Many Jews, Roma, and Nazi enemies were left hungry, hungry, confused, and traveling in horrible, rickety cattle cars, without water, food, or toilets. The huge doors to the cattle car opened to the blinding sunshine. Many people were afraid they couldn’t see the silhouettes, which included men wearing uniforms who shouted orders and pulled on the tired bodies. The German Shepards barked angrily and furiously at the starving crowd, following the SS guards’ leashes. Josef Mengele was the only figure that stood out in all of the confusion and shouting.
Josef was born March 16, 1911. The Mengele family lived near the Danube River in Gunzburg in southern Germany. Karl, Josef’s father, was a farmer and a mechanic. The factory burned down in 1907. Andreas and Karl had enough insurance money to rebuild the factory on their own. Andreas quit the partnership in 2009, leaving only seven men on its payroll. Karl then took control of the business. Karl was able to quickly make the business flourish. By Josef’s birth, his father was wealthy enough that he could buy a Mercedes motorcar. Karl, upon purchasing the costly car, arrived home to surprise and disappoint his wife. Many people feared the ill-tempered wife. Factory workers and townspeople often thought Walburga incapable of loving. Karl drove his shiny Mercedes from factory to farm, traveling between farms in search of farm machinery buyers. The family grew, despite Karl’s absences from home. Josef’s younger brother Karl Jr. was also born in 1912. Josef received less affection and love than his parents. Alois was Josef’s youngest brother. Karl Sr. left the family to join the war effort. Soon after, Walburga took over the business, making him a fearsome and ruthless tyrant. Walburga was a brutal and disciplined commander of the factory. Walburga managed to secure a lucrative contract for the production of special army equipment. Walburga, her mother, raised her sons in strict Catholicism and demanded obedience from them.
Josef was affectionately called “Beppo” among his friends, family, as well as the townspeople. He was an ambitious, bright young man. He was regarded as the role model for obedience in the community by many. Josef almost drowned while playing with a rainwater canister. He was also nearly killed by blood poisoning during his childhood. Josef was a bitter child who held grudges against his older brothers Karl and Irene. The three of them grew up and formed close bonds. This was despite the fact that their parents were not loving them. Josef was never the best in his class, but he did well academically. His good manner and punctuality earned him many compliments. He wrote “Travels To Liechtenstein,” a fairytale play, as a teenager. It was performed at a children’s home. At 15 years old, he was diagnosed by osteomyelitus. This condition is caused when bone marrow becomes infected with a fungal or bacteria infection. Osteomyelitus may sometimes cause crippling symptoms. Mengele was disillusioned by his strict Catholic mother and began to stray more from the Church as he got older. Despite his hatred for the Church’s teachings, Mengele continued to be involved in the community’s good, including joining the Red Cross and a patriotic youth group. Mengele was a handsome young adult who grew up with charisma and punctuality. Mengele took pride in his appearance, a trait that added to his reputation for being charming and suave.
Josef graduated the Gymnasium with his descent grades in 1930. He had the ambition to study his favourite subjects, anthropology or genetics. He believed that his family would love to have a Mengele scientist as a member of their family. However, his father had other plans. His father wanted him to manage the family business, which had provided them with so much wealth. Mengele left behind his family and his upbringing. He moved to Munich after his grades got him into the University of Munich. There he studied medicine and philosophy. Munich was changing from being the capital city of Bavaria to becoming the capital for Anti-Semitism. Adolf Hitler’s racist propaganda and the spread of it throughout the city created an army of supporters, both young and old. Mengele listened intently to Hitler’s rants about the Jewish vermin as well as Aryan nationalism.
Mengele was beginning his academic journey at University of Munich when the National Socialist Party took 18% of the votes in Reichstag elections. It became the second-largest party of the German parliament. The party received 107 Reichstag seat wins with the 6.4million votes they received, up from the 12 that it had won the previous year. Mengele began to become more interested in the science of eugenics. Mengele joined the Steel Helmuts as a veteran servicemen organisation that held many of Hitler’s beliefs but wasn’t yet affiliated with Nazism. Josef disinterested in Nazi party, but Karl Sr. took an interest and was diabolically planning to expand his business. Hitler’s passionate speeches about “unworthy life” and purification of race began to influence medical professionals and academic scholars in Munich. Mengele heard Dr. Ernst Rudin lecture on a regular schedule at the University. This was the beginning of a cold-blooded killer. Rudin backed Hitler in public, believing that “unworthy people should not live” and that doctors must take care of the “unworthy”. Rudin’s boisterous views were actually heard by Hitler, who recruited Rudin to take an integral part in the creation of the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health in 1933. The law required sterilization of those with unfit characteristics such as physical abnormalities, mental disorders, epilepsy and schizophrenia. Josef, who was constantly exposed to scientifically-racial propaganda, became more interested genetic abnormalities and diseases. Through his research, he sought to verify his assertions. He would become the cold-hearted Auschwitz monstrosity because of his burning desire for proof about human genetics and anomalies.
The SA absorbed Steel Helmuts in 1933. However, Mengele was exhausted and in poor physical condition when he resigned from the organization. This lack of commitment enabled Mengele to have more time to pursue his studies and his degree. T. Mollinson was his mentor and awarded Mengele a Ph.D. Mollinson supported Hitler’s ideas and allowed them to cloud his scientific work with racism and slander. Mengele was however unbiased in his research. His dissertation, entitled “Racial Morphological Research in the Lower Jaw Sections Of Four Racial Groups”, was the one that earned him his doctorate. It stated that there was a clear, concise difference between these groups, but it did not explain the inferiority or superiority that many of his scientific colleagues had included. Josef was able to pass his medical exams and was soon placed in a permanent, paid position as a junior resident doctor at the University Medical Clinic Leipzig. He met his first wife and love of life, Irene Schoenbein. She was the daughter of the University president.
Mengele was tired of working as a junior doctor in a difficult hospital setting for four months and decided to return to the work that he loved, genetics. Professor Mollinson recommended Mengele to be appointed to the position of research assistant at Professor Otmar Friedherr von Vershuer’s Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity, University of Frankfurt. Von Vershuer, a distinguished European geneticist, engaged in twin research that would ultimately consume Mengele’s work in Auschwitz.
Mengele became Von Vershuer’s favorite pupil and mentor. The Nazi ideals of “racial purification”, sterilization of unworthy people, and sterilization of the unfit continued at the Institute. The Institute was deeply committed to the preservation of the Nordic-rooted Aryan Race and its succession. Neben von Vershuer’s twin study, Mengele along his mentor performed “racial purity” interviews at Institute. Many patients received sterilization sentences as a condition of their release. They also interviewed possible felons who had broken the Nuremberg Race Law to determine if a person is truly Jewish. His work helped him to come closer to the Nazi ideals he once rejected. Josef joined NSDAP as a member 5574974 after five months of employment at the Institute. Mengele was accepted into the elite SS, Schutszshaffel, one year after he joined. His family’s racially-pure and untinted history and his unquestionable dedication to the racial purity Aryans, made it possible for him to be accepted. Mengele decided to not have his bloodtype tattooed onto him when he was admitted into this small army of Hitler’s race guardians. This would prove to be a lifesaver in the years ahead. Mengele was also awarded a medical degree by the Frankfurt Institute in the same year. The award could have been made due to his Nazi friendly mentor and party affiliation.
After a long and tedious examination of his fiance’s family lineage, Mengele married Irene in July 1939. The marriage was permitted after much discussion about her legally absent Aryan greatgrandfather. His children were not considered “pure Aryan” and he would not receive presents from Himmler for every child. Josef was determined to defend Germany’s degenerate race a few weeks later. As a Waffan medical corps member, he went to war in 1940. Within weeks of his arrival in Ukraine, he received the Iron Cross Second-class. Mengele earned the Iron Cross First Class one year later when he saved two Germans from an encroaching tank. Josef was also awarded the Black Badge for the Wounded along with the Medal for the Protection of the German People.
Mengele was permanently expelled from the battlefields Father Germany’s War in 1942 and joined von Vershuer at Berlin’s Race and Resettlement Office. Mengele was appointed to the Race and Resettlement Office within five months. He was then sent to Auschwitz to be the women’s inmate physician. As an inmate surgeon, Mengele had to decide which of the newcomers were to go to concentration camp work and which were to go straight to the gas chamber for execution using Zyklon B. Mengele adapted quickly to his new environment and job. He was thrilled to have so much material for his genetic and twin research.
Mengele, despite not having the same squeamish resentment that many of his assigned doctors felt for the terrible conditions and mistreatment at Auschwitz was able to smile as he stood on the ramp, perfectly dressed in his uniform, shining black boots and white spotless gloves. He also had a riding crop in his hand, and his uniform was well-pressed. Many inmate doctors arrived at the ramps intoxicated, which dampened their emotions and senses for the difficult decisions ahead. Mengele was always sober and graceful, no matter what his assignment to the selection process. Dr. Olga Lengyel a fellow inmate, recalls Mengele’s jovial attitude on the ramp during selections processes.
We detested his detached, self-important air, his constant whistling, as well as his brutal cruelty. He watched the miserable, exhausted crowd of cattle trucks passengers and their children struggle on, day after another, until he finally retired to his spot. He would point his (riding) crop at every person and say one word to direct them: “right” or,” Lynott said.
Mengele sent 600 people from his women’s camp hospital to the gas chamber as soon as he arrived. He used to torture the women he sent for death by making them wear naked in front SS guards.
Mengele was cruel, cold-hearted, and had a fiery temper. He would often act abruptly or unintentionally. Gisella perl, another prisoner doctor, recalls Mengele’s anger at a female inmate who attempted to escape sixth times while being transported together to the gas room.
He grabbed her neck and beat her to death. He hit her, punched her, and boxed them, always her head, screaming, “You want freedom, don’t ya?” You can’t escape now. You are going be burned like the others. Within seconds, her straight, pointed nasal was covered in blood. Dr. Mengele returned the hospital half an hours later. He reached into his bag to grab a bar of perfumed soap. With a deep smile and a wistful smile, he began washing his hands (Lynott).
Mengele was passionate about genetic research and managed an Auschwitz laboratory. There he studied twins (and dwarfs) as well any other deformed persons he saw on the ramp. His subjects received better food rations and more comfortable sleeping arrangements. He clothed his subjects with more clothes than many prisoners in the laboratory. And unlike the camp workers, which had their hair cut at the beginning of each day, he allowed them to keep their hair. Mengele did not think differently of his subjects than he did about the prisoners, even though he allowed them better living conditions. Mengele believed Jews were vermin and that Roma threatened the health of the German superrace. Mengele believed that Jews and Roma were vermin, as he was taught at the University of Munich from his early years of higher education.
His assistants and he would walk up the ramp to search for twin children among the filthy prison inmates. The men shouted, “Twins! Twins!” and mothers held on to their twin babies, not knowing if they would be freed or sent straight to the gas chamber. The Mengele laboratory’s bloodthirsty madman caused the deaths of the twins he found and took to him. He often bled children and transferred one pair of twins’ blood to another, causing unbearable headaches and high fevers for several days. One time he almost killed a child. Mengele loved using one twin for control and the second as an experiment. In order to determine how long the twins could be infected, Mengele placed them in isolation, used painful stimuli and performed surgery without anesthesia to remove limbs or organs. Mengele became interested in the “noma” defect, which he found particularly interesting. Nomas can be caused by the grim and filthy conditions at Auschwitz. Mengele searched in vain for the reason behind nomas while he was at Auschwitz. The noma is a result of a bacteria infection. His work on eye color was another favorite. Mengele tried to permanently alter the color of an eye by injecting methylene into twins. He was particularly interested in studying patients with heterochemia (two-colored eyes). Mengele would inject chloroform into a subject’s heart to immediately dissect it. His mentor von Vershuer often received specimens from eyeballs and other parts. This was in support of his fairy tale theories. Auschwitz’s research didn’t involve any real science. It was based only on Mengele fantasies and hypotheses. Mengele’s coldness and indifference to the value or life could also be a part of it.
Josef Mengele was one of the few survivors who managed to escape Auschwitz before it was liberated. Mengele sought refuge in other camps like Gross-Rosen or Mauthausen before they were liberated. Mengele was eventually captured and made a POW. He was freed on the grounds that he didn’t appear to be an enemy because he had no tattoo of blood on his arm, as most SS members. Mengele managed to escape the Allies and flee to South America. He took various aliases and married Martha, his brother Karl, in South America. His 1964 degree was withdrawn by the University of Munich and his medical degree withdrawn by the University of Frankfurt. On February 7, 1979, he drowned after a stroke while swimming which prevented him from returning to shore. Josef Mengele was positively identified as Wolfgang Gerhard’s body in 1985 after his body was exhumed. Mengele’s body, along with his experiments and victims, is now buried in ground.
