Many Jews, Roma, enemies of Nazis and others arrived at Auschwitz confused, hungry, thirsty, and in terrible, rickety cattle wagons. The blinding sun reflected off the huge cattle car doors, and the terrified people couldn’t make out the silhouettes the intimidating uniformed men who shouted orders at them and pulled on the exhausted 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. He was Walburga and Karl’s first child after Walburga died in stillbirth. 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. With only seven employees, Andreas quit the partnership after a few years and relinquished all control to Karl. Karl was able to quickly make the business flourish. By Josef’s birth, his father had become 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 considered Walburga to be a person incapable or loveable. Karl was driven to the farm more often than usual, whether it was because his domineering and cold-hearted wife, or his desire to keep his success in the farm machinery business. The family grew despite Karl’s absence 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. later left for war. He gave all the business power to Walburga who was a cruel and fearsome dictator. 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, who was known by family and friends as “Beppo”, was a bright, ambitious young boy. Many considered him the role model for obedience in their community. Josef almost drowned while he was just six years old after he fell in a rainwater basin he was using. He was also nearly killed by blood poisoning during his childhood. Josef was resentful towards his brothers Karl and Anna, his younger brother. The three of them grew up and formed close bonds. This was despite the fact that their parents were not loving them. Josef was not the best in his class, but he did well at school. 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, bacterial, or bacterial infection. The pus can block blood flow and cause an abscess. 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. He was still active in the community’s good, despite his disdain for the Church. He joined the Red Cross and a local patriotic youth organization. Mengele was a handsome young adult who grew up with charisma and punctuality. Mengele took pride in his appearance and added his charming charm to his other qualities.
Josef graduated with a degree from the Gymnasium in 1930. He also received descent grades. His ambition was to continue studying his favorite subjects of anthropology as well as genetics. Josef believed his family would love to have a Mengele scientist as a member of their family. Unfortunately, his father had different plans for him, and he wanted to continue the family’s business that had made them so wealthy. Mengele left behind his sheltered upbringing and moved to Munich. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Munich to study medicine as well as 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 started his academic journey at the University of Munich on September 14, 1930. The National Socialist Party won 18 percent of the votes for the Reichstag election. They were the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament. The party won 107 Reichstag seats, compared to 12 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 scheming for his business. Hitler, through his passionate speeches on “unworthy Lives” and purification, began to influence academics and medical experts in Munich. Mengele was regularly lectured by Dr. Ernst Rudin at the University. Rudin planted the seeds for a coldblooded 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. Individuals with unfit characteristics (e.g., physical abnormalities or epilepsy, Huntington’s, Huntington, and manic depression) were subject to sterilization. Josef, who was constantly exposed to scientifically-racial propaganda, became more interested genetic abnormalities and diseases. Through his research, he sought out evidence to support his claims. 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, but Mengele, suffering from renal trouble, had no choice but to quit the organization. Because he was not committed, he had more time to do his research and pursue his degree. T. Mollinson was his mentor and awarded Mengele a Ph.D. Mollinson openly supported Hitler’s ideas and allowed it to cloud his scientific work with racism and slander. Mengele was however unbiased in his research. His dissertation entitled “Racial Morphological Research of the Lower Jaw Sections Four Racial Groups” that earned him his degree was entitled “Racial Morphological Research of the Lower Jaw Sections Four Racial Groups”. He claimed that there was clear and precise difference between the groups. But, he did not offer the explanations of inferiority, superiority, or both that his scientific colleagues included. Josef passed the medical examinations the following summer and was quickly appointed to a full time, paying job as a junior doctor at 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 favourite pupil, and Von Vershuer was his mentor. Both of them continued the Nazi ideals for “racial purification”, sterilization of unworthy and unfit people, 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 were sentenced to sterilization 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 aswell as his unquestionable dedication to the racial purity Aryan race 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 act would prove to be a lifesaver in the years ahead. Mengele received his medical degree from the Frankfurt Institute the following year. It was possible that Mengele had been awarded this award due to his Nazi friend mentor and party affiliation.
After much deliberation about his fiance’s racial purity, Mengele married Irene in July 1939. The marriage was permitted after much discussion about her legal Aryan greatgrandfather. His children were not considered pure Aryans and he would not receive presents from Himmler. Josef became 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, now permanently banned from Father Germany’s battlefields, was posted to Berlin at the 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. His job as an inmate doctors involved deciding which new arrivals should be sent to work in concentration camps. Those who were not selected were then sent to the gas chamber where they would be slowly killed with Zyklon B. Mengele adapted quickly to his new environment and job. Mengele was thrilled to have so much material for his genetic and twin research.
Mengele did not have the squeamish hatred that some assigned doctors held for the horrific conditions and mistreatment at Auschwitz. He seemed to love the power that he had and stood flawlessly on the ramp wearing his shiny black boots, spotless gloves, clean uniform and a smiling face. Many inmate physicians arrived on the ramps drunk, dampening their emotions and reducing their awareness of the consequences. 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 desperate swarms of women, children, and men struggling along the road to the finish line of the inhuman cattle trucks ride. He would point at each person with his (riding-crop) crop and give directions with just one word: “right”, “left”, “right” (Lynott).
Mengele sent 600 people from 600 hospitals to the gas chamber during his first days in the women’s camps. He used to torture the women he sent for death by making them dress 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 with his fist and boxed her. 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 took out some soap, and began to wash the hands. Lynott smiled at him, as he whistled with deep satisfaction.
Mengele, still passionate about genetic research, ran an Auschwitz laboratory where he studied twins and dwarfs as well as any other deformed creatures he encountered on the ramp. His subjects received better food rations and better sleeping arrangements. He clothed his subjects in more than just the rags used by prisoners outside of the laboratory. His subjects were also allowed to keep their hair longer than camp workers, who had it cut off at arrival. 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, Roma and other vermin were a threat to the German super-race’s vitality. 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 twins among the filthy prisoners. The men called out “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 took the twins to its bloody lab. He then made it clear that the children suffered terrible. He would often bleed children and transfer one pair of twins’ blood to another. This caused the children to have a severe headache and high fever for several days. One time he almost killed a child. Mengele liked using one twin to control the other and 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 and 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 spent a lot of time searching Auschwitz for the genetic or racial cause of the noma. The nomadic condition is simply due to 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 did not involve real science. It was based solely on Mengele’s fantasies and hypotheses about race and science. These theories were also influenced by the Nazi party, as well jaded scholars and medical experts. Mengele’s cold attitude and indifference to the value of human life can be seen in a small portion 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 captured as a POW. His lack of a tattoo indicating his blood type, which is what most SS members had, meant that he wasn’t considered an enemy and was allowed to be released. Mengele managed to flee to South America in the wake of confusion from the Allies. He adopted various aliases and married Martha his brother Karl. 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 positive identified as the owner of Wolfgang Gerhard’s corpse in 1985. Mengele’s body, along with his experiments and victims, is now buried in ground.