DR JOSEF MENGELE AUSCHWITZ’S ‘ANGEL OF DEATH’
The name Josef Mengele has become synonymous with the evil of Auschwitz. He inflicted horrific medical experiments on unwilling victims, thousands of whom perished at his hands. Yet at the end of World War II the Allies failed to realise who this obscure sadist was and even let him go. When his crimes became known, a frantic manhunt commenced, but Mengele evaded his pursuers until his death in 1979.
Early life
Born in 1911 in Günzburg, Germany, Mengele was the eldest of three sons to Karl and Walburga Mengele. Mengele senior ran a business called Firma Karl Mengele & Söhne, which produced agricultural machinery. It was a business that proved prosperous for the Mengele family.
Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, where he came under the influence of Alfred Rosenberg, a racial theorist and ideologue who would himself later serve the Nazis. Mengele gained a PhD in anthropology at the University of Munich in 1935.
Following his PhD, Mengele worked at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where he came under the influence of another notorious German scientist called Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who researched twins. Gerald Posner and John Ware, in their book Mengele: The Complete Story, describe Verschuer as “an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, whom he considered the first statesmen to recognize the true importance of hereditary biological and race hygiene”.
While working for Verschuer, Mengele studied genetics linked to conditions of the cleft lip and the cleft palate. In 1938, his. As David Marwell writes in : “In an article reviewing the accomplishments of the institute during its first four years, Verschuer chose to single out Mengele’s dissertation as having gone beyond the work of others.”
