Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele (* March 16, 1911 in Günzburg; † February 7, 1979 in Bertioga, Brazil) was a Nazi war criminal, medical doctor and anthropologist. After working as an assistant to the hereditary biologist and racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer from 1937, Mengele volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1940. After a front-line assignment as a troop doctor with the 5th SS Panzer Division "Wiking", Mengele was assigned as a camp doctor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from May 1943 to January 1945. In this capacity, he performed selections, supervised the gassing of victims, and conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners. He collected material and conducted studies on twin research, growth anomalies, methods of sterilizing people and transplanting bone marrow, as well as on the therapy of typhus and malaria.

After the end of World War II, Mengele was internationally sought as a Nazi war criminal but never caught. He drowned in 1979 in the Brazilian resort of Bertioga when he suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea. In 1985, in the course of an intensified manhunt, his remains, buried under a false name, were discovered and identified.

Mengele only came to the attention of the prosecution during the early 1960s in the course of the investigations into the Auschwitz trials. Before that, he had already lived undisturbed in Argentina for several years under his real name. His further escape via Paraguay to Brazil gave rise to countless speculations and legends, but could only be clarified after the discovery of his body.

After the person of Mengele had been perceived in an increasingly distorted way since the 1960s due to sensationalist press coverage and Hollywood films, research has endeavoured to "demonise" him since the mid-1980s. While the initial focus was on the circumstances of his escape and on Mengele's personality structure, in recent years the main focus has been on his integration into the basic scientific research conducted at the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes during National Socialism. Mengele's close contact with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) under Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in Berlin, to whom he sent hundreds of specimens, his human experiments on prisoners and, above all, his twin research in Auschwitz are seen by some historians as "pseudoscience", by others as part of an experimental medicine conducted unscrupulously and under racist premises.

Live

Origin and youth

Josef Mengele was the eldest of the three sons of Karl and Walburga Mengele (née Hupfauer), who had bought an agricultural machinery business in Günzburg in 1907 and built it up in just a few years to become the largest employer in the town. At the death of Mengele's father in 1959, the company Karl Mengele & Söhne employed over 2000 people worldwide. Karl Mengele fought in World War I, joined the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, during the 1920s, and was at least temporarily a member of the DNVP. He is described as conservative, but is not considered an anti-Semite. He ran unsuccessfully in 1924 and 1929 on the list of the Free Citizens' Association for the Günzburg City Council. The fact that he made one of his factory halls available for a campaign appearance by Adolf Hitler in 1932 is often cited as evidence of National Socialist sentiments, but historians agree that it was an act of solidarity within the framework of the Harzburg Front. In May 1933 Karl Mengele joined the NSDAP and apparently received a seat on the city council in return for a party donation. After criticism from party circles that he had bought his mandate, he also joined the SS in 1935. Historical research describes the family milieu from which Josef Mengele came not as a National Socialist milieu, but as a Catholic-conservative and German-national one.

Josef Mengele himself joined the Greater German Youth League (GDJ) in 1924, which belonged to the Bündische Jugend. Between 1927 and 1930 he presided over the Günzburg local group as "Ältestenführer". Although the GDJ was anti-Semitic in orientation and represented an aggressive nationalism, Mengele's membership is not seen as an expression of an already National Socialist worldview, because the GDJ is rather assigned to the spectrum of the "Conservative Revolution".

Study

After passing his Abitur in 1930, Josef Mengele enrolled in medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and moved to Bonn in the third semester because of a private relationship. Consciously, as he himself describes it, he did not join a beating student fraternity, as he did not like their drinking habits. In May 1931, however, he joined the Jungstahlhelm. In his diary, Mengele explained this in 1974 by saying that he had observed a communist demonstration with a fellow student and had thus come to the conclusion that it was time to take sides politically. In the summer of 1932 Mengele passed the physics examination and returned to Munich in the summer of 1933 after a semester in Vienna. He now also enrolled in anthropology, which was taught in the natural history section of the Faculty of Philosophy.

Mengele received his doctorate in 1935 from the director of the Munich Anthropological Institute, Theodor Mollison, with the highest grade on "Racial Morphological Investigation of the Anterior Mandibular Section in Four Racial Groups". For this purpose he examined 123 mandibles from the Munich State Anthropological Collection, i.e. predominantly material from the early history of mankind (ancient Egyptians, Melanesians, short- and long-skinned Europeans, Ofnet skulls/Stone Age). He was interested in proving that these jaw sections could be used to determine the affiliation to different "races". The medical historians Udo Benzenhöfer, Hanns Ackermann and Katja Weiske point out that this work does not stand up to a critical analysis of the methodology, not even from the perspective of the year 1935. It is to be regarded as "pseudo-science or delusion".

In the summer of 1936 Mengele passed the medical state examination. After a four-month internship at the Children's Hospital of the University of Leipzig, he accepted a position as an assistant at the University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt am Main in 1937, which was headed by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer at the time. He started there on 1 January 1937, initially as a medical trainee, and received his medical license on 1 September. In the month of September 1937 he was listed as a volunteer, and from October 1 as a fellow of the Kerckhoff Foundation. Mollison and Verschuer are considered to be the ones who awakened Mengele's interest in hereditary pathology and racial hygiene.

Assistant to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer

Verschuer gained particular importance for Mengele's further career. Verschuer had made his name with studies on hereditary biology and habilitated in 1927 on heredity in twins. Verschuer did not join the NSDAP until 1940, but never left any doubt that he unreservedly supported National Socialist racial hygiene. He not only worked on the inheritance of diseases and their hereditary prognosis, but also gave expert opinions on forced racial sterilizations and in trials on so-called "racial defilement" according to the Nuremberg Laws. Mengele, whom his institute colleague Hans Grebe described after the war as Verschuer's "favourite pupil", collaborated on such expert opinions or drew up his own.

Mengele was probably awarded his doctorate in June 1938, also with the highest grade, with "Sippenuntersuchungen bei Lippen-Kiefer-Gaumspalte," an attempt to prove statistically its heritability. On June 1 or July 16, 1938, he accepted an assistant position in Verschuer's Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. For his doctorate, Mengele selected 17 subjects who had undergone surgery for their cleft lip and palate in the children's ward of the Frankfurt University Surgical Clinic between 1925 and 1935. Through the "Sippenuntersuchung" he identified a total of 1222 people, of whom he personally visited 583. The medical historians Udo Benzenhöfer and Katja Weiske note that Mengele focused on so-called "micro-manifestations", since the rate of heredity determined on the basis of the main forms was obviously not sufficient for him. According to Benzenhöfer, it was actually not at all certain whether these "micromanifestations" could even be counted as cleft lip and palate. One may therefore assume that Mengele wanted to "achieve a high heritability rate". By taking at least one "micromanifestation" into account, Mengele initially achieved a heritability rate of 100%. He lowered this rate again by arbitrarily making the simultaneous occurrence of two "micromanifestations" (instead of only one) a condition. The rate achieved in this way (heritability in 13 out of 17 families) was significantly higher than in comparable contemporary research on the subject.

Both doctoral degrees were revoked from Mengele because of his crimes committed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1960 and 1961 respectively. This decision became legally effective on September 23, 1963.

With the incorporation of the Stahlhelm into the SA in November 1933, Mengele also belonged to the SA, but resigned from it in October 1934 with reference to a kidney disease that had existed since his youth. In 1937 he applied for membership in the NSDAP (membership number 5,578,974), which took place on 1 April 1938. In 1938, he joined the SS (SS no. 317,885). Hans Münch, who was also a doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp, attested to Mengele in 1985 that he had "[a]bsent cool career considerations and out of full political conviction" set himself on the track "that finally led him to Auschwitz in May 1943".

Mengele did not engage in any significant political activities. From 24 October 1938 to 21 January 1939, he performed basic military service, shortened to three months, with the 19th Company of the Mountain Infantry Regiment 137 in Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer. In July 1939 he married Irene Schoenbein, whom he had met in Leipzig. Because his wife's father's grandfather was unknown, the couple's entry in the "Sippenbuch der SS" (SS clan book) was rejected by the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (Main Race and Settlement Office). After the beginning of World War II, Mengele initially remained at the Frankfurt Institute until he was drafted into the Wehrmacht's Sanitätsersatzabteilung 9 in Kassel on 15 June 1940. According to lecture notes, Mengele was still listed as an assistant in Frankfurt until the end of the war.

army doctor

Allegedly because he was harassed by an instructor, Mengele enlisted in the Waffen-SS and, with the rank of Hauptscharführer, completed military medical training with the Waffen-SS Medical Inspectorate from early August to early November 1940. In September 1940 he was retroactively promoted to Untersturmführer. In the meantime - apparently already immediately after his transfer to the Waffen-SS - he was seconded to the "Resettlement Office" in Łódź and to the "Immigration Office" in Posen of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality, where he provided expert opinions on the racial-biological classification of ethnic German resettlers according to the standards of the German National List within the framework of the National Socialist "Germanization" policy. Probably with the formation of the division from February to May 1941, at the latest at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was transferred as a troop doctor to the SS division "Wiking" (SS Pioneer Battalion 5). The fact that Mengele took part in the Russian campaign from the beginning is proven by his meeting with a student friend at the front near Dnepropetrovsk in the summer of 1941. The division is held responsible for massacres of Jews in July 1941.

For his actions in the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross I and II Class. Class and was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer. There are different statements about how long Mengele fought with the division "Wiking" at the front. Later statements by war comrade and later Auschwitz concentration camp doctor Horst Fischer, von Verschuer, and Mengele's wife Irene indicate that Mengele did not return from the front until mid-January 1943 due to a wound. In October 1942, he was still listed as a troop doctor in his unit and proposed for promotion. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that he complied with an order to transfer to the Reichsarzt SS und Polizei on 23 July 1942. After evaluating hitherto unknown field post letters and photographs dated September and October 1942, it can now be considered certain that Mengele returned to his unit and position on the Eastern Front as early as the beginning of September 1942, after a first wounding and a furlough in Freiburg in August 1942. It is also certain that Mengele was transferred to the SS Replacement Battalion "East" on 14 February 1943 and, after his promotion to SS Hauptsturmführer (April 1943), was seconded to the Auschwitz concentration camp by the SS Central Command on 24 May 1943, effective 30 May 1943.

camp doctor

Mengele served as chief camp doctor of the "Gypsy camp" Auschwitz B II until its dissolution in August 1944. He then became the chief camp doctor at the "prisoner infirmary camp" (HKB) B IIf, and in December 1944 he became the troop doctor at the SS troop hospital in Birkenau. However, he also took on duties in other camp sections of the concentration camp. His superior in the Auschwitz concentration camp was SS site physician Eduard Wirths. Mengele left Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the direction of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, which had been designated as a reception camp. Mengele's transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp has given rise to speculation. It has been speculated that Mengele volunteered in order to avoid having to return to the front, or that von Verschuer may have worked behind the scenes to have Mengele as a confidant in the death camp who could provide research material. On the one hand, it is considered likely that the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office needed a replacement at short notice due to the sudden and prolonged illness of Benno Adolph, the camp doctor of the "Gypsy camp" that had just been set up, and Mengele was just available at the replacement battalion.

On the other hand, it is documented that during his stay in Berlin Mengele was unofficially at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem, which Verschuer had taken over as director in 1942. Verschuer had intended to bring Mengele to Dahlem on occasion anyway. The historian Benoit Massin considers Verschuer's assistant Siegfried Liebau to be the key figure. Liebau had virtually brokered an "alliance between Verschuer and the SS". As a personnel officer in the Waffen-SS medical office, he had signed Mengele's transfer to the Reichsarzt SS in 1942, also worked there during Mengele's informal stay at the KWI-A, and had not only already been to the Auschwitz concentration camp before Mengele's transfer, but had also brought the researcher Karin Magnussen photographs of "gypsies" with different-colored eyes from there. This connection and a statement by Hans Münch that Mengele had asked for the transfer "because of the great research possibilities" lead Massin to conclude that Mengele's presence in Auschwitz was no coincidence.

What Mengele did in Auschwitz emerges primarily from the testimonies of survivors, not least because he took his documents with him and the camp SS attempted to destroy the camp files and hospital records shortly before their escape. On the basis of his review of the files of the investigation by the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor's Office, Ernst Klee warned that statements about Mengele should be "treated with the utmost caution," since according to them Mengele had "raged" simultaneously in the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and the satellite camps. However, Mengele's area of operation had been Birkenau. Witness statements can be erroneous, but especially in Mengele's case there are statements from prisoner doctors and nurses who had to work closely with him in the Auschwitz concentration camp, sometimes over long periods of time, so that their statements have been evaluated as valid in various investigations. Mengele himself left no records of his time in Auschwitz.

Head camp doctor of the "gypsy camp

Various prisoners report that Mengele made efforts to improve the situation immediately after his arrival at Auschwitz. He instructed the kapos not to beat any prisoners to death, ensured that the children in particular received sufficient and regular care, allowed sports such as soccer, and showed himself to be open to the prisoners' concerns. Such statements, however, are few and far between. Instead, characterizations attesting to Mengele's changeable moods and his particular willingness to participate in mass murder far outweigh them. According to one characterization by Hans Münch, he was not an opportunist, but completely convinced of the necessity of the "extermination of the Jews". He had unreservedly identified himself with his task. Hermann Langbein, a clerk for Eduard Wirths at Auschwitz, testified in 1960 in the preliminary proceedings against Mengele that he was "the most feared camp doctor" after Friedrich Entress. Mengele had prevented attempts to improve the situation of the sick prisoners. He had not only concealed the hygienic deficiencies in his camp, but had also vigorously worked to ensure that as few medicines as possible were supplied.

Mengele stood out for his particularly ruthless and inhumane way of fighting diseases and epidemics, which were widespread given the poor living conditions in the camp. When a typhus epidemic broke out at the end of 1943 in the women's camp, which was under his supervision at the time, he had the 600 inmates of an entire block gassed and then had the block disinfected. The women of the next block were then transferred to this block, the emptied block disinfected, and so on. In this way he also proceeded against Hungarian Jewish women in camp B IIc who had contracted scarlet fever, and against Jewish children in camp B IIa among whom measles had spread. In the "Gypsy camp" Mengele also sent all sick people with such potentially epidemic infections to the gas chambers. According to Rudolf Höß, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Mengele adhered to a secret order of Heinrich Himmler, according to which the sick in the Gypsy camp, especially the children, were to be eliminated inconspicuously by the doctors.

His superior Wirths nominated Mengele for the War Merit Cross in February 1944 precisely because of his work in combating the epidemic. In July 1944 Mengele directed the liquidation of the "family camp Theresienstadt", in which about 4000 people were murdered under the pretext of fighting a typhus epidemic. On 19 August 1944 Wirths judged that Mengele had "fulfilled all the tasks assigned to him, often under the most difficult conditions, to the complete satisfaction of his superiors and had shown himself equal to any situation".

Due to disease and poor nutrition, about 70% of the approximately 22,600 Sinti and Roma deported to Auschwitz - more than half of them women and children - died by the end of 1943. By the time their systematic murder began, 13,600 inmates had died. The liquidation of the "Gypsy camp", probably decided in May 1944, was advocated and implemented by Mengele. After Mengele's selection of those still able to work, who were first transferred to the main camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp and then to other concentration camps, he personally supervised the forcible liquidation of the camp on August 2, 1944. In the process, the remaining inmates, according to various accounts between 2897 and 3300, were murdered in the gas chambers.

The Polish prisoner doctors Tadeusz Śnieszko, Tadeusz Szymański and Danuta Szymańska report that Mengele's way of working as a camp doctor in the "Gypsy camp" was "very strange in general". During inspections he had shown himself to be mild, so that "even the less skilled Gypsies turned to him with their pleas and complaints and addressed him as father, little father, uncle or the like". In general, however, Mengele showed no interest in the many sick people. During delousing operations he made the sick remain naked for hours without regard to their condition, even in winter in the open air in snow and rain, so that many died. In the late autumn of 1943 he sent 60 tuberculosis patients to the gas chambers, so that no one dared to call in sick with chest pains. He fought scabies in the spring of 1944 with an acid bath, which disinfected but was life-threatening. Mengele was particularly interested in the spreading disease of noma, twins, children with congenital anomalies and people with different coloured eyes (iris heterochromia).

Selections

One of the main tasks of the camp doctors in Auschwitz was to carry out selections. The doctors made regular selections of arriving transports at the so-called ramp, but also regularly in the camp itself. They essentially decided by eye who was to be killed immediately or not. Above all, children, the old, the sick, the disabled, the weak and pregnant women were designated for immediate gassing, which was also supervised by the doctors.

It is reported of Mengele that he literally pushed himself to carry out selections, while other SS doctors like Münch avoided this task if possible. The SS man Richard Boeck from Günzburg, who was a member of the transport unit of the main camp at Auschwitz, reported in the investigation against Mengele in 1971 about the selection of a transport of Hungarian Jews. Mengele had let the column of deportees pass him by, pointing with his thumb sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. With this gesture he sent some to the gas chambers, others to the camps. Survivors report that Mengele, who was always very well-groomed and very good-looking, attracted attention because he did not look like a murderer. He sometimes smiled and sometimes whistled an opera aria, especially themes from Rigoletto.

Selections were also made time and again within the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which Mengele was the one who "always went far beyond the prescribed number". The camp elder of the Birkenau quarantine camp for Jews, Hermann Diamanski, reported in 1959 in the preliminary proceedings that Mengele went from block to block and pointed to those prisoners whom he designated for gassing or shooting. On one transport from Lithuania, through which about 80 to 90 children and youths entered the camp, Mengele set up a frame about 1.20 to 1.40 m high. Whoever passed through this frame without bumping into it was destined to be murdered. This method of selection is also confirmed by other witnesses. The prisoner scribe Tadeusz Joachimowski also described that Mengele sometimes commissioned prisoner doctors to carry out selections when he himself wanted to perform other tasks.

During selections in the infirmary, Mengele often used a kind of indirect selection, in which he asked the prisoners' doctors for a list of diagnoses and prognoses and made his decisions on the basis of these documents. Not infrequently, the prisoner doctors and nurses tried to work against Mengele, for example by writing down false prisoner numbers of the selected prisoners, skipping numbers or trying to hide selected prisoners, which sometimes, but not always, succeeded and, when Mengele discovered it, regularly led to fits of rage.

Through the selections within the camp alone, Mengele was involved in the killing of tens of thousands of people. Joachimowski estimates that Mengele sent around 51,000 women to their deaths in 1943 and 1944 in camp sections B II b, B II c, B II e and B III alone. The number of victims of his sick selections also runs into the thousands, since 400 to 800 prisoners were "sorted out" during each selection. When the "Gypsy camp" and also the "family camp Theresienstadt" were dissolved, Mengele selected the prisoners who were still fit for work and had the rest gassed.

According to the Italian Auschwitz prisoner and physician Leonardo De Benedetti, Mengele also carried out selections in the infirmary of the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp. De Benedetti reported that he had been subjected to four sick selections by Mengele in Monowitz in 1944: "In the Monowitz camp, these selections took place in two stages: The first selection was made by an SS officer, assisted by the doctors of the infirmary in the camp, and a few days later Dr. Mengele came and confirmed the selection of the first by a second, equally rapid and superficial examination." This had been "final" and constituted "an incontestable verdict and an irrevocable death sentence." De Benedetti's fellow prisoner and friend Primo Levi also testified to Mengele's presence and responsibility for 1944 sick selections at Monowitz in a statement at the Warsaw trial of Rudolf Höß in 1947.

Medical experiments and examinations

The "water crab" epidemic

Mengele paid special attention to "water cancer" (noma), a rare bacterial infectious disease. This initially causes a swelling of the cheek, which, as the inflammation progresses, develops into mouth rot and finally into rotting of the cheek with holes in the skin of the face, and finally leads to death through blood poisoning. The prerequisite for this most severe course of the disease is a considerable weakening of the body's own defences.

The "water cancer" broke out in the summer of 1943 in the "Gypsy camp", where malnutrition and hygiene deficiencies were prevalent. Children and young people in particular fell ill. "Whole pieces of flesh fell off, even the lower jaws were affected," reported Czech prisoner doctor Jan Češpiva. "I have never seen such a facial burn as there." Mengele had a separate barrack set up on the grounds of the infirmary for the sick and supervised by Jewish prisoner and pediatrician Berthold Epstein, who had been deported to Auschwitz from Prague. With the help of another prisoner doctor, Rudolf Vítek (still Rudolf Weißkopf in the camp), Epstein investigated the course, causes and cures of the disease on Mengele's behalf and reported regularly.

Mengele conducted detailed examinations of the sick, photographed the affected parts of each cheek, and commissioned an artist among the prisoners to draw the faces. The doctor Czesław Głowacki, a nurse and corpse bearer in the "Gypsy camp", also reported in an interrogation on 13 April 1972 that Mengele took secretions from the oral mucosa of sick children and injected them into healthy children. There had also been an experimental group of adults. After the injections, a rapid deterioration of the patients was observed. According to Głowacki, 3000 people died from these "vaccinations", mainly children.

It is also reported that Mengele had sick children killed in order to have them examined, and that he conducted experiments on the effect of different diets. Histopathological examinations and other laboratory analyses were carried out by the laboratory of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Raisko, where prisoners such as Václav Tomášek or Ludwik Fleck worked. Preparations of individual organs, according to Češpiva also whole children's heads, were made for the Medical Academy of the Waffen-SS in Graz. It is emphasized from various sides that Mengele was less interested in the problems of malnutrition than in the role of genetic or racial-biological factors during the entire investigations, which lasted until the dissolution of the hospital in the "Gypsy camp" in June 1943.

Twin Research

Another of Mengele's main areas of interest was twin research, which was also Verschuer's special field. Systematic twin research goes back to the British Francis Galton, who is also considered the founder of eugenics. The development of monozygotic and dizygotic twins is compared under the assumption that differences between monozygotic twins are exclusively caused by environmental influences, because these twin pairs, in contrast to dizygotic twin pairs, have identical genetic material. Since the 1920s in particular, twin research has been an internationally recognised and widespread method of investigating problems of human heredity. In Germany, it was mainly used to investigate hereditary pathological questions. At the beginning of the 1940s, the desiderata of the research consisted primarily in wanting to know what role heredity played in the reaction of humans to infections. Methodologically, however, this required studying sick twins as simultaneously as possible. In practice, however, such cases were very rare. It was even rarer to have the opportunity to perform a dissection of deceased twin pairs as soon as possible in order to be able to carry out histological or anatomical-pathological examinations.

Under this condition, it is considered very likely that Mengele saw in the Auschwitz concentration camp an opportunity for scientific profiling. Hans Münch reported that Mengele considered it irresponsible to let the opportunities for twin research at Auschwitz pass by. "If they are going to the gas anyway ...," Mengele had said. "There will never be another one, this chance." He probably intended to use the material from his twin research to qualify as a professor.

Mengele set up a so-called "kindergarten" on the grounds of the "Gypsy camp", in which all children up to the age of six were accommodated and specially looked after. The barracks were in better condition than most of the others, a regular children's playground with sandbox, swings, merry-go-round and gymnastic equipment had been set up, and the children were given better food for a while. Here, however, Mengele also carried out the first examinations on twins and accommodated further pairs of twins, which he took mainly from the constantly arriving new transports. For this purpose Mengele frequently stayed at the ramp even outside his actual duty schedule.

Mengele, however, could not carry out his extensive research without help. He made Epstein the head of his experimental laboratory and secured the cooperation of the prisoners' doctors and nurses, whom he strictly supervised and kept in the dark about the purpose of his research. In the case of the Polish anthropologist Martina Puzyna, who was ill with typhus when she met Mengele during a selection in the infirmary in March 1944, Mengele arranged for extra rations and better accommodations so that she could take anthropological measurements on twins after her recovery. She stated that rumors were circulating that "a multiplication of the Nordic race" was being sought and that the breeding of twins was being tested. She had not learned anything about the further fate of the twins.

Many prisoner doctors, in fear of their lives, followed Mengele's orders. A few chose suicide. According to a report by the head of the prisoner corpse command in Birkenau, Joseph Neumann, the physician Dr. Koblenz-Levi, who had done research on meningitis before the Second World War, was ordered by Mengele to continue his research in the Auschwitz infirmary together with his brother, who was also a physician. After a few days, however, Koblenz-Levi had told him, Neumann, "that he could not do such barbaric research. [A few days later Dr. Koblenz-Levi committed suicide, as did his brother. [...] I remember how Dr. Koblenz-Levi cried all the time at work like a little child."

The procedure developed by Verschuer and used by Mengele to distinguish between monozygotic and dizygotic twins was based on a thorough examination of various physical characteristics. Mengele used KWI-A questionnaires at Auschwitz, on the basis of which a 96-point personal file was compiled for each twin, including photographs, X-rays, regular examinations, urine and blood tests. No definite information is available as yet as to what special experiments and examinations Mengele carried out on twins.

Eva Mozes Kor, one of the few survivors and founder of CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors), recalls:

Experiments with blood transfusions, injections of foreign substances and pathogens as well as surgical procedures without anaesthesia are witnessed. It is true that the twins enjoyed a kind of special role and protection in the camp as objects of Mengele's research. At the same time, however, Mengele determined their fate without further ado. There are several reports of killings, either commissioned by Mengele or carried out by him personally, especially of cases in which one twin died a natural death and the other was killed, for example, by an injection of phenol or chloroform into the heart so that an autopsy could be performed. The pathologist and prisoner doctor Miklós Nyiszli reported in the summer of 1945 how Mengele personally killed 14 "Gypsy twins" by injection in order to have them dissected afterwards. As a rule, the victims did not notice that Mengele also killed or had them killed in the course of his investigations. Towards them, Mengele also called them "my guinea pigs", he behaved outwardly correct and accessible. Survivors therefore had difficulties after the war to admit the insincerity of Mengele's attention.

Since May 1944, the Jewish twins had been partly housed on the grounds of the infirmary (section B Ia) in barrack 22 of the women's camp. They were transferred to wooden barrack I in July 1944. Mothers with twins aged up to two years remained in barrack 22. Older boys and men were housed in barrack 15 of the men's infirmary camp in Birkenau (B IIf). After the liquidation of the "Gypsy camp", Mengele's laboratory with facilities for radiology, stomatology and ophthalmology was also located here.

With the dissolution of the "Gypsy camp" at the beginning of August 1944, the last twelve pairs of twins remaining there were killed. According to the testimony of Snieszko and the Szymanskis, Mengele shot the children in the anteroom of the Birkenau crematorium and then ordered their dissection. Miklós Nyiszli, who dissected the last of these pairs, assumes that the children were gassed.

The exact number of twins examined by Mengele is unknown. Massin estimates their number to be at least 900 in total. A prisoner nurse states that in wooden barrack I the highest number of pairs of twins was 350 and that in January 1945, shortly before the evacuation, there were still 72 twins there. Most of them were children between the ages of eight and twelve, and rarely adults. Only very few survived Auschwitz.

Eyes from Auschwitz

While Mengele primarily pursued his own research interests with his twin studies, some of his experiments are directly linked to the projects of other scientists who were conducting research at the KWI-A. For example, prisoners reported several times after 1945 that Mengele had told them that he was "working on the possibility of changing the color of the iris." Mengele was observed pouring liquids into the eyes of children, which caused the eyes to swell, fester, and redden, and also led to blindness or death. Some witnesses report a large number of prepared eyes, which Mengele apparently also sent to the KWI-A in Berlin for further examination. Mengele performed the experiments on Sinti children as well as on Jewish and non-Jewish children, including newborns.

A connection is seen between Mengele's experiments and a research project by the biologist Karin Magnussen at the KWI-A. Magnussen was working on the question of the extent to which eye color was hereditary and could serve as a basis for racial and ancestry studies. She first tested the effect of hormones and pharmacological substances on the pigmentation of the eyes of different "races" in the department of "Experimental Hereditary Pathology" headed by Hans Nachtsheim. Their experiments were reminiscent of the instillations carried out by Mengele. Since Mengele had no ophthalmological experience, he had probably obtained his substances from Magnussen. In an essay written in the summer of 1944 On the Relationships Between Iris Color, Histological Pigment Distribution, and Pigmentation of the Bulb in the Human Eye, Magnussen also reported on her examination of pairs of human eyes. In the case of 31 of these pairs of eyes, she did not provide any information about their origin, so that it is considered probable that these eyes came from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In the course of her denazification proceedings in ­1949, Magnussen did not give any further details on this, but described how she had become aware of a "Gypsy clan" - the Mechau family - as early as 1938, in which heterochromia was ­common. In the spring of 1943, shortly before the family was deported to Auschwitz as "Gypsies", she photographed the eyes of twins from this family. Mengele gave her the opportunity to continue her research. She had asked him to send her a dissection report and the pathological eye material after the death of a member of this family. Many members of this family died in Auschwitz. Although the circumstances of their deaths have not yet been fully clarified, it is considered certain that the children of the Mechau family were victims of Mengele's human experiments. The prisoner doctor Iancu Vexler, for example, testifies that Mengele instructed him to remove heterochromic eyes from members of a Gypsy family after their death, to prepare them and send them to Berlin for examination. Here Magnussen's superior Nachtsheim received the box.

Miklós Nyiszli also reports of four pairs of twins whom Mengele killed on 27 June 1944 by injecting chloroform or phenol and whose heterochromic eyes he had prepared. SS-Oberscharführer Erich Mußfeldt, commanding officer of the Sonderkommando Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, confirmed this as early as 1947.

Blood tests

Mengele officially cooperated in another research project at the KWI-A in Berlin in his function as camp doctor at Auschwitz. The biochemist Emil Abderhalden had contacted Verschuer in 1940 because he needed the blood of twins to test the "Abderhalden reaction" named after him on identical twins. Abderhalden claimed that certain reactions of the defence system stimulated the production of specific proteases. By detecting such enzymes in the blood - Abderhalden called them "defence enzymes" - it should become possible to detect diseases such as mental illness or cancer by blood tests. However, Abderhalden also believed that racial characteristics were contained in the proteins of tissue and blood.

Verschuer took up this idea and used it to develop a research project on the inheritance of "specific protein bodies", from which he obviously hoped to be able to develop a blood test to determine human racial affiliation. In an interim report from the KWI-A to the German Research Foundation, which funded the project, Verschuer explained that his assistant Mengele, who had been assigned as a camp doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp, had joined this branch of research as a collaborator. "With the approval of the Reichsführer SS, anthropological studies will be carried out on the various racial groups of this concentration camp and the blood samples sent to my laboratory for processing." The biochemist Günther Hillmann, who had been seconded from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry under Adolf Butenandt as a proven specialist in protein research, was also involved in the project. In this context, Verschuer spoke of 200 blood samples from members of different "races" that had already been examined and from which substrates had been produced.

The molecular biologist Benno Müller-Hill has linked these blood tests to another research project at the KWI-A, namely on the racial specificity of tuberculosis, worked on by Karl Diehl. According to this, Mengele had deliberately infected "gypsy" twins and Jews with tuberculosis and typhus in order to take their blood for examinations in Dahlem. This had been the content of Günther Hillmann's tests, because it had been hoped to develop a therapy on a molecular basis. His thesis is made plausible by the external circumstances, coincidences between the research projects and by what has become known about Mengele's experiments anyway.

The historian Achim Trunk, however, has asserted a different reconstruction. According to this, the tuberculosis research project and the protein body project were in fact separate from each other and not linked. Instead, Verschuer had been primarily concerned with "determining the racial specificity of protein substances", i.e. with a serological racial test. For this purpose, the test persons in Auschwitz were examined racially anthropologically, and blood was taken from them. Plasma substrate was prepared from the blood samples in Dahlem and injected into rabbits in order to be able to observe the presumed "defence enzymes". In this context, Hans-Walter Schmuhl quotes a letter from Verschuer to Diehl from 1944, through which he sees Trunk's reconstruction clearly proven. It was not a matter of detecting "defense enzymes" against tuberculosis and other infectious diseases in the blood samples taken by Mengele, but of processing the samples into substrates that were to be converted by defense enzymes obtained from rabbits.

Smallish

In addition to his interest in twins, Mengele is also reported to have paid special attention to people of short stature and those with congenital disabilities. Mention is made in this connection, for example, of a group of twenty-two Hungarian people of short stature who were taken to Auschwitz as part of the deportation of Hungarian Jews on 19 May 1944. Mengele had deferred them from selection and placed them in Block 30 of Camp Section B II b, and later in Block 9 of Women's Camp B I a, and had conducted extensive examinations. Members of this family were liberated by the Red Army. The victims of small stature in particular, despite their privileges, always assumed that they would not survive Auschwitz.

The killing of deformed people for research purposes is confirmed by various sources. Miklos Nyiszli reports that he first had to measure the people with deformities precisely. Afterwards they were ­killed by Oberscharführer Erich Mußfeldt with a small caliber rifle ­by shooting them in the neck. Nyiszli then had to dissect the corpses and finally etch them ­with chlorinated lime. He then sent the clean bones in packages to the KWI-A in Dahlem, where an "Erbbiologische Centralsammlung" was maintained. The recipients there were probably Hans Grebe and Wolfgang Abel, at the KWI-A the specialists in these fields. The number of these victims is not known.

Other medical crimes

Mengele conducted human experiments not only within the framework of his own research interests, but was also guided by the experiments of other concentration camp doctors at Auschwitz. Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann, for example, experimented on the sterilization of humans with special encouragement from Heinrich Himmler. Mengele also tested various surgical techniques for the sterilization and castration of men and women, experimented with the injection of acids into the female fallopian tube, with X-ray irradiation ­and hormone administration­. Mengele, who had no specialist training in surgery, usually performed ­these and other operations without anesthesia. Those who survived the operations were later gassed.

To all appearances, Mengele was only marginally involved in the testing of the new medicines against typhus and malaria, which the Behringwerke, Hoechst and Bayer AG sent in large quantities to the concentration camps. Stanisław Czelny, a Polish doctor who was a prisoner nurse in the "Gypsy camp," testified in the 1972 preliminary proceedings that he was first infected with typhus by Mengele in June 1943 and then treated with an unknown, apparently ineffective drug. The former corpse bearer in the infirmary, Jakov Balabau, reported that Mengele once had prisoners searched for who had already contracted malaria at least once. A total of 48 prisoners had been brought to the infirmary, led one by one into a room and killed by injection. The blood was taken from the still warm bodies, probably in the hope of being able to produce a vaccine from it.

The precinct clerk Judith Guttmann, who had originally attracted Mengele's attention as a twin, testified on January 21, 1972, that Mengele conducted experiments with "electric shocks." These involved administering electric shocks of varying strengths to approximately 70 to 80 prisoners, mostly women at Auschwitz-Monowitz, to determine at what strength they died. The survivors of this series of experiments were also gassed afterwards.

Ruth Elias, who was deported to Auschwitz as a very pregnant woman at the end of 1943, reported in her memoirs that Mengele forbade her to breastfeed her child after her delivery, apparently in order to determine how long a newborn could survive without food. After six days, she said, Mengele announced that she should get herself and her child ready to be "picked up," which meant nothing more than the announcement of her gassing. In this hopeless situation, Ruth Elias accepted a morphine injection from a prisoner doctor and killed her own child. As a young, able-bodied woman without a child, she was assigned to a transport to another camp. The historian Thomas Rahe describes this example of infanticide, which occurred repeatedly in Auschwitz in order to save at least the mother's life, as part of the counter-logic constructed by the National Socialists, which turned every rational assumption into its fatal opposite and instrumentalized the victims' intention to survive as part of the extermination plan.

Interim balance: Mengele - director of a branch of the KWI-A in Auschwitz?

The question of the extent to which Mengele conducted serious scientific research at Auschwitz, despite all the inhumanity, has recently been answered anew. Opinions about his qualities as a scientist already differed widely among those who had experienced him in Auschwitz. For Hans Münch, he was a gifted, almost prophetic scientist. Former prisoner doctors questioned the scientific nature of his work because he had only catalogued and collected, without having been able to evaluate the data he thus obtained without bias. Other prisoners considered him an obsessed megalomaniac.

Benno Müller-Hill, in a powerful interpretation of the collaboration between Mengele and Verschuer, regarded "mass murder and truth" as fundamentally incompatible and spoke of "pseudoscience". It has been objected that this interpretation exonerates science as such. For example, historian Stefanie Baumann has sharply criticized the designation of human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps as "pseudoscientific." For "the terms 'pseudomedical' experiments or 'pseudoscience', which are still used in reparations terminology today, [contribute] to the trivialization of the facts, and it was precisely the German medical profession that insisted on these terms after 1945. The distinction between serious and unserious research was intended to help excuse the 'real' scientists [...]. Thus the term 'pseudoscience' is inaccurate for the very reason that the experiments were not unscientific per se." In the discussion about the quality of National Socialist science, it is neglected that the experiments were to be rejected primarily because they were carried out on disenfranchised and defenceless people.

Ernst Klee, on the other hand, identified Mengele's experiments and killings as an "orgy of consumptive research" with science par excellence. A research project on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society uncovered that the links between elite German research institutions and Nazi violent crimes, however, were broader and more complex than these characterizations suggest. Mengele was well connected in academia and received invitations to international congresses before the war. According to historian Carola Sachse, the Mengele case shows "that there were indeed scientists in this elite organization who were able to profit from the medical crimes committed at Auschwitz by obtaining human specimens on order from there. They used this opportunity for their research, in accordance with a way of thinking that goes back a long way in experimental medicine and is by no means overcome today, which, for the sake of scientific progress in knowledge, worries as little as possible about the origin of its preparations."

Especially since various visits by Mengele to Verschuer in Dahlem are documented, Benoit Massin described Mengele as the "'institute director' of the 'Auschwitz branch'" of the KWI-A Dahlem. Hans-Walter Schmuhl finds this far-reaching interpretation problematic because it assumes an institutional connection that did not actually exist and also assumes that Mengele was too dependent on Verschuer. Schmuhl points out that Mengele also tried to integrate himself into science, for example by conducting pharmaceutical studies for IG Farben. Mengele's collaboration with various researchers such as Grebe, Abel, and Liebau, but also with the SS physician Erwin von Helmersen, who was a student of the racial hygienist Fritz Lenz and a subordinate of Mengele as a camp doctor in the "Gypsy camp" and in the prisoner hospital B II f, reveal a whole network of connections with possible other clients from science, industry, and the SS.

In a truncated form, these historical research results were perceived as if Mengele had conducted inhumane, but nevertheless serious, cutting-edge genetic research. However, it should not be overlooked that the research questions may have been on the cutting edge, but that they were above all determined by an unquestioned racism based on an organizist worldview and with a practical connection to Nazi racial policy. The American historian Sheila Weiss has also raised the question of whether Verschuer or Mengele would also have been prepared, for the sake of science, to carry out experiments on people whom they did not regard as inferior.

Verschuer, at least, lost his position at KWI-A because Robert Havemann, who had taken over as director of the KWI institutes in Berlin at the beginning of 1946, made the contacts between Mengele and Verschuer public and a commission of inquiry was set up. In interrogations by military authorities in 1947, Verschuer himself denied having known the extent of the crimes at Auschwitz; Mengele had merely told him about factories and how well he got along with his patients.

Camp doctor in the concentration camp Groß-Rosen

On January 17, 1945, the Red Army advanced on Krakow, only fifty kilometers east of Auschwitz. While camp commandant Richard Baer ordered the camp to be evacuated, Mengele left the camp by car in the direction of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, his hastily packed medical records in his luggage. From 18 January he was listed as camp doctor at Groß-Rosen. He was designated as the successor to Friedrich Entress, who had been transferred on February 6, 1945, as the new SS site doctor. After Groß-Rosen was evacuated, the commandant's staff moved to the subcamp Reichenau, from where they continued to administer the remaining subcamps in the Groß-Rosen camp complex until the end of the war. Mengele presumably also continued his activities from Reichenau, because multiple inspections of the infirmaries of various Groß-Rosen women's satellite camps in the Sudeten region are documented for February and March 1945. There, among other things, he made selections of sick and pregnant women who were transferred to other camps. Towards the end of the war Mengele was in northern Bohemia in the 17th Army's Kriegslazarett 2/591. Here the internist Otto-Hans Kahler worked as a military doctor, whom Mengele knew as a colleague at the Frankfurt Institute under Verschuer. Through Kahler's intercession, Mengele received permission to join the military hospital in Wehrmacht uniform on May 2, 1945.

After the end of the war

internment by the Americans

The unit initially stayed in the Erzgebirge on its further retreat and finally reached Bavaria in June 1945, where it was interned by members of the US Army, initially in a prisoner-of-war camp near Schauenstein. After six weeks Mengele was transferred to another camp near Helmbrechts and released after two more weeks, although he had already been on the war crimes lists since May 1945. He was not identified as an SS member, let alone a concentration camp doctor, because he carried no papers, used false names, comrades vouched for him, and he also did not have the typical blood group tattoo of the SS - allegedly he had not gotten a tattoo out of vanity. With forged papers in the name of "Fritz Hollmann" he made his way home via Donauwörth to Günzburg, where he made contact with his family and initially hid in the forest for a few weeks.

On the run

farmhand in Upper Bavaria

At the beginning of October 1945 Mengele arrived via Munich at a lonely farmstead in Upper Bavaria, the Lechnerhof in Mangolding. Here he worked in seclusion as a farmhand. The Mengele family avoided all contact for security reasons. It was not until the autumn of 1946 that his wife Irene visited him and asked for a divorce. Although Josef Mengele's name had already been mentioned in several trials, the Americans believed him to be dead, especially since the Mengele family had given the public the impression that he was missing in the East.

Across the "Rat Line" to Argentina

In the summer of 1948 Mengele had come to the decision to flee to Peronist Argentina. He left the Lechnerhof on August 1, 1948 and made preparations for his escape. Thus he notarially ceded his share of Mengele's inheritance, while the family procured a forged passport, albeit an amateurish one. It is unclear where Mengele was during this time, presumably in the woods around Günzburg. On April 15, 1949, he took the train to Innsbruck and went from there to Steinach am Brenner, where he met his escape helpers around the former SS man and now innkeeper Jakob Strickner on April 17, 1949. During the night Mengele was smuggled across the "green border" into Italy. He travelled on by train to Vipiteno. Here he stayed for four weeks and presumably met his school friend Hans Sedlmeier, who brought him foreign currency from his father and a small suitcase with preparations and notes from Auschwitz, which Mengele had saved for himself. In Sterzing in South Tyrol Mengele obtained forged identity papers in the name of "Helmut Gregor" and in Genoa turned to the Swiss consulate, which issued him a Red Cross passport. Through bribery, he obtained an Italian exit visa and left Europe on May 25, 1949, on the ship North King, bound for Buenos Aires. He thus followed one of the so-called "rat lines" organized by escape organizations such as Hans Ulrich Rudel's "Kameradenwerk".

Mengele arrived in Buenos Aires on 20 June 1949. He found shelter with Gerald Malbranc, received a foreigner's identity card on his false identity on September 17, and met other emigrants such as Rudel, Willem Sassen, and Adolf Eichmann in the German colony. With the support of his family, Mengele was economically independent. After his divorce was granted in 1954, he came into closer contact with his widowed sister-in-law Martha Mengele, née Ensmann. In 1956, a meeting was arranged for the two to go skiing in the Swiss winter resort of Engelberg. Mengele flew in to Geneva via New York City and in Engelberg also met his son Rolf, born in Freiburg in 1944, to whom he was introduced as "Uncle Fritz." Mengele then briefly visited Günzburg before returning to Argentina.

To make his marriage to Martha possible, Mengele needed a birth certificate. In the summer of 1956, Mengele therefore applied to the German embassy in Buenos Aires for identity papers in his real name, and on September 11, 1956, he received a new German passport without fuss, because there was no warrant for his arrest in Germany. The authorities had not bothered to check Mengele's name against the list of internationally wanted war criminals.

In October 1956, Martha Mengele arrived in Argentina with her son Karl-Heinz. Mengele had become a co-partner in a pharmaceutical company and married Martha on 28 July 1958 in Nueva Helvecia (Uruguay).

German arrest warrant and hiding in Paraguay

In the spring of 1958, the writer Ernst Schnabel had published his book Anne Frank - Trace of a Child, in which Josef Mengele was mentioned. Excerpts also appeared as a sequel in the Ulmer Nachrichten. At one point, it was said that no one knew where Mengele was. Soon after, the editors received an anonymous letter. The writer stated that some people in Günzburg knew very well where Mengele was. The editors passed this letter on to Schnabel, who handed it over to the Ulm public prosecutor's office on 3 August 1958. The Memmingen public prosecutor's office then started investigations, which were brought to the Mengele family's attention. On February 25, 1959, the public prosecutor's office in Freiburg im Breisgau, which had taken over the investigation, issued an arrest warrant, and a few days later Mengele went into hiding in Paraguay.

Independently of Schnabel, Hermann Langbein had also picked up Mengele's trail. He had investigated Mengele's divorce lawyer and compiled a dossier on Mengele, which he submitted to the Federal Ministry of Justice. He even succeeded in finding Mengele's address, which he then passed on to the Freiburg public prosecutor's office. It was Langbein who, in 1960, submitted a petition asking the University of Munich to comment on Josef Mengele's eligibility for a doctorate.

While Martha Mengele returned to Europe in 1961, Josef Mengele initially hid in southern Paraguay on the farm of a friend Rudel near Hohenau near Encarnación. With the help of influential friends, he procured Paraguayan citizenship in the name "José Mengele" in November 1959. Not only was Paraguay at that time ruled by the German-born dictator Alfredo Stroessner, with whom Rudel maintained close contacts, but the Paraguayan constitution also forbade the extradition of its own citizens. However, Mengele was less concerned about the extradition requests that the Federal Republic of Germany had meanwhile addressed to Argentina. On May 11, 1960, the Mossad had abducted Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem. Since his papers were in his real name, Mengele also had to fear that he would soon be tracked down. With a Brazilian passport issued in the name of "Peter Hochbichler", he therefore fled to Brazil in mid-October 1960.

There are different accounts of how close the Mossad was to Mengele and why the search was finally discontinued. Mengele's trail had been followed to Brazil and his escape agent had also been identified. The agent Zvi Aharoni was sure he had discovered Mengele. But at the end of November 1962, as part of a strategic reorientation of the Mossad, Isser Harel ruled out commando operations like the one in the Eichmann case until further notice.

Hidden in Brazil and Death

In São Paulo, Wolfgang Gerhard of the "Kameradenwerk" took Mengele in and employed him in his print shop. Dissatisfied with the monotonous work, Mengele took a job as administrator at the fazenda of the Hungarian couple Stammer near Araraquara in 1961. When the Stammers realized who their new caretaker really was, they forced Mengele to participate in the purchase of a new farm, the Santa Luzia coffee plantation near Lindóia. In early 1969, Mengele half-financed a house purchase by the Stammers in Caieiras, near São Paulo, and then moved there as well. Here he became friends with Wolfram Bossert, who took over the necessary messenger services in 1971 when Wolfgang Gerhard returned to Austria. Gerhard left his papers to Mengele. The contact to the Mengele family was mainly through Hans Sedlmeier, an authorized signatory of the Mengele company. In 1975, long-standing tensions between Mengele and the Stammers could no longer be bridged, and Mengele moved into a small house in São Paulo. In October 1977, his son Rolf visited him there. On 7 February 1979, during a bathing holiday with the Bosserts in Bertioga, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned. Actually they wanted to have him cremated. However, since the family's consent was required for this and no contact could be established with them so quickly, he was buried on 8 February 1979 as "Wolfgang Gerhard".

The family was informed, but decided to keep quiet. Although the Mengele family, as relatives, did not face any legal consequences, the loyal contact person Sedlmeier could have been held accountable for obstruction of justice. This offence became time-barred five years after Josef Mengele's death, i.e. in February 1984.

Josef Mengele (Buenos Aires, 1956)


Noma - coloured lithograph after a drawing by Robert Froriep (1836)


Surviving children at the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army, among them the Jewish twins Miriam and Eva Mozes (wearing knitted caps) - still photo from film footage by Soviet soldier Alexander Vorontsov (January 27, 1945)


An old woman with children on the way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau (May 1944) - photograph from the "Auschwitz Album


Arrival of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz concentration camp (May 1944) - photograph from the "Auschwitz Album


Josef Mengele (center) between commanders Richard Baer (left) and Rudolf Höß at the Solahütte near Auschwitz, 1944. Photograph from Karl-Friedrich Höcker's Auschwitz album.


Graphic representation of the gypsy camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

Discovery

With the identification of Martin Bormann's remains in 1973, Mengele became arguably the world's most wanted Nazi criminal. In August 1979, Paraguay revoked Mengele's citizenship after an intervention by the German government under Helmut Schmidt. But it was not until 1985 that there was movement in the investigation. Nearly one hundred of Mengele's surviving victims, who had formed the organization Children of Auschwitz-Nazi's Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors (C.A.N.D.L.E.S.) in 1984, visited the memorial in 1985 on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, January 27. From February 4 to 6, the so-called "Mengele Tribunal" took place at Yad Vashem, where Mengele was tried in absentia and thirty survivors described their fate. Both events attracted a great deal of attention around the world. The United States began to investigate its involvement in the Mengele case and launched an international search operation to find Mengele. Richard Breitman explains the American involvement by saying that the lessons of the Nuremberg trials had been internalized in the American security agencies. The U.S. was willing to take considerable risks to capture Mengele in order to put pressure on Paraguay.

The rewards offered for his capture amounted to the equivalent of ten million DM. On March 14, Petra Kelly addressed a parliamentary question to the German government in connection with the planned visit to Germany of Alfredo Stroessner, who was still said to be hiding Mengele.

On June 6, 1985, the discovery of Mengele's body in the Embú cemetery was reported. The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office had had Hans Sedlmeier's residence searched on May 31, 1985 and discovered Mengele's extensive correspondence and an address book. On June 5, the Bosserts' apartment in São Paulo was searched, and they reported Mengele's death. Brazilian, German, American and Israeli experts examined the exhumed remains and on June 21 came to the unequivocal conclusion that it was indeed the wanted man. A DNA analysis cleared up the last doubts in 1992.