Josef Mengele

German physician and Nazi ideologue

• Born: March 16, 1911
• Birthplace: Günzburg, Germany
• Died: February 7, 1979
• Place of death: Bertioga, Brazil

Cause of notoriety: Mengele tortured and murdered Auschwitz prisoners in the name of medical experimentation.

Active: May 30, 1943-January 18, 1945

Locale: Auschwitz (Oswiecim) concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland

Early Life

As the son of a prosperous industrialist, Josef Mengele (MEHN-geh-leh) had a privileged upbringing in Bavaria until, at fifteen, he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis. His health problems led to an interest in medicine, which he pursued at the University of Munich, where, as a right-wing nationalist, he joined the “Steel Helmet” (Stahlhem), an organization that blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I. In Munich he may have met Adolf Hitler, whose racist ideas deeply influenced him. In 1935 he received his doctorate for a study of the lower jaws of four racial groups. While working at the University of Frankfurt for his doctorate in medicine under the supervision of Otmar von Verschuer in the Institute for Racial Hygiene, he joined the Nazi Party. His medical dissertation, on the genetics of cleft palate, illustrates his early commitment to use science to support Nazi ideology. He joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), Hitler’s elite special security force, in 1938, the year he received his M.D.

Aspiring to an academic career, Mengele became Verschuer’s assistant and married a professor’s daughter, with whom he later had a son, but the outbreak of World War II in 1939 interrupted his research. As a member of the medical corps of the Waffen Schutzstaffel, he served in France, in occupied Poland, and on the Ukrainian front, where he was severely wounded. His bravery in combat earned him promotion and several decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class.

Because his wounds rendered him unfit for combat, he was reposted to Berlin, where he resumed his scientific work with Verschuer, who was now director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity, and Eugenics. With Verschuer’s support, Mengele sought work as a doctor and researcher at a concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, appointed Mengele as a medical officer at Birkenau, a supplementary camp near Auschwitz.

Concentration-Camp Career

On arrival at Auschwitz on May 30, 1943, Mengele was assigned to the Gypsy camp at Birkenau (sometimes called “Auschwitz II”). Over the following twenty months he would be given increasingly powerful positions, and he became infamous for his roles as the “Great Selector” (because he chose incoming Jews and other “undesirables” for labor or extermination in the gas chambers) and as a medical experimenter on human subjects. The two roles often overlapped, as he was interested in selecting twins and prisoners with genetic abnormalities for his experiments. Committed to the Nazi policy of race hygiene, Mengele believed it was his duty to rid the Third Reich of “human garbage” and to discover how to breed a master race. He sent thousands of prisoners to their deaths because they were weak, ill, or aged, or because they had such “defects” as skin blemishes, scars, or even diminutive height.

Mengele became most notorious for his experiments on human beings, first at the Gypsy camp, then at his other Auschwitz assignments. While working with Verschuer, he had absorbed his mentor’s interest in twins, and Verschuer’s Berlin Institute financially supported Mengele’s medical experiments, no matter how horrendous. For example, he injected chemicals into children’s eyes to discover if he could permanently alter eye color. As a consequence, some children were blinded, and others died due to painful infections. Mengele even tried to create artificial conjoined twins by connecting two children’s blood vessels and organs. In one experiment the joined twins screamed for three days until death ended their suffering. In other cases Mengele killed healthy twins simply because they had differently colored eyes, and he wanted these eyes to be exhibited at the Berlin Institute. People with genetic abnormalities of all kinds fascinated Mengele, and he also selected them for experimentation.

As a physician, Mengele was responsible for controlling the spread of diseases among prisoners. For example, in July, 1944, he combated a spotted fever epidemic by the monstrous method of gassing nearly four thousand men, women, and children. Mengele’s work was admired by his superiors, who promoted him to the position of First Physician of Auschwitz II-Birkenau and honored him with the War Service Medal. However, early in 1945, Soviet military successes in eastern Poland forced Mengele and other Nazi officials to flee from Auschwitz to Gross-Rosen, another concentration camp, which proved to be only a temporary asylum.

Legal Action and Outcome

Disguised as a regular army soldier, Mengele, after eluding the Russians and Americans, was eventually captured and held as a prisoner of war under his own name by Americans, who failed to realize that he was a war criminal until after he had escaped. With the help of family and friends, Mengele created a new identity as a farm laborer in Bavaria, before departing via Italy for Argentina in 1949. For the following thirty years Mengele lived under a variety of names in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Despite a three-million-dollar reward and efforts by the Israeli agency Mossad and prosecutors in Frankfurt, Mengele was never brought to justice. He was even able, in 1977, to meet with his son, who was deeply dissatisfied with his father’s explanations of his Auschwitz activities. After Mengele’s death from a stroke in 1979, the search for him continued, and in 1981 a court in Freiburg issued a new arrest warrant. These searches finally ended when his body was identified through the combined efforts of West German, South American, and U.S. officials in 1985.

Impact

Unlike many Nazi doctors who were captured, tried, and convicted during the Nuremberg Trials, Josef Mengele avoided punishment for crimes far worse than those of the prosecuted physicians. When his role in the deaths and sufferings of thousands became known to the world, he served as a symbol of all that was evil in Nazi Germany, though scholars such as Robert Jay Lifton believe it is a mistake to treat him as “purely evil.” Instead, Lifton sees Mengele as a “double man” who schizophrenically compartmentalized his life into the self-sacrificial soldier and the dispassionately cruel Nazi ideologue.

Mengele’s concentration-camp career has had an influence on Holocaust studies and on psychologists who study aberrant behavior. When his crimes against humanity became known, the universities of Munich and Frankfurt withdrew his degrees. The twins who survived Mengele’s macabre experiments founded an organization, Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Laboratory Experiments Survivors (CANDLES), in 1984 to gather evidence of his crimes and educate people about them. In 1985 a public trial was held in Israel, and Mengele was tried and convicted of war crimes in absentia.

His crimes have also had a cultural impact. In Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial drama The Deputy (1963), the character of “the Doctor” is obviously modeled on Mengele, who serves as a symbol of Nazi evil. William Goldman’s 1974 novel Marathon Man was made into a successful film featuring a character based on Mengele, as was Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil (1976). The character Dorf in the 1978 television series Holocaust was also derived from Mengele. He was even the subject of a song, “Angel of Death,” on a 1986 rock album, Reign in Blood, by the group Slayer. Although he saw himself as a Nazi revolutionary with a mission to remake the world, politicians, writers, religious leaders, and others see him as Hitler’s “most absolutely convinced Nazi,” whose incalculable atrocities must be remembered so that they will never be repeated.

Bibliography

Lagnado, Lucette Matalon, and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. This book, based largely on eyewitness accounts, tells not only the story of Mengele’s experiments but also what happened to Mengele and the surviving twins after World War II.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Lifton tells the story of how doctors before and during World War II became involved in killing their patients. Chapter 17 is devoted to Mengele. Extensive notes to primary and secondary sources, and an index.

Posner, Gerald. Mengele: The Complete Story. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Based on research into previously unavailable family papers, this biography gives a detailed account of Mengele’s life and work as well as an analysis of why he was never brought to justice.