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Josef Mengele

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Josef Mengele

Dr. Josef Mengele Ph.D. (March 16, 1911 – February 7, 1979) was a Nazi German SS officer and a physician in the concentration camp Auschwitz. He gained notoriety chiefly for being one of the SS physicians that would supervise the selection of arriving transports, determining who was to be sent directly to the gas chambers and who was to become a prisoner, and for performing brutal experiments of dubious scientific value on camp inmates. After the war he escaped Germany through a variety of ruses and subterfuges and lived covertly abroad until his eventual accidental death 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 (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, and passed his Abitur, the preliminary college entry examination. His score was unremarkable, but it was good enough for him to be accepted to the University of Munich. He studied medicine and anthropology there, 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, working 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); this organization was incorporated into the SA in 1933, but resigned shortly thereafter, alluding to health problems. He applied for Nazi party membership in 1937 and in 1938 he joined the SS. In 1939, Mengele married his first wife, Irene Shoenbein, 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, the multi-national SS-Division (mot.) Wiking. 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 for bravery in combat.

Auschwitz

In 1943 Mengele was sent to the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, to replace another doctor who had fallen ill. On May 24, 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's so-called gypsy camp. In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates 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". His work in the camp had nothing to do with the usual tasks of a physician. The camp's main purpose was extermination of its inmates. The work of the camp physicians was concerned mainly with the taking, not the saving, of life. Mengele was usually part of the medical delegation that met incoming prisoners, determining who would be retained for work and who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers.

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particulary interested in twins. Beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks. He also studied a disease called Noma, that particulary affected children from the gypsy camp. While Noma is a bacterial disease that affects chiefly children who suffer from malnutrition and physical exhaustion, he tried to prove that it was caused by their 'racial inferiority".

Mengele's experiments were of dubious scientific value, including attempts to change eye colorings by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs etc. and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempts to create an artificially conjoined twins by sewing the veins in two twins together; this operation was not successful and only caused the hands of the children to become badly infected. Another dubious experiment that he purportedly conducted involved submerging subjects into boiling cauldrons of water so as to see how much heat the human body could take before death.

Rena Kornreich Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. During roll calls Dr. 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 labor 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.

Mengele also took an interest in dwarfs with the arrival of the Ovitz family, a Jewish Romanian artist's family; seven of whose ten members were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput troupe. He often called them "his dwarf family". To him they seemed to be the perfect expression of 'the abnorm'.

The subjects to Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were saved from the gas chambers. To Mengele they were nevertheless not fellow human beings, but rather material to conduct his experiments on. He would not hesitate to kill a subject simply to be able to dissect him or her afterwards.

After the war

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Josef Mengele in 1971.

Mengele left Auschwitz and went to Gross-Rosen concentration camp. In April 1945, he fled westward disguised as a member of the regular German infantry. He was captured as a POW and held near Nuremberg. He was released by the Allies, who had no idea that he was in their midst. After hiding as a farm labourer in Upper Bavaria, Mengele departed for Argentina in 1949, where many other fleeing Nazi officials had also sought refuge. Mengele divorced his wife Irene, and in 1958 married his brother Karl's widow, Martha. She and her son moved to Argentina to join Mengele.

His family at home backed him financially and he prospered in the 1950s. In 1959 he fled to Altos, Paraguay when his address was discovered by Nazi hunters. Martha never managed to adjust to her new life and returned to Europe with her son. Mengele later moved south to Hohenau and then from late 1960s he lived in Embu, a small city near of Sao Paulo, Brazil until his death in 1979, when he suffered a stroke while swimming at Bertioga, Brazil and drowned. He was buried in Embu under his false ID, Wolfgang Gerhard.

Despite international efforts to track him down, he was never apprehended and lived for 35 years hiding under various aliases. In 1992 DNA tests confirmed his identity.

Mengele has a daughter born to an Australian woman of German lineage after a liaison between the two when the woman visited the German Colony in Paraguay in mid-1960. His child was born in Melbourne, Australia on March 10, 1961. Her name was recorded as "Marion", but was changed when she was adopted privately in August of that year.

Eighty-five previously unreleased letters and diaries written by Mengele were discovered in late 2004. They had been seized in a 1985 raid on the home of Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, who had harbored the fugitive Mengele until his death. These personal writings have not been made publicly available.

As reported in a PBS documentary, Mengele denied his war crimes to his estranged son, Rolf Mengele, calling them "fabrications".

In fiction

  • Mengele has also been used as a fictionalized literary and movie character, featured prominently in The Boys from Brazil (portrayed by Gregory Peck) and as part of an amalgam of Nazi doctors in Marathon Man.
  • He was the subject matter of the song "Angel of Death", the opening track on Slayer's 1986 album, Reign in Blood. He was also the subject of a song by Al Stewart called, Running Man, from his 1980 album, 24 Carrots.
  • Mordecai Richler's St-Urbain's Horseman refers to Mengele several times throughout the book
  • He was one of the lead characters in the movie Out Of The Ashes, starring Bruce Davison and Christine Lahti.
  • He was mentioned in Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow."
  • It is argued that Dr. Emmenberger, a nazi doctor in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's book "Der Verdacht", represents a fictionalized and symbolic version of Mengele.
  • The 1979 Herbert Lieberman novel Climate of Hell is a fictional account of Mengele's post-war escapades.
  • The controversial 1999 film After the Truth depicts a fictional trial against an 80-year-old Mengele before a German criminal court.
  • In the science fiction book Camouflage by Joe Haldeman, one of the main characters meets with Mengele and his experiments are briefly described. It also offers an alternate scenario for Mengele's death.
  • It seems very likely that the character Tinker in Sarah Kane's third play Cleansed was based at least in part on Mengele.

See also

References

  • Mengele - the complete story, Gerald Posner and John Ware, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1986 ISBN 0-07-050598-5
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