German doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Mengele personally engaged in the selection of prisoners arriving at the camp, conducted criminal experiments on prisoners. Its victims were tens of thousands of people.
Childhood and youth
The infamous Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in Gunzburg, near Ulm in Germany. His father, Karl Mengele, was a manufacturer of agricultural equipment, and his mother, Walburga Hapfaue, was a housewife.
He was the first-born in the family of Karl, later he still had two brothers Karl and Alois.
After graduating from high school in April 1930, he enters the Faculty of Medicine at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
In 1935, Joseph received his doctorate in physical anthropology at the University of Munich.
Career
In January 1937, Joseph Mengele got a job at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. He becomes an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Werscher, who gained worldwide fame thanks to his twin studies.
In 1937, he joined the Nazi party. And already in 1938 he received received a medical degree and in the same year joined the ranks of the SS.
In 1940 he was drafted into the army and sent to the medical service of the Waffen-SS. During the summer of 1940, he worked as a medical expert for the RHSA or "Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt" in their "Central Immigration Office", located in the northeast of Posen (today Poznan, Poland).
He later goes to the Eastern Front as a medical officer with the Wiking division.
He was wounded in battle and returned to Germany in January 1943 to join the Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics.
In April 1943 he received the rank of captain of the SS.
For the first time, he entered Auschwitz on May 30, 1943, when he was appointed assistant garrison physician of the SS captain, Dr. Eduard Wirts.
In November 1943, he became the head physician of the Auschwitz II or Birkenau camp.
His duty was to filter newly arrived prisoners of war. He immediately sent some to gas chambers, while others went to work huts to continue to work on hard labor.
In this position, he continues his monstrous medical experiments on twins, most often of Jewish and gypsy nationality.
Highly qualified doctors who got to the camp often became his assistants. Under the threat of death, they were forced to assist Mengele. A striking example is Dr. Miklos Nisli, who was an assistant killer doctor in his experiments. This man spoke about his life in a concentration camp in his memoirs Auschwitz: Memoirs of a Doctor, which was published in Hungarian in 1946.
Mengele hoped to defend another doctoral dissertation in order to later head the medical department at a German university, but the defeat of Nazi Germany prevented the implementation of his plans.
Life after the war
He fled from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945, when Soviet troops were already very close.
Joseph spent several weeks in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and after his evacuation he fled to the west.
Mengele was arrested by American troops, but he was quickly released, because due to confusion in the papers, he was not identified as a war criminal.
From the summer of 1945 to the spring of 1949, he calmly worked on a farm in Rosenheim.
In 1949, Joseph immigrated to South America and settled in a suburb of Buenos Aires.
In 1959, the German government issued a warrant for his arrest.
Mengele was forced to move to Paraguay, and then to Brazil, after he learned that Adolf Eichmann had been arrested and taken to Israel.
Death
He spent the rest of his life in a villa near São Paulo until he drowned while swimming in a resort in Bertioga on February 7, 1979.
He was buried in the São Paulo Cemetery under the pseudonym Wolfgang Gerhard.
In 1985, the German police exhumed the body and conducted an identification after a forensic examination.
A DNA analysis in 1992 confirmed that the exhumed corpse really belonged to Joseph Mengele.
