
at Auschwitz is unclear, but alone during the summer of 1944, when 400,000 of Hungary’s
Jews were murdered en-masse at Auschwitz, Mengele is said to have identified and examined
at least 175 sets of twins. In a bizarre twist of circumstances, being
a twin could actually initially be of benefit to an individual in surviving Auschwitz. Many who were selected in this fashion by
Mengele would most likely have otherwise been sent straight to the gas chamber, while Mengele’s
twin subjects were also fed better than nearly all other inmates at the camps. Their heads were not shaved and they were
often permitted to keep their own clothing, rather than wearing the standard issue uniforms
which were given to all others at Auschwitz. Mengele’s research involved a large amount
of taking measurements and other seemingly banal examinations of the twins. Witnesses later testified that Mengele was
extremely detailed in this work. Exact measurement of the twins’ skulls and
other facial features were taken. One twin who survived Auschwitz later recalled
Mengele measuring he and his twin brother’s eyes for approximately two hours. Such examinations could occur two or three
times a week for periods of months and photographs were also taken. All of this seems to have been so that Mengele
could record where physical variations, however minute, might have existed between identical
and non-identical twins. But there was also a much more sinister aspect
to all of this. Often Mengele would induce pain in one twin
to see if it impacted on the other. Chemicals were used and subjects were injected
with random substances. Most brutally Mengele’s work on twins extended
to studying their internal organs, and as such he routinely murdered sets of twins using
injections of chloroform and then dissected them. On one occasion he suspected a set of Romani
twins of having tuberculosis, so he simply killed them and performed an autopsy to confirm
his suspicion. Mengele had been wrong in his suspicions. The children did not have TB.
What is most striking about all this was the simple manner in which Mengele completely
dissociated himself psychologically from the act of killing. First-hand witnesses from Auschwitz, including
Jewish doctors who were forced into acting as Mengele’s lab assistants, reported afterwards
that Mengele could be quite kind towards the twins he studied and other subjects of his
research. He would often bring them sugar or treats
and inquired how they were doing. Yet just minutes later he could murder them
as though it were nothing at all. Mengele was evidently so obsessed by his research
that he believed it trumped any concerns of conventional morality, while his total indoctrination
in Nazi ideology and the concept of Aryan racial hierarchy inculcated into him the idea
that murder of supposedly less evolved races was completely acceptable, if it could produce
some scientific benefit for the Nazi regime. The result was terrifying. Here was a man who hummed Italian operas to
himself while he dissected people he had murdered just minutes earlier for no reason other than
a wish to study their organs. Consequently, it is no surprise to learn that
Mengele became known in Auschwitz as ‘the Angel of Death’, in part because of his
ubiquitous presence at ‘the Selection’ and because of widespread knowledge of his
experiments. Luckily the experiments would soon come to
an end. As the Russian advance on the Eastern Front
into Poland had continued in the course of 1944 the SS had begun dismantling the concentration
camps and destroying what evidence could be obliterated. By the early winter, moves were underway to
abandon Auschwitz. And it would eventually be liberated by the
advancing Soviet forces on the 27th of January 1945. Mengele was relatively late in leaving. On the 17th of January he was transferred
to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia. He took with him extensive samples from his
research and his copious notes, but the bulk was left behind. His time at Gross-Rosen was not extensive
and by mid-February he also had to leave there, again narrowly missing the advancing Soviet
armies. This was just the beginning of a continuous
effort to elude the conquering enemy. For the next three months Mengele moved ever
further westwards trying to disguise his identity. By early May he was in the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia. It was here that he would have learned of
Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on the 30th of April 1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich
in the days that followed. On the 8th of May, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel
signed the final surrender of Germany in Berlin bringing the Second World War in Europe to
an end. Mengele was a marked man once the war was
over. The Allies had determined that they would
not seek excessive retribution on Germany itself in the aftermath of the war. But it had been agreed that those who were
at the top of the government would be prosecuted for war crimes and in particular those who
had been in the SS and had ran the concentration camps would be charged for their crimes. Mengele would be among them. He knew he needed to stay ahead of those who
wanted to apprehend him. On the night of the 8th of May, just hours
after the war had officially ended, he crossed back into Germany, now making efforts to disguise
his role as a member of the SS and posing as a rank and file German soldier. This continued for weeks. In mid-June he narrowly avoided apprehension
when some 10,000 German soldiers he had been amongst were detained together for questioning,
but just days later he was finally apprehended when his unit was arrested by an American
division. What is striking about what happened next,
is that when Mengele was questioned he gave his interviewers his real name. And it was even recorded as such by those
who were questioning him, but for some reason it was not realised at the time exactly who
he was, that he was a high-ranking member of the SS and that he was the notorious ‘Angel
of Death’ of Auschwitz, a fact which had been clearly recorded by this time. In April 1945 he had been added to a list
of wanted high-profile war criminals. This was as close as Mengele would ever come
to justice. For weeks he was transferred between detention
centres, but eventually in September 1945 he was released. What seems to have won him his freedom was
that he did not bear one of the blood group tattoos which nearly all members of the SS
were tattooed with. Mengele had refused this in 1938 when he had
joined the paramilitary organisation. That decision now brought about his freedom. He was dropped at the town of Ingolstadt in
late September 1945 and from there he headed to the city of Donauworth. This was a time when Germans were still being
stopped and questioned regularly by the American and other Allied troops who were in every
town and village in the country. So it was, that he began to identify himself
as Fritz Ulmann in line with some documentation he had, which had previously belonged to a
friend of his by that name. Later he altered these slightly to read Fritz
Hollmann. Another close call in Donauworth led him to
head for the Russian-occupied zone in Eastern Germany. Here he finally managed to get word to his
wife Irene that he was safe and was avoiding detection. Irene Mengele had already been questioned
repeatedly as to her husband’s whereabouts. This was the beginning of a long period in
which Mengele continuously moved around Germany in the post-war period. His state of mind was not entirely level during
this time. Bizarrely a couple with whom he stayed for
a while late in 1945 remembered him as stating that he intended to turn himself in once he
could receive a fair trial, asserting that he had done everything he could to improve
the situation at Auschwitz. Eventually in the early winter of 1945, he
found a job working as a farmhand in the foothills of the Alps, having returned to southern Germany. Here he worked for the Fischers under his
alias of Fritz Hollmann. The Fischers soon began to suspect that their
new lodger was a fugitive, not least as Mengele would speak about the Allies as ‘The Crusaders’
who had invaded German,y and his bitterness about the post-war settlement would often
boil over in conversation. Soon he was back in contact with his wife
and in the course of the months that followed, she would visit him periodically in secret. And this is the life he led for several years
as the Allies made episodic efforts to locate him. These were often half-hearted, though. Without any record of his whereabouts or sightings,
many assumed Mengele was dead already in the same way that many other senior Nazi war criminals
had simply vanished in the aftermath of the war. Eventually in 1949 Mengele decided to leave
Europe altogether. This was achieved using the so-called ‘Ratline’,
a network of individuals who were sympathetic to the Nazi cause who used various methods
to smuggle former Nazis who had remained in hiding out of Germany. Assisted by several individuals in this way,
Mengele made his way over the German-Italian border in mid-April of 1949 and travelled
to the city of Genoa in north-west Italy. Here he duplicitously acquired a passport
from the Red Cross under the name of Helmut Gregor and in the summer he sailed for South
America. Here the Argentine government was particularly
welcoming of former Nazis, a result of the acrimony between the regime there and the
United States, while several other Latin American states also viewed aiding German war criminals
as an act of defiance against the United States and its neo-imperial policies in Central and
South America. Moreover, the Nazis had shipped massive amounts
of money and material goods to Argentina in advance of the war ending, and it was these
which bought many their relative freedom there after 1945. As a result, individuals such as Adolf Eichmann,
one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, and Mengele were allowed to live in Argentina
unmolested for a great many years. It was here in Buenos Aires that Mengele first
settled late in 1949.
Mengele’s life in the years that followed was one of gradually establishing a new life
in South America. For a time he worked as a travelling salesman
selling farm equipment, tools which he had grown familiar with on the Fischers’ farm
in southern Germany. After spending some time living with a Nazi
sympathiser he moved into an apartment of his own in Buenos Aires. Some family funds were channelled to him in
Argentina from Germany and it was enough for him to take a stake in a carpentry business
and rent a house soon thereafter. It is also probable that he practiced medicine
during these years without an official medical licence. There are records which suggest, for instance,
that Mengele was involved in organising illegal abortions. His family life changed too. Mengele’s wife Irene, despite remaining
faithful to him through the horrors of Auschwitz and the post-war period, was unwilling to
leave Germany for South America. They divorced in 1954 and Mengele remarried
four years later to Martha Mengele, his widowed sister-in-law, who had previously been married
to his brother Karl, and who had joined him in South America. Such was the laxity of surveillance of Mengele
that he was even able to briefly return to Europe during the mid-1950s to see his son,
and he began living back in Argentina under his real name. That Josef Mengele was able to escape detection
in plain sight during these years was largely owing to the fact that nobody was looking
for him. The German authorities and the Allies had
assumed he was dead by the late 1940s. This was despite coming to the attention of
the authorities in Argentina. In 1958 he and several other doctors were
questioned in relation to a network of medical professionals who had been performing illegal
abortions, though Mengele was not charged. The episode produced enough worry though,
that he decided to change his location again and in the late 1950s and early 1960s he moved
around South America on numerous occasions, at one time living in Paraguay and briefly
residing in Bolivia as well. And this cautious approach led to him avoiding
arrest again in the summer of 1960. In mid-May that year the Israeli secret service
agency Mossad raided the house of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. They had been tipped off as to Mengele’s
possible whereabouts and were preparing to seize him too, but Mengele was in Bolivia
at the time. Eichmann was brought back to Israel where
he stood trial in the most dramatic prosecution of a Nazi war criminal since the Nuremburg
Trials of 1945 and 1946. He was found guilty and executed there in
1962. Despite the close call with being captured
that Mengele had had in 1960, and despite the fact that it was now clear to international
Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal that Mengele was in fact alive and living in South
America, he returned briefly to West Germany shortly afterwards. Then he relocated to Brazil where he resided
on a farm near Sau Paulo belonging to a Nazi sympathiser by the name of Wolfgang Gerhard,
while his second wife, Martha, settled for a time in Italy. These were the years in which Mengele was
most actively being pursued as Israeli agents and others sought his extradition from Latin
America and tried to pin down his location. As such it is not often possible to be sure
where exactly Mengele was at any given time. At one point in 1962 Mossad had gathered intelligence
that he was in Egypt. It is impossible to tell if this is accurate
or not, though it continued to be South America where Mengele largely hid with the aid of
Nazi sympathisers such as Gerhard and a couple of Hungarian expatriates by the names of Geza
and Gitta Stammer. These helped him acquire further hide-outs
around Sao Paulo in Brazil throughout the 1960s. Their aid extended to Mengele assuming Gerhard’s
identity when the German headed back to Europe to receive medical care for a family member.
Josef Mengele would elude justice for the remainder of his life. He eventually died on the 7th of February
1979 after years of poor health. He had already had a stroke in 1976 and was
affected by other ailments including high blood pressure. His death when it came about was owing to
a second stroke while he was swimming at the seaside town of Bertioga in Brazil. The cause of his death is given as drowning. He had nearly reached his seventieth year,
making him one of the longest-lived of the more notorious Nazi war criminals. And two years earlier, his son Rolf had visited
his father in Sao Paulo. He had not seen his father in over twenty
years and it was the first time he met him as an adult. His impressions of his father, as recorded
much later, were of a man who over thirty years after the war had ended, showed no remorse
for anything he had done, but rather continued to affirm that he had done what he did at
Auschwitz as part of his duties as an SS officer. Rolf Mengele concluded that his father was
an ‘unrepentant Nazi’. There was one final twist to the story of
his flight from justice. For many years the world was unaware of Mengele’s
death and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal continued to make efforts to locate ‘the
Angel of Auschwitz’ in the hopes that he would be brought to justice, however belatedly. It was not until 1985 when intelligence brought
a cache of Mengele’s correspondence to light in his hometown of Gunzburg in Germany that
it was revealed that Mengele had died several years earlier. An investigation followed in Brazil to try
to identify the place of his burial. These proved successful and it was soon revealed
that Mengele had been buried at Embu das Artes near Sao Paulo in Brazil under the name of
the man who had sheltered and aided him many years earlier and whose name he had adopted,
Wolfgang Gerhard. Consequently his body was exhumed in the summer
of 1985 and an examination proved that it was highly likely that it was Mengele’s
skeleton, a fact which Rolf Mengele subsequently confirmed. It was never reburied. Today the skeleton of the man who once killed
people at Auschwitz simply so he could examine their organs, is used as an educational aid
at a medical school in the University of Sao Paulo. What should anyone say in evaluating a figure
like Josef Mengele? As we have seen, this was a heinous individual,
seemingly totally lacking in concern or empathy for those whom he experimented on and murdered,
whether in the course of his experiments or as a cold effort to stop the spread of disease
at Auschwitz. Perhaps it is worth assessing how he became
‘the Angel of Death’. Mengele did not become a member of the Nazi
Party until 1937 and until the mid-1930s he was a promising medical student who combined
exploration of anthropology with examination of human features. He was an affable character according to those
who knew him and scholars since have noted that his work from these early days is not
problematic. It is not suffused with racism or violence
towards others, but rather could have been read as legitimate scientific work of the
inter-war period. In this respect Mengele, prior to his involvement
with the Nazis, was somewhat akin to Albert Speer, the architect who later became German
minister of war production. Before the rise of the Nazis and their involvement
with them, both were middle class academics with promising careers ahead of them. Neither had demonstrated any overt outward
signs of Anti-Semitism or the capacity for mass murder.
Ultimately, though, after he became involved with the Nazis and began his work into racial
anthropology under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in Frankfurt at the beginning
of 1937 Mengele’s character changed quickly. By the end of 1938 he was not only a member
of the Nazi Party, but also of the Waffen SS, the most fanatical branch of the various
Nazi paramilitary organisations. It was in this capacity that he enthusiastically
joined the war effort following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and from the beginning
some of his work involved the concept of supposed racial purity. But the worst of it came at Auschwitz between
the summer of 1943 and when he fled the camp in January 1945. Here, in a stretch of time, spanning just
twenty months Mengele personally ordered the deaths of thousands of individuals and in
a great many instances committed the act himself by lethally injecting the subjects of his
experiments. These same experiments ranged from the immoral
to the downright perverse such as when Mengele sowed two people together in a bizarre test
concerning conjoined twins. They died days later after their wounds turned
gangrenous. Mengele was certainly a harbinger of death
at Auschwitz during his time there. In the end, however, Josef Mengele escaped
retribution. He spent over thirty years in hiding across
a vast range of places and countries, sometimes returning to Europe and moving with seeming
ease around Latin America. It is also striking how many people were willing
to aid an individual who was guilty of the crimes Mengele had committed. But he was also very lucky. In 1945 he was arrested by the Allies and
let go only on the basis that he did not have the standard blood group tattoo that nearly
all SS members had. Then he narrowly escaped arrest on several
other occasions in the years and decades that followed, most notably in 1960 when Adolf
Eichmann was arrested in Buenos Aires. As a result Mengele escaped punishment in
his own lifetime, but his crimes will never be forgotten. What do you think of Josef Mengele? Was he perhaps the most brutal of all the
Nazis in his own way, and what explains his rapid change of character from 1937 onwards? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
