Original subtitles

The man known to history as Josef Mengele was born on the 16th of March 1911 in the

town of Günzburg in southern Germany.

His father was Karl Mengele, an engineer, who around about the time of Josef’s birth

had become the proprietor of a foundry which manufactured farming equipment for various

purposes such as sawing, cutting and milling.

There were seven men on the payroll of the company in the early 1910s which meant that

the Mengeles were one of the more affluent families in the Günzburg area.

Josef’s mother was Walburga Hupfauer, who would subsequently give birth to Josef’s

two younger brothers, Karl Jnr. and Alois.

The young Josef grew up in a world which was in the depths of total war.

It was only in the recent past that Germany had become a country at all.

As recently as the 1860s its territory was divided between over two dozen smaller states.

However, in 1871, these united under Prussian leadership to form the German Empire.

This severely disrupted the balance of power in Europe, and in the decades that followed

the continent drifted towards war.

Germany formed an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while Britain, France and Russia allied

to offset the rise of Germany.

At first these powers confined their disputes to proxy conflicts in Africa and the Balkans,

but in the summer of 1914 a regional dispute in the Balkans led to the outbreak of a general

European war.

It soon expanded to bring in countries such as Japan.

And so the First World War had commenced.

It lasted for over four years, with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire fighting

Britain, France, Russia and Italy, with the United States later joining on their side.

The defeat of Germany brought the empire to an end and a new German republic was created,

named after the town of Weimar.

More importantly a series of punitive peace terms were imposed on Germany under the terms

of the Treaty of Versailles and these would have lasting repercussions.

The infant Mengele might not have been entirely unaware of these developments, as they had

impacted substantially on the Mengele household.

Karl left to fight in the German army shortly after the conflict began, and Walburga was

left to raise the children and attempt to keep the business ticking over during the

war.

She did this with a steely determination and successfully negotiated a contract with the

German government to produce a type of army vehicle for use on the warfront, known as

a Fouragewagen.

As a result the company prospered and when Karl Mengele returned to Günzburg at the

end of the war he was able to keep the company moving forward.

By the early 1920s it had become the third largest producer of threshing machinery in

the whole of Germany.

Extended family members were called upon to aid in the building up of the organisation

and as a result the Mengele name is very common in the Günzburg area to this day and Karl

Mengele Strasse is one of the main streets in the town, a curious contrast between the

civic significance of the wider Mengele family and the appalling crimes which Karl and Walburga

Mengele’s eldest son would commit.

More immediately, what this prosperity meant for Josef in the 1920s was that he had the

financial backing to engage in extensive studies.

Mengele was a relatively successful student in his teenage years.

He excelled at art and developed wide interests in music and in physical activity.

He appears to have favoured skiing, the town being not too far from the northern end of

the German Alps.

In April of 1930 Josef Mengele passed his high-school exams with a decent, but hardly

exceptional grade.

Initially he seems to have considered becoming a dentist, having noted there was not one

dentist in the local area and that this would be a promising trade to practice.

However, he subsequently decided that this was too specialised and opted for medicine,

with an emphasis on anthropology and genetics.

He was clearly ambitious and his correspondence from this time indicates an individual who

wanted to impress his family by becoming its first medical scientist.

And so it was that in October 1930 he left the family home and headed east to the city

of Munich, the capital of Bavaria.

Here he enrolled in both the medicine and philosophy departments, indicating an interest

in both the hard science element of medicine and broader speculation and inquiry.

It was a mix of interests which would later have terrifying results.

Mengele arrived in Bavaria just as a new political party was emerging in the area, and was beginning

its ascent to power.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazi Party had been founded a decade earlier

and had quickly come under the control of an Austrian firebrand called Adolf Hitler.

In November 1923 this collection of disaffected war veterans, whose main concern was to prevent

the rise of leftist parties such as the Communists, and to redress the overly punitive terms of

the Treaty of Versailles which had brought the First World War to an end, had attempted

a coup in Munich, but it was quickly suppressed.

Thereafter they turned to constitutional politics to achieve their ends, but initially floundered

at the polls, until the autumn of 1929 when, after a decade of rampant growth, the Wall

Street stock exchange suffered catastrophic losses and the world’s economy went into

a tailspin.

As individuals lost their jobs and life savings throughout Germany, parties such as the Nazis

and the Communists began to experience a surge of support in elections.

As the Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street Crash, dragged on through the

early 1930s Hitler and his associates would become ever more popular with their message

of xenophobia and resentment at Germany’s position in the world.

Mengele was soon involved in the political torrents which were raging around him, although

he would not become a member of the Nazi Party itself for some time yet.

In March 1931 he joined the Stahlhelms, an ex-serviceman’s organisation which was named

after the helmets worn by the German army during the First World War.

The Stahlhelms marched regularly and held military style rallies.

But the Nazis also had an early appeal to the young Josef.

In his autobiography written years later, Mengele noted that “The students of the

university, those who had already reached the voting age, had contributed to this [Nazi]

success.

I was not then old enough to vote.

My political leanings then were, I think for reasons of family tradition, national conservative.

. . . I had not joined any political organization.

Though indeed I was strongly attracted by the program and the whole organization of

the National Socialists.

But for the time being I remained an unorganized private person.

But in the long run it was impossible to stand aside in these politically stirring times,

should our Fatherland not succumb to the Marxist-Bolshevik attack.

This simple political concept finally became the decisive factor in my life.”

From this it appears that it was only a matter of time before Mengele joined the Nazis.

Mengele’s early years in Munich witnessed

the full rise of the Nazis.

By 1932 Hitler and his associates were the largest party in Germany and their support

translated into 40% of the national vote in the Reichstag elections which were held that

year.

This was still not enough to form a majority government and Germany’s politics floundered

in the second half of 1932.

At stake was whether the country would lean towards the Nazis or towards the Communists,

the second largest political group in Germany by this time.

Whichever was to seize power would probably spell the end of the Weimar Republic.

Then, late in 1932 and into early 1933 the political and business establishment made

a Faustian bargain with Hitler and the Nazis, agreeing to bring Hitler and several of his

senior colleagues into the government in the misguided belief that they would be able to

control him and his party . It was a fatal underestimation, and having allowed Hitler

in, the Nazis quickly set about seizing absolute power.

A political emergency was concocted to warrant the passage of an Enabling Act which effectively

allowed Hitler, as Chancellor, to rule by decree.

Thus, in the course of just a few short months in the first half of 1933 the Nazis seized

absolute power throughout Germany and established a one-party state, one which would hold power

for the next twelve years.

By 1934 Mengele was increasingly preoccupied by his studies, though many of his contemporaries

subsequently recorded that they never regarded him as being a particularly accomplished student.

Many, however, would note that he made up for his lack of pronounced intellect with

ambition and hard work.

His ambition had driven Mengele to simultaneously study for a doctorate and act as a practicing

medic during the mid-1930s.

It was during this time that the Stahlhelms, which Mengele had been a member of for some

time, were merged with the Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts, the Nazi Party’s original

paramilitary wing.

Hitler had ordered the merger distrusting the Stahlhelms fundamentally monarchist nature.

A serious kidney complaint forced Mengele to end his association with the organisation,

leaving him more time for his studies.

Overall, his studies did result in academic rewards.

In 1935 Mengele was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled “Racial Morphological Research

on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups”.

Here Mengele argued that it was possible to determine the race of an individual by examining

their jaw alone.

However, it should be noted that at this time Mengele’s findings were based on scientific

principles and there was no overt racist or Anti-Semitic sentiments expressed in the thesis.

This is significant, for it suggests Mengele had not been radicalised to the extent he

later would be.

Having finished his thesis and acquired his doctorate, Mengele briefly spent a few months

working as a junior resident doctor, a compulsory service which was required for him to obtain

a full medical licence.

It was during this time, while working in a hospital in Leipzig, that he first met Irene

Schoenbein, whom he would subsequently marry in 1939.

Their only son, Rolf, would be born in 1944.

However, while his personal life had prospered, Mengele was not suited to the work of a resident

doctor, with its long hours and ward rounds.

And he was eager to resume his studies.

To that end he sought and obtained a position as a research assistant at the Third Reich

Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt in January

1937.

Here he would study under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, an admirer of Hitler’s

and an individual who professed to be an expert on the ominously titled concept of ‘race

hygiene’.

It is to this period in his life that Mengele’s more deplorable views and the corruption of

his character can surely be traced.

Until this point, while he had exhibited an interest in race and genetics, his earlier

thesis was not overtly racist.

In Frankfurt he became steeped in Nazi racial ideology and in May 1937 he finally applied

to join the Nazi Party and was soon accepted as member 5,574,974.

In the course of the late 1930s Mengele worked closely with Von Verschuer, often co-authoring

reports for courts which the Nazi state was convening to judge German Jewish people who

were deemed to have violated the Nuremburg Laws, a series of oppressive measures which

had been introduced during the mid-1930s to disenfranchise the Jewish population of the

country.

This involved rather perverse medical evidence.

For instance, defendants were often brought before the court to decide whether or not

they actually had Jewish blood, and so would consequently have breached one of the Nuremburg

Laws.

In some of these instances, Mengele and von Verschuer would conduct physical examinations

of the defendant, measuring his or her nose and other features in order to determine if

the defendant did in fact have Jewish ancestry.

There is a definite shift here from Mengele.

In Munich he had used legitimate scientific methods in his research and produced work

which historians and other scholars have generally agreed was unproblematic even by modern standards.

However, in Frankfurt in the late 1930s there was a descent into unscientific racial theories

based around Nazi ideology.

Clearly his time at Frankfurt had brought on a significant change of character.

Whatever the nuances of his actual work, Mengele’s role in Frankfurt was allowing him to progress

rapidly in his career.

Mengele was promoted by Von Verschuer to become one of his assistant physicians after Mengele

had been awarded his full medical degree from Frankfurt in 1938.

It is from this time that Mengele first began to discuss the concept of individuals and

races being ‘improved’ through appropriate selection, a clear indication that he was

fully involved in the Nazis’ racial ideology by this time.

And politically he was becoming more and more mired in the regime.

Several months after becoming a member of the Nazi Party he applied for membership of

the SS or Schutzstaffel, one of the paramilitary wings of the Nazi regime, headed by Heinrich

Himmler, and the one which would soon be placed in charge of a network of concentration camps

which proliferated across Central and Eastern Europe.

He would subsequently join the Waffen SS, an elite sub-group of the SS, while his professional

work and political life were bleeding into each other as well, as he joined the Third

Reich Institute and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, both institutions being to the fore of the

study of eugenics in Germany, and as a result effectively mouthpieces for pseudo-scientific

Nazi racial ideology.

As Mengele’s studies were continuing through the 1930s the Nazis were pushing Europe towards

war.

It had always been the stated aim of Hitler and his associates to overturn the terms of

the Treaty of Versailles and reassert Germany’s place as a European power.

While the first years after the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933 did not see an overt effort

to do so, from 1936 this aggression rapidly escalated.

In the spring of that year the German army moved into the Rhineland, remilitarising a

part of the country which had been expressly forbidden under the terms of the Treaty of

Versailles.

Then in 1938 Austria was effectively annexed into a greater Germany.

And further annexations quickly followed, first the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in

the autumn of 1938, and then early in 1939 the conquest of Central Europe was effectively

completed when Hungary and the rest of Czechoslovakia were turned into puppet regimes.

At this stage Britain and France had signalled that their appeasing of German aggression

would not continue any further, particularly if Hitler tried to occupy Poland.

And so it was that, when Germany did invade its eastern neighbour on the 1st of September

1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September.

The Second World War had begun.

On the eve of the titanic struggle which would

soon engulf the European continent Mengele’s career had run into its first and only significant

impediment under the Nazis.

In the summer of 1939, he planned to marry Irene after several years of courtship, but

there was controversy in the run up to the wedding, with some querying whether his wife-to-be

had some traces of Jewish blood.

Mengele enlisted the help of some well-connected colleagues and friends who assured the panel

which adjudicated on these matters that Irene had ‘Very Nordic ways’.

And yet a search through records for the extended family as far away as the United States could

not entirely resolve the matter.

Consequently, while Josef was unable to comprehensively prove that he was not marrying a woman who

had a small amount of Jewish blood, he was nevertheless able to sweep the question aside

without having fully answered it.

There is a dark irony here as the man who would soon be deciding upon people’s lives

based on racial purity, was prohibited from being issued a certificate himself by the

Nazi regime that would declare his own children to be of pure Aryan blood.

Mengele was pleased when the war broke out.

His son Rolf would state many years later that his father had told him that he viewed

the war as a necessary struggle to reassert the German nation after years of being trammelled

and downtrodden following the First World War.

Mengele had enlisted straight away, however, his old kidney ailment returned in late 1939

and made it impossible for him to enter service until the summer of 1940, by which time the

German Panzer divisions were conquering Western Europe in a blistering military campaign.

Mengele was originally stationed at a military base in Kassel in Central Germany.

He remained here only for a few weeks before being reassigned to a combat position in his

role as a member of the Waffen SS.

As such he was given an officer’s title of Untersturmfuhrer, a sub-lieutenant.

And the next several months were spent in occupied Poland where Mengele was attached

to the Genealogical Section of the Race and Resettlement Office, the goal of which was

to assess the racial purity and thus suitability of individuals who were being chosen to settle

as German colonists in Eastern Europe.

The idea here was to effectively remove non-Germans from the new Lebensraum or Living Space which

was being created in Eastern Europe.

While Mengele was serving in Poland, the Nazi state itself was meeting with success in its

war effort.

The initial invasion of Poland in September 1939 had seen that country quickly overrun

and occupied.

Thereafter a ‘phoney war’ of sorts followed through the winter and early spring of 1939

and 1940, as Britain and France tried belatedly to rearm themselves in preparation for a German

attack on France.

It was slow in coming and when Hitler did make his move in the spring of 1940 it was

to occupy Denmark and Norway.

But then in the early summer a lightning attack on France saw the north of the country and

the Low Countries completely overrun in just a matter of weeks.

By the end of the summer of 1940 Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany.

Worse was to follow, with Benito Mussolini’s Italy now joining Hitler’s Germany, and

a campaign was commenced in North Africa to try to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal from

the British.

In the summer of 1941 that possibility looked imminent and other parts of Europe including

the Balkans had also fallen to the Axis powers of Germany and Italy.

Thus, in mid-1941 the war effort looked very bleak indeed for Winston Churchill and his

government in London.

As the war turned in its favour, Nazi policy

began to take on an even darker hue.

Confident in the fact that they would soon be masters of Europe and would not have to

answer to international pressure from other states, Hitler and the leaders of the Nazi

party began contemplating a more stark approach to their Anti-Semitic policies.

In 1940 and early 1941 they were considering the idea of forcibly removing millions of

Europe’s Jews to the East African island of Madagascar where they would live in a kind

of open air prison, however when the North Africa campaign stalled and the possibility

of seizing the Suez Canal diminished a much more drastic idea began to develop.

This was the ‘Final Solution’, the idea that Europe’s Jews would be forcibly rounded

up and sent to the patchwork of several dozen concentration camps which had been created

across Central and Eastern Europe since the inception of the war.

Here a small number of the most able bodied would be used as slave labour in factories

to produce German war materials, but most would be killed by exposure to gas within

hours of arrival.

This approach was ratified at the Wannsee Conference north of Berlin in January 1942

and mass murder was soon occurring at camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz.

Mengele would soon be posted to the latter.

Mengele was to see some military action in 1941.

After a protracted period in Poland in mid-1941, he was reassigned to the Eastern Front.

Flushed with success in 1940, Hitler had commanded his generals to begin plans for the invasion

of the Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa as it became known would be the largest land invasion ever undertaken

by an army.

When it commenced that summer, hundreds of thousands of German troops swarmed over the

border into the Soviet Union.

At first the invasion met with enormous success, as the Soviet forces melted away, and the

German Wehrmacht advanced towards Moscow and Leningrad.

However, gradually Joseph Stalin and his generals mobilised their troops in an effective fashion.

But then the Russian winter set in.

The German army was unprepared for the extreme cold and had not been issued with adequate

winter clothing.

Consequently in the course of the winter of 1941 the tide of the war began to shift as

the German advance stalled a short distance from Moscow.

Mengele served on this front in 1941, specifically in Ukraine, during which action he was awarded

the Iron Cross Second Class.

Mengele continued to serve on the Eastern Front even as the war was turning against

Germany.

In January 1942 he was appointed to the medical corps of the Waffen SS’s Viking division.

This crack unit would eventually penetrate further into Russian territory than any other

division of the German armed forces.

However, Josef was kept away from the front lines.

As a medic attached to the division, he was deemed of considerable value, and kept back

towards the defensive lines, where the unit was performing clearing up operations as opposed

to leading at the front.

In July the Viking unit was sent into action around the towns of Rostow and Bataisk in

a vicious battle of attrition which lasted for five days.

During this particular affray he received the higher version of the Iron Cross, the

Iron Cross Frist Class, as a result of rescuing two wounded soldiers from a burning tank while

under enemy fire.

Having dragged the pair to cover Mengele had performed first aid on them.

He was also awarded the Black Badge for the Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the

German People.

Thus it was that Mengele returned back to Poland towards the end of 1942 as a considerably

decorated veteran of the Eastern Front.

Mengele’s return to Poland was probably

not a result of mere chance or a reward for his performance in the field of battle.

It is more plausible that he owed his recall from the Eastern Front to his old mentor,

Professor von Verschuer who had been appointed as a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

in Berlin in early 1942.

This institute was charged with overseeing research in the Reich into the concept of

racial purity and eugenics.

With the decision to enact the ‘Final Solution’ and the expansion of the concentration camp

system there was now a limitless supply of individuals who could be studied at the camps

as part of this research and with zero consequences for the researchers as to the methods they

employed in their so-called ‘research’.

Already in the summer of 1942 Von Verschuer, in making his plans for heading to the concentration

camps, had stated that he planned to take some of his former colleagues and students

with him.

Mengele was doubtlessly one of these and it seems probable that Von Verschuer had secured

Josef’s recall from the Eastern Front in mid-1942 for this explicit purpose.

Consequently by January 1943, after a brief hiatus in Poland, Mengele was back in Berlin

at the Institute.

But he would soon be sent to the place with which he has become synonymous: the concentration

camp at Auschwitz in Poland.

While all of this was proceeding it was becoming increasingly clear to any German who took

a sombre look at the strategic situation that the war effort was doomed.

Following the German defeat at Stalingrad, the Russians had gradually begun pushing the

German armies back out of Russia.

Moreover, in the spring of 1943 Britain, which was now joined by the United States following

its entry into the war in December 1941, had defeated the combined Italian and German forces

in North Africa.

In the summer of 1943 a southern front was now opened in Europe against the Axis powers

when the western Allies commenced with Operation Husky and invaded the island of Sicily as

a preliminary to encroaching onto the Italian mainland.

Meanwhile the Russians continued to press the Germans back into Ukraine and Poland,

and in the summer of 1944 a western front was also opened with the D-Day landings in

Normandy in France.

The defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies was now inevitable, but what was open to question

was the speed at which the retreat of Germany would occur and which of the Allied powers

would arrive to Berlin first.

On that might depend much about how high ranking members of the regime would be prosecuted

In May 1943 Mengele, who by now had been promoted to the position of Haupsturmfuhrer, a captain,

received his posting to Auschwitz.

The Auschwitz camp had started in a small way shortly after Poland had been conquered,

however by 1943 it had been expanded into a vast complex under the direction of its

commandant, Rudolf Höss.

There were three camps.

Auschwitz I was the original camp, and contained the administrative centres, the guards’

quarters and some of the earliest built detention facilities.

Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau was effectively an extermination or death camp.

Here Jews and other individuals who were sent here by the Nazi regime, including Roma gypsies

and Soviet prisoners of war were murdered en-masse in shower rooms which were filled

with the gas, Zyklon-B. The bodies were then quickly burned in crematoria which were built

on site.

This factory of death was where over one million people, most of them Jewish, would be killed

between 1942 and 1945.

A final camp, known as Auschwitz III or Auschwitz-Monowitz was used as a slave labour camp, increasingly

for the purposes of producing a synthetic rubber manufactured by the IG Farben chemical

company.

It was to this vast complex that Mengele arrived in the early summer of 1943.

When he arrived at Auschwitz, Mengele was

appointed by Eduard Wirths, the chief medical officer of the entire camp, to the position

of chief physician of the Romani family camp.

His role in the wider camp was varied and brutal.

The doctors at Auschwitz were central to what was called ‘the Selection’.

This was a process which occurred with new arrivals to the complex.

When the trains of thousands of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani and other unfortunates

arrived at the camp they were physically examined on the gangway next to the train platforms.

Little did the bewildered newcomers know, but the doctors appraising them were handing

out death sentences to most of them.

They selected a small number of those who were deemed physically fittest, and these

were sent to the labour camps, while a few others were selected for reasons relating

to experimental research or some other reason, but the remainder were all sent to the gas

chambers and would be dead within hours.

Mengele’s detachment from any emotional response to this was strikingly clear.

Some of the doctors at Auschwitz genuinely disliked being put on ‘Selection’ duty,

a process which involved effectively condemning children and the elderly to death.

By way of contrast, Mengele would sometimes show up to do it, on his day off.

Mengele was soon engaged in other activities which point towards a total lack of any emotional

response to the suffering of others.

This began almost immediately at the Romani family camp to which he was assigned upon

first arriving there.

Several weeks after he first reached Auschwitz there was an outbreak of Noma within the Romani

camp.

This is an aggressive gangrenous process in which body tissue dies due to both the initial

infection and a lack of blood supply which follows.

It affects the mouth and lips in particular.

A normal medical doctor’s first concern would have been to treat his or her patients,

however Mengele’s was to carry out experiments into a disease, about which little was known

at the time.

Patients who exhibited symptoms were isolated in separate locations to be studied.

Most appalling, several children who had the condition were killed, before their heads

and organs were removed to be sent back the SS medical institute in the Austrian city

of Graz for later study.

This macabre research was still ongoing months later when a decision was taken to liquidate

the entire Romani camp on the night of the 2nd of August 1944.

There were other atrocities.

The camps were riddled with diseases of all kinds, the result of poor sanitation generally,

and the fact that those who arrived at Auschwitz were often carrying diseases already, a result

of the cramped conditions of the trains which transported them to the death camp.

As a result, diseases such as typhus and scarlet fever were often rampant.

Mengele’s approach to dealing with such outbreaks was viciously utilitarian.

On one occasion of a typhus epidemic he simply sent the entire populace of the barracks in

which it had been detected, some 600 Jewish women, to the gas chamber.

This barracks was then sterilised before moving hundreds of new occupants in, who were de-loused

and given new clothes on arrival.

The process was repeated with each barracks.

Perversely, for his actions in this regard, in stamping out outbreaks of disease at Auschwitz

Mengele was awarded the War Merit Cross and in 1944 was made the senior First Physician

of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

And this was not an isolated incident.

There are many reports of Mengele sending hundreds of people at one time to the gas

chamber as a precautionary measure against the disease.

He was particularly ruthless towards the Romani population of Auschwitz.

But surely his most brutal action was in ordering the liquidation of thousands of Jewish people

towards the end of 1944 when the camp’s ration supplies, which were a mere 700 calories

a day for prisoners, could no longer be sustained.

While Mengele’s actions in combatting disease

and ordering other mass deaths at Auschwitz were brutal, he has become most notorious

for the experiments he carried out at the camp.

Mengele treated Auschwitz as a giant laboratory through which he could continue the research

he had started back in the mid-1930s on heredity and genetics.

In this regard he treated the inmates of Auschwitz as research material in much the same way

as a chemist might treat the chemicals in his lab; as something dispensable.

He was particularly interested in people with dwarfism and heterochromia iridum, the latter

being the condition whereby an individual has two different coloured eyes.

His methods were often brutal.

One experiment involved injecting chemicals into the eyes of those with heterochromia

iridum to see if he could change the colour of the irises.

Often after studying the subjects to the maximum degree to which he felt it was possible, he

would have them killed or killed them himself with lethal injections so that their internal

organs could be studied and their skeletons preserved for later research.

Perhaps the most shocking experiments involved Mengele removing some subjects’ organs without

anaesthesia.

One man who had one of his kidneys removed in this way was quickly sent back to work

without painkillers.

Mengele is particularly notorious for his research into identical twins at Auschwitz,

with whom he became obsessed for his study of heredity and other characteristics.

Often when ‘the Selection’ of new arrivals was taking place on the gangway near the train

station at the camp, Mengele was on the look-out for twins for his research.

These were typically twin children who often arrived together, though there is evidence

of a pair of twins who were nearly seventy years old being examined by Mengele.

Exactly how many sets of twins he examined at Auschwitz is unclear, but alone during

the summer of 1944, when 400,000 of Hungary’s Jews were murdered en-masse at Auschwitz,

Mengele is said to have identified and examined at least 175 sets of twins.

In a bizarre twist of circumstances, being a twin could actually initially be of benefit

to an individual in surviving Auschwitz.

Many who were selected in this fashion by Mengele would most likely have otherwise been

sent straight to the gas chamber, while Mengele’s twin subjects were also fed better than nearly

all other inmates at the camps.

Their heads were not shaved and they were often permitted to keep their own clothing,

rather than wearing the standard issue uniforms which were given to all others at Auschwitz.

Mengele’s research involved a large amount of taking measurements and other seemingly

banal examinations of the twins.

Witnesses later testified that Mengele was extremely detailed in this work.

Exact measurement of the twins’ skulls and other facial features were taken.

One twin who survived Auschwitz later recalled Mengele measuring he and his twin brother’s

eyes for approximately two hours.

Such examinations could occur two or three times a week for periods of months and photographs

were also taken.

All of this seems to have been so that Mengele could record where physical variations, however

minute, might have existed between identical and non-identical twins.

But there was also a much more sinister aspect to all of this.

Often Mengele would induce pain in one twin to see if it impacted on the other.

Chemicals were used and subjects were injected with random substances.

Most brutally Mengele’s work on twins extended to studying their internal organs, and as

such he routinely murdered sets of twins using injections of chloroform and then dissected

them.

On one occasion he suspected a set of Romani twins of having tuberculosis, so he simply

killed them and performed an autopsy to confirm his suspicion.

Mengele had been wrong in his suspicions.

The children did not have TB.

What is most striking about all this was the

simple manner in which Mengele completely dissociated himself psychologically from the

act of killing.

First-hand witnesses from Auschwitz, including Jewish doctors who were forced into acting

as Mengele’s lab assistants, reported afterwards that Mengele could be quite kind towards the

twins he studied and other subjects of his research.

He would often bring them sugar or treats and inquired how they were doing.

Yet just minutes later he could murder them as though it were nothing at all.

Mengele was evidently so obsessed by his research that he believed it trumped any concerns of

conventional morality, while his total indoctrination in Nazi ideology and the concept of Aryan

racial hierarchy inculcated into him the idea that murder of supposedly less evolved races

was completely acceptable, if it could produce some scientific benefit for the Nazi regime.

The result was terrifying.

Here was a man who hummed Italian operas to himself while he dissected people he had murdered

just minutes earlier for no reason other than a wish to study their organs.

Consequently, it is no surprise to learn that Mengele became known in Auschwitz as ‘the

Angel of Death’, in part because of his ubiquitous presence at ‘the Selection’

and because of widespread knowledge of his experiments.

Luckily the experiments would soon come to an end.

As the Russian advance on the Eastern Front into Poland had continued in the course of

1944 the SS had begun dismantling the concentration camps and destroying what evidence could be

obliterated.

By the early winter, moves were underway to abandon Auschwitz.

And it would eventually be liberated by the advancing Soviet forces on the 27th of January

1945.

Mengele was relatively late in leaving.

On the 17th of January he was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower

Silesia.

He took with him extensive samples from his research and his copious notes, but the bulk

was left behind.

His time at Gross-Rosen was not extensive and by mid-February he also had to leave there,

again narrowly missing the advancing Soviet armies.

This was just the beginning of a continuous effort to elude the conquering enemy.

For the next three months Mengele moved ever further westwards trying to disguise his identity.

By early May he was in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

It was here that he would have learned of Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on the 30th of

April 1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich in the days that followed.

On the 8th of May, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the final surrender of Germany in Berlin

bringing the Second World War in Europe to an end.

Mengele was a marked man once the war was over.

The Allies had determined that they would not seek excessive retribution on Germany

itself in the aftermath of the war.

But it had been agreed that those who were at the top of the government would be prosecuted

for war crimes and in particular those who had been in the SS and had ran the concentration

camps would be charged for their crimes.

Mengele would be among them.

He knew he needed to stay ahead of those who wanted to apprehend him.

On the night of the 8th of May, just hours after the war had officially ended, he crossed

back into Germany, now making efforts to disguise his role as a member of the SS and posing

as a rank and file German soldier.

This continued for weeks.

In mid-June he narrowly avoided apprehension when some 10,000 German soldiers he had been

amongst were detained together for questioning, but just days later he was finally apprehended

when his unit was arrested by an American division.

What is striking about what happened next, is that when Mengele was questioned he gave

his interviewers his real name.

And it was even recorded as such by those who were questioning him, but for some reason

it was not realised at the time exactly who he was, that he was a high-ranking member

of the SS and that he was the notorious ‘Angel of Death’ of Auschwitz, a fact which had

been clearly recorded by this time.

In April 1945 he had been added to a list of wanted high-profile war criminals.

This was as close as Mengele would ever come to justice.

For weeks he was transferred between detention centres, but eventually in September 1945

he was released.

What seems to have won him his freedom was that he did not bear one of the blood group

tattoos which nearly all members of the SS were tattooed with.

Mengele had refused this in 1938 when he had joined the paramilitary organisation.

That decision now brought about his freedom.

He was dropped at the town of Ingolstadt in late September 1945 and from there he headed

to the city of Donauworth.

This was a time when Germans were still being stopped and questioned regularly by the American

and other Allied troops who were in every town and village in the country.

So it was, that he began to identify himself as Fritz Ulmann in line with some documentation

he had, which had previously belonged to a friend of his by that name.

Later he altered these slightly to read Fritz Hollmann.

Another close call in Donauworth led him to head for the Russian-occupied zone in Eastern

Germany.

Here he finally managed to get word to his wife Irene that he was safe and was avoiding

detection.

Irene Mengele had already been questioned repeatedly as to her husband’s whereabouts.

This was the beginning of a long period in which Mengele continuously moved around Germany

in the post-war period.

His state of mind was not entirely level during this time.

Bizarrely a couple with whom he stayed for a while late in 1945 remembered him as stating

that he intended to turn himself in once he could receive a fair trial, asserting that

he had done everything he could to improve the situation at Auschwitz.

Eventually in the early winter of 1945, he found a job working as a farmhand in the foothills

of the Alps, having returned to southern Germany.

Here he worked for the Fischers under his alias of Fritz Hollmann.

The Fischers soon began to suspect that their new lodger was a fugitive, not least as Mengele

would speak about the Allies as ‘The Crusaders’ who had invaded German,y and his bitterness

about the post-war settlement would often boil over in conversation.

Soon he was back in contact with his wife and in the course of the months that followed,

she would visit him periodically in secret.

And this is the life he led for several years as the Allies made episodic efforts to locate

him.

These were often half-hearted, though.

Without any record of his whereabouts or sightings, many assumed Mengele was dead already in the

same way that many other senior Nazi war criminals had simply vanished in the aftermath of the

war.

Eventually in 1949 Mengele decided to leave Europe altogether.

This was achieved using the so-called ‘Ratline’, a network of individuals who were sympathetic

to the Nazi cause who used various methods to smuggle former Nazis who had remained in

hiding out of Germany.

Assisted by several individuals in this way, Mengele made his way over the German-Italian

border in mid-April of 1949 and travelled to the city of Genoa in north-west Italy.

Here he duplicitously acquired a passport from the Red Cross under the name of Helmut

Gregor and in the summer he sailed for South America.

Here the Argentine government was particularly welcoming of former Nazis, a result of the

acrimony between the regime there and the United States, while several other Latin American

states also viewed aiding German war criminals as an act of defiance against the United States

and its neo-imperial policies in Central and South America.

Moreover, the Nazis had shipped massive amounts of money and material goods to Argentina in

advance of the war ending, and it was these which bought many their relative freedom there

after 1945.

As a result, individuals such as Adolf Eichmann, one of the prime architects of the Holocaust,

and Mengele were allowed to live in Argentina unmolested for a great many years.

It was here in Buenos Aires that Mengele first settled late in 1949.

Mengele’s life in the years that followed

was one of gradually establishing a new life in South America.

For a time he worked as a travelling salesman selling farm equipment, tools which he had

grown familiar with on the Fischers’ farm in southern Germany.

After spending some time living with a Nazi sympathiser he moved into an apartment of

his own in Buenos Aires.

Some family funds were channelled to him in Argentina from Germany and it was enough for

him to take a stake in a carpentry business and rent a house soon thereafter.

It is also probable that he practiced medicine during these years without an official medical

licence.

There are records which suggest, for instance, that Mengele was involved in organising illegal

abortions.

His family life changed too.

Mengele’s wife Irene, despite remaining faithful to him through the horrors of Auschwitz

and the post-war period, was unwilling to leave Germany for South America.

They divorced in 1954 and Mengele remarried four years later to Martha Mengele, his widowed

sister-in-law, who had previously been married to his brother Karl, and who had joined him

in South America.

Such was the laxity of surveillance of Mengele that he was even able to briefly return to

Europe during the mid-1950s to see his son, and he began living back in Argentina under

his real name.

That Josef Mengele was able to escape detection in plain sight during these years was largely

owing to the fact that nobody was looking for him.

The German authorities and the Allies had assumed he was dead by the late 1940s.

This was despite coming to the attention of the authorities in Argentina.

In 1958 he and several other doctors were questioned in relation to a network of medical

professionals who had been performing illegal abortions, though Mengele was not charged.

The episode produced enough worry though, that he decided to change his location again

and in the late 1950s and early 1960s he moved around South America on numerous occasions,

at one time living in Paraguay and briefly residing in Bolivia as well.

And this cautious approach led to him avoiding arrest again in the summer of 1960.

In mid-May that year the Israeli secret service agency Mossad raided the house of Adolf Eichmann

in Buenos Aires.

They had been tipped off as to Mengele’s possible whereabouts and were preparing to

seize him too, but Mengele was in Bolivia at the time.

Eichmann was brought back to Israel where he stood trial in the most dramatic prosecution

of a Nazi war criminal since the Nuremburg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

He was found guilty and executed there in 1962.

Despite the close call with being captured that Mengele had had in 1960, and despite

the fact that it was now clear to international Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal that

Mengele was in fact alive and living in South America, he returned briefly to West Germany

shortly afterwards.

Then he relocated to Brazil where he resided on a farm near Sau Paulo belonging to a Nazi

sympathiser by the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, while his second wife, Martha, settled for

a time in Italy.

These were the years in which Mengele was most actively being pursued as Israeli agents

and others sought his extradition from Latin America and tried to pin down his location.

As such it is not often possible to be sure where exactly Mengele was at any given time.

At one point in 1962 Mossad had gathered intelligence that he was in Egypt.

It is impossible to tell if this is accurate or not, though it continued to be South America

where Mengele largely hid with the aid of Nazi sympathisers such as Gerhard and a couple

of Hungarian expatriates by the names of Geza and Gitta Stammer.

These helped him acquire further hide-outs around Sao Paulo in Brazil throughout the

1960s.

Their aid extended to Mengele assuming Gerhard’s identity when the German headed back to Europe

to receive medical care for a family member.

Josef Mengele would elude justice for the

remainder of his life.

He eventually died on the 7th of February 1979 after years of poor health.

He had already had a stroke in 1976 and was affected by other ailments including high

blood pressure.

His death when it came about was owing to a second stroke while he was swimming at the

seaside town of Bertioga in Brazil.

The cause of his death is given as drowning.

He had nearly reached his seventieth year, making him one of the longest-lived of the

more notorious Nazi war criminals.

And two years earlier, his son Rolf had visited his father in Sao Paulo.

He had not seen his father in over twenty years and it was the first time he met him

as an adult.

His impressions of his father, as recorded much later, were of a man who over thirty

years after the war had ended, showed no remorse for anything he had done, but rather continued

to affirm that he had done what he did at Auschwitz as part of his duties as an SS officer.

Rolf Mengele concluded that his father was an ‘unrepentant Nazi’.

There was one final twist to the story of his flight from justice.

For many years the world was unaware of Mengele’s death and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal

continued to make efforts to locate ‘the Angel of Auschwitz’ in the hopes that he

would be brought to justice, however belatedly.

It was not until 1985 when intelligence brought a cache of Mengele’s correspondence to light

in his hometown of Gunzburg in Germany that it was revealed that Mengele had died several

years earlier.

An investigation followed in Brazil to try to identify the place of his burial.

These proved successful and it was soon revealed that Mengele had been buried at Embu das Artes

near Sao Paulo in Brazil under the name of the man who had sheltered and aided him many

years earlier and whose name he had adopted, Wolfgang Gerhard.

Consequently his body was exhumed in the summer of 1985 and an examination proved that it

was highly likely that it was Mengele’s skeleton, a fact which Rolf Mengele subsequently

confirmed.

It was never reburied.

Today the skeleton of the man who once killed people at Auschwitz simply so he could examine

their organs, is used as an educational aid at a medical school in the University of Sao

Paulo.

What should anyone say in evaluating a figure like Josef Mengele?

As we have seen, this was a heinous individual, seemingly totally lacking in concern or empathy

for those whom he experimented on and murdered, whether in the course of his experiments or

as a cold effort to stop the spread of disease at Auschwitz.

Perhaps it is worth assessing how he became ‘the Angel of Death’.

Mengele did not become a member of the Nazi Party until 1937 and until the mid-1930s he

was a promising medical student who combined exploration of anthropology with examination

of human features.

He was an affable character according to those who knew him and scholars since have noted

that his work from these early days is not problematic.

It is not suffused with racism or violence towards others, but rather could have been

read as legitimate scientific work of the inter-war period.

In this respect Mengele, prior to his involvement with the Nazis, was somewhat akin to Albert

Speer, the architect who later became German minister of war production.

Before the rise of the Nazis and their involvement with them, both were middle class academics

with promising careers ahead of them.

Neither had demonstrated any overt outward signs of Anti-Semitism or the capacity for

mass murder.

Ultimately, though, after he became involved

with the Nazis and began his work into racial anthropology under Professor Otmar Freiherr

von Verschuer in Frankfurt at the beginning of 1937 Mengele’s character changed quickly.

By the end of 1938 he was not only a member of the Nazi Party, but also of the Waffen

SS, the most fanatical branch of the various Nazi paramilitary organisations.

It was in this capacity that he enthusiastically joined the war effort following the invasion

of Poland in September 1939 and from the beginning some of his work involved the concept of supposed

racial purity.

But the worst of it came at Auschwitz between the summer of 1943 and when he fled the camp

in January 1945.

Here, in a stretch of time, spanning just twenty months Mengele personally ordered the

deaths of thousands of individuals and in a great many instances committed the act himself

by lethally injecting the subjects of his experiments.

These same experiments ranged from the immoral to the downright perverse such as when Mengele

sowed two people together in a bizarre test concerning conjoined twins.

They died days later after their wounds turned gangrenous.

Mengele was certainly a harbinger of death at Auschwitz during his time there.

In the end, however, Josef Mengele escaped retribution.

He spent over thirty years in hiding across a vast range of places and countries, sometimes

returning to Europe and moving with seeming ease around Latin America.

It is also striking how many people were willing to aid an individual who was guilty of the

crimes Mengele had committed.

But he was also very lucky.

In 1945 he was arrested by the Allies and let go only on the basis that he did not have

the standard blood group tattoo that nearly all SS members had.

Then he narrowly escaped arrest on several other occasions in the years and decades that

followed, most notably in 1960 when Adolf Eichmann was arrested in Buenos Aires.

As a result Mengele escaped punishment in his own lifetime, but his crimes will never

be forgotten.

What do you think of Josef Mengele?

Was he perhaps the most brutal of all the Nazis in his own way, and what explains his

rapid change of character from 1937 onwards?

Please let us know in the comment section, and

in

the meantime, thank you very much

for watching.