German doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Mengele was personally involved in the selection of prisoners arriving at the camp, conducted criminal experiments on prisoners. Tens of thousands of people became its victims.
Childhood and youth
The infamous Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in Günzburg, near Ulm in Germany. His father, Karl Mengele, was an agricultural equipment manufacturer and his mother Walburgi Happaue was a housewife.
He was the firstborn in the family of Karl, later he had two brothers, Karl and Alois.
After graduating from high school in April 1930, he entered the medical faculty of the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
In 1935, Josef received his doctorate in physical anthropology at the University of Munich.
Career
In January 1937, Josef Mengele took a job at the "Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene" in Frankfurt. He becomes an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verscher, who is renowned worldwide for his twin studies.
In 1937 he joins the Nazi Party. And already in 1938 he 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 Waffen-SS medical service. During the summer of 1940, he works as a medical expert for the RHSA or "Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt" at their "Central Immigration Office" located in the northeast of Posen (today Poznan, Poland).
He later went to the Eastern Front as a medical officer with the Wiking Division.
He was wounded in action and returned to Germany in January 1943 to join the Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics.
In April 1943 he was promoted to SS Captain.
For the first time he entered the territory of Auschwitz on May 30, 1943, being appointed assistant to the garrison doctor of the SS-captain Dr. Edward Wirtsch.
In November 1943, he became the chief physician of the Auschwitz II or Birkenau camp.
His job was to filter the newly arrived prisoners of war. Some he immediately sent to the gas chambers, while others were sent to the workers' barracks in order to work in the future in heavy hard labor.
In this position, he continues his monstrous medical experiments on twins, most often of Jewish and Gypsy nationality.
His assistants were often highly qualified doctors who ended up in the camp. Under threat of death, they were forced to assist Mengele. A prime example is Dr. Miklos Nyisli, who was an assistant to the killer doctor in his experiments. This man recounted his life in a concentration camp in his memoir Auschwitz: A Doctor's Memoirs, which was published in Hungarian in 1946.
Mengele hoped to defend another doctoral dissertation in order to later head the medical department at some of the German universities, but the defeat of Nazi Germany prevented the implementation of his plans.
Life after the war
He fled 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 fled west.
Mengele was arrested by American troops, but was quickly released as, due to the confusion in the papers, he was not identified as a war criminal.
From the summer of 1945 to the spring of 1949, he worked quietly on a farm in Rosenheim.
In 1949, Joseph immigrated to South America and settled in the suburbs 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 learning 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 at 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 carried out an identification following a forensic examination.
DNA analysis in 1992 confirmed that the exhumed corpse did indeed belong to Josef Mengele.
Personal life
Mengele was married twice. His first wife was Irene Schönbein with whom they signed in 1939, and divorced in 1954.
Later in 1958, he married Martha Mengele (widow of his brother Karl).
