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Dr. Josef Mengele (March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979) was a Nazi German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He gained notoriety chiefly for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced labourer, and for performing brutal human experiments of dubious scientific value on camp inmates (among them, Mengele was known as the Angel of Death). After the war he first hid out in Germany under an assumed name, then escaped and lived in various countries in South America until an eventual accidental death by drowning in Brazil, which was later confirmed using DNA testing on his remains.
Early life, career, and education Mengele was born in Günzburg, Bavaria, eldest of three sons of Karl Mengele (1881–1959), a well-to-do industrialist, and his wife Walburga Hupfauer (d. 1946). He had two younger brothers, Karl (1912–1949) and Alois (1914–1974). In 1930 Mengele graduated from the Günzburg gymnasium, or high school. He studied veterinary medicine and anthropology at the University of Munich, earning a doctorate in Anthropology (Ph.D.) in 1935 with a dissertation on racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw, supervised by Prof. Theodor Mollison. After his exams he went to Frankfurt, and worked as an assistant to Otmar von Verschuer at the Frankfurt University Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. In 1938 he obtained a doctorate in medicine (M.D.) with a dissertation called "Familial Research on Cleft Lip, Palate and Jaw". His belief in the Nazi racial ideology was already evident in his academic research. The Universities of Munich and Frankfurt revoked his degrees in 1964. In 1931, at the age of 20, Mengele joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten (Steel Helmet, League of Front Soldiers), which was incorporated into the SA in 1933. He resigned shortly thereafter, alluding to health problems and sexual issues. He applied for Nazi party membership in 1937 and in 1938 joined the SS. In 1939, Mengele married his first wife, Irene Schönbein, with whom he had one child, a son named Rolf. In 1940 he was placed in the reserve medical corps, following which he served with a Waffen-SS unit. In 1942 he was wounded at the Russian front and was pronounced medically unfit for combat, and promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain). During his service on the Eastern Front during 1941-1942, Mengele received an Iron Cross first class and an Iron Cross second class. Auschwitz In 1943 Mengele's application for an assignment to the German Nazi extermination camp Birkenau was accepted; he replaced another doctor who had fallen ill. On May 24 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp". In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates were gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths. It was during his 21-month stay at Auschwitz that Mengele achieved infamy, and it is for this period that he was later referred to as the "Angel of Death". Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the ramp, determining who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. Human experimentation Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in twins, who were selected and placed in special barracks. He also studied a disease called Noma, that particularly affected children from the Gypsy camp. While the cause of Noma remains not entirely known, it is a disease that affects chiefly children suffering from malnutrition and a weak immune system, and many develop the disease shortly after having suffered another illness like measles or tuberculosis. Mengele tried to prove that Noma was caused by "racial inferiority". Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the concentration camp. This included dwarves, notably the Ovitz family, a Jewish Romanian artist's family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves. Prior to their deportation they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. He often called them "my dwarf family". To him they seemed to be the perfect expression of 'the abnorm'. Mengele's experiments were of dubious scientific value, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case, attempts to create artificially conjoined twins by sewing two young children together back-to-back, also joining the veins at their wrists. This operation was not successful and only caused the wounds to become badly infected. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. During roll calls Mengele would show up to perform a "special work detail" selection, which fooled some into thinking that this would be a relief from the otherwise hard labour they were performing. In actuality Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, either due to the experiments or later infections. A Hungarian Jewish prisoner doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who was an experienced pathologist and had studied in Germany, was chosen to work as Mengele's assistant and wrote about his experiences. The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were for the time being safe from the gas chambers. To Mengele they were nevertheless not fellow human beings, but rather material to conduct his experiments on. On several occasions he killed subjects simply to be able to dissect them afterwards*. In hiding
Death Despite international efforts to track him down, he was never apprehended and lived for 35 years hiding under various aliases. In 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming at Bertioga, Brazil and drowned. He was buried in the Nossa Senhora do Rosário cemetery in Embu under his false identity, Wolfgang Gerhard. In 1992 DNA tests on the exhumed corpse confirmed his identity. In film and literature See also | ||||||||||
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