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Josef Mengele

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Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele (March 16 1911 – February 7, 1979), was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He gained notoriety chiefly for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced labourer, and for performing human experiments of dubious scientific value on camp inmates, amongst whom Mengele was known as the Angel of Death.

After the war he first hid in Germany under a assumed name, then escaped and lived in South America, first in Argentina (until 1959) and finally in Brazil, where he accidentally drowned. This was confirmed using DNA testing on his remains.

Biography

Mengele was born in Günzburg, Bavaria, eldest of three sons of Karl Mengele (1881–1959), a well-to-do industrialist, and his wife Walburga Hupfauer (d. 1946). He had two younger brothers, Karl (1912–1949) and Alois (1914–1974).

In 1930 Mengele left Günzburg gymnasium (high school). He studied medicine and anthropology at the University of Munich, earning a doctorate in Anthropology (Ph.D.), supervised by Prof. Theodor Mollison, in 1935 with a dissertation on racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw. He worked as an assistant to Otmar von Verschuer at the Frankfurt University Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. In 1938 he obtained a doctorate in medicine (M.D.) with a dissertation called "Familial Research on cleft lip and palate and Jaw". His belief in the Nazi racial ideology was already evident in his academic research. The Universities of Munich and Frankfurt revoked his degrees in 1964.

In 1931, at the age of 21, Mengele joined the Stahlhelm, a paramilitary organization, which was incorporated into the SA in 1933. He resigned shortly thereafter, alluding to health problems. He applied for Nazi party membership in 1937 and in 1938 joined the SS. In 1939, Mengele married his first wife, Irene Schönbein, with whom he had one child, a son named Rolf. In 1940 he was placed in the reserve medical corps, following which he served with a Waffen-SS unit. In 1942 he was wounded at the Russian front and was pronounced medically unfit for combat, and promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain). During his service on the Eastern Front during 1941-1942, Mengele received the Iron Cross, both first class and second class, the Wound Badge in black, and the Eastern Front Medal.

Auschwitz

In 1943 Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau's "Gypsy camp". In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates were rumoured to have been gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths.

It was during his 21-month stay at Auschwitz that Mengele achieved infamy, and it is for this period that he is referred to as the Angel of Death. Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the ramp, determining who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately.

Human experimentation

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in twins, who were selected and placed in special barracks. He also studied a disease called Noma, which particularly affected children from the Gypsy camp. While the cause of Noma remains relatively unknown, it is a disease that affects chiefly children suffering from malnutrition and a weak immune system, and many develop the disease shortly after having suffered another illness like measles or tuberculosis. Mengele tried to prove that Noma was caused by racial inferiority.

Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the concentration camp. This included dwarves, notably the Ovitz family, a Jewish Romanian artist's family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves. Prior to their deportation they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. He often called them "my dwarf family", to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of 'the abnorm'. Mengele's experiments were of dubious scientific value, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. During roll calls Mengele would show up to perform a "special work detail" selection, which fooled some into thinking that this would be a relief from the otherwise hard labour they were performing. In actuality Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, either due to the experiments or later infections.

A Hungarian Jewish prisoner doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who was an experienced pathologist and had studied in Germany, was chosen to work as Mengele's assistant, and wrote about his experiences. The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were for the time being safe from the gas chambers. To Mengele they were nevertheless not fellow human beings, but rather material on which to conduct his experiments. On several occasions he killed subjects simply to be able to dissect them afterwards.

In film and literature

  • Mengele has also been used as a fictionalized literary and movie character, featuring prominently in The Boys from Brazil (portrayed by Gregory Peck).
  • In the Dustin Hoffman movie, Marathon Man, the former Nazi dentist Dr Christian Szell, played by Laurence Olivier, might be modeled on Mengele.
  • His was one of the lead characters in the movie Out Of The Ashes, starring Bruce Davison and Christine Lahti
  • Mengele figured in the 2001 movie The Grey Zone, an account of everyday life in Auschwitz and the hopeless revolt attempted by some of the prisoners.
  • The controversial 1999 film Nichts als die Wahrheit (Nothing But the Truth) depicts a fictional trial of an 80-year-old Mengele before a German criminal court
  • The character Uncle Pepi in Martin Amis's Time's Arrow is based on him.
  • Mordecai Richler's St-Urbain's Horseman refers to Mengele several times.
  • Dr Emmenberger, a Nazi doctor in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's book Der Verdacht (translated as Suspicion or The Quarry), is probably a fictionalized and symbolic version of Mengele.
  • Mengele is briefly mentioned in Elie Wiesel's book Night
  • The German novelist Peter Schneider's 1987 novella Vati (Daddy) is based on the account Rolf Mengele's visit to his father in Brazil in the 1970s published in the German magazine Bunte.
  • Mengele is a character in the play Playing for Time by Arthur Miller.
  • Mengele, played by Daniel Del Ponte, is briefly shown inspecting prisoners (female Jews who worked for Oskar Schindler) in the well-known movie Schindler's List.
  • There is a movie about a survivor, Eva Mozes Kor, of Mengele in Forgiving Dr. Mengele, made in 2006.
  • The song Angel of Death by Slayer is based on him.

See also

References

  1. The Holocaust history project
  2. Internet movie database

Further reading

  • Mengele - the complete story, Gerald Posner and John Ware, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1986 ISBN 0-07-050598-5
  • Miklos Nyiszli's At Last the Truth About Eichmann's Inferno Auschwitz and Auschwitz—A doctor’s eyewitness account describes his experience involuntary working for Mengele.
  • The book Children of the Flames by Lagnado & Dekel is an account of Mengele's experiments with twins, with the surviving twins' personal accounts.

External links

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