Introduction: Josef Mengele – Doctor of Death at Auschwitz
Josef Mengele, a German physician and SS captain, remains one of history’s most reviled figures. Known widely as the “Mengele Doctor,” he stands as the most notorious among the Nazi doctors who perpetrated horrific medical experiments in concentration camps. His tenure as “Chief Camp Physician” at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) starting in November 1943 marked a period of unspeakable cruelty and suffering. The experiments conducted by this mengele doctor were not only inhumane but often resulted in agonizing deaths for the prisoners, many of whom were murdered to facilitate gruesome post-mortem examinations.
Mengele’s name is indelibly linked with the atrocities of the Holocaust, particularly those committed at Auschwitz. His actions there, especially the cruel medical experiments, have cemented his place as the most recognized perpetrator of the camp’s crimes. Even after the war, his life in hiding symbolized the global failure to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. This mengele doctor’s legacy continues to haunt the historical narrative of the Holocaust.
The infamy of the mengele doctor has spurred numerous books, films, and television programs. However, many of these popular depictions often misrepresent the factual horrors of Mengele’s actions, divorcing him from the broader historical context. Some portrayals simplify him into a caricature of a mad scientist, driven by baseless sadism.
The reality of the mengele doctor is far more chilling. Josef Mengele was not a fringe figure but a highly qualified physician and medical researcher, and a decorated war veteran. He was respected within his professional circles and affiliated with leading German research institutions. Much of the so-called “medical research” he conducted at Auschwitz was aligned with and supported by other scientists in Germany. He was just one of many biomedical researchers who exploited concentration camp prisoners for unethical experiments. Furthermore, this mengele doctor also participated in the selection process that sent countless victims to their deaths in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
Mengele’s actions were not aberrations but rather were consistent with the distorted norms of German science under the Nazi regime. His crimes serve as a stark warning about the catastrophic dangers of science twisted to serve ideologies that deny the fundamental rights, dignity, and humanity of entire groups of people. The story of the mengele doctor is a critical lesson in the ethical responsibilities of the medical profession and the horrors of unchecked power.
Mengele’s Path Before Auschwitz: From Doctor to Ideologue
Josef Mengele’s origins were seemingly ordinary. Born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Bavaria, Germany, he was the eldest son in a prosperous family of farming equipment manufacturers. His early life gave little indication of the monstrous path he would later take as the mengele doctor.
Mengele pursued higher education in medicine and physical anthropology, studying at several German universities. He earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935, marking his early academic achievements. In 1936, he passed the state medical exams, qualifying him as a doctor.
In 1937, Mengele began his professional medical career at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. Working as an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a prominent geneticist known for twin studies, Mengele furthered his research. Under Verschuer’s guidance, he obtained a second doctorate in 1938, solidifying his credentials as a capable and ambitious doctor.
Embracing Nazi Ideology: The Making of the Mengele Doctor
While not an early supporter of the Nazi Party, Mengele’s political leanings shifted during his formative years. In 1931, he joined the Stahlhelm, a paramilitary group associated with the German National People’s Party, a right-wing political entity. His involvement deepened when he became a member of the SA (Stormtroopers), a Nazi paramilitary organization, following the Stahlhelm‘s absorption in 1933. Although his active participation in the SA waned by 1934, his ideological alignment was taking shape.
During his university years, Mengele fully embraced racial science, the pseudoscientific foundation of biological racism. He adopted the belief in the supposed biological superiority of Germans over other races. This racist ideology was central to Nazism. The Nazi regime employed racial science to justify horrific policies, including forced sterilization of individuals deemed “unfit” and the discriminatory Nuremberg Race Laws, which prohibited marriage between Germans and Jewish, Black, or Romani people.
By 1938, Mengele had joined both the Nazi Party and the SS, solidifying his commitment to Nazi ideology. His scientific work became intertwined with the Nazi agenda of racial purity and superiority. His mentor, Verschuer, also a proponent of biological racism, played a significant role in shaping Mengele’s views and career trajectory. Together, Verschuer, Mengele, and their colleagues provided “expert” opinions to Nazi authorities, determining who qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws and identifying individuals for forced sterilization or marriage restrictions based on perceived racial and genetic inferiority. This period marked Mengele’s transformation from a doctor into an instrument of Nazi racial policy.
Service on the Eastern Front: Hardening into a Ruthless SS Officer
In June 1940, Mengele’s medical career was interrupted by his conscription into the German army (Wehrmacht). Within a month, he volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS, signaling his deeper commitment to the Nazi cause. Initially, he served with the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in occupied Poland, evaluating racial criteria used by the SS to determine German ancestry and racial suitability.
Around late 1940, Mengele was reassigned as a medical officer to the engineering battalion of the SS Division “Wiking.” For approximately 18 months starting in June 1941, he experienced intense and brutal combat on the eastern front of World War II. His division was also implicated in the massacres of Jewish civilians during the early stages of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Mengele’s service in this brutal conflict earned him the Iron Cross, 2nd and 1st Class, and promotion to SS captain (SS-Hauptsturmführer), highlighting his rising status within the SS ranks.
In January 1943, Mengele returned to Germany. While awaiting his next Waffen-SS assignment, he resumed working with Verschuer, who had become the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin. This reunion would set the stage for Mengele’s most infamous role as the mengele doctor at Auschwitz.
Assignment to Auschwitz: The Doctor of Auschwitz Emerges
On May 30, 1943, the SS assigned Mengele to Auschwitz. Evidence suggests that Mengele himself may have requested this posting. He became one of the camp physicians at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Auschwitz complex and a central killing center for Jews from across Europe. Beyond general duties, Mengele was specifically responsible for Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager (the “Gypsy camp”). From 1943 onwards, nearly 21,000 Romani people were imprisoned in this camp. When the Zigeunerlager was liquidated on August 2, 1944, Mengele participated in selecting 2,893 Romani prisoners for murder in the gas chambers. Shortly after, he was appointed chief physician for Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II). By November 1944, he was reassigned to the Birkenau hospital for the SS, solidifying his position of authority within the camp’s medical hierarchy. It was in Auschwitz that the “mengele doctor” would become synonymous with unimaginable cruelty.
The “Angel of Death”: Mengele as Selector and Executioner
A group of SS officers socializing at an SS retreat outside Auschwitz (Photo)
A group of SS officers socialize at an SS retreat outside Auschwitz. Pictured from left to right: Dr. Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Josef Kramer, and an unidentified officer.
The primary duty of medical staff at Auschwitz was the gruesome task of “selections.” These selections were designed to identify prisoners deemed unable to work, whom the SS considered “useless” and marked for extermination. Upon arrival of transports of Jews at Birkenau, camp doctors, including the mengele doctor, selected able-bodied adults for forced labor. Those deemed unfit, including children and the elderly, were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
Camp physicians also conducted periodic selections within the camp infirmaries and barracks, identifying prisoners who were injured, ill, or too weak to work. Various methods were employed to murder these individuals, including lethal injections and gassing. Mengele routinely performed these selections at Birkenau, earning him the terrifying nickname “Angel of Death” among the prisoners. Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist imprisoned at Birkenau, recounted the sheer terror Mengele’s presence evoked in the women’s infirmary:
We feared these visits more than anything else, because [. . .] we never knew whether we would be permitted to live [. . . .] He was free to do whatever he pleased with us.
Post-war, Mengele’s infamy as the “Angel of Death” grew, fueled by accounts from prisoner physicians and survivors of his medical experiments. While Mengele was one of approximately 50 physicians at Auschwitz and not the highest-ranking medical officer, his name became the most recognizable. This notoriety stemmed partly from his frequent presence at the selection ramps, where he often sought twins for his experiments and physicians for the Birkenau infirmary. Many survivors mistakenly believed Mengele was the sole selector, though he performed this duty no more often than his colleagues. Regardless, the name “mengele doctor” became indelibly linked with the selection process and the horrors of Auschwitz.
Mengele Doctor: The Realm of Biomedical Experiments at Auschwitz
The SS authorized German biomedical researchers to conduct unethical and lethal human experiments within the concentration camps. Auschwitz, due to its vast prisoner population, became a prime site for these experiments. Researchers seeking specific populations for their studies found Auschwitz an unparalleled resource.
Mengele was among over a dozen SS medical personnel who conducted experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. Other notable doctors included Eduard Wirths, Carl Clauberg, Horst Schumann, Helmut Vetter, and Johann Paul Kremer. For these doctors, including the mengele doctor, Auschwitz offered a perverse “opportunity” to advance their research agendas without ethical constraints.
Types of Experiments Conducted by the Mengele Doctor and Others
The experiments carried out in Auschwitz were brutal, often resulting in permanent injury or death. For some experiments, death was the intended outcome. Prisoners were never asked for consent nor informed about the procedures or risks. The types of experiments included:
- Developing and testing mass sterilization methods.
- Inflicting wounds or injecting diseases to study their progression and test treatments.
- Performing unnecessary surgeries and medical procedures for research or training purposes.
- Murdering and dissecting prisoners for anthropological and medical research.
Mengele’s Gruesome Experiments: The Mengele Doctor’s “Research”
Beyond his selection duties, the mengele doctor, Josef Mengele, engaged in his own horrific research and experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. His mentor, Verschuer, may have even facilitated Mengele’s Auschwitz assignment to support the research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A). Throughout his Auschwitz tenure, Mengele sent blood samples, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses from prisoners to his colleagues in Germany. He actively collaborated on research projects, using prisoners as unwilling subjects.
In addition to KWI-A collaborations, Mengele pursued his own experiments, aiming for publications that could secure him a university professorship. Within Auschwitz, Mengele established a research complex across several barracks, staffed by prisoner medical professionals. He acquired advanced equipment and even set up a pathology lab, illustrating the resources allocated to his horrific endeavors.
Research Goals: Twisted Science of the Mengele Doctor
Mengele’s research, both independently and for KWI-A, centered on the genetic basis of physical and mental traits. While genetic research itself is legitimate, Mengele, Verschuer, and their colleagues warped this field through the lens of Nazi racial ideology. They operated under the pseudoscientific belief in distinct, hierarchical human races, asserting that “inferior” races were genetically predisposed to negative traits, including not only illnesses but also “undesirable” social behaviors. They falsely believed that racial mixing threatened the purity of “superior” races.
The mengele doctor sought to identify “racial markers” to definitively distinguish between races, believing this was crucial for preserving German racial superiority. This twisted justification led Mengele and his peers to deem harmful and lethal experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, whom they considered racially inferior, as necessary and justifiable.
Mengele’s Victims: Who Suffered at the Hands of the Mengele Doctor?
Renate, her twin brother, Rene, and their German-Jewish parents lived in Prague. Shortly before the twins were born, Renate’s parents had fled Dresden, Germany, to escape the Nazi government’s policies against Jews. Before leaving Germany to live in Czechoslovakia, Renate’s father, Herbert, worked in the import-export business. Her mother, Ita, was an accountant. 1933-39: Renate’s family lived in a six-story apartment building along the #22 trolley line in Prague. A long, steep flight of stairs led up to their apartment, where Renate and her brother, Rene, shared a crib in their parents’ bedroom; a terrace overlooked the yard outside. Renate and Rene wore matching outfits and were always well-dressed. Their days were often spent playing in a nearby park. In March 1939 the German army occupied Prague. 1940-45: Just before Renate turned 6, her family was sent to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto. There, she became #70917. She was separated from her brother and mother and taken to a hospital where she was measured and X-rayed; blood was taken from her neck. Once, she was strapped to a table and cut with a knife. She got injections that made her throw up and have diarrhea. While Renate was ill in the hospital after an injection, guards came in to take the sick to be killed. The nurse caring for her hid her under her long skirt and she was quiet until the guards left. Renate and her brother survived and were reunited in America in 1950. They learned that as one pair of the “Mengele Twins,” they had been used for medical experiments.
The mengele doctor primarily targeted Roma and Jews for his experiments. Nazi ideology deemed both groups “subhuman” and threats to the German “race,” thus stripping them of any ethical consideration in the eyes of Nazi scientists. Auschwitz-Birkenau provided an unprecedented concentration of Roma and Jews, offering scientists like Mengele a horrifyingly unique opportunity for human experimentation on a mass scale. A colleague of Mengele reportedly remarked that it would be “criminal” not to exploit the experimental possibilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau, revealing the chilling mindset of these Nazi doctors.
Roma Victims of the Mengele Doctor
Mengele conducted anthropological studies on Romani prisoners in the Zigeunerlager alongside his medical experiments. During a noma outbreak among Romani children, he tasked prisoner physicians with studying the disease. Despite noma being linked to malnutrition, Mengele attributed it to heredity, reflecting his racial biases. Prisoner doctors found a cure for noma, normally fatal, yet all cured children were ultimately murdered in gas chambers, highlighting the mengele doctor’s utter disregard for human life.
Twins: A Special Focus for the Mengele Doctor
Twins held particular interest in 1930s genetic research. Before the war, Verschuer and others studied twins to explore the genetic basis of diseases, though ethically obtaining twins for research was challenging. Auschwitz provided Mengele access to hundreds of pairs of twins, both Jewish and Romani. He collected and experimented on an unprecedented scale.
Mengele meticulously documented every aspect of the twins’ bodies, drawing large quantities of blood and performing painful procedures. Lorenc Andreas Menasche, a survivor, recounted:
[…] They also gave us injections all over our bodies. As a result of these injections, my sister fell ill. Her neck swelled up as a result of a severe infection. They sent her to the hospital and operated on her without anesthetic in primitive conditions. (…)
Mengele also murdered twins simultaneously to conduct comparative autopsies, sending organs to the KWI-A for further study.
Victims with Anomalies and Children: Exploitation by the Mengele Doctor
Mengele specifically sought individuals with physical abnormalities like dwarfism, gigantism, or clubfoot during selection. These individuals were studied and then murdered, their bodies sent to Germany for research. He also targeted Roma and Jews with heterochromia, sending their eyes to a KWI-A colleague interested in the condition.
Children were the most frequent victims of the mengele doctor’s experiments. They were housed in separate barracks with slightly better conditions. Mengele often feigned kindness towards them. Moshe Ofer, a survivor, described Mengele’s deceptive demeanor:
[Mengele] visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or a syringe, he would say: ‘Don’t be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you…’ …he injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi’s spine. After the experiments he would bring us gifts…In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms.
Mengele used children in his own experiments and in KWI-A studies, such as a study on eye color development that involved putting harmful substances in children’s eyes, causing severe damage, blindness, and even death. A prisoner caregiver for Jewish twins described the children’s terror and suffering during these procedures:
Samples of blood were collected first from the fingers and then from the arteries, two or three times from the same victims in some cases. The children screamed and tried to cover themselves up to avoid being touched. The personnel resorted to force. (…) Drops were also put into their eyes….Some pairs of children received drops in both eyes, and others in only one. ….The results of these practices were painful for the victims. They suffered from severe swelling of the eyelids, a burning sensation….
Evading Justice: The Mengele Doctor Flees Accountability
In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached, Mengele fled Auschwitz with other SS personnel, marking the end of his reign of terror as the mengele doctor at the camp. He briefly served at Gross-Rosen and its subcamps. In the war’s final days, he disguised himself as a German army officer and surrendered to US forces, becoming a prisoner of war.
Remarkably, Mengele was released by the US Army in August 1945, as they were unaware of his war criminal status. From late 1945 to 1949, he lived under a false name as a farmhand in Bavaria, reconnecting with his family. When war crimes investigators began pursuing him, his family falsely claimed he was dead. This forced Mengele to flee Germany in 1949, aided by family finances, and he immigrated to Argentina under another false identity.
By 1956, Mengele had established himself in Argentina, even obtaining citizenship as José Mengele. However, in 1959, learning of West German arrest warrants, he fled to Paraguay, again acquiring citizenship. Following Adolf Eichmann’s abduction by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960, Mengele, fearing capture, escaped to Brazil. Supported by his family, he lived under an assumed name near São Paulo until his death. On February 7, 1979, he suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a resort near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried as “Wolfgang Gerhard.”
Discovery and Identification: Unmasking the Mengele Doctor’s Grave
In May 1985, a collaborative effort by Germany, Israel, and the US aimed to locate and bring Mengele to justice. German police raids on a family friend’s home in Günzburg uncovered evidence of Mengele’s death and burial near São Paulo. Brazilian police located his grave and exhumed the body in June 1985. Forensic experts from multiple nations positively identified the remains as Josef Mengele, confirmed by DNA evidence in 1992.
Despite his horrific crimes as the mengele doctor, Josef Mengele evaded justice for 34 years, never facing accountability for his atrocities. His story remains a chilling reminder of the depths of human cruelty and the long shadow of the Holocaust.
Footnotes
Last Edited: Nov 15, 2024 Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
