Josef Mengele, a psycho Nazi Doctor, was also known as the ‘Angel of death‘. He was one of the most crucial war criminals after World War II.
Yet he got away without being held captive. We’ll know about how he fled away from being arrested and the unexplained death of Josef Mengele.
Image by Barak Broitman from Pixabay/Copyright 2014
1. Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele was one of the most known figures in the history of the Holocaust. Despite being a medical researcher and a highly skilled Doctor, he performed activities that scarred his medical experiments for life.
Let’s know about him from the beginning.
1.1 His Early Life and Education
Josef Mengele, aka Todesengel or Angel of death, was born on the 16th of March, 1911. He was born to Walburga (née Hupfauer) and Karl Mengele, in Gunzburg, Bavaria of Germany in a catholic family. Out of the three brothers, Josef Mengele was the oldest. His father, Karl Mengele was the founder of the company, ‘Karl Mengele & Sons.
As a child, Josef Mengele was interested in art, music, and skiing. He was said to have had good grades in school. He went to Gymnasium, Academia high school, in Germany. And later he attended the University of Bonn, after studying psychology in Munich.
At the University of Bonn, he gave the medical preliminary exam. He completed his PhD in anthropology at the University of Munich.
While doing his post-doctorate with a Nazi Eugenicist, Dr Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, Mengele took an interest in biology and racial hygiene. Soon after that, he started to write about the Nazi racial theory.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay/Copyright 2014
1.2 Josef Mengele’s Family
Did Josef Mengele have any wives or children?
The answer is yes. Josef Mengele married Irene Schönbein on the 28th of July, 1939. He met him when he was working as a medical resident in Leipzig. They had a boy in 1944 and named him Rolf.
2. Nazi Germany
Around 1937, Josef Mengele joined the Nazi party. And the next year, in 1938, he joined the SS Protection Squadron.
It was noted that Mengele did not particularly support the Nazi party before it came to power.
After 1 year of joining the SS, he volunteered there for medical service during World War II. Then gradually, his rank rose when he saved two soldiers from a burning tank. But soon enough, he was injured and was sent to the headquarters of the SS.
As for his workplace, Josef Mengele was now sent to the main office in Berlin, where he became the SS captain around 1943.
Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay/Copyright 2015
3. Auschwitz Death Camp
In around 1942, the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was initially a labour camp Mengele was supposed to serve, had begun to turn into an extermination camp. The doctors were supposed to perform specific tasks selected for them. Only fit and fine Jews were allowed to be admitted to the camp.
3.1 Mengele’s Experiments on Prisoners
For those victims, who were not murdered in the gas chambers right away, Josef Mengele applied to transfer to Auschwitz to be appointed as a chief physician to the camp Birkenau.
Josef Mengele visited the hospital just to order prisoners to death, who had not gotten better within 2 weeks. He also chose people to do his medical experiments on. He was especially interested to perform experiments on twin children.
It was distinguishable how he was in a good mood often and smiled at the prisoners. While going for a round in the gas chambers, Mengele used to whistle as well. It was noted that, during a typhus outbreak, Mengele ordered 600 Jews into the gas chambers, all women.
3.2 The Psycho Nazi Doctor
Despite being a highly skilled doctor, Mengele never showed any care or mercy to his victims. He would look for twins, with different eye colours, deformed bodies, or even dwarfs, to perform his gruesome medical experiments on.
The test subjects were comparatively kept in better conditions than the other prisoners, and excluded from the gas chamber.
For a limited amount of time, his test subjects were given all the necessities, a separate room, and good food. And while talking to children, he referred to himself as Uncle Mengele. It was rather said that Mengele was skilled enough to be kind to children and make them very fond of him.
3.2.1 What Were Mengele’s Experiments Like?
But little do the children know that very soon, Mengele would use these innocent lives for his medical and human experiments too. How he would kill so many of his victims by lethal injections and beatings, using them for Mengele’s human experiments like transferring blood from one twin to another, after being infected with deadly diseases.
Sometimes, Mengele would kill 14 twin children in one night just by injecting their hearts with chloroform. And during his medical research, if one of the twins passed away, the other was intentionally killed for post-mortem.
Mengele also made attempts to change their eye colours and even more crucial experiments like sewing the twins together.
4. Josef Mengele Escaped
For all of the Nazi crimes, it was said that Mengele would be held captive. He is said to have killed about 400,000 people with his experiments. But in 1945, Mengele left Auschwitz and travelled across Czechoslovakia dressed as a medical officer, to prevent being held captive by the Soviet Union.
Eventually, Mengele was captured by the Americans as a prisoner of war. But apparently, his name was not on the list of major war criminals and he did not have a SS blood group tattoo. That’s why, in 1945, at the end of July, despite Mengele’s crimes, he was released from prison.
4.1 Argentine Identity Card
After being released from prison, Mengele managed to gather false papers to change his identity to Fritz Holman. After changing his identity, he stayed a few more months to retrieve his notes by travelling to Auschwitz.
Having retrieved his notes, Mengele left Germany on the 17th of April, 1949. By this time, Mengele knew he would be held captive and executed for his war crimes.
Therefore, he used his way to help former SS members and war criminals to escape. Mengele fled to Genoa and managed to get a false passport under the name, Helmut Gregor, and in July 1949, he finally escaped to Argentina.
4.2 His Time in Argentina
While escaping to Argentina, he wanted to take his wife and children too but they refused. So, he went alone
After reaching, he would work as a carpenter there until he started living in a boarding house with a Nazi sympathizer. This person owned a Farm equipment company and Mengele used to work as a salesman for them. He also took trips to Paraguay as a salesman.
It was also noted that, at this time in South America, he practised medicine in Buenos Aires, performing abortions.
Later, he is said to have gotten a copy of his birth certificate in 1956 from the West German Embassy and also received residence under his original name. He even got a west German passport and went to travel Europe to for a ski holiday in Switzerland.
After coming back from holiday, he lived under his real name and soon enough, he was owning a part of a Pharmaceutical company.
During his time with an Argentine identity card, his allies thought Mengele is already dead.
5. Josef Mengele Escaped Again
Nazi hunters had started gathering information about Mengele’s activities during the war and therefore, an arrest warrant was drawn on the 5th of June 1959. But the Argentina government refused to arrest and by the time they agreed on his arrest, Mengele had fled again. This time he went to Paraguay.
West Germany had even put up a reward for whoever could hand over Mengele. With this news going worldwide, Mengele fled again, to Brazil.
In Brazil, he bought a farm with a few Hungarian refugees. These refugees later came to know about his real identity but were convinced not to hand him over. In 1969, these refugees, along with Mengele bought a farmhouse in Brazil. But in about 5 years, their friendship died due to several reasons.
In 1977, Josef Mengele returned to being a Nazi but still wasn’t ashamed of his actions.
6. The Unexplained Death of Josef Mengele
It was reported that Mengele had experienced a stroke in 1976 and his health had deteriorated a lot. He had high blood pressure and several other problems.
6.1 Wolfgang Gerhard
It was said that on the 7th of February 1979, he had gone to visit his friends in Bertioga. He went for a swim and he was said to have a stroke while swimming and drowned. He was then buried under the name, Wolfgang Gerhard.
Image by Eszter Miller from Pixabay/Copyright 2018
6.2 Did He Die?
The show didn’t end yet though. In 1986, a mock triathlon took place in Jerusalem, which showcased several testimonies from Mengele’s victims. Israel, the US, and the West German government had now come together to locate the Psycho Nazi Doctor. They even offered rewards for handing over this criminal.
But soon on the 30th of July, police found the house of one of Mengele’s lifelong friends and raided his home. They found out that Mengele had died in South America. The Brazilian police were alerted and they were on their way to investigate now.
The Sao Paulo police succeeded to find his grave and last remains. His body was then sent for forensic analysis to recognize whether it was Mengele’s body and if he had died. After further analysis, they announced that there is a very high chance that the body was his indeed
In 1992, a DNA test was done for further accuracy and this test did not leave any more doubts that the body was of Josef Mengele and that he was dead.
7. Conclusion
Josef Mengele, aka, the Angel of death, was one of the major and most wanted criminals at the time of World War II. Despite having done those gruesome human experiments, he was never ashamed of his actions. But his last few years, he spent in constant fear of being held captive and executed.
Even after all of this, this case remained unjustified. His crimes never faced justice as they should have. If he was caught, it might have been justified.
This makes the Angel of death, Josef Mengele, one of the most hated people in the history of the Holocaust.
Last Updated on by somya909
