Top 10 Facts about Josef Mengele

Top 10 Facts about Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele was a philosophy student who later went on to become one of the most terrifying figures in the Holocaust.  The Nazi doctor is known for the chilling experiments that he performed while he was a doctor at the Nazi camp. He is considered to be among the most heinous criminals in the 20^th Century as he seems to have a reputation that rivals that of a super villain in a movie.

He was known for doing terrible things and justifying them to be the right thing and thus making him a big sadist. Therefore, this article will explore some facts about the doctor to create a clear picture in the reader’s mind and what people had to go through during the Holocaust.

1. He came from a wealthy family

A picture of Josef Mengele. Photo sourced from Wikimedia-Wikimedia

Josef Mengele was born into a wealthy family in that his father known as Karl owned a company that produced farm machinery. The company was doing well and this means that Josef’s family were considered to be well off before the war. The family’s money was even used to help Josef escape Germany and set himself up in Argentina when he was on the run. This goes to show that the family was not struggling as they were able to fund their son’s escape to Argentina.

2. He was academically gifted

The doctor was considered to be academically gifted as he earned his doctorate from the University of Munich in Anthropology. This was when he was only 24 years old. He then went on to work in the field of genetics among some of the brilliant minds in the field of medicine at that time.

During this time, he earned a medical doctorate in 1938 to add to the first one he had gotten in Anthropology. He then went on to study genetic traits like cleft plates and twins. It was during this time that his obsession with experiments grew.

3. He was obsessed with studying twins

This is one of the most known facts about the doctor that he was obsessed with twins. He started his experiments as a way to further look into the Nazi’s concept of eugenics which is a philosophy that advocates the improvement of genetics y weeding out the negative traits.

Mengele believed that by knowing more about twins, he could get a deeper insight into how one can remove the negative DNA. Since the twins were important to his research, they were treated somehow better than the other prisoners in Auschwitz.

4. He was known as The Angel of Death

Some Jewish prisoners at the ramp by Yad Vashem-Wikimedia

The doctor was nicknamed the Angel of Death because of the horrifying things that he used to do to the prisoners. When the prisoners were brought to Auschwitz, one role of the doctors was to meet them in the trains and decide who was going to form the labour gangs and those that were going to the death chambers.

Most of the doctors hated this job and even got drunk before going to the platform where the train stopped. However, this was not the case for Josef as he enjoyed going to the platform and even wore his best suit. He even went to select the Jews going to the chambers when he was not scheduled to do so. This earned him the nickname Angel of Death.

5. He was a war hero

The man was a dedicated Nazi soldier and he joined the SS around the time that he got his second medical doctorate. When the Second World War started, he was sent to the eastern front to fight the Soviets.

He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for bravery in combat in 1941. The following year, he saved fellow German soldiers from a burning tank, an act that also earned him the Iron Cross First Class. This shows that he was one of the exalted soldiers in the military as he did notable things for the country.

6. His experiments were inhuman

Josef Mengele with colleagues by USHMM–Wikimedia

Having been given absolute freedom to do his experiments on the Jews brought into the prison as they were all meant to be killed anyway. His experiments were very cruel and callous and thus considered utterly inhuman.

He even injected the eyes of the inmates with dye to determine if it would change their eye colour. In some instances, he injected the inmates with viruses of deadly diseases so that he could monitor their progress. It is said that his experiments equalled what one can see when they have horrible nightmares

7. He was held in a US custody

During the end of the war, things were very chaotic. After the Germans surrendered, Josef was held in US custody but the United States officials were not aware that the doctor was among the list of criminals and they released him. That was how he managed to flee the country to escape the punishment that awaited him because of his crimes.

8. He took on a false identity

Josef Mengele took on a fake identity to avoid being caught after he escaped the country. While in Austria, he met a Nazi supporter known as Wolfgang Gerhard who was excited to meet such a prominent figure and even gave Josef his identification card. Josef then used that identity to remain in hiding. Even when he died his headstone read the name of the Austrian.

9. He was fascinated with heterochromia

A picture of an eye iris by Che-Wikimedia

The doctor is famed for his weird fascinations and one of them was heterochromia which is a condition in which one has eyes of different colours. The doctor wished to change the eye colour into one by injecting chemicals into the iris. When his experiment did not work then he would just go ahead and rip the eyeball off so that more research could be done on it.

10. He did not feel guilty for his crimes

It’s uncertain whether Mengele’s child Rolf was always aware that his father was alive and well in South America, or if he discovered him later. What we do know is that when Rolf visited his father in Brazil in 1977, he encountered an older and more heinous Nazi.

During their meeting, Josef Mengele told his son that he “had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life,” demonstrating the level of delusion he cultivated while working not only to torture human beings in his cruel experiments but also as a major component of the machine hell-bent on annihilating an entire race of people.