Before The MilitaryJosef Mengele was born the oldest child out of three, born on March 16, 1911 in Bavaria, Germany. Mengele did well in school and graduated in April of 1930.
He went to study medicine at the Goethe University Frankfurt, as well as philosophy and earned a PhD in anthropology at the University of Munich, which had also happened to be the headquarters for the Nazi Party, in 1935. Two years later he decided to join the nazi party. Mengele had been working with Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a scientist experimenting with genetics. While working, Mengele had a focus on cleft chins or cleft lips and palette. The thesis he had wrote on this earned him a doctorate in 1938. That same year, Josef Mengele joined the Schutzstaffel (SS).
Military ServiceAfter receiving his training with the mountain infantry in 1940, he was soon called up for service in the Wehrmacht, the german air forces. Not long after, he decided to volunteer for the medical services in the Waffen-SS, where he served as the second lieutenant until November 1940. He was later assigned to the Race and Resettlement Office in Posen, Poland evaluating people, or candidates, for the spread of Germanisation, meaning the spread of their language, policies, traditions and culture, and people. Seven months later Mengele was posted to the Ukraine front, where he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. Another seven months pass, Josef Mengele joined 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, he’s a battalion medical officer.
He earned the Iron Cross First Class, the Wound Badge in black, and the Medal for the Care of the German People after rescuing two soldiers from a burning tank. In mid-1942, he’s declared unfit for combat after being severly injured while in action in the port town of Rostov-on-Don, Russia. When he recovered, he was sent to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin, Germany. He became associated with Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer again. He was promoted to SS-Captain in April 1943.
AuschwitzEarly 1943 Mengele applied to be transferred to concentration camp service, as von Verschuer had suggested, because he saw it as an opportunity to study genetics even further and use the prisoners as his human experiments. He was accepted and sent to Auschwitz where he was then appointed chief medical officer by SS-Standortarzt, Eduard Wirths. Mengele became part of the team of doctors who made the selections of who would be exterminated when Hitler decided that the Jews of Europe should be made rid of. He undertook this work when he wasn’t assigned to do so, hoping to find subjects for his experiments. The other doctors thought it was the most stressful jobs, but Mengele thought it was fun and did it while whistling and smiling. Mengele was always hoping to find sets of twins, due to his peaked interest in them and their genetics. The SS doctors didn’t treat them, but they watched over the inmate doctors. Every week they would make visits to the hospital and send patients to the gas chambers if they hadn’t recovered after two weeks in bed.
Mengele was also part of the team of doctors that were in charge of the administration of the Zyklon B, the gas that was being used in the chambers. The Romani camp had an outbreak of noma in 1943, Mengele isolated the camp and killed the affiliated children so he could preserve their heads and organs for testing and treatment. The camp was closed and the remaining prisoners were killed in 1944. Mengele earned the War Merit Cross for clearing out the womens block when typhis broke out, he sent 600 women to the gas chambers and had the rooms cleaned and disinfected, while the neighbouring blocks occupants were bathed and de-loused.
He was promoted to First Physician of the Birkenau subcamp. The Second Class War Merit CrossHuman ExperimentsJosef performed many experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, he had a keen interest in twins, but he liked to experiment on people with different coloured eyes, and very rarely experimented on dwarfs and people with physical disabilities. TwinsThe children of the camps often called Mengele “ Uncle Mengele”, he was known to arrive with pockets full of candy and chocolate so the children had no fear of him. The twins’ day began at 6am, for a roll call, breakfast, then an inspection by Mengele. The twins wouldn’t have hard labour jobs and would be messengers, and be given brief instructions in some makeshift classes. They were spared from punishments and selections being made by the doctors.
Other people were often jealous of the twins’ lives at the camps, until the trucks came to take them away for the experiments. Everyday the twins would have their blood drawn, the blood would be used in transfusions from one twin to the other. Twins were forced to undress and lay down next to each other, then their bodies would be studied, examined, and measured. These tests would last for up to several hours. Every two days the twins would be taken into the lab where they would be injected with several shots. The contents of the shots are unknown, but caused severe pain.
Diseases would be given to one twin but not the other, the purpose of this being to see if the untouched twin could feel the pain the diseased twin was feeling. When one died, the other would be killed and dissected to examine the effects the disease on the body and organs. Mengele performed surgeries without anesthesia; these surgeries could be for anything like amputation, castration, and organ removal. Mengele once performed a surgery that connected two gypsy twins together, creating siamese twins. Their veins became infected. Mengele would often try to change the colours of the twins’ eyes. He would inject or drop chemicals into the eyes.
These chemicals often caused severe pain, infections, and temporary and permanent blindness. Heterochromia IridumMengele tried to change the color of patients eyes genetically by injecting dye into their eyes. This usually resulted in painful infections and even blindness. After a victim would die, he took out their eyes and would tack them onto the wall in his office. This mostly caused headaches and high fevers for several days. Mengele placed patients in isolation cages and subjected them to a variety of stimuli just to see their reactions. DwarfsThe experimentation with dwarfs is quite fascinating.
There was a family in the camp that were ordered into the chambers, once they had started dying they heard Dr. Mengele order that they be carried out and revived. They were saved! Orso they thought. The first night they arrived, when Mengele saw the family of 12 he was excited that he had work for another 20 years.
Mengele was sure to be careful with this family as they were his only dwarves and didn’t want to lose them too quickly. Mengele saved them time and time again from being gassed. This made them believe he was their saviour. Mengele often took blood from each member in the family, leading to them passing out. The doctors extracted bone marrow, pulled out healthy teeth, plucked hair and eyelashes, and carried out psychological and gynaecological tests on them all.
The teenage females in the family were paired with dwarf men, and Mengele used their uterus’ as labs, to see the offspring it produced. After The Experiments and Auschwitz Mengele was one of the first people to escape when Auschwitz was liberated. He was a very wanted criminal once his crimes hit the light of humanity.
Mengele went back home after he escaped the allies trying to capture him, he lived in the woods for a few months while his family provided him with all that he needed. Not long after, he found work at a nearby farm, but they let him work with no knowledge of him being the criminal he was. He decided it was too dangerous to stay in Europe. Once he decided to go to Argentina, he escaped through Italy to an ocean liner. A lot of other ex-nazis were already there, which made it easier for him to settle down there.
This is where he remained for 30 years. He became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959, later moving to Brazil where he met up with ex-Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard. For the first 20 years, no one really tried to capture Mengele. He was still gaining support through the neo-nazi groups in South America. Mengele disappeared off the radar when the Israeli groups came close to finding him. In 1985, forensic experts traveled to Brazil to find Mengele, only to find the body that died in the ocean that went by the name of Gerhard. They believed that Dr.
Josef Mengele had a stroke while swimming, causing him to drown on February 7, 1979. The dental records proved this to be true, meaning that Mengele had taken the identity of Gerhard.
