Josef Mengele

Opinion | March 25, 2011 | Share

One of the most horrifying aspects of the World Wars was the holocaust and one of the most feared people to be a part of this was ‘Doctor Josef Mengele’.

Holocaust was the genocide of millions of Jews living in Europe during the Second World War, at the time of Hitler’s rule. Humiliated by the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty after their defeat in the First World War, Hitler blamed their loss on the German Jews living in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Deeply involved in the myth of superiority of the Aryan race, Hitler believed that the only way Germany could regain its previous position of power was by exterminating the Jews.

Concentration camps were expanded all over Germany after the Reichstag fire and were set up in order to contain political prisoners, gypsies, diseased people and of course Jews. Concentration camps are different from extermination camps, the latter being predominately set up for mass killing of the Jewish population. Some of these ‘death camps’ as they were called included Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and the most famous being Auschwitz-Birkenau (famous for holding Anne Frank and her family as prisoners towards the end of World War II).

Josef Mengele or more popularly known as the ‘Angel of Death’ was a German SS physician who was infamous for carrying out unthinkable human experiments on the camp prisoners. Josef Mengele was the eldest of the three children of Karl and Walburga Mengele. He was born in Gunzburg, Bavaria and his family ran an implement factory in Germany. Born on March 16, 1911, he studied anthropology from Munich University and medicine from Frankfurt University and became the assistant to Doctor Otmar Freiherr Von Verschuer who was a scientist known for his research in the work of genetics particularly in the area of twins.

In 1937 Mengele joined the Nazi party and was promoted to the rank of a SS officer before being transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1943. He would wait on the train station to receive the cattle cars containing the prisoners in order to select his victims for carrying out his grisly experiments. He performed many examinations on twins, preferably gypsies such as removing organs, stitching the twins, carrying out many experiments in the area of contagious diseases to see how people of different ethnicities withstood these. After the completion of his research he would have their bodies dissected and killed.

He was the chief provider for the gas chambers and the crematoria for burning the bodies thereafter. He was also known to have carried out sex change operations, blood transfusions, he subjected the victims to pressure chambers at different temperature conditions to see the fatal human body temperature. They would be put into ice cold water, naked then would be heated in order for warming them but ultimately they would die. He would carry out his surgeries without anaesthesia and often screams of crying victims could be heard coming from his laboratory in the camps. Being obsessed with the theory of the Aryan race himself he was famous in carrying out experiments in the area of eye colour. He would inject dyes into the eyes of the child to see if he could change the colour.

This man wore his tunic which was neatly pressed, did not have a hair out of place and had a calm and pleasant look about his face. He would come into the camps with candies and chocolates for the children and then give them injections thus taking them away for carrying out his monstrous experiments. Numerous people both young and old were victims to his whims.

Josef Mengele was listed as one of the war criminals of the 1940’s and was many times mentioned for the Nuremberg trials. But after he left Germany in 1948, he could not be found for many years and was reported to be in hiding somewhere in Argentina. Later in 1979 reports were found that he had drowned in Brazil after suffering a heart attack and the mystery of his disappearance was at last solved.

Madhurima Ganguly