Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death,” is a frightening figure remembered for his atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He gained fame for carrying out deadly experiments on Nazi concentration camp prisoners.
Born on March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg, Germany, he studied medicine and anthropology at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1935.
Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the Schutzstaffel, a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler, in 1938.
He arrived at Auschwitz in May 1943 and was given the role of camp doctor. His main task was to decide the fate of prisoners as they arrived. He would choose who would work in harsh conditions and who would go straight to the gas chambers to be killed.
His medical experiments were famous for their extreme cruelty and lack of scientific value. He focused specifically on twins, believing that studying them could reveal genetic information useful for Nazi beliefs. Victims, including children and adults, were subjected to surgeries, injections and other painful procedures without any form of pain relief, often leading to excruciating deaths. He even tried to change his eye color through injections. These experiments were conducted without the consent of the victims.
“In a grotesque perversion of the doctor’s role, Auschwitz’s so-called Angel of Death employed his knowledge of the workings of life to destroy it. He determined who would die immediately in Auschwitz’s gas chambers and who would be exploited for labor or “A” Nazi science before he was killed,” the US Department of Justice said in a report.
“When prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, Mengele and his fellow ‘doctors’ selected for slave labor those who appeared medically fit (thus consigning them to work in inhumane and often deadly conditions) or who could be used by the Third Reich in some other way. All the other prisoners, the vast majority, were immediately murdered by gassing in specially designed asphyxiation chambers,” he added.
For his experiments, he would allegedly remove organs from prisoners without anesthesia and intentionally infect his test subjects with diseases.
Due to his highly visible and significant role in the Hitler regime’s homicidal reign of terror, Mengele effectively became a symbol of the Holocaust; in particular, his name became synonymous with the evil of Auschwitz.
With the end of World War II, Mengele left Auschwitz and avoided capture for many years. Despite the efforts of those searching for Nazi criminals and international authorities, he managed to escape prosecution using different aliases in several countries.
In 1979, there was enough evidence to confirm Mengele’s death in Brazil, where he lived under a false name. Forensic investigations in 1985 conclusively identified his remains, confirming that he had drowned in a swimming accident.
Mengele became known as the personification of evil at Auschwitz, where more than a million people, most of them Jews, were killed. His actions, seen as a terrible misuse of medical knowledge, showed how far people can sink under oppressive governments.
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