Dr. Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, the eldest of three sons of Karl and
Walburga Mengele. Josef was refined, intelligent and popular in his town. He
studied philosophy at Munich and
medicine at Frankfurt University.
In 1935 his dissertation dealt with racial differences in the structure of the
lower jaw.
In 1937 he joined the Nazi party, then in 1938 he went to
the SS. In 1942 he was wounded at the Russian front and was pronounced unfit
for duty. After that he volunteered to go to the concentration camp, he was
sent to the death camp, Auschwitz. Dr. Josef Mengele,
nicknamed "the Angel of Death", became the surviving symbol of Adolf
Hitler's "Final Solution".
At death camps like Auschwitz
children did not fare well: they were generally killed upon arrival. Children
born in the camps were generally killed on the spot, especially if the child
was Jewish. So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele,
would torture Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. "Patients"
were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death,
and exposed to various other traumas.
Mengele was always immaculately prepared for the
long-drawn-out rituals of death, the hellish selections which the young SS
doctor so regularly attended during his twenty-one months at Auschwitz.
Josef Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers and their crematoria.”
He had a look that said 'I am the power,'" said one survivor. When it was
reported that one block was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by
gassing all the 750 women assigned to it. At the time, Mengele was only 32
years old.
The Angel of Death fed his legend by dramatizing murderous
policies, such as his drawing a line on the wall of the children's block
between 150 and 156
centimeters (about 5 feet or 5 feet 2 inches) from the floor. Then
sending those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber ...
(Lifton, p. 346.)
The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out
of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his
Death's Head SS cap tilted rakishly to one side, remains vivid for those who
survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz
railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt,
he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to
the right. Four hundred thousand souls - babies, small children, young girls,
mothers, fathers, and grandparents - are said to have been casually waved to
the left-hand side with a flick of the cane clasped in a gloved hand.
In another case in which a mother did not want to be
separated from her thirteen-year-old daughter, and bit and scratched the face
of the SS man who tried to force her to her assigned line, Mengele drew his gun
and shot both the woman and the child. As a blanket punishment, he then sent to
the gas all people from that transport who had previously been selected for
work, with the comment: "Away with this shit!" (Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors.)
There were moments when his death mask gave way to a more
animated expression, when Mengele came alive. There was excitement in his eyes,
a tender touch in his hands. This was the moment when Josef Mengele, the
geneticist, found a pair of twins. Mengele was almost fanatical about drawing blood from twins,
mostly identical twins. He is reported to have bled some to death this way.
Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins
during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table
and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their
hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele then began dissecting and
meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies. At Auschwitz Mengele did a number of twin studies, and these
twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies
dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn
together to create Siamese twins; the hands of the children became badly
infected where the veins had been infected.
Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an
attempt to change their eye color. Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over
the experiments enabled Mengele to do his work more effectively. The full
extent of his gruesome work will never be known because the records he sent to
Dr. Von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were shipped out in two
truckloads and destroyed by the latter.
Twins undergoing his experiments didn't know what the
objectives were. It is known that he had a special pathology lab where he
performed autopsies on twins who had died from experiments. It was located next
to the crematorium.
Any remaining notes Mengele carried with him on his escape
to South America and those were never found. Some forty
years after the war, only a few of these twins could be found, many living in Israel
and the United States.
Strangely enough, many of them recall Mengele as a gentle, affable man who
befriended them as children and gave them chocolates. Since many had
immediately been separated from their families upon entering the camp, Mengele
became a sort of father figure. Still a tension existed, that at any time they
could be killed if they did not keep a low profile. Older twins recognized his
kindness as a deception ...
Mengele performed both physical and psychological
experiments, experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions
of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various
stimuli. He made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the
removal of organs and limbs, incestuous impregnations.
The book "Children of the Flames" by Joe E. White chronicles
the notorious medical experimental activities of Josef Mengele on approximately
three thousand twins who passed through the Auschwitz
death camp during WWII until its liberation at the end of the war. Only a few
of the three thousand twins survived and now fifty years later they have told
their story of how they were given special privileges in Auschwitz due to
Mengele’s interest in twins and how as a result they have suffered during the
past fifty years as the children who survived the still unknown and unexplained
medical experiments and injections which they were subjected to at the hands of
Josef Mengele.The survivors tell how as children in Auschwitz
they were visited by a smiling "Uncle Mengele" who brought them candy
and clothes. Then he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in
trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car to undergo
his experiments.
One twin recalls the death of his brother: "Dr. Mengele
had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he
was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his
spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out
his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I
cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They
had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin
..."
The twins, Bernard and Simon Zajdner, born Dec. 28, 1929, were deported with
their sister, Micheline, on May 20, 1944.They were victims of Josef Mengele's
inhuman "medical experiments." Eva Mozes and her identical twin,
Miriam, were survivors of the deadly genetic experiments conducted by Josef
Mengele. Their parents, grandparents, two older sisters, uncles, aunts and
cousins were killed in the Holocaust. After the liberation of the camp, Eva and
Miriam were the first two twins in the famous film taken by the Soviets - often
shown in footage about the horrors of Holocaust.
Likewise at Auschwitz Dr. Herta Oberhauser killed children
with oil and evipan injections, removed their limbs and vital organs, rubbed
ground glass and sawdust into wounds. She drew a twenty-year sentence as a war
criminal, but was released in 1952 and became a family doctor at Stocksee in Germany.
Her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1960. (Laska) Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save
gas, "cost- accountant considerations" led to an order to place
living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.
Josef Mengele left Auschwitz
disguised as a member of the regular German infantry. He turned up at the
Gross-Rosen work camp and left well before it was liberated on February 11, 1945. He was then seen
at Matthausen and shortly after he was captured as a POW and held near Munich.
He was released by the allies, who had no idea that he was in their midst.
Mengele gave an Italian residency document with a false name and permission to
enter Argentina.
He received his passport in 1949. So Mengele fled to South America,
but moved from country to country afraid of being caught There were many
warrants, rewards, and bounties offered, but he was lucky.
Josef Mengele hid in
South America after the war and he divorced Irene
Mengele. In 1958, Mengele married his brother Karl's widow, Martha, and later
she and her son Rolf moved to Argentina
to join Mengele. Mengele's life had now established itself into the comfortable
and secure routine of a family man in a 9-to-5 job with good prospects. Despite
international efforts to track him down, he was never apprehended and lived for
35 years hiding under various aliases.
The first clue that Mengele was dead and buried in a remote Brazilian cemetery came from Paraguay. A letter suggested that a man named Hans Sedlmeier, formerly deputy manager of a Bavarian factory owned by the Mengele family, might have assisted Mengele in Brazil. Sedlmeier was a familiar name to the Nazi hunters.
By the 1960s they suspected he was in contact with Mengele, believed to be hiding in South America. West German police raided Sedlmeier's residence, finding correspondence with an Austrian couple living in Brazil, the Bossarts.West German authorities then turned to Brazil, which raided the couple's home. The Bossarts admitted that Mengele had been present at the house, and that he confessed his identity after living there for a year or two. They added that they hosted him for many years, and "he was always afraid that the Jews would come and get him".
The Bossarts said they had gone on vacation with Mengele in February 1979, one afternoon he went for a swim. While in the ocean he suffered a massive stroke and began
to drown. By the time he was dragged to shore, he was dead. People didn't find
out about Mengele's death until the mid 1980's when Nazi hunters, using newly
discovered information, uncovered his grave marked "Wolfgang Gerhard"
at Embu.
One of the most important factors in identifying the body exhumed by Brazilian police, was the fact that Mengele had fractured his pelvis in a motorcycle accident at Auschwitz in 1944 and a fracture in a similar location was found on the skeleton. Another item was the gap found between the front teeth in the mandible of the skull that corresponded precisely to that found in the SS dental records of Mengele's in Germany.
With these findings on June 22, 1985, Brazilian police formally announced to the press that the remainsy, "beyond any shadow of a doubt" belonged to Mengele. It was then that his family admitted they had shielded him all those
years and they turned over his diaries and letters to investigators.
The possibility of a hoax kept the case open for several
years. It was not until 1992, after coaxing DNA from a bone, and matching it to
DNA in blood samples taken from Mengele's son and wife that the official
conclusion is announced: "The remains are those of Josef Mengele". The
mystery of Josef Mengele, the evil symbol of the Nazi's, was solved.
