The state of Germany after World War I was a time of unrest and plotting. After receiving the largest loses and thanks to the Versailles Treaty, Germany was looking to bring new leaders to power in order to take back what was theirs. During this time persuasive and dangerous leader, Adolf Hitler was able to gain power thanks to his vast knowledge and manipulation of propaganda. While at the time Germany what only seemed like a want to take back what was theirs brought along a raise of nationalist socialism. Their party, Nazi party was able to take control of all media outlets and disseminate their party’s views quickly.
But they were preaching more than just socialism they were also instilling and defining cultural norms, they were building the perfect German. Hitler and his party wanted to spread Volk ideology and to create an Aryan race while wiping the world clean of vermin and abnormal groups such as the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Africans, and Jehovah’s witnesses. In 1933 the Nazi’s had much more than political power in Germany and they were starting to put plans into place to eradicate and rid the world of cultural groups that were believed to taint pure German blood lines.
As Jews and other targeted “races” were moved from their homes to ghettos and later concentration camps and there was little concern for what happened to them. In the year 1937 a new face began to work for the Nazi party. He was an SS physician named Josef Mengele. Hired to differentiate and select though fit to work prisoners and those fit to be gassed, this doctor was doing much more to test the limits of the human body. Nicknamed the Angel of Death, where did the Nazi’s acquire such a twisted mind, what medical experimentation was actually conducted, and what happened to the Nazi party’s most mysterious member?
Born in March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg Germany, Josef was the eldest son of Karl Mengele (“Josef”). He was born into an intellectual family and his father was a rich German business owner (Stockton). This pushed Josef into studying physical anthropology at the University of Munich and he earned his Ph. D. in 1935 (Stockton). Leading him in 1937 to start working in the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt (“Josef”). Here where he first started to study twins, which will become a main focus during his time at Auschwitz.
As mentioned in the year 1937, Mengele joined the Nazi party, and the year directly after he received his second doctoral degree in medicine, making him an excellent advocate to be an SS officer (Stockton). In 1940, he was drafted for the army where he volunteered his medical services for Germany, but Mengele was wounded on campaign (“Josef”). So he returned to Germany in 1943 and began work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, focusing on genetics and eugenics.
This prompted his promotion to SS captain and he was transferred to Auschwitz in May of that same year (“Josef”). Mengele began his career in the spring and was the medical officer in charge of the Birkenau’s “Gypsy Camp,” once this camp was eradicated, he receive another promotion and was the Chief Camp Physician of Auschwitz (“Josef”). During his time here he was in charge of deciding who would live and work or who would be sent to die, this was the reasoning behind his nickname “The Angel of Death” (“Josef”).
This was due to the fact people would recall seeing him during his rounds and know he brought death. Also it was noticed that he spent much of his time off selecting people, especially twins for new experiments (“Josef’). While the “Angel of Death” was hired to preform selection duties he was overly present on the unloading ramp. He has a thirst and eye to find people with unusual hereditary traits such as dwarfs, twins, giants, people with clubbed feet, or even heterochromia (Rosenberg). His main focus though, twins, he wanted to make sure they would not be missed.
It was said that he pulled approximately three thousand twins, majority being children and only around two hundred survived (Rosenberg). Once the twins were in Mengele’s possession they were taken straight to the showers and they were known as “Mengele’s children” and were given “special treatment”. Such as being able to keep their hair and own clothes, and were tattooed with special numbers (Rosenberg). They lived in twin barracks and were under constant inspection. Every day the twins had blood drawn, and approximately ten cubic centimeters of blood was extracted daily (Rosenberg).
No one knew exactly why he was doing this or what they were being injected with and often times turned a blind eye to what was going on in the laboratories. Some experiments that occurred were mass blood transfusions, their naked bodies would be examined for hours by Mengele alone, their eyes injected with chemicals or drops, and shots of mysterious painful substances or even infectious diseases were given to the twins (Rosenberg). Then if one twin died as a result, the other was killed and examined to see a contrast of the effects in one versus the other.
One living twin after the holocaust said his brother was paralyzed by a misguided spinal tap and then had his sexual organs removed with no anesthetic (Rosenberg). Other accounts of experiments that were conducted at the hands of Dr. Mengele were equally gruesome. Many survivors provided testimonies recalling the absolute horrors that took place inside Auschwitz. One women was given shot directly in her uterus and suffered pain for upwards of a year and a half due to Mengele forcefully shrinking her uterus to the size of a 4 year olds (Conference).
Another woman said that the ladies in Barrack No. 10 were force fed drugs in the little food they received, which resulted in painful, oozing sores all over their bodies, and they were given zero relief (Conference). One woman was brought to Auschwitz as a child and whipped upon entering with the promise of more if she didn’t listen to Dr. Mengele. Her body was then used as a pin cushion, every day she was injected with drugs and chemicals. Cuts and the wounds were left untreated and she was never given painkillers and anesthetics (Conference).
Women weren’t the only ones targeted, one man recalls being forced to ejaculated so Mengele could study Jewish male semen, this happened so often that the man left Auschwitz weighing only 30 kilograms (Conference). Sadly, the horror doesn’t end there and during a trail in 1985, more survivors came forward. One woman that was in the twin studies was impregnated with the semen of another twin and when her child was born and wasn’t a twin it was thrown directly into an oven (Broder). Another woman underwent the same impregnation and was forced to starve her child having her nipples bandaged off (Broder).
She said she knew she would be killed for allowing the baby to survive and killed it with a stolen morphine injection to protect her own life (Broder). Mengele was sentenced to trial after WWII ended, but his life got more mysterious after Auschwitz. Mengele’s crimes were well documented the international Military Tribunal and there was a warrant for his arrest release in 1959 after the end of World War II (“Josef”). Then in 1960 there was a request of extradition, Mengele was tipped of and alarmed by the capture of other SS officials and ran off to Paraguay that same year (“Josef”).
It was kept a secret that Mengele was in South American and finally reestablished himself in Brazil under the name Wolfgang Gerhard (Siegert). He died in 1979 on the beaches of Sao Paul and his body was dug up and verified to be him hiding under an alias name (Siegert). After his death they found his diary documenting how he had made it to South America with the power of money and Nazi allies that were working to help other members of their party escape (Siegert). This discovery helped capture other fleeing war criminals and those aiding their escapes.
When medicine goes uncontrolled there is nothing but horror that unfolds. Mengele was no better than a modern day serial killer and how he could even stomach to preform such acts is beyond me. The lack of ethics and emotion just depicts a psychopath. There is no amount of knowledge worth that many lives. There was nothing gained from his experiments. He gained no credible discoveries and was just using medicine to fill his sick fantasies. Dr. Mengele was one of the sickest SS members and was fooling everyone.
The most terrifying thing is that the other SS members had zero idea why or what he was doing 80 percent of the time. Proving that there was no care about what happened to the Jewish people. They didn’t care as long as it didn’t hurt the true Germans. No one ever batted an eye at this mysterious man and often aided him even when they saw no purpose. From the start of his life he was privileged and in the end he was able to skate through life scot free. Ultimately, the “Angel of Death” came from a privileged life and used his brilliance for evil.
With the education he was given and the opportunities he could have perused Mengele fed into his sick fantasies rather than desired to improve medicine and it is clear. Worst of all his life ended with zero consequence and thousands of lives were lost at his expense. Even his survivors still have to face the dark images that they witnessed to this day. In summation, Dr. Mengele was a highly educated, sadist who used medicine for his own personal pleasure not providing cause for his experimentation and drawing zero conclusive and useful data. The Angel of Death was the Nazi party’s most dangerous secret weapon.