On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army entered Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination centers in German-occupied Poland. Between 1940 and 1945, an estimated minimum of 1.3 million people were deported to the camp, and at least 1.1 million of them were murdered.
Not all prisoners died in what has been called a Nazi factory of horror. Soviet soldiers liberated more than seven thousand surviving inmates, most of them ill and dying. Some had been subjected to cruel and painful pseudo-medical experiments performed by the most notorious of the Nazi doctors, Josef Mengele.
Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in the Bavarian city of Günzburg, then part of the German Empire. The eldest son of Carl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming equipment, he studied medicine and physical anthropology at several universities.
In 1935 he earned a doctorate in physical anthropology from the University of Munich, and in 1936 he passed the state medical exams. In 1937 he began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt.
There he served as an assistant to the director, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a leading geneticist known for his research on twins. Under Verschuer's direction, Mengele completed an additional doctorate in 1938.
Mengele did not actively support the Nazi Party before it came to power in January 1933. During his university studies, however, he embraced racial science, the false theory of biological racism.
He believed Germans were biologically different from and superior to members of all other races. Racial science was a fundamental tenet of Nazi ideology, which Hitler used to justify the forced sterilization of persons with certain physical or mental diseases or deformities.
The 1935 Nuremberg race laws, which outlawed marriage between Germans and Jewish, Black, or Romani peoples, were also based on racial science. In 1938, Mengele joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
As a scientist, he sought to support the Nazi goal of maintaining and increasing the supposed superiority of the German race. His employer and mentor, Dr. Verschuer, also embraced biological racism.
Verschuer and his staff, including Mengele, provided expert opinions to Nazi authorities who had to determine whether persons qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws. They also evaluated Germans whose physical or mental condition might qualify them to be forcibly sterilized or barred from marriage.
In 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein. Their only son, Rolf, was born in 1944.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In June 1940, Mengele was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces. A month later he volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS.
At first he worked for the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in German-occupied Poland, evaluating the criteria and methods used by the SS to determine whether persons claiming German descent were racially and physically suitable to qualify as Germans.
Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. For about eighteen months afterward, Mengele saw extremely brutal fighting on the Eastern Front.
In the first weeks of Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, his division shot thousands of Jewish civilians. After Mengele rescued two German soldiers from a burning tank, he was decorated with the Iron Cross, both second and first class, and promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, equivalent to the rank of captain.
Mengele returned to Germany in January 1943. While awaiting his next Waffen-SS assignment, he began working again for his mentor Verschuer, who had recently become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin.
On May 30, 1943, the SS assigned Mengele to Auschwitz, where he worked as one of the camp physicians at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is some evidence that Mengele himself requested this assignment because of the opportunities it could provide for his research.
Birkenau was the largest of the Auschwitz camps and also served as a killing center for Jews deported from throughout Europe. In addition to other duties, Mengele had responsibility for the so-called Gypsy Family Camp.
Beginning in 1943, nearly 21,000 Romanian men, women, and children were sent to Auschwitz and imprisoned in the Gypsy Camp. When this family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, Mengele participated in selecting the 2,893 Romani prisoners who were to be murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers.
Shortly afterward he was appointed chief physician for Auschwitz-Birkenau, and in November 1944 he was assigned to the Birkenau hospital for the SS.
As part of their camp duties, medical staff at Auschwitz performed so-called selections. The purpose was to identify persons unable to work, whom the SS considered useless eaters and therefore murdered.
When transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau, camp medical personnel selected some able-bodied adults for forced labor. Those not selected, including children and older adults, were murdered in the gas chambers.
All visibly pregnant women and mothers of babies and young children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival. Mengele rationalized this by saying that when a Jewish child was born or a woman came to the camp with a child, he did not know what to do with the child.
He said he could not set the child free because there were no longer any Jews who lived in freedom, and could not let the child stay in the camp because there were no facilities to enable the child to develop normally. He claimed it would not be humanitarian to send the child to the ovens without permitting the mother to witness the child's death, which is why he sent mother and child to the gas ovens together.
Mengele was also alleged to have had an affair with the infamous Irma Grese, one of the most hated and feared guards in the camp. When Mengele discovered that she was having affairs with Jewish inmates deemed racially inferior, he ended his relationship with her.
Mengele was also described as a sexual deviant who indulged in sexual brutality. For example, while male prisoners were left standing at assembly awaiting his arrival, he is reported to have spent one whole night recording the reactions of Jewish women to being raped by camp functionaries.
Camp physicians at Auschwitz and at other concentration camps also conducted periodic selections in the camp infirmaries and barracks. They did so to identify prisoners who were injured or had become too ill or weak to work.
The SS used various methods to murder these prisoners, including lethal injections and gassing. Mengele routinely carried out such selections at Birkenau, leading some prisoners to call him the angel of death.
Prisoner Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist at Birkenau, later recalled how Mengele's appearance in the women's infirmary filled the prisoners with terror. "We feared these visits more than anything else because we never knew whether we would be permitted to live," she said. "He was free to do whatever he pleased with us and he did."
When a typhus epidemic began in the women's camp, Mengele cleared one block of 600 Jewish women and sent them to their deaths in the gas chambers. The building was then cleaned and disinfected, and the occupants of the neighboring block were bathed, deloused, and given new clothing before being moved into the clean block.
This process was repeated until all the barracks were disinfected. Similar procedures were used for later epidemics of scarlet fever and other diseases, with infected prisoners killed in the gas chambers.
After World War II, Mengele became infamous for his work at Auschwitz thanks to the accounts of prisoner physicians who had worked under him and of prisoners who survived his medical experiments. These experiments had been authorized by the SS, which was responsible for managing the concentration camps.
Mengele was one of some fifty physicians who served at Auschwitz. He was neither the highest-ranking doctor nor the commander of the other doctors present, yet his name is by far the best known of all the doctors who served there.
One reason was Mengele's frequent presence on the ramp where selections took place. When he did not himself perform selection duty, he often still appeared at the ramp, looking among the prisoners for twins for his experiments and physicians for the Birkenau infirmary.
Auschwitz not only provided prisoners for human experiments conducted at various other camps, but also served as the site of a variety of human experiments. The SS sent 1.3 million men, women, and children from many different national and ethnic backgrounds to Auschwitz, so researchers looking for human subjects who met specific criteria could more easily find them there than at other camps.
Mengele was one of more than a dozen SS medical personnel who conducted experiments on people imprisoned at Auschwitz. These doctors saw their appointment to Auschwitz as an exciting opportunity to advance their research.
The experiments in the concentration camps permanently maimed many victims or caused them to die. In some experiments, death was the intended outcome.
The medical professionals who conducted experiments at Auschwitz did not seek the prisoners' consent or inform them of their treatment or possible effects. The types of experiments conducted there included testing methods of mass sterilization, inflicting wounds on prisoners or infecting them with diseases to study the effects and test treatments, conducting unnecessary surgeries and procedures for research or to train medical professionals, and murdering and dissecting prisoners for anthropological and medical research.
Mengele's mentor, Dr. Verschuer, may have arranged Mengele's assignment to Auschwitz to support research for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. Throughout his time at Auschwitz, Mengele sent his colleagues in Germany blood, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses taken from Auschwitz prisoners.
Mengele collaborated on his colleagues' research projects by conducting studies and experiments for them using prisoners. In addition to his work with the institute, he conducted his own experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, hoping to publish the results and thereby gain the credentials to qualify for a university professorship.
During his service at Auschwitz, Mengele organized a research complex located in a number of barracks. He chose his staff from among the prisoners who were medical professionals. He was able to obtain up-to-date instruments and equipment for his research and even set up a pathology lab.
Mengele's own research, and the research he conducted for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, generally focused on how genes develop into specific physical and mental traits. Conducted ethically, this is a legitimate and important field of genetic research.
However, the work of Mengele, Verschuer, and their colleagues was warped by their belief in the pseudoscientific theory of race that was fundamental to Nazi ideology. This theory held that human races are genetically distinct from each other, established a hierarchy of races, and stressed that inferior races are genetically more likely to exhibit negative traits than members of superior races.
These negative hereditary traits supposedly included more than physical and mental illnesses and deficiencies. They also supposedly included socially unacceptable or immoral behaviors such as vagrancy, prostitution, and criminality. According to the false theory of race, intermarriage between races passed negative traits to superior races and undermined them.
Mengele sought to identify specific physical and biochemical markers that could definitively identify members of specific races. His colleagues believed that finding such markers was vitally important for preserving the supposed racial superiority of the German people.
For Mengele's colleagues, the importance of the research justified conducting harmful and lethal experiments on people they considered racially inferior. Mengele drew his victims mainly from two ethnic groups: Roma and Jews.
These groups were of particular interest to biomedical researchers in Nazi Germany, as Nazi ideology considered both Roma and Jews to be subhuman and to pose a threat to the German race. For this reason, Nazi scientists did not consider medical ethics to apply to members of these groups.
While Mengele served at Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 20,000 Roma were imprisoned there, and hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived there on transports. Nowhere else in the world could scientists have access to so many members of these groups concentrated in one place, and nowhere else did they have the power to experiment on human beings in whatever way they wanted.
Mengele commented to a colleague that it would be a crime not to take advantage of the opportunities for human experimentation at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In addition to choosing Roma as subjects for his medical experiments, Mengele conducted an anthropological study of the Romani men, women, and children in the Gypsy Camp. When there was an outbreak of noma, a gangrene of the mouth, among Roma children in the camp, he assigned prisoner physicians to study it.
Noma is a bacterial infection that primarily afflicts extremely malnourished children. Mengele, however, believed that the Romani children at Auschwitz suffered from noma because of heredity rather than because of the conditions of the camp.
Several afflicted children were killed so that their preserved heads and organs could be sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz and other facilities for study. In the end, the prisoner physicians discovered how to cure noma, which was normally fatal. Nevertheless, all of the children who were cured were eventually murdered in the gas chambers.
Mengele was particularly interested in identical twins, who in the 1930s were a major focus of human genetic research. Before World War II, Verschuer and other biomedical researchers used twins to study the hereditary basis of diseases.
These earlier researchers obtained the consent of the twins or their parents, but it was difficult for researchers to enlist many twins for these studies. At Auschwitz, however, Mengele collected hundreds of pairs of twins from among the Jews who arrived there on transports and from among the Roma.
No researcher had ever been able to study or experiment on such a large number of twins. Mengele ordered his staff to measure and record every aspect of the twins' bodies. He drew large amounts of blood from the twins and sometimes performed other painful procedures on them.
Such was the case of Renata Goodman. At Auschwitz she became number 70917, was separated from her brother and mother, and taken to a hospital where she was measured, x-rayed, and had blood taken from her neck. Once she was strapped to a table and cut with a knife.
Another Holocaust victim, Lawrence Manash, later recalled that injections were given all over their bodies. As a result of these injections, his sister's neck swelled up from a severe infection. She was sent to the hospital and operated on without anesthetic in primitive conditions.
The experiments Mengele performed on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin to another. Witness Vera Alexander described how Mengele sewed two Romani twins together back to back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. Both children died of gangrene after several days of immense suffering.
Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures, and those who survived the experiments were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected once Mengele had no further use for them. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner doctor at Auschwitz, recalled one occasion when Mengele personally killed 14 twins in one night by injecting their hearts with chloroform.
If one twin died from disease, Mengele would kill the other twin to allow comparative post-mortem reports. After he studied the autopsies, Mengele sent some of their organs to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
When Mengele conducted selections of arriving Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he also looked for people with physical abnormalities. These included dwarves, people with gigantism, and persons who had a club foot.
His experiments on dwarves and people with physical abnormalities included taking physical measurements, drawing blood, extracting healthy teeth, and treatment with unnecessary drugs and x-rays. After Mengele studied these people, he had them murdered and sent their bodies to Germany for study by researchers.
Elizabeth Ovitz, a dwarf survivor of Mengele's experiments, later remembered that it was impossible to put into words the intolerable pain they suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.
Mengele also sought out Roma and Jews with heterochromia, a condition in which a person's eyes differ from each other in color. One of Mengele's colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was particularly interested in this condition.
He killed people with heterochromatic eyes so that their eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study. Mengele also kept hundreds of human eyes pinned to his lab wall like a collection of butterflies, as he called it.
Most of the victims of Mengele's medical experiments were children. Mengele was friendly toward the children he selected for experiments. They lived in separate barracks from the other prisoners and received somewhat better food and treatment.
Moshe Offer, a survivor of Mengele's experiments, later recalled that Mengele visited them as a good uncle, bringing them chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or syringe, he would say, "Don't be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you." Then he injected chemical substances and performed surgery on Offer's brother Tibi's spine. After the experiments he would bring them gifts.
In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into their heads, and the puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. The brother was gone for several days, and when he was brought back his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in Offer's arms.
Mengele used children for his own experiments and also to support the work of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. He collaborated in a study of the change of eye color by putting a chemical substance supplied by one of his colleagues into the eyes of children and newborns. The results ranged from irritation and swelling to blindness and even death.
The Hungarian doctor Gisella Perl described the aftermath of one brutal killing by Mengele. He took a piece of perfumed soap out of his bag and, whistling gaily with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face, began to wash his hands.
A prisoner assigned to care for Jewish twins selected for Mengele's experiments later described how the children reacted emotionally and physically to their treatment. 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 to avoid being touched, and personnel resorted to force. Drops were also put into their eyes, with some pairs of children receiving drops in both eyes and others in only one.
The results of these practices were painful for the victims, who suffered from severe swelling of the eyelids and a burning sensation. The Holocaust survivor Alex Dekor reported witnessing Mengele performing surgery without anesthesia, removing the hearts and stomachs of victims.
Yitzhak Ganor, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor from northern Greece deported to Auschwitz at the age of 20, reported in 2009 how, after Mengele removed his kidney without anesthesia, he was forced to return to work without painkillers.
Mengele also sought out pregnant women, on whom he would perform experiments before sending many of them to the gas chambers. The Czech Holocaust survivor Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz.
She later recalled that she delivered a beautiful, big, blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that her breast be bound so that, as he said, they could see how long a newborn baby could survive without food. After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female Czech doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's agony.
Another Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Olga Lengyel, recalled how, after Mengele supervised the birth of a child with meticulous care, within an hour he sent both mother and child to the gas chamber. On another occasion, Mengele ripped an infant from his mother's womb, having expected twins to be born, then held the child into an oven because it was not a twin as he had hoped.
In January 1945, as the Soviet Red Army advanced through western Poland, Mengele fled Auschwitz with the rest of the camp's SS personnel. He spent the next few months surviving at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and its subcamps.
In the final days of the war, he donned a German army uniform and joined a military unit that surrendered to U.S. military forces after the war ended. Posing as a German army officer, Mengele became a U.S. prisoner of war, but the U.S. Army released him in early August 1945, unaware that his name was already on a list of wanted war criminals.
From late 1945 until spring 1949, Mengele worked under a false name as a farmhand near Rosenheim in Bavaria, and from there he was able to establish contact with his family. When U.S. war crimes investigators learned of Mengele's crimes at Auschwitz, they tried to find and arrest him, but based on lies told by Mengele's family, the investigators concluded that he was dead.
The U.S. effort to arrest him forced Mengele to recognize that he was not safe in Germany. With financial support from his rich family, he immigrated to Argentina under yet another false name in July 1949.
By 1956 he was well established in Argentina and felt so safe that he obtained Argentine citizenship as José Mengele. In 1959, however, he learned that West German prosecutors knew he was in Argentina and were seeking his arrest.
Mengele immigrated to Paraguay and obtained citizenship there. In May 1960, Israeli intelligence agents abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel to be tried. Correctly guessing that the Israelis were also looking for him, Mengele fled Paraguay.
With support from his family in Germany, he spent the rest of his life under an assumed name near São Paulo in Brazil. When his son Rolf visited him there in 1977, he found an unrepentant Nazi who claimed he had never personally harmed anyone and had only carried out his duties as an officer.
On February 7, 1979, Mengele, then 67 years old, suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga in Brazil. He was buried in a suburb of São Paulo under the assumed name Wolfgang Gerhard.
Mengele, the most notorious of the Nazi doctors and one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust, thus eluded arrest for 34 years and was never brought to justice. There were no tears shed for Josef Mengele.