The eldest of Walburga and her husband Karl Mengele’s three sons, Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg. Karl Jr. and Alois were his two younger brothers. Their father founded the farming machinery manufacturer Karl Mengele & Sons. Mengele excelled in school and acquired interests in music, painting, and skiing. He graduated from high school in April 1930 while studying philosophy at Munich, the Nazi Party’s headquarters; he was influenced by Alfred Rosenberg’s racial doctrines. His initial medical exam was completed when he was enrolled at the University of Bonn.
His Nazi sympathies deepened at this time, and in 1933 Josef decided to join the Sturmabteilung, also dubbed as “Assault Division.” He joined a research section regarding Racial Hygiene and Hereditary Biology soon after, in 1934, in Frankfurt. He was a medical officer in the Waffen-SS, a German paramilitary force stationed in France and Russia during World War II.
Heinrich Himmler, who was camped at Birkenau, named him the chief doctor at the auxiliary concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1943, where he and his team picked apart arriving Jews into two factions of labor or to be exterminated at the gas chambers and oversaw medical tests on inmates to develop methods of raising reproduction to help populate the Germans. This is where the true horror of the Angel of Death was unearthed.
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Von Verschuer And Josef Mengele
The relationship between Josef and his teacher was such that Mengele was inspired to use twins in their medical study by his mentor, Verschuer. He worked in Frankfurt for the German geneticist who had a particular interest in twin research, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. To determine the genetic causes of numerous disorders, Verschuer himself became well-known for performing experiments on fraternal and identical twins.
In 1938, he obtained an honorary doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for his dissertation on genetic studies. Mengele was esoteric regarding the study of what genetically caused either a cleft lip and palate or a cleft chin while working as Von Verschuer’s assistant.
Mengele was raised to the rank of an SS captain in April 1943 after being sent to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office’s Berlin headquarter, where he reestablished his relationship with Von Verschuer. Von Verschuer pushed Mengele to request deportation to Auschwitz II in Birkenau, which was originally designed to house slave workers but was soon used as a mixed detention center and death camp facility.
Where his popularity would rise as the angel that brought death upon all in the camp. The mentor played a huge part in his budding cruelty by aiding him by urging the German Research Foundation to grant him the authority to ship dissected human specimens and medical reports.
The Auschwitz Twins And Other Experiments
Josef Mengele continued his anthropological study and hereditary studies in Auschwitz, subjecting prisoners to human experiments. His medical techniques demonstrated little regard for the victims’ wellbeing, security, or discomfort on a physical or mental level. He had a special interest in physically atypical persons, including dwarfs, monozygotic twins, and those with heterochromia iridium.
To provide “research material” to his associate Karin Magnussen, a KWI scientist doing in-depth research on eye coloration, Mengele acquired the eyeballs of his dead victims during his time in Auschwitz. He also undertook various tests to uncover the secrets of altering eye color artificially.
He also sought to show the deterioration of Jewish blood by documenting physiological anomalies and collecting and extracting tissue and viscera. Many of his “research participants” perished as a consequence of the experiment or were killed in gas chambers or otherwise to allow for post-mortem investigation. A Hungarian Jewish man, Miklós Nyiszli, a physician and pathologist, was forced to work on his kin with the Angel of Death.
The twin study was partly designed to support the Nazi theory that the Aryan race was genetically superior by demonstrating the superiority of heredity over the environment in determining phenotypes. In addition to being directly accountable for the murders of an undetermined number of victims who were executed using lethal injection, gunshots, floggings, and his fatal experiments while they addressed him as “Uncle Mengele”, he provided them candy. His heinous crimes towards all Jews and Gypsies, including their pregnant, are written in the scattered bones at Auschwitz, but Josef Mengele’s life would not end just yet.
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Death Of An Angel
Josef Mengele lived for four years as a field stableman close to Rosenheim in the state of Bavaria after World War II after evading incarceration. In 1949, he allegedly fled to South America through Genoa, Italy. In 1958, he got remarried in Uruguay using his name, and in 1959, he applied for citizenship in Paraguay using the name “José Mengele.” He reportedly relocated to Brazil in 1961, where he supposedly made friends with Wolfgang Gerhard, a former Nazi, and lived in a string of homes of a Hungarian family.
Auschwitz concentration campA group of forensic specialists from Brazil, West Germany, and the United States concluded in 1985 that Mengele had stolen Gerhard’s identity, died of a stroke while swimming in 1979, and set in a grave under Gerhard’s name, supposedly after killing the man.
The forensic result was later verified by dental records. His atrocities have been recalled by the few that escaped the Auschwitz horror. Josef Mengele’s deeds have been set in history through David G. Marwell’s “Mengele: Unmasking the ‘Angel of Death”, a 2006 documentary called “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” and “The German Doctor” in 2013.
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