The Life and Legacy of Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death - Audio History Documentary

Dive into the haunting past as we unravel the life and legacy of Josef Mengele, infamously known as the "Angel of Death." This gripping podcast episode offers an in-depth exploration of Mengele's journey from his privileged beginnings in Günzburg, Germany, to his chilling role as a Nazi war criminal. Discover how his education and early political affiliations led him down a dark path of racial ideology and cruelty within the Nazi regime.

We delve into Mengele's transformation into a key figure at Auschwitz, where his gruesome experiments on inmates, especially twins, became a terrifying testament to his complete indoctrination into Nazi ideology. Through a meticulous recount of his career and actions, listeners will gain insight into the horrific conditions of the concentration camp and the twisted rationale behind his infamous medical experiments.

The episode also uncovers Mengele's post-war escape to South America via the notorious Rat Line, highlighting his evasion of justice and life in secrecy across Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Despite international efforts to capture him, Mengele remained unrepentant until his death, a haunting reminder of the depths of his indoctrination and the impact of his actions on history. Join us for a sobering journey into the life of a man whose actions left an indelible stain on humanity, as we piece together the untold stories of one of history's most notorious figures.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
The man known to history as Yosef Mengele was born on the
16th of March 1911 in the town of Ginsburg in southern Germany.
His father was Carl Mengele, an engineer who, around about the
time of Yosef's birth, had become the proprietor of a
foundry which manufactured farming equipment for various

(00:26):
purposes such as sewing, cuttingand milling.
There was seven men on the payroll of the company in the
early 1910s, which meant that the Mengelets were one of the
more affluent families in the Ginsburg area.
Yosef's mother was Val Berger Hoopfar, who would subsequently
give birth to Yosef's two younger brothers, Carl Junior

(00:47):
and Alois. The young Yosef grew up in a
world which was in the depths ofTotal War.
It was only in the recent past that Germany had become a
country at all. As recently as the 1860s, its
territory was divided between over two dozen smaller states.
However, in 1871 these united under Prussian leadership to

(01:08):
form the German Empire. This severely disrupted the
balance of power in Europe, and in the decades that followed the
continent drifted towards war. Germany formed a alliance with
the Austro Hungarian Empire, while Britain, France and Russia
allied to offset the rise of Germany.
At first these powers confined their disputes to proxy

(01:31):
conflicts in Africa and the Balkans.
But in the summer of 1914, a regional dispute in the Balkans
led to the outbreak of a generalEuropean war.
It soon expanded to bring in countries such as Japan.
And so the First World War had commenced.
It lasted for over four years, with Germany, Austria, Hungary

(01:52):
and the Ottoman Empire fighting Britain, France, Russia and
Italy, with the United States later joining on their side.
The defeat of Germany brought the Empire to an end, and a new
German Republic was created, named after the town of Weimar.
More importantly, a series of punitive peace terms were
imposed on Germany under the terms of the Treaty of

(02:14):
Versailles and these would have lasting repercussions.
The infant Mengele might not have been entirely unaware of
these developments as they had impacted substantially on the
Mengele household. Karl left a fight in the German
army shortly after the conflict began and Wehlberger was left to
raise the children and attempt to keep the business ticking

(02:36):
over during the war. She did this with a steely
determination and successfully negotiated a contract with the
German government to produce a type of army vehicle for use on
the war front known as the Farage.
As a result, the company prospered and when Karl Mengele
returned to Ginsburg at the end of the war, he was able to keep

(02:57):
the company moving forward. By the early 1920s it had become
the third largest producer of threshing machinery in the whole
of Germany. Extended family members were
called upon to aid in the building up of the organization
and as a result the Mengele nameis very common in the Ginsburg
area to this day, and Karl Mengele Estrasa is one of the

(03:19):
the main streets in the town. A curious contrast between the
civic significance of the wider Mengele family and the appalling
crimes which Karl and Val Burger, Mengele's eldest son,
would commit more immediately. What this prosperity meant for
Yosef in the 1920s was that he had the financial backing to
engage in extensive studies. Mengele was a relatively

(03:43):
successful student in his teenage years.
He excelled at art and developedwide interests in music and in
physical activity. He appears to have favored
skiing, the town being not too far from the northern end of the
German Alps. In April of 1930, Youssef
Mengele passed his high school exams with a decent but hardly

(04:03):
exceptional grade. Initially, he seems to have
considered becoming a dentist, having noted that there was not
one dentist in the local area and that this would be a
promising trade to practice. However, he subsequently decided
that this was too specialized and opted for medicine with an
emphasis on anthropology and genetics.

(04:24):
He was clearly ambitious and hiscorrespondence from this time
indicates an individual who wanted to impress his family by
becoming its first medical scientist.
And so it was that in October 1930, he left the family home
and headed east to the city of Munich, the capital of Bavaria.
Here he enrolled in both the medicine and philosophy

(04:47):
departments, indicating an interest in both the hard
science element of medicine and broader speculation and inquiry.
It was a mix of interests which would later have terrifying
results. Mengele arrived in Bavaria just
as a new political party was emerging in the area and was
beginning its ascent to power. The National Socialist German

(05:10):
Workers Party, or Nazi Party, had been founded a decade
earlier and had quickly come under the control of an Austrian
firebrand called Adolf Hitler inNovember 1923.
This collection of disaffected war veterans, whose main concern
was to prevent the rise of leftist parties such as the
Communists and to redress the overly punitive terms of the

(05:31):
Treaty of Versailles, which had brought the First World War to
an end, had attempted a coup in Munich, but it was quickly
suppressed. Thereafter, they turned to
constitutional politics to achieve their ends, but
initially floundered at the polls until the autumn of 1929,
when, after a decade of rampant growth, the Wall Street Stock

(05:53):
Exchange suffered catastrophic losses and the world's economy
went into a tailspin. As individuals lost their jobs
and life savings throughout Germany, parties such as the
Nazis and the Communists began to experience a surge of support
in elections. As the Great Depression which
followed the Wall Street crash dragged on through the early

(06:14):
1930s, Hitler and his associateswould become ever more popular
with their message of xenophobiaand resentment at Germany's
position in the world. Wengele was soon involved in the
political torrents which were raging around him, although he
would not become a member of theNazi Party itself for some time
yet. In March 1931 he joined the

(06:37):
Stahlhelms, an ex servicemen's organization which was named
after the helmets worn by the German army during the First
World War. The Stahlhelms marched regularly
and held military style rallies,but the Nazis also had an early
appeal to the young Yosef. In his autobiography, written
years later, Mengele noted that the students of the university,

(07:01):
those who had already reached the voting age, had contributed
to this Nazi success. I was not then old enough to
vote. My political leanings then were,
I think, for reasons of family tradition, national
conservative. I had not joined any political
organization, though indeed I was strongly attracted by the

(07:21):
program and the whole organization of the National
Socialists. But for the time being I
remained an unorganized private person.
But in the long run, it was impossible to stand aside in
these politically stirring times.
Should our fatherland not succumb to the Marxist Bolshevik
attack? This simple political concept

(07:42):
finally became the decisive factor in my life.
From this it appears that it wasonly a matter of time before
Mengele joined the Nazis. Mengele's early years in Munich
witnessed the full rise of the Nazis.
By 1932, Hitler and his associates were the largest
party in Germany, and their support translated into 40% of

(08:04):
the national vote in the Reichstag elections which were
held that year. This was still not enough to
form a majority government, and Germany's politics floundered in
the second-half of 1932. At stake was whether the country
would lean towards the Nazis or towards the Communists, the
second largest political group in Germany.

(08:24):
By this time. Whichever was to seize power
would probably spell the end of the Weimar Republic.
Then, late in 1932 and into early 1933, the political and
business establishment made a Faustian bargain with Hitler and
the Nazis, agreeing to bring Hitler and several of his senior

(08:45):
colleagues into the government in the misguided belief that
they would be able to control him and his party.
It was a fatal underestimation, and having allowed Hitler in,
the Nazis quickly set about seizing absolute power.
A political emergency was concocted to warrant the passage
of an Enabling Act, which effectively allowed Hitler as

(09:06):
chancellor to rule by decree. Thus, in the course of just a
few short months in the first half of 1933, the Nazis seized
absolute power throughout Germany and established A1 party
state, one which would hold power for the next 12 years.
By 1934, Mengele was increasingly preoccupied by his

(09:28):
studies, although many of his contemporaries subsequently
recorded that they never regarded him as being a
particularly accomplished student.
Many, however, would note that he made-up for his lack of
pronounced intellect with ambition and hard work.
His ambition had driven Mengele to simultaneously study for a
doctorate and act as a practicing medic during the mid

(09:52):
1930s. It was during this time that the
Stahlhelms, which Mengele had been a member of for some time,
were merged with the Sturm AB Tyleng, or Brown Shirts, the
Nazi Party's original paramilitary wing.
Hitler had ordered the merger, distrusting the Stahlhelms
fundamentally monarchist nature.A serious kidney complaint

(10:13):
forced Mengele to end his association with the
organization, leaving him more time for his studies.
Overall, his studies did result in academic rewards.
In 1935, Mengele was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled Racial
Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial

(10:34):
Groups. Here, Mengele argued that it was
possible to determine the race of an individual by examining
their jaw alone. However, it should be noted that
at this time Mengele's findings were based on scientific
principles and there was no overt racist or anti-Semitic
sentiments expressed in the thesis.

(10:54):
This is significant, for it suggests Mengele had not been
radicalized to the extent he later would be.
Having finished his thesis and acquired his doctorate, Mengele
briefly spent a few months working as a junior resident
doctor, a compulsory service which was required for him to
obtain a full medical license. It was during this time, while

(11:17):
working in a hospital in Leipzig, that he first met Ilena
Schoenbein, whom he would subsequently marry in 1939.
Their only son, Rolf, would be born in 1944.
However, while his personal lifehad prospered, Mengele was not
suited to the work of a residentdoctor, with its long hours and
ward rounds, and he was eager toresume his studies.

(11:41):
To that end, he sought and obtained a position as a
research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity,
Biology and Racial Purity at theUniversity of Frankfurt in
January 1937. Here he would study under
Professor Ottmar Feiherfon, for sure an admirer of Hitler's and
an individual who prefers to be an expert on the ominously

(12:04):
titled concept of race hygiene. It is to this period in his life
that Mengele's more deplorable views and the corruption of his
character can surely be traced. Until this point, while he had
exhibited an interest in race and genetics, his earlier thesis
was not overtly racist. In Frankfurt he became steeped

(12:26):
in Nazi racial ideology and in May 1937 he finally applied to
join the Nazi party and was soonaccepted as member. 5,574,974 In
the course of the late 1930s, Mengele worked closely with fond

(12:46):
for sure, often authoring reports for courts which the
Nazi state was convening to judge German Jewish people who
were deemed to have violated theNuremberg Laws, a series of
oppressive measures which had been introduced during the mid
1930s to disenfranchise the Jewish population of the
country. This involved rather perverse

(13:06):
medical evidence. For instance, defendants were
often brought before the court to decide whether or not they
actually had Jewish blood and sowould consequently have breached
one of the Nuremberg Laws. In some of these instances,
Mengele and Font for sure would conduct physical examinations of
the defendant, measuring his or her nose and other features in

(13:29):
order to determine if the defendant did in fact have
Jewish ancestry. There is a definite shift here
from Mengele in Munich. He had used legitimate
scientific methods in his research and produced work which
historians and other scholars have generally agreed was
unproblematic even by modern standards.

(13:49):
However, in Frankfurt in the late 1930s, there was a descent
into unscientific racial theories based around Nazi
ideology. Clearly, his time at Frankfurt
had brought on a significant change of character.
Whatever the nuances of his actual work, Mengele's role in

(14:10):
Frankfurt was allowing him to progress rapidly in his career.
Mengele was promoted by Fun For Sure to become one of his
assistant physicians after Mengele had been awarded his
full medical degree from Frankfurt in 1938.
It is from this time that Mengele first began to discuss
the concept of individuals and races being improved through

(14:33):
appropriate selection, a clear indication that he was fully
involved in the Nazi's racial ideology by this time, and
politically he was becoming moreand more mired in the regime.
Several months after becoming a member of the Nazi Party, he
applied for membership of the s s Auschwitz Shtarfel, one of the

(14:53):
paramilitary wings of the Nazi regime headed by Heinrich
Himmler and the one which would soon be placed in charge of a
network of concentration camps which proliferated across
Central and Eastern Europe. He would subsequently join the
Waffen S S, an elite subgroup ofthe S S, while his professional
work and political life were bleeding into each other as well

(15:17):
as he joined the Third Reich Institute and the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute, both institutions being to the fore of the study
of eugenics in Germany and as a result effectively mouthpieces
for pseudo scientific Nazi racial ideology.
As Mengley's studies were continuing through the 1930's,

(15:38):
the Nazis were pushing Europe towards war.
It had always been the stated aim of Hitler and his associates
to overturn the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and
reassert Germany's place as a European power.
While the first years after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933
did not see an overt effort to do so, from 1936 this aggression

(16:02):
rapidly escalated. In the spring of that year the
German army moved into the Rhineland, remilitarizing a part
of the country which had been expressly forbidden under the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Then, in 1938, Austria was effectively annexed into a
Greater Germany, and further annexations quickly followed.

(16:22):
First the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in the autumn of
1938, and then early in 1939 theconquest of Central Europe was
effectively completed when Hungary and the rest of
Czechoslovakia were turned into puppet regimes.
At this stage, Britain and France had signalled that their
appeasing of German aggression would not continue any further,

(16:46):
particularly if Hitler tried to occupy Poland.
And so it was that when Germany did invade its eastern neighbor
on the 1st of September 1939, Britain and France declared war
on Germany. On the 3rd of September the
Second World War had begun. On the eve of the Titanic

(17:06):
struggle which would soon engulfthe European continent,
Mengele's career had run into its first and only significant
impediment under the Nazis. In the summer of 1939 he planned
to marry Irena after several years of courtship, but there
was controversy in the run up tothe wedding, with some querying
whether his wife to be had some traces of Jewish blood.

(17:30):
Mengele enlisted the help of some well connected colleagues
and friends to assure the panel which adjudicated on these
matters that Irena had very Nordic ways, and yet a search
through records for the extendedfamily as far away as the United
States could not entirely resolve the matter.
Consequently, while Youssef was unable to comprehensively prove

(17:53):
that he was not marrying a womanwho had a small amount of Jewish
blood, he was nevertheless able to sweep the question aside
without having fully answered it.
There is a dark irony here as the man who would soon be
deciding upon people's lives based on racial purity was
prohibited from being issued a certificate himself by the Nazi

(18:14):
regime that would declare his own children to be a pure Aryan
blood. Nengele was pleased when the war
broke out. His son Rolf would state many
years later that his father had told him that he viewed the war
as a necessary struggle to reassert the German nation.
After years of being trammelled and downtrodden following the

(18:35):
First World War, Nengele had enlisted straight away.
However, his old kidney ailment returned in late 1939 and made
it impossible for him to enter service until the summer of
1940, by which time the German Panzer divisions were conquering
Western Europe in a blistering military campaign.
Mengele was originally stationedat a military base in Castle in

(18:58):
central Germany. He remained there only for a few
weeks before being reassigned toa combat position in his role as
a member of the Vuffin's. As such he was given an
officer's title of Unter Sturmfiller or a sublettenant
and the next several months werespent in occupied Poland when
Mengele was attached to the genealogical section of the Race

(19:20):
and Resettlement Office, The goal of which was to assess the
racial purity and the suitability of individuals who
have been chosen to settle as German colonists in Eastern
Europe. The idea here was to effectively
remove non Germans from the New Labour or living space which was
being created in Eastern Europe.While Mengele was serving in

(19:44):
Poland, the Nazi state itself was meeting with success in its
war effort. The initial invasion of Poland
in September 1939 had seen that country quickly overrun and
occupied. Thereafter, a phony war of sorts
followed through the winter and early spring of 1939 and 1940,
as Britain and France tried belatedly to rearm.

(20:07):
Themselves in preparation for a German attack on France.
It was slow in coming, and when Hitler did make his move in the
spring of 1940, it was to occupyDenmark and Norway.
But then in the early summer, a lightning attack on France saw
the north of the country and theLow Countries completely overrun
in just a matter of weeks. By the end of the summer of

(20:29):
1940, Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany.
Worse was to follow with Benito Mussolini's Italy now joining
Hitler's Germany, and a campaignwas commenced in North Africa to
try to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal from the British in the
summer of 1941. That possibility looked imminent

(20:50):
and other parts of Europe, including the Balkans, had also
fallen to the Axis powers of Germany and Italy.
Thus in mid 1941 the war effort looked very bleak indeed for
Winston Churchill and his government in London.
As the war turned in its favour,Nazi policy began to take on an
even darker hue. Confident in the fact that they

(21:12):
would soon be masters of Europe and would not have to answer to
international pressure from other states, Hitler and the
leaders of the Nazi Party began contemplating a more stark
approach to their anti-Semitic policies.
In 1940 and early 1941, they were considering the idea of
forcibly removing millions of Europe's Jews to the East

(21:33):
African island of Madagascar, where they would live in a kind
of open air prison. However, when the North Africa
campaign stalled and the possibility of seizing the Suez
Canal diminished, a much more drastic idea began to develop.
This was the final solution, theidea that Europe's Jews would be
forcibly rounded up and sent to the patchwork of several dozen

(21:55):
concentration camps which had been created across Central and
Eastern Europe since the inception of the war.
Here a small number of the most able bodied would be used as
slave labour in factories to produce German war materials,
but most would be killed by exposure to gas within hours of
arrival. This approach was ratified at

(22:16):
the Vansea Conference North of Berlin in January 1942 and mass
murder was soon occurring at camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor
and Auschwitz. Mengele would soon be posted to
the latter. Wengele was to see some military
action in 1941. After a protracted period in

(22:37):
Poland. In mid 1941 he was reassigned to
the Eastern Front. Flushed with success in 1940,
Hitler had commanded his generals to begin plans for the
invasion of the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, as it
became known, would be the largest land invasion ever
undertaken by an army. When it commenced that summer,

(22:58):
hundreds of thousands of German troops swarmed over the border
into the Soviet Union. At first, the invasion met with
enormous success, as the Soviet forces melted away and the
German Wehrmacht advanced towards Moscow and Leningrad.
However, gradually Joseph Stalinand his generals mobilized their
troops in an effective fashion. Then the Russian winter set in.

(23:22):
The German army was unprepared for the extreme cold and had not
been issued with adequate winterclothing.
Consequently, in the course of the winter of 1941, the tide of
the war began to shift as the German advance stalled a short
distance from Moscow. Mengele served on this front in
1941, specifically in Ukraine, during which action he was

(23:45):
awarded the Iron Cross Second Class.
Mengele continued to serve on the Eastern Front even as the
war was turning against Germany.In January 1942, he was
appointed to the Medical Corps of the Waffen SS's Viking
Division. This crack unit would eventually
penetrate further into Russian territory than any other

(24:06):
division of the German armed forces.
However, Youssef was kept away from the front lines.
As a medic attached to the division, he was deemed of
considerable value and kept backtowards the defensive lines
where the unit was performing clearing up operations as
opposed to leading at the front.In July, the Viking unit was
sent into action around the towns of Rostov and Bataisk in a

(24:28):
vicious battle of attrition which lasted for five days.
During this particular refray hereceived the higher version of
the Iron Cross, the Iron Cross First class, as a result of
rescuing 2 wounded soldiers froma burning tank while under enemy
fire. Having dragged the pair to
cover, Mengele had performed first stayed on them.

(24:49):
He was also awarded the Black Badge for the wounded and the
medal for the care of the Germanpeople.
Thus it was that Mengele returned back to Poland towards
the end of 1942 as a considerably decorated veteran
of the Eastern Front. Mengele's return to Poland was
probably not a result of mere chance or a reward for his

(25:11):
performance in the field of battle.
It is more plausible that he owed his recall from the Eastern
Front to his old mentor, Professor from For Sure, who had
been appointed as a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin in early 1942. This institute was charged with
overseeing research in the Reichinto the concept of racial

(25:32):
purity and eugenics. With the decision to enact the
final solution and the expansionof the concentration camp
system, there was now a limitless supply of individuals
who could be studied at the camps as part of this research
and with 0 consequences for the researchers as to the methods
they employed in their so-calledresearch.

(25:53):
Already in the summer of 1942, Fun for Sure, in making his
plans for heading to the concentration camps, had stated
that he planned to take some of his former colleagues and
students with him. Mengele was doubtlessly one of
these, and it seems probable that Fond for Sure had secured
Yosef's recall from the Eastern Front in mid 1942 for this

(26:16):
explicit purpose. Consequently, in January 1943,
after a brief hiatus in Poland, Mengele was back in Berlin at
the Institute. But he would soon be sent to the
place with which he has become synonymous, the concentration
camp at Auschwitz in Poland. While all of this was
proceeding, it was becoming increasingly clear to any German

(26:40):
who took a somber look at the strategic situation that the war
effort was doomed. Following the German defeat at
Stalingrad, the Russians have gradually begun pushing the
German armies back out of Russia.
Moreover, in the spring of 1943,Britain, which was now joined by
the United States following its entry into the war in December

(27:00):
1941, had defeated the combined Italian and German forces in
North Africa. In the summer of 1943, a
southern front was now opened inEurope against the Axis powers
when the Western Allies commenced with Operation Husky
and invaded the island of Sicilyas a preliminary to encroaching

(27:20):
onto the Italian mainland. Meanwhile, the Russians
continued to press the Germans back into Ukraine and Poland,
and in the summer of 1944 a Western Front was also opened
with the D-Day landings in Normandy and France.
The defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies was now inevitable,
but what was open to question was the speed at which the

(27:43):
retreat of Germany would occur and which of the Allied powers
would arrive in Berlin first. On that might depend much about
how high-ranking members of the regime would be prosecuted in
the post war settlement. In May 1943 Engelay, who by now
had been promoted to the position of Hausdemferr, a

(28:06):
captain, received his posting toAuschwitz.
The Auschwitz camp had started in a small way shortly after
Poland had been conquered. However, by 1943 it had been
expanded into a vast complex under the direction of its
commandant, Rudolf Hers. There were 3 camps.
Auschwitz 1 was the original camp and contained the

(28:27):
administrative centres, the God's quarters and some of the
earliest built detention facilities.
Auschwitz 2 or Auschwitz Birkenau was effectively an
extermination or death camp. Here, Jews and other individuals
who were sent here by the Nazi regime, including Roma, Gypsies
and Soviet prisoners of war, were murdered en masse in shower

(28:50):
rooms which were filled with thegas Cyclone B.
The bodies were then quickly burned in crematoria which were
built on site. This factory of death was where
over 1, 1,000,000 people, most of them Jewish, would be killed.
Between 1942 and 1945 a final camp known as Auschwitz 3 or
Auschwitz Monovitz was used as aslave labour camp, increasingly

(29:14):
for the purposes of producing A synthetic rubber manufactured by
the Ege Farben, the chemical company.
It was to this vast complex thatMengele arrived in the early
summer of 1943. When he arrived at Auschwitz,
Mengele was appointed by EdouardVelts, the chief medical officer
of the entire camp, to the position of chief physician of

(29:36):
the Romani family camp. His role in the wider camp was
varied and brutal. The doctors at Auschwitz were
central to what was called the selection.
This was a process which occurred with new arrivals to
the complex. When the trains of thousands of
Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani and other unfortunates

(29:57):
arrived at the camp, they were physically examined on the
gangway next to the train platforms.
Little did the bewildered newcomers know, but the doctors
appraising them were handing outdeath sentences to most of them.
They selected a small number of those who were deemed physically
fittest and these were sent to the labor camps, while a few

(30:17):
others were selected for reasonsrelating to experimental
research or some other reason, but the remainder were all sent
to the gas chambers and would bedead within hours.
Mengele detachment from any emotional response to this was
strikingly clear. Some of the doctors at Auschwitz
genuinely disliked being put on selection duty, a process which

(30:39):
involved effectively condemning children and the elderly to
death. By way of contrast, Mengele
would sometimes show up to do iton his day off.
Mengele was soon engaged in other activities which point
towards a total lack of any emotional response to the
suffering of others. This began almost immediately at

(31:00):
the Romani family camp to which he was assigned upon first
arriving there. Several weeks after he first
reached Auschwitz, there was an outbreak of Noma within the
Romani camp. This is an aggressive,
gangrenous process in which bodytissue dies due to both the
initial infection and the lack of blood supply which follows.
It affects the mouth and lips inparticular.

(31:23):
A normal medical doctor's first concern would have been to treat
his or her patients. However, Mengele's was to carry
out experiments into a disease about which little was known at
the time. Patients who exhibited symptoms
were isolated in separate locations to be studied.
Most appallingly, several children who had the condition

(31:43):
were killed before their heads and organs were removed to be
sent back to the S S Medical Institute in the Austrian city
of Kurds for latest study. This macabre research was still
going on months later when a decision was taken to liquidate
the entire Romani camp on the night of the 2nd of August 1944.

(32:05):
There were other atrocities. The camps were riddled with
diseases of all kinds, the result of poor sanitation
generally and the fact that those who arrived at Auschwitz
were often carrying diseases already, a result of the cramped
conditions of the trains which transported them to the death
camp. As a result, diseases such as
typhus and scarlet fever were often rampant.

(32:27):
Mengele's approach to dealing with such outbreaks was
viciously utilitarian. On one occasion of a typhus
epidemic, he simply sent the entire populace of the barracks
in which it had been detected, some 600 Jewish women, to the
gas chamber. This barracks was then
sterilized before moving hundreds of new two occupants in

(32:48):
who were de loused and given newclothes on arrival.
The process was repeated with each barracks.
Perversely, for his actions in this regard in stamping out
outbreaks of disease at Auschwitz, Mengele was awarded
the War Merit Cross and in 1944 was made the Senior First
Physician of Auschwitz Birkenau.And this was not an isolated

(33:11):
incident. There are many reports of
Mengele sending hundreds of people at one time to the gas
chamber as a precautionary measure against the disease.
He was particularly ruthless towards the Romany population of
Auschwitz. But surely his most brutal
action was in ordering the liquidation of thousands of
Jewish people towards the end of1944, when the camps Russian

(33:34):
supplies, which were a mere 700 calories a day for prisoners,
could no longer be sustained. While Mengele's actions in
combating disease and ordering other mass deaths at Auschwitz
were brutal, he has become most notorious for the experiments he
carried out at the camp. Mengele treated Auschwitz as a

(33:54):
giant laboratory through which he could continue the research
he had started back in the mid 1930s on heredity and genetics.
In this regard, he treated the inmates of Auschwitz as research
material in much the same way asa chemist might treat the
chemicals in his lab as something dispensable.
He was particularly interested in people with dwarfism and

(34:18):
heterochromia Iridium, the latter being the condition
whereby the individual has two different coloured eyes.
His methods were often brutal. One experiment involved
injecting chemicals into the eyes of those with heterochromia
Iridium to see if he could change the colour of the irises.
Often, after studying the subjects to the maximum degree

(34:41):
to which he felt it was possible, he would have them
killed or killed them himself with lethal injections so that
their internal organs could be studied and their skeletons
preserved for later research. Perhaps the most shocking
experiments involved Mengele removing some subjects organs
without anesthesia. One man who had one of his

(35:02):
kidneys removed in this way was quickly sent back to work
without paying. Mengele is particularly
notorious for his research into identical twins at Auschwitz,
with whom he became obsessed forhis study of heredity and other
characteristics. Often, when the selection of new
arrivals was taking place on thegangway near the train station

(35:25):
at the camp, Mengele was on the lookout for twins for his
research. These were typically twin
children who often arrive together, though there is
evidence of a pair of twins who were nearly 70 three years old
being examined by Mengele, exactly how many sets of twins
he examined at Auschwitz is unclear, but alone During the

(35:46):
summer of 1944, when 400,000 of Hungary's Jews were murdered en
masse at Auschwitz, Mengele is said to have identified and
examined at least 175 sets of twins.
In a bizarre twist of circumstances, being a twin
could actually initially be of benefit to an individual in
surviving Auschwitz. Many who were selected in this

(36:08):
fashion by Mengele would most likely have otherwise been sent
straight to the gas chamber. While Mengele's twin subjects
were also fed better than nearlyall other inmates of the camps,
their heads were not shaved and they were often permitted to
keep their own clothing rather than wearing the standard issue
uniforms which were given to allothers at Auschwitz.

(36:31):
Mengele's research involved a large amount of taking
measurements and other seeminglybanal examinations of the twins.
Witnesses later testified that Mengele was extremely detailed
in this work. Exact measurement of the twins
skulls and other facial featureswere taken. 1 twin who survived
Auschwitz later recalled Mengelemeasuring he and his twin

(36:54):
brother's eyes for approximately2 hours.
Such examinations could occur two or three times a week for
period of months and photographswere also taken.
All of this seems to have been so that Mengele could record
where physical variations, however minute, might have
existed between identical and non identical twins.

(37:15):
But there was also a much more sinister aspect to all of this.
Often Mengele would induce pain in one twin to see if it
impacted on the other. Chemicals were used and subjects
were injected with random substances.
Most brutally, Mengele's work ontwins extended to studying their
internal organs, and as such he routinely murdered sets of twins

(37:39):
using injections of chloroform and then dissected them.
On one occasion he suspected a set of of Romany twins of having
tuberculosis, so he simply killed them and performed an
autopsy to confirm his suspicion.
Mengele had been wrong in his suspicions.
The children did not have TB. What is most striking about all

(38:01):
this was the simple manner in which Mengele completely
dissociated himself psychologically from the act of
killing. First hand witnesses from
Auschwitz, including Jewish doctors who were forced into
acting as Mengele's lab assistants, reported afterwards
that Mengele could be quite kindtowards the twins he studied and
other subjects of his research. He would often bring them sugar

(38:24):
or treats and inquired how they were doing.
Yet just minutes later, he couldn't murder them as though
it were nothing at all. Mengele was evidently so
obsessed by his research that hebelieved it trumped any concerns
of conventional morality, While his total indoctrination in Nazi
ideology and the concept of Aryan racial hierarchy

(38:46):
inculcated into him the idea that murder of supposedly less
evolved races was completely acceptable if it could produce
some scientific benefit for the Nazi regime.
The result was terrifying. Here was a man who hummed
Italian operas to himself while he dissected people he had
murdered just minutes earlier for no reason other than a wish

(39:09):
to study their organs. Consequently, it is no surprise
to learn that Mengele became known in Auschwitz as the Angel
of Death, in part because of hisubiquitous presence at the
selection and because of widespread knowledge of his
experiments. Luckily, the experiments would
soon come to an end, as the Russian advance on the Eastern

(39:33):
Front into Poland had continued.In the course of 1944, the s s
had begun dismantling the concentration camps and
destroying what evidence could be obliterated.
By the early winter, moves were under way to abandon Auschwitz
and it would eventually be liberated by the advancing
Soviet forces on the 27th of January 1945.

(39:55):
Mengele was relatively late in leaving.
On the 17th of January he was transferred to the Korswozen
concentration camp in Lower Silesia.
He took with him extensive samples from his research and
his copious notes, but the bulk was left behind.
His time at Korswozen was not extensive and by mid February he

(40:16):
also had to leave the. Again narrowly missing the
advancing Soviet armies, this was just the beginning of a
continuous effort to elude the conquering enemy.
For the next three months, Mengele moved even further
westwards, trying to disguise his identity.
By early May he was in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

(40:37):
It was here that he would have learned of Hitler's suicide in
Berlin on the 30th of April 1945and the collapse of the Third
Reich in the days that followed.On the the 8th of May, Field
Marshall Wilhelm Keitel signed the final surrender of Germany
in Berlin, bringing the Second World War in Europe to an end.

(40:58):
Mengele was a marked man once the war was over.
The Allies had determined that they would not seek excessive
retribution on Germany itself inthe aftermath of the war, but it
had been agreed that those who were at the top of the
government would be prosecuted for war crimes, and in
particular those who had been inthe s s and had run the

(41:19):
concentration camps would be charged for their crimes.
Mengele would be among them. He knew he needed to stay ahead
of those who wanted to apprehendhim.
On the night of the 8th of May, just hours after the war had
officially ended, he crossed back into Germany, now making
efforts to disguise his role as a member of the s s and posing

(41:41):
as a rank and file German soldier.
This continued for weeks. In mid June he narrowly avoided
apprehension when some 10,000 German soldiers he had been
amongst were detained together for questioning, but just days
later he was finally apprehendedwhen his unit was arrested by an
American division. What is striking about what

(42:01):
happened next is that when Mengele was questioned, he gave
his interviewers his real name and it was even recorded as such
by those who were questioning him.
But for some reason it was not realized at the time exactly who
he was, that he was a high-ranking member of the s s
and that he was the notorious Angel of Death of Auschwitz, a

(42:25):
fact which had been clearly recorded by this time.
In April 1945 he had been added to a list of wanted high profile
war criminals. This was as close as Mengele
would ever come to justice. For weeks he was transferred
between detention centres but eventually, in September 1945 he

(42:45):
was released. What seems to have won him his
freedom was that he did not bearone of the blood group tattoos
which nearly all members of the s s were tattooed with.
Mengele had refused this in 1938when he had joined the
paramilitary organization. That decision now brought about
his freedom. He was dropped at the town of
Ingolg Start in late September 1945, and from there he headed

(43:09):
to the city of Donnavoort. This was a time when Germans
were still being stopped and questioned regularly by the
American and other Allied troopswho were in every town and
village in the country. So it was that he began to
identify himself as Fritz Ullmann, in line with some
documentation he had which had previously belonged to a friend

(43:31):
of his by that name. Later he altered these slightly
to read Fritz. Another close call in Donnavoort
led him to head for the Russian occupied zone in eastern
Germany. Here he finally managed to get
word to his wife Irena that he was safe and was avoiding
detection. Irena Mengele had already been

(43:51):
questioned repeatedly as to her husband's whereabouts.
This was the beginning of a longperiod in which Mengele
continuously moved around Germany in the post war period.
His state of mind was not entirely levelled during this
time. Bizarrely, a couple with whom he
stayed for a while late in 1945 remembered him as stating that

(44:13):
he intended to turn himself in once he could receive a fair
trial, asserting that he had done everything he could to
improve the situation at Auschwitz.
Eventually, in the early winter of 1945, he found a job working
as a farmhand in the foothills of the Alps, having returned to
southern Germany. Here he worked for the Fishers

(44:35):
under his alias of Fritz Holmann.
The Fishers soon began to suspect that their new lodger
was a fugitive, not least as Mengele would speak about the
Allies as The Crusaders who had invaded Germany, and his
bitterness about the post war settlement would often boil over
in conversation. Soon he was back in contact with

(44:55):
his wife and in the course of the months that followed she
would visit him periodically in secret.
And this is the life he led for several years as the Allies made
episodic efforts to locate him. These were often half hearted
though without any record of hiswhereabouts or sightings.
Many assumed Mengele was dead already, in the same way that

(45:16):
many other senior Nazi war criminals had simply vanished in
the aftermath of the war. Eventually, in 1949, Mengele
decided to leave Europe all together.
This was achieved using the so-called Ratline, a network of
individuals who were sympatheticto the Nazi cause, who used
various methods to smuggle former Nazis who had remained in

(45:39):
hiding out of Germany. Assisted by several individuals
in this way, Mengele made his way over the German Italian
border in mid-april of 1949 and travelled to the city of Genoa
in northwest Italy. Here he duplicitously acquired a
passport from the Red Cross under the name of Helmut Gregor,

(46:00):
and in the summer he sailed for South America.
Here, the Argentine government was particularly purely
welcoming of former Nazis, a result of the acrimony between
the regime there and the United States, while several other
Latin American states also viewed aiding German war
criminals as an act of defiance against the United States and

(46:20):
its neo imperial policies in Central and South America.
Moreover, the Nazis had shipped massive amounts of money and
material goods to Argentina in advance of the war ending, and
it was these which bought many of their relative freedom there
after 1945. As a result, individuals such as

(46:41):
Adolf Eichmann, one of the primearchitects of the Holocaust, and
Mengele were allowed to live in Argentina unmolested for a great
many years. It was here in Buenos Aires that
Mengele first settled, late in 1949.
Mengele's life in the years thatfollowed was one of gradually
establishing a new life in SouthAmerica.

(47:04):
For a time he worked as a travelling salesman selling farm
equipment, tools which he had grown familiar with on the
Fisher's farm in southern Germany.
After spending some time living with a Nazi sympathizer, he
moved into an apartment of his own in Buenos Aires.
Some family funds were channelled to him in Argentina
from Germany, and it was enough for him to take a stake in a

(47:26):
carpentry business and rent a house soon thereafter.
It is also probable that he practiced medicine during these
years without an official medical license.
There are records which suggest,for instance, that Mengele was
involved in organizing illegal abortions.
His family life changed too. Mengele's wife Irina, despite
remaining faithful to him through the horrors of Auschwitz

(47:49):
and the post war period, was unwilling to leave Germany for
South America. They divorced in 1954 and
Mengele remarried four years later to Martyr Mengele, his
widowed sister-in-law, who had previously been married to his
brother Karl and who had joined him in South America.
Such was the laxity of surveillance of Mengele that he

(48:10):
was even able to briefly return to Europe during the mid 1950s
to see his son, and he began living back in Argentina under
his real name. That Youssef Mengele was able to
escape detection in plain sight during these years was largely
owing to the fact that nobody was looking for him.
The German authorities and the Allies had assumed he was dead

(48:33):
by the late 1940s. This was despite coming to the
attention of the authorities in Argentina in 1958, he and
several other doctors were questioned in relation to a
network of medical professionalswho had been performing illegal
abortions. Though Mengele was not charged,
the the episode produced enough worry, though, that he decided

(48:54):
to change his location again, and in the late 1950s and early
1960s he moved around South America on numerous occasions,
at one time living in Paraguay and briefly residing in Bolivia
as well, and this cautious approach led him to avoiding
arrest again in the summer of 1960.
In mid-May that year, the Israeli Secret Service agency

(49:17):
Mossad raided the House of AdolfEichmann in Buenos.
They had been tipped off as to Mengele's possible whereabouts
and were preparing to seize him too.
But Mengele was in Bolivia at the time.
Eichmann was brought back to Israel, where he stood trial in
the most traumatic prosecution of a Nazi war criminal since the

(49:38):
Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946.
He was found guilty and executedthere in 1962.
Despite the close call with being captured that Mengele had
had in 1960, and despite the fact that it was now clear to
international Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal that Mengele

(49:59):
was in fact alive and living in South America, he returned
briefly to West Germany shortly afterwards.
Then he relocated to Brazil, where he resided on a farm near
Sao Paulo belonging to a Nazi sympathizer by the name of
Wolfgang Gerhart, while his second wife Marta settled for a
time in Italy. These were the years in which

(50:21):
Mengele was most actively being pursued as Israeli agents and
others sought his extradition from Latin America and tried to
pin down his location. As such, it is not often
possible to be sure where exactly Mengele was at any given
time. At one point in 1962, Mossad had
gathered intelligence that he was in Egypt.

(50:43):
It is impossible to tell if thisis accurate or not, though it
continued to be South of in America, where Mengele largely
hit with the aid of Nazi sympathizers such as Gerhardt
and a couple of Hungarian expatriates by the name of
Geyser and Geeta Stammer. These helped him acquire further
hideouts around Sao Paulo and Brazil.
Throughout the 1960s, their aid extended to Mengele assuming

(51:07):
Gerhardt's identity when the German headed back to Europe to
receive medical care for a family member.
Youssef Mengele would elude justice for the remainder of his
life. He eventually died on the 7th of
February 1979 after years of poor health.
He had already had a stroke in 1976 and was affected by other

(51:29):
ailments including high blood pressure.
His death when it came about wasowing to a second stroke while
he was swimming at the seaside town of Bertioga in Brazil.
The cause of his death is given his drowning.
He had nearly reached his 70th year, making him one of the
longest lived of the more notorious Nazi war criminals,

(51:50):
and two years earlier his son Rolf had visited his father in
Sao Paulo. He had not seen his father in
over 20 years and it was the first time he met him as an
adult. His impressions of his father,
as recorded much later, were of a man who, over 30 years after
the war had ended, showed no remorse for anything he had

(52:11):
done, but rather continued to affirm that he had done what he
did at Auschwitz as part of his duties as an s s officer.
Rolf Mengele concluded that his father was an unrepentant Nazi.
There was one final twist to thestory of his flight from
justice. For many years, the world was

(52:32):
unaware of Mengele's death, and Nazi hunters such as Simon
Wiesenthal continued to make efforts to locate the Angel of
Auschwitz in the hopes that he would be brought to justice,
however belatedly. It was not until 1985, when
intelligence brought a cache of Mengele's correspondence to
light in his hometown of Ginsburg in Germany, that it was

(52:54):
revealed that Mengele had died several years earlier.
An investigation followed in Brazil to try to identify the
place of his burial. These proved successful and it
was soon revealed that Mengele had been buried at AIM Buddhist
Archis near Sao Paulo in Brazil,under the name of the man who
had sheltered and aided him manyyears earlier and whose name he

(53:16):
had adopted, Wolfgang Gerhart. Consequently, his body was
exhumed in the summer of 1985 and an examination proved that
it was highly likely that it wasMengele skeleton, a fact which
Rolf Mengele subsequently confirmed.
It was never reburied. Today, the skeleton of the man
who once killed people at Auschwitz simply so he could

(53:39):
examine their organs is used as an educational aid at a medical
school in the University of Sao Paulo.
What should anyone say in evaluating a figure like Josef
Mengele? As we have seen, this was a
heinous individual, seemingly totally lacking in concern or
empathy for those whom he experimented on and murdered.

(54:01):
Whether in the course of his experiments or as a cold effort
to stop the spread of disease atAuschwitz.
Perhaps it is worth assessing how he became the Angel of
Death. Mengele did not become a member
of the Nazi Party until 1937, and until the mid 1930s he was a
promising medical student who combined exploration of

(54:22):
anthropology with examinations of human features.
He was an affable character according to those who knew him,
and scholars since have noted that his work from these early
days is not problematic. It is not suffused with racism
or violence towards others, but rather it could have been read
as legitimate scientific work ofthe interwar period.

(54:43):
In this respect, Mengele, prior to his involvement with the
Nazis, was somewhat akin to Albert Speer, the architect who
later became German Minister of War Production.
Before the rise of the Nazis andtheir involvement with them,
both were middle class academicswith promising careers ahead of
them. Neither had demonstrated any

(55:03):
overt outward signs of anti-Semitism or the capacity
for mass murder. Ultimately, though, after he
became involved with the Nazis and began his work into racial
anthropology under Professor Ottmar Freihevan for sure in
Frankfurt at the beginning of 1937, Mengele's character
changed quickly. By the end of 1938, he was not

(55:25):
only a member of the Nazi Party,but also of the Waffen s s, the
most fanatical branch of the various Nazi paramilitary
organizations. It was in this capacity that he
enthusiastically joined the war effort following the invasion of
Poland in September 1939. And from the beginning, some of
his work involved the concept ofsupposed racial purity.

(55:49):
But the worst of it came at Auschwitz, between the summer of
1943 and when he fled the camp in January 1945.
Here, in a stretch of time spanning just 20 months, Mengele
personally ordered the deaths ofthousands of individuals and in
a great many instances committedthe ACT himself by lethally

(56:10):
injecting the subjects of his experiments.
These same experiments range from the immoral to the
downright perverse, such as whenMengele sewed 2 people together
in a bizarre test concerning conjoined twins.
They died days later after theirwounds turned gangrenous.
Mengele was certainly a harbinger of death at Auschwitz

(56:33):
during his time there. In the end, however, Joseph
Mengele escaped retribution. He spent over 30 years in hiding
across a vast range of places and countries, sometimes
returning to Europe and moving with seeming ease around Latin
America. It is also striking how many
people were willing to aid an individual who was guilty of the

(56:55):
crimes Mengele had committed. He was also very lucky.
In 1945, he was arrested by the Allies and let go on the basis
that he did not have the standard blood group tattoo that
nearly all s s members had. Then he narrowly escaped arrest
on several other occasions in the years and decades that

(57:16):
followed, most notably in 1960 when Adolf Eichmann was arrested
in Buenos Aires. As a result, Mengele escaped
punishment in his own lifetime, but his crimes will never be
forgotten. What do you think of Yosef
Mengele? Was he perhaps the most brutal
of all the Nazis in his own way?And what explains his rapid

(57:40):
change of character from 1937 onwards?
Please let us know in the comments section and in the
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