Doctor Josef Mengele

 

Most people have seen gruelling images of truckloads of people arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but how many know what went on behind closed doors. Amid all the despair stood a solitary figure wearing an immaculate SS uniform and white gloves, inspecting the new arrivals and dividing them up into two separate groups merely by the wave of a riding crop. The group on the left were heading straight for the gas chambers, while the ones on the right were heading for a fate far worse than death. The man making this decision was Josef Mengele, dubbed the ‘Angel of Death’, one of the many doctors assigned to Auschwitz, where medicine was used as a tool for genocide.

 

early life

 

Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg, in Germany’s Bavarian region, and was the eldest of three sons. His father Karl Mengele had a successful company producing farm machinery, Karl Mengele & Sons, and Josef was expected to following in his father’s footsteps. However, the young Mengele had far greater aspirations.

In October 1930, a confident and ambitious young man left his family home and headed for the Bavarian capital of Munich. The city was fast becoming impregnated with the racist doctrines of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. Mengele, who had had a strict Catholic upbringing, found it difficult at first, but soon discovered that the Nazi movement had a strong attraction for him. It was in Munich that Hitler first gave birth to his idea for a new German super-race that Mengele was eventually to get involved with.

Mengele enrolled at the University of Munich and studied philosophy and medicine. He also went on to study anthropology and paleontology and showed intense interest in the evolution of man. Precisely what corrupted the young Mengele’s mind is hard to ascertain, but it is obvious that at this stage in his life he was driven by a searing ambition to succeed.

Mengele passed his state medical examination in Munich in 1936, and for four months was a resident junior doctor, a compulsory period of work that was required for his full medical practitioner’s degree. During this period of long hours and exhausting ward rounds, Mengele met Irene Schoenbein, his first and only real love. Irene was just nineteen, blonde and beautiful, and together they cut a dashing pair.

Mengele was desperate to return to his studies in genetics and with the help of one of his professors, T. Mollinson, he was appointed as a research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. It was this appointment that changed Mengele’s life. Working under one of Europe’s foremost geneticists, Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, he devoted much of his time to studying the genetics of twins. Verschuer was quite open with his new student about his admiration of Adolf Hitler and his dream of a perfect race.

Mengele soon became Verschuer’s favourite student, and they developed a mutual respect for each other. Mengele became indoctrinated into the Nazi theories of race ‘purification’ and was just one short step away from the act of genocide. By the time his education had finished, Mengele was a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS, and had developed a deep hatred of the Jewish race.

 

active service

 

By July 1938, Mengele had finished his medical training and had received his degree. In July 1939, he married Irene, who was just twenty-one years old, after an initial hitch when her family had to be tested to make sure it carried no Jewish genes.

With war clouds gathering over Europe, Mengele was keen not to be left out of the action and at the beginning of World War II, was enlisted for service with the Waffen-SS. Mengele served as a medical officer and was stationed with various units in the Ukraine, receiving four medals for his bravery. However his career in the Army was cut short when he was wounded and declared unfit for active service.

 

auschwitz

 

In 1942, Mengele was posted to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin, which meant he was involved in the medical supervision of the concentration camps. It is pretty certain that this position was secured with the helping hand of his old tutor and friend, Professor Verschuer. At the time Verschuer was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, which was responsible for over-seeing research programmes into racial purity. There is evidence that Verschuer convinced Mengele to take the next major step in his career – to go and work at Auschwitz.

Mengele’s posting came in May 1943, and by the end of the month the young captain arrived at the vast barbed-wire enclosure in a swampy valley just a short drive from Krakow in southern Poland. In just twenty-one months at Auschwitz, Mengele was to commit untold atrocities ‘all in the name of science’!

Anyone who survived the concentration camp, remembered vividly the slightly built man, with the immaculate uniform, the tilted SS cap, the well-scrubbed face and neatly combed hair. Unlike the other physicians stationed at Auschwitz, Mengele seemed to glory in the power and was in total agreement with the brutal treatment of the inmates. He liked to be present to supervise the selections of incoming transports and it is believed that as many as 400,000 babies, children, mothers, fathers and grandparents were given their fate by just the flick of his riding crop. He wasn’t opposed to actually using this riding crop on any insubordinate prisoners and there are even reports that he used his pistol under extreme circumstances.

Mengele, although not the chief physician at Auschwitz, was appointed his own laboratory block with independent financing. At thirty-two years of age, he was in charge of his staff of inmate physicians, who were well aware of his feelings towards the prisoners. In his mind they were not fit to be humans and his behaviour reflected this attitude. This became apparent from the moment Mengele arrived at Auschwitz, when he ordered 600 sick women that he found in the camp hospital to be taken directly to the gas chambers. However, it was not just his harsh administration that Mengele will be remembered for, it was also the perverse experiments he carried out on his hapless victims.

The main reason Mengele wanted to be present at the arrival ramps was his obsession with twins. He gave strict orders that any twins were to be housed in separate quarters, pampered and treated like priceless objects. Mengele felt that by studying the identical features of the twins he could somehow unlock the secret to creating a genetically engineered perfect human being. Each twin was carefully measured and his findings were carefully recorded, with the dissection report always coming last. However well the twins were treated, Mengele never saw them as people – to him they were just his subjects of research. He carried out twin-to-twin transfusions, stitched twins together, sex change operations and the removal of organs and limbs, all under the guise of experimental surgery. He injected them with viral and bacterial agents to see how long it took each twin to succumb to the infections. He tried swapping body parts from one twin to another to see if it would continue to thrive. There was no end to Mengele’s research, and he had no compunction whatsoever about personally killing the twins as the final step.

His research didn’t stop at twins, however, he also had a ‘collection’ of dwarves and people (especially Jews) with any genetic abnormality. He became interested in a condition called ‘noma’, which was gangrene of the face and mouth caused by extreme debilitation. Although the condition was caused by the conditions at Auschwitz, Mengele was still obsessed in finding the genetic causes for the disease.

Another horrifying type of experiment carried out by Mengele were his attempts to change the colour of a person’s eyes. He began by injecting various chemicals into the eyes, but, of course, the end results were pain and infections which usually led to blindness.

He was known to have conducted some of the most abominable experiments ever carried out during World War II. He would strap children to slabs of marble and then, without medication or any form of anaesthesia he would perform macabre surgical procedures, which nearly always ended in death. His behaviour certainly defies rational explanation, and his reputation became equal to that of a demon. In addition to his own experiments at Auschwitz, Mengele also sent specimens such as eyes to his old associate Professor Verschuer, to carry out his own research.

Not many children survived Auschwitz, but those who did recall the smiling Uncle Mengele bringing them sweets and clothes before being taken to his laboratory, where the nightmare would begin.

 

last days in exile

 

Mengele’s days as a ‘doctor’ at Auschwitz came to an end on January 17, 1945, when the Soviet Army marched into Poland. The only option Mengele had was to flee the country. Using a false identity, he managed to reach Argentina on an Italian ocean liner, where he was harboured by a number of South American families.

By the time the Brazilian police tracked down his whereabouts, all that was left was a grave marked ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’ and a few skeletal remains. Mengele was eventually broken by more than thirty years of being on the run. Although he died in 1979 from a stroke while swimming near Sao Paulo in Brazil, news of his death did not reach the rest of the world until 1985.

There is no doubt that Mengele was a fiendish killer, a direct result of Adolf Hitler’s seduction and perversion of the German people. Although there is some consolation in the fact that the once frightening figure died a lonely and embittered old man, there is no justice, however, in knowing that Mengele remained unrepentant and untried to the very end.