Josef Mengele
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Josef Mengele (; 16 March 19117 February 1979) was a Nazi German (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during
the Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
, often dubbed the "Angel of Death" (). He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers. Before the war, Mengele received doctorates in
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the
Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...
in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service in early 1943. He was assigned to Auschwitz, where he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects. With Red Army troops sweeping through German-occupied Poland, Mengele was transferred away from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on 17 January 1945, ten days before the arrival of the Soviet forces at Auschwitz. After the war, Mengele fled to Argentina in July 1949, assisted by a network of former SS members. He initially lived in and around
Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...
, but fled to Paraguay in 1959 and later Brazil in 1960, all while being sought by
West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...
, Israel, and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal, who wanted to bring him to trial. Mengele eluded capture in spite of extradition requests by the West German government and clandestine operations by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming off the coast of Bertioga, and was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard. His remains were disinterred and positively identified by forensic examination in 1985.


Early life

Mengele was born into a Catholic family in
Günzburg Günzburg (; Swabian German, Swabian: ''Genzburg'') is a town in Bavaria, Germany. It is a ''Große Kreisstadt'' and the capital of the Swabian Günzburg (district), district Günzburg. This district was constituted in 1972 by combining the city ...
, Bavaria on 16 March 1911, the eldest of three sons of Walburga (née Hupfauer) and Karl Mengele. His two younger brothers were Karl Jr. and Alois. Their father was the founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company (later renamed ), which produced farming machinery. In 1915, the company expanded and switched to producing military equipment such as specialized wagons for military transport and parts for deploying naval mines. Karl joined the
Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...
in 1933 and the SS in 1935, primarily as a way to advance his career in local politics. He served as a district economic advisor, and was found during denazification proceedings after the Second World War to have not been a committed Nazi. Mengele was successful at school and developed an interest in music, art, and skiing. In 1924, he joined the , a right-wing youth group, and remained a member until 1930, serving as leader of the local chapter from 1927. He completed high school in April 1930 and went on to study medicine at the University of Munich. (Munich is where the headquarters of the Nazi Party was located.) After two semesters, he switched to the University of Bonn, where he took his medical preliminary examination. In 1931, he joined , a paramilitary organization that was absorbed into the Nazi ('Storm Detachment'; SA) in 1934. He spent the summer of 1933 studying at the
University of Vienna The University of Vienna (, ) is a public university, public research university in Vienna, Austria. Founded by Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria, Duke Rudolph IV in 1365, it is the oldest university in the German-speaking world and among the largest ...
, and earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935, studying for four years under , a physical anthropologist and proponent of the pseudoscience of
scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evi ...
. Mengele's dissertation, titled ''Rassenmorphologische Untersuchung des vorderen Unterkieferabschnittes bei vier rassischen Gruppen'' ("Racial morphological study of the anterior segment of the mandible in four racial groups"), attempted to prove that measurements of the lower jaw could be used to make a determination of race. In January 1937, he joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in
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, where he worked for Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist with a particular interest in researching twins. As Verschuer's assistant, Mengele focused on the genetic factors that result in a cleft lip and palate, or a cleft chin. His thesis on the subject earned him a doctorate in medicine ( MD) from the University of Frankfurt in 1937. In a letter of recommendation, Verschuer praised Mengele's reliability and his ability to verbally present complex material in a clear manner. In 1938, he hired him as a permanent assistant at his institute. As part of his duties, he assessed the racial heritage of applicants for the Aryan certificate, a document required before a person could qualify for government jobs or German citizenship. On 28 July 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met while working as a medical resident in
Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...
. Their only child, a son they named Rolf, was born in 1944.


Military career

Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the (SS) in 1938. He received basic training in 1938 with the (mountain light infantry) and was called up for service in the (Nazi armed forces) in June 1940, some months after the outbreak of World War II. He soon volunteered for medical service in the , the combat arm of the SS, where he served with the rank of SS- (second lieutenant) in a medical reserve battalion until November 1940. He was next assigned to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in
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, where one of his assignments was evaluating candidates for Germanization. At the end of 1940, Menegele was assigned to the engineering battalion of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, first as an assistant medical officer and as primary medical officer from October 1941. His unit was sent to the Ulm area for training in April 1941 and were eventually sent to an area southeast of
Lublin Lublin is List of cities and towns in Poland, the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the centre of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin i ...
to await the commencement of
Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and several of its European Axis allies starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. More than 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the western Soviet Union along ...
, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The unit crossed into
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on 30 June. On 2 July, the commander of the division's Westland Regiment was killed by a sniper. In response, members of the Wiking Division killed several thousand Jews. This was the beginning of a
pogrom A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of Massacre, massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century Anti-Jewis ...
by the Wiking Division that continued into Zolochiv and nearby areas until 4 July. German historian Kai Struve estimates the total number of Jewish civilians killed by the Wiking Division in their first week of action during Barbarossa was 4,280 to 6,950 people. Historian David G. Marwell states that while Mengele did not participate in these killings, he must have known what was taking place. Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class on 14 July for bravery. The unit continued to see action in Ukraine and Russia as part of Case Blue (June to November 1942) and were ordered to more towards Stalingrad in late December. After rescuing two German soldiers from a burning tank, he was decorated with the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Wound Badge in Black, and the Medal for the Care of the German People. He was declared unfit for further active service in mid-1942, when he was seriously wounded in action near Rostov-on-Don. Following his recovery, he was transferred to the headquarters of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in
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. He was promoted to the rank of ( captain) in April 1943. For four months in early 1943, he also worked as an assistant to Verschuer, who was now the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin.


Auschwitz

In 1942, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, originally intended to house slave laborers, began to be used instead as a combined labour camp and extermination camp. Prisoners were transported there by rail from all over Nazi-controlled Europe, arriving in daily convoys. By July 1942, SS doctors were conducting selections where incoming Jews were segregated, and those considered able to work were admitted into the camp while those deemed unfit for labor were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Those selected to be killed, about three-quarters of the total, included almost all children, women with small children, pregnant women, all the elderly, and all of those who appeared (in a brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor) to be not completely fit and healthy. In early 1943, Verschuer encouraged Mengele to apply for a transfer to the
concentration camp A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitati ...
service. Mengele's application was accepted and he was posted to Auschwitz in May 1943, where he was appointed by SS- Eduard Wirths, chief medical officer at Auschwitz, to the position of chief physician of the Romani family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The SS doctors did not administer treatment to the Auschwitz inmates but supervised the activities of inmate doctors who had been forced to work in the camp medical service. As part of his duties, Mengele was one of the doctors who made weekly visits to the hospital
barracks Barracks are buildings used to accommodate military personnel and quasi-military personnel such as police. The English word originates from the 17th century via French and Italian from an old Spanish word 'soldier's tent', but today barracks ar ...
and ordered any prisoners who had not recovered after two weeks in bed to be sent to the gas chambers. Mengele's work also involved carrying out selections of new arrivals, sorting new arrivals into those who woud be admitted to the camp from those who would be killed immediately. He would sometimes visit the selection ramp when not on duty in the hope of locating sets of twins for his experiments. He also looked for physicians, pharmacists, and other medical professionals that could potentially assist him in his research. In contrast to most of the other SS doctors, who viewed selections as one of their most stressful and unpleasant duties, he undertook the task with a flamboyant air, often smiling or whistling. He was one of the SS doctors responsible for supervising the administration of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide that was used for the mass killings in the Birkenau gas chambers. He served in this capacity at the gas chambers located in crematoria IV and V. When a typhus epidemic began in the women's camp, Mengele cleared one block of six hundred Jewish women and sent them to be killed in the gas chambers. The building was then cleaned and disinfected and the occupants of a neighboring block were bathed, de–loused, and given new clothing before being moved into the clean block. This process was repeated until all of the barracks were disinfected. Similar killings and disinfections were used for later epidemics of scarlet fever, measles, and other diseases. For these actions, Mengele was awarded the War Merit Cross (Second Class with swords) and was promoted in 1944 to First Physician of the Birkenau subcamp.


Human experimentation and research

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his anthropological studies and research into heredity, using inmates for medical experimentation. For this purpose, he set up his own research facility in the Romani family camp. He was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia iridum (eyes of two different colors), dwarves, and people with physical abnormalities. He also studied blood proteins, did anthropological studies of the Romani population, and collected specimens for forwarding to the SS Medical Academy in Graz. A grant was provided by the ('German Research Foundation'), at the request of Verschuer, who received regular reports and shipments of specimens from Mengele. The grant was used to build a pathology laboratory attached to Crematorium II at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Miklós Nyiszli, who was forced to work on Mengele's behalf due to his pathologist background, prepared specimens and performed autopsies for this laboratory. When an outbreak of noma—a gangrenous bacterial disease of the mouth and face—struck the Romani camp in 1943, Mengele initiated a study to determine the cause of the disease and develop a treatment. He enlisted the assistance of prisoner Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician and professor at Prague University. The patients were isolated in separate barracks. The treatment involved administering vitamins and antibiotics to afflicted children, who saw significant improvement. However, once he was satisfied that it was effective, he discontinued treatment, and the children immediately fell ill again. The preserved heads and organs of several afflicted children were sent to the SS Medical Academy in
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and other facilities for study. This research was still ongoing when the Romani camp was liquidated and its remaining occupants murdered in 1944. In his search for genetic markers to indicate race, Verschuer had Mengele provide him with blood samples from around 200 racially diverse Auschwitz prisoners. The hypothesis was that each race had unique proteins that could be identified by laboratory testing. Most of the documentation from these experiments has not survived. Twin research was of particular interest to Mengele. One twin could serve as subject with the other as the control. Mengele viewed the opportunity to undertake twin research at Auschwitz as unique, as it is normally difficult to locate and study a significant number of subjects. Most of the twins he studied were children between the ages of two and sixteen. Historian Nikolaus Wachsmann estimates Mengele may have studied as many as a thousand sets of twins. Some were actually siblings who passed themselves off as twins to avoid being killed. The research largely involved taking dozens of physical measurements and recording the characteristics of various anatomical characateristics. Each examination could take several hours. Mengele generally ordered the twins to undertake weekly physical examinations. Nyiszli and others suggested that twin studies may have been pursued to uncover strategies for 'racially desirable' Germans to produce more twins. The actual purpose of Mengele's twin research is unknown. In his 1945 deposition, Nyiszli testified that he watched Mengele kill 14 twins in a single night, first by injecting evipan to induce sleep, and then injecting their hearts with chloroform. Nyiszli described it differently in his book; there he said that he smelled chloroform in the hearts of twins he dissected. He added that he feared Mengele might have him killed for knowing this secret. Mengele's research subjects were better fed and housed than the other prisoners, and temporarily spared from the gas chambers. His research subjects lived in their own barracks, where they were provided with a marginally better quality of food and somewhat improved living conditions than the other areas of the camp. When visiting his young subjects, he offered them sweets. Some children referred to him as "Uncle Mengele". A former Auschwitz inmate doctor said of Mengele: Mengele's eye research involved introducing chemicals or hormones into the eyes of subjects. Although there has been speculation that Mengele was attempting to "Aryanize" prisoner eyes by making them blue with dyes or other chemicals, this idea has been rejected by Marwell. He argues that Mengele would not be interested in a "cosmetic change" with "no genetic meaning". According to Marwell, Mengele was most likely administering adrenaline drops into the eyes of subjects while researching the condition heterochromia (color differences of the iris), as part of his collaboration with biologist and eugenicist Karin Magnussen, who carried out Reich-funded research on eye color at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. Magnussen was testing whether drugs or hormones such as adrenaline could alter pigmentation of the eyes of rabbits, as well as studying the anatomy of the eye and the genetics underlying heterochromia. Mengele's collaboration with Magnussen also included compiling genealogical records and documenting eye characteristics of prisoners. He sent eyes removed from Auschwitz prisoners to her lab in Berlin for histological study. After the war, Magnussen stated she believed that the specimens were from prisoners who had died of natural causes. The inmate pathologist Nyiszli said that some of the samples were from the bodies of people who had been killed by lethal injection.


Myths and apocryphal anecdotes

Some testimonies regarding Mengele have been rejected or challenged by historians, including the claim that Mengele sewed two twins together to create conjoined twins. Agnieszka Kita, a historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has described this as a myth. Marwell has rejected other stories about Mengele, including the suggestion that he surgically "connected the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon", or that he attempted to "make boys into girls and girls into boys" using "cross transfusions", or that he attempted to change people's eye color.


After Auschwitz

Along with several other Auschwitz doctors, Mengele transferred to Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia on 17 January 1945, taking with him two boxes of specimens and the records of his experiments at Auschwitz. Most of the camp medical records had already been destroyed by the SS by the time the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on 27 January. Mengele fled Gross-Rosen on 18 February, a week before the Soviets arrived there, and traveled westward to Žatec in
Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
, disguised as a officer. There he temporarily entrusted his incriminating documents to a nurse with whom he had struck up a relationship. He and his unit then hurried west to avoid being captured by the Soviets, but were taken prisoners of war by the Americans in June 1945. Although Mengele was initially registered under his own name, he was not identified as being on the major war criminal list due to the disorganization of the Allies regarding the distribution of wanted lists, and the fact that he did not have the usual SS blood group tattoo. He was released at the end of July and obtained false papers under the name "Fritz Ulmann", documents he later altered to read "Fritz Hollmann". After several months on the run, including a trip back to the Soviet-occupied area to recover his Auschwitz records, Mengele found work near Rosenheim as a farmhand. He eventually escaped from Germany on 17 April 1949, convinced that his capture would mean a trial and death sentence. Assisted by a network of former SS members, he used the ratline to travel to Genoa, where he obtained a passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross under the alias "Helmut Gregor", and sailed to Argentina in July 1949. His wife refused to accompany him, and they divorced by proxy in
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in 1954.


In South America

Mengele worked as a carpenter in
Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...
, Argentina, while lodging in a
boarding house A boarding house is a house (frequently a family home) in which lodging, lodgers renting, rent one or more rooms on a nightly basis and sometimes for extended periods of weeks, months, or years. The common parts of the house are maintained, and ...
in the suburb of Vicente López. After a few weeks, he moved to the house of a Nazi sympathizer in the neighborhood of Florida Este. He next worked as a salesman for his family's farm equipment company, Karl Mengele & Sons, and in 1951 he began making frequent trips to
Paraguay Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...
as a regional sales representative. He moved into an apartment in central Buenos Aires in 1953, used family funds to buy a part interest in a carpentry concern, and then rented a house in the suburb of Olivos in 1954. Files released by the Argentine government in 1992 indicate that Mengele may have practiced medicine without a license while living in Buenos Aires, including performing abortions. After obtaining a copy of his birth certificate through the West German embassy in 1956, Mengele was issued an Argentine foreign residence permit under his real name. He used this document to obtain a West German passport using his real name and embarked on a trip to Europe. He met with his son Rolf (who was told Mengele was his "Uncle Fritz") and his widowed sister-in-law Martha, for a ski holiday in Switzerland; he also spent a week in his home town of Günzburg. When he returned to Argentina in September 1956, Mengele began living under his real name. Martha and her son Karl Heinz followed about a month later, and the three began living together. Josef and Martha were married in 1958 while on holiday in
Uruguay Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...
, and they bought a house in Buenos Aires. Mengele's business interests now included part ownership of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical company. Along with several other doctors, he was questioned in 1958 on suspicion of practicing medicine without a license when a teenage girl died after an abortion, but he was released without charge. Aware that the publicity could lead to his Nazi background and wartime activities being discovered, he took an extended business trip to Paraguay and was granted citizenship there in 1959 under the name "José Mengele". He returned to Buenos Aires several times to settle his business affairs and visit his family. Martha and Karl lived in a boarding house in the city until December 1960, when they returned to West Germany. Mengele's name was mentioned several times during the Nuremberg trials in the mid-1940s, but the Allied forces believed that he was probably already dead. Irene Mengele and the family in Günzburg also claimed that he had died. Working in West Germany, Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Hermann Langbein collected information from witnesses about Mengele's wartime activities. In a search of the public records, Langbein discovered Mengele's divorce papers, which listed an address in Buenos Aires. He and Wiesenthal pressured the West German authorities into starting extradition proceedings, and an arrest warrant was drawn up on 5 June 1959. Argentina initially refused the extradition request because the fugitive was no longer living at the address given on the documents; by the time extradition was approved on 30 June, Mengele had already fled to Paraguay and was living on a farm in Hohenau, near the Argentine border. Mengele reportedly worked as a veterinary surgeon under the alias of 'Francisco Fischer' while living in Hohenau, before leaving Paraguay for Brazil sometime in 1964. After a request from Paraguayan Attorney General Clotildo Jimenez, the Supreme Court of Paraguay annulled Mengele's citizenship in August 1979.


Efforts by Mossad

In May 1960, Isser Harel, director of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, personally led the successful effort to capture Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. He was hoping to track down Mengele so that he too could be brought to trial in Israel. Under interrogation, Eichmann provided the address of a boarding house that had been used as a safe house for Nazi fugitives. Surveillance of the house did not reveal Mengele or any members of his family, and the neighborhood postman claimed that although Mengele had recently been receiving letters there under his real name, he had since relocated without leaving a forwarding address. Harel's inquiries at a machine shop where Mengele had been part owner also failed to generate any leads, so he was forced to abandon the search. Despite having provided Mengele with legal documents using his real name in 1956 (which had enabled him to formalize his permanent residency in Argentina), West Germany was now offering a reward for his capture. Continuing newspaper coverage of his wartime activities, with accompanying photographs, led Mengele to relocate again in 1960. Former pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel put him in touch with the Nazi supporter Wolfgang Gerhard, who helped Mengele cross the border into Brazil. He stayed with Gerhard on his farm near
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until a more permanent accommodation could be found, which came about with Hungarian expatriates Géza and Gitta Stammer. The couple bought a farm in Nova Europa with the help of an investment from Mengele, who was given the job of managing for them. The three bought a coffee and cattle farm in Serra Negra in 1962, with Mengele owning a half interest. Gerhard had initially told the Stammers that the fugitive's name was "Peter Hochbichler", but they discovered his true identity in 1963. Gerhard persuaded the couple not to report Mengele's location to the authorities by convincing them that they themselves could be implicated for harboring a fugitive. In February 1961, West Germany widened its extradition request to include Brazil, having been tipped off to the possibility that Mengele had relocated there. Meanwhile, Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents who had been involved in the Eichmann capture, was placed in charge of a team of agents tasked with tracking down Mengele and bringing him to trial in Israel. Their inquiries in Paraguay revealed no clues to his whereabouts, and they were unable to intercept any correspondence between Mengele and his wife Martha, who by this time was living in Italy. Agents who were following Rudel's movements also failed to produce any leads. Aharoni and his team followed Gerhard to a rural area near São Paulo, where they identified a European man whom they believed to be Mengele. This potential breakthrough was reported to Harel, but the logistics of staging a capture, the budgetary constraints of the search operation, and the priority of focusing on Israel's deteriorating relationship with Egypt led the Mossad chief to call off the manhunt in 1962.


Later life and death

In 1969, Mengele and the Stammers jointly purchased a farmhouse in Caieiras, with Mengele as half owner. When Wolfgang Gerhard returned to Germany in 1971 to seek medical treatment for his ailing wife and son, he gave his identity card to Mengele. The Stammers' friendship with Mengele deteriorated in late 1974, and when they bought a house in São Paulo, he was not invited to join them. The Stammers later bought a bungalow in the Eldorado neighborhood of Diadema, São Paulo, which they rented out to Mengele. Rolf, who had not seen his father since the ski holiday in 1956, visited him at the bungalow in 1977; he found an "unrepentant Nazi" who claimed he had never personally harmed anyone and only carried out his duties as an officer. Mengele's health had been steadily deteriorating since 1972. He suffered a stroke in 1976, experienced high blood pressure, and developed an ear infection which affected his balance. On 7 February 1979, while visiting his friends Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert in the coastal resort of Bertioga, Mengele had a second stroke while swimming and drowned. His body was buried in Our Lady of the Rosary cemetery in Embu das Artes under the name "Wolfgang Gerhard", whose identification Mengele had been using since 1971. Other aliases used by Mengele in his later life included "Dr. Fausto Rindón" and "S. Josi Alvers Aspiazu".


Exhumation

Sightings of Mengele were being reported all over the world in the decades following the war. Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960, in
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in 1961, in Spain in 1971, and in Paraguay in 1978, eighteen years after he had left the country. He insisted as late as 1985 that Mengele was still alive—six years after he had died—having previously offered a reward of US$100,000 () in 1982 for the fugitive's capture. Worldwide interest in the case was heightened by a mock trial held in
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in February 1985, featuring the testimonies of over one hundred victims of Mengele's experiments. Shortly afterwards, the West German, Israeli, and U.S. governments launched a coordinated effort to determine Mengele's whereabouts. The West German and Israeli governments offered rewards for his capture, as did '' The Washington Times'' and the
Simon Wiesenthal Center The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is a Jewish human rights organization established in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier. The center is known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating antisemitism, tolerance educati ...
. On 31 May 1985, acting on intelligence received by the West German prosecutor's office, police raided the house of Hans Sedlmeier, a lifelong friend of Mengele and sales manager of the family firm in Günzburg. They found a coded address book and copies of letters sent to and received from Mengele. Among the papers was a letter from Wolfram Bossert notifying Sedlmeier of Mengele's death. German authorities alerted the police in São Paulo, who then contacted the Bosserts. Under interrogation, they revealed the location of Mengele's grave and the remains were exhumed on 6 June 1985. Extensive forensic examination indicated with a high degree of probability that the body was indeed that of Josef Mengele. Rolf Mengele issued a statement on 10 June confirming that the body was his father's and that news of his father's death had been concealed to protect people who had sheltered him. In 1992, DNA testing confirmed Mengele's identity beyond doubt, but family members refused repeated requests by Brazilian officials to repatriate the remains to Germany. The skeleton is stored at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine, where it is used as an educational aid during forensic medicine courses at the University of São Paulo's medical school.


Later developments

In 2007, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust, dedicated to the documentation, study, and interpretation of the Holocaust. Opened in 1993, the museum explores the Holocaust through p ...
received as a donation the Höcker Album, an album of photographs of Auschwitz staff taken by Karl-Friedrich Höcker. Eight of the photographs include Mengele. In February 2010, a 180-page volume of Mengele's diary was sold by Alexander Autographs at auction for an undisclosed sum to the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. The unidentified previous owner, who acquired the journals in Brazil, was reported to be close to the Mengele family. A Holocaust survivors' organization described the sale as "a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from the writings of one of the most heinous Nazi criminals". Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center was glad to see the diary fall into Jewish hands, calling the acquisition significant. In 2011 (centenary of Mengele's birth), a further 31 volumes of Mengele's diaries were sold—again amidst protests—by the same auction house to an undisclosed collector of World War II memorabilia for US$245,000.


Publications

* ''Rassenmorphologische Untersuchung des vorderen Unterkieferabschnittes bei vier rassischen Gruppen'' ("Racial morphological study of the anterior segment of the mandible in four racial groups"). This dissertation, completed in 1935 and first published in 1937, earned him a PhD in anthropology from Munich University. In this work Mengele sought to demonstrate that there were structural differences in the lower jaws of individuals from different ethnic groups, and that racial distinctions could be made based on these differences. * ''Genealogical Studies in the Cases of Cleft Lip-Jaw-Palate'' (1938), his medical dissertation, earned him a doctorate in medicine from Frankfurt University. Studying the influence of genetics as a factor in the occurrence of this deformity, Mengele conducted research on families who exhibited these traits in multiple generations. The work also included notes on other abnormalities found in these family lines. * ''Hereditary Transmission of Fistulae Auris''. This journal article, published in ('The Genetic Physician'), focuses on fistula auris (an abnormal fissure on the external ear) as a hereditary trait. Mengele noted that individuals who have this trait also tend to have a dimple on their chin.


See also

* Angel of Death (Slayer song) * Aribert Heim * Carl Clauberg * Eva Mozes Kor * Grigory Mairanovsky * Hans Münch * Kurt Blome *
Nazi eugenics The social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany were composed of various ideas about genetics. The Nazi racial theories, racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic race, No ...
* Shirō Ishii * ''The Boys from Brazil'' (film) * ''The Boys from Brazil'' (novel) *'' The German Doctor'' * Son of Saul


Informational notes


Citations


Bibliography

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Further reading

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External links

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Mengele, Josef 1911 births 1979 deaths 20th-century German anthropologists 20th-century German non-fiction writers Accidental deaths in Brazil Auschwitz concentration camp medical personnel Combat medics Deaths by drowning Fugitives wanted by Germany Fugitives wanted on crimes against humanity charges Fugitives wanted on war crimes charges German eugenicists German expatriates in Argentina German expatriates in Brazil German expatriates in Italy German male non-fiction writers German mass murderers German medical writers German military doctors German prisoners of war in World War II held by the United States Goethe University Frankfurt alumni Gross-Rosen concentration camp personnel Holocaust perpetrators in Poland Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni Nazi human subject research Nazis in South America People associated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics People from Günzburg People from the Kingdom of Bavaria People who died at sea Physicians in the Nazi Party Recipients of the Iron Cross (1939), 1st class Recipients of the War Merit Cross Romani genocide perpetrators SS-Hauptsturmführer Waffen-SS personnel