Josef Mengele’s nickname was “Angel of Death” that should tell you something right there. 

Josef Mengele was the eldest of three sons.  His mother was Walburga Mengele.  His father was Karl Mengele.  They lived in the Bavarian Village of Gunzburg.  His father was a local industrialist who owned a local plant that manufactured farming equipment.  Walburga was the one everyone feared.  She had a terrible temper and would come to the factory to criticize the workers terribly.  Their mother forced them to be devout Catholic.  She was just as demanding to her husband.  Josef Mengele without a doubt had to be affected somehow by his mother’s wrath.  Josef described his mother as not capable of loving. 

 

Despite his home life, Josef is remembered in Gunzburg as a pleasant child.  No one could have guessed that he would later do his gruesome work.  He was a good student according to his teachers.  As he grew he developed into a handsome man that processed a certain self-confidence.

 

Josef’s father wished for him to work at his factory but Josef wanted to have a career in science and anthropology.  He wanted to leave Gunzburg.  Soon he was accepted to the University of Munich.  Mengele majored in Philosophy and Medicine. At the time Munich was the heart of the growing Nazi Socialist party and was led by Adolf Hitler.  Hitler was using Munich as a place where he could gain German domination.  Mengele taking the side of the Nazi Socialist party. 

 

 

He later joined a nationalistic organization called “Stalhem or steel helmets” in 1931.  They shared the same beliefs as the Nazis.  He also began to grow an interest in human genetics.  His interests grew right at the time when a number of Germans were saying some people had unworthy life.  He began making himself known.  He began to strive in his efforts to distinguish himself to both gain renown and respect as a scientific researcher. 

 

Professor Han Grebe quotes, “There was nothing in his personality to suggest that he would do what he did.” (As a SS doctor at Auschwitz).  He began to attend lectures by Dr. Ernest Rudin.  Dr. Rudin believed that not only were some lives not worthy but doctors had the responsibility to destroy such life.  Rudin was drafted to assist the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health when Hitler caught sight of Rudin’s beliefs.  When the Nazis’ took complete control of the German government, Rudin contributed to Nazi decree the called for sterilization of people that had some kind of gene flaw such as blindness, deafness, and so on.

  

In 1934 Hitler ordered the SA to absorb Stalhelm Organization making Mengele a member of the SA.  Later Mengele suffered from a kidney ailment.  His condition forced him to drop out leaving him time and more time for his studies.  He earned a PhD in college.

 

In 1937 he received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Heredity at the University of Frankfert.  He was assigned to work for Professor Otmar Freiherr Von Vershuer.  Von Vershuer was an appraiser of Hitler’s.  Mengele quickly began to strive for respect from Von Vershuer, which he quickly gained.  Von Vershuer was like a father to Mengele.  In return Mengele did everything to praise him. 

 

He soon became an official member of the S.S.  By the age of 28 he had climbed to the position of great respect and power.  In the same year he earned his medical degree. 

 

In July 1939 Mengele married Irene.  Their marriage wasn’t allowed for a long time before they knew that there was no sign of Jewish heritage in her.  After their marriage and the birth of their son, war broke out.  In 1940 he began to fight as a soldier.  Wounds he received kept him from returning to combat.  In January 1942 Mengele joined the medical corps of Waffen 55’s Viking division. 

 

Dr. Josef Mengele received an assignment in 1943 to go to Auschwitz, Poland (a concentration camp).  Auschwitz was a gruesome death camp of human suffering.  Mengele’s job was to perform experiments and research on human genetics.  Instead of helping science he just added more and more human suffering with his experiments. 

 

He was distinguished from other doctors as a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.  Although, strangely enough many victims remember him as a father figure away from home that gave them candy.  Older children knew better.  They knew that his kindness was merely a distraction. 

 

He had a power where he could decide if you lived or died right there on the spot within seconds.  You weren’t a person to him you were merely a specimen.  He ordered nongermans with diseases straight to the gas chamber while Germans he spared. 

 

Mengele is mainly known for is experiments.  He promoted medical experiments on inmates especially twins and dwarfs.  Twins fascinated him.  He held experiments on nearly 1500 sets of twins between 1943 and 1944.  Of the 3000 twins that passed through his lab only 200 survived. 

“Mengele made several operations on Tibi.  On one operation on his spine left him paralyzed, then he took out his sexual organs.  After his fourth we didn’t see Tibi anymore.” A victim quotes.  Mengele once supervised an operation where two gypsy twins were sewn together to make Siamese twins.  Their hands became badly infected where the veins had been resected.  Mengele also made many attempts to change the eye color of people by injecting various chemicals.  He performed most operations without anesthesia, which is a painkiller or it makes you go to sleep.  Imagine having an organ taken out and being able to see and feel everything. Mengele would often take blood from one twin and put it in the other then record the reaction.  If the patients would die or he would kill them he would dissect them and sometimes even pin their eyeballs to the wall.  Young children were kept in isolation cages.  Many twins had limbs or organs removed.  Others had infection injected into them to see how long it would take for them to get a disease. 

Mengele’s twins were housed in a special block.  He would carefully measure and examine them.  They were treated much better than the others, but they were never thought of as people to Mengele.  He was known to settle an argument by killing twins.  He would draw a line from the floor to about 5 feet and sometimes if the children weren’t tall enough he would send them to be gassed. 

 

With the end of the war Mengele became a fugitive.  He escaped to South America where he and his family lived hunted.  While swimming he suffered a stroke and drown.  The full extent of his gruesome work will never be know because the records he sent to his mentor, Von Vershuer, were destroyed accidentally.  His research was useless, as it was never found.  

 

 

Whitney Fox

7th Social Studies

Rossville Jr. High

Holocaust Project

Spring 2003

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