Josef Mengele: The Doctor in Charge of the Horrors of Auschwitz

“At Auschwitz dying was so easy. Surviving was a full time job.” From his warm smiles to his lethal experiments, Josef Mengele deceived the prisoners of Auschwitz to make them feel safe, and then exploit their trust. Josef Mengele was one of many doctors positioned at the concentration camps in Poland. He orchestrated malicious experiments which led to the death of thousands of innocent people. Mengele was given the name Angel of Death during his years at the concentration camp.

He was a master manipulator that made prisoners feel content and comfortable one moment, but then screaming in agony the next. Occasionally, he would deliver candy and clothing to children with the goal to discover his next victim. One woman that goes by the name of Ms. M, relives the horrors of her time at Auschwitz everyday through anxiety. She states, 'I was never ever given painkillers or anesthetics. Every day I suffered excruciating pain. I was injected with drugs and chemicals. My body most of the time was connected to tubes which inserted some drugs in to my body. Many days I was tied up for hours. Some days they made cuts in to my body and left the wounds open for them to study… We were left with open infected wounds and no food. We all were half dead with no energy or life left in us. Josef Mengele, being the vicious human that he was, tortured and murdered too many lives. The cruel “treatments” performed by doctor Josef Mengele made him one of the most feared individuals during the Holocaust.

What many people do not know about Mengele is that he had a great deal of experience prior to his career at Auschwitz. Josef came into the world on March 16th of 1911 in Gunzberg, Germany. He was born into a wealthy family, although after he became older, he was not interested in working with the family business. From a young age, Mengele had always been independent. In the year 1935, Mengele began his medical career by receiving his PhD in anthropology at the University of Munich. Following his PhD, Mengele got his doctoral degree in genetic medicine. After these important points in Mengele’s life, he pushed himself even more to become the doctor that he intended to be. In 1937, Josef became the assistant to a doctor, that specified in twins, at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. Not only did this spark Mengele’s interest of the human anatomy, but it also influenced his curiosity with twins. All of the chaos began when Josef Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937. He started working at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute until he got promoted to SS captain. Not many knew that May 30th, 1943 would be the most dreadful day of their lives. On this day, Josef Mengele was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp where he would soon perform unthinkable experiments on humans as young as newborns. Auschwitz provided Mengele with an abundance of humans to examine because trains were constantly bringing people back and forth.

Many of the victims of Josef Mengele are terrified to this day because they cannot get this evil man out of their minds. Even if he did not perform experiments on them directly, people are still replaying the horrible events. Josef Mengele is known for his sickening experiments but he also was in charge of which people would be sent to the gas chambers or crematoria and which people would be working in the fields. Ms. B remembers, “During this time Dr. Mengele came once or twice a week and he pulled out the weak and the sick from the line and they never have been seen again. It was necessary to make sure that the entire body was covered so Dr. Mengele would not see even one sore, or our life would be over.' He paid close attention to the people that he was selecting being sure to choose the twins. He was extremely interested in twins because his goal was to create the “perfect Nazi”. This consisted of, blond hair, blue eyes, and a perfect body.

Twins were treated with much more respect than other prisoners. He provided them with clean clothes and fresh food until he injected them with chemicals so they would die which would give him a chance to view their organs. Mengele was fascinated by the existence of twins so he would compare every single part of their bodies before killing and dissecting them. Although twins were operated on the most, they had the greatest chance of survival.

Despite the fact that twins were operated on the most, Mengele experimented on Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. Some experiments that he conducted included, artificially changing a person’s eye color, inject prisoners with chemicals, conjoining a set of twins, and performing autopsies. If prisoners were not experimented on by Mengele, they were tortured by him and other Nazis. Ms. G looks back on her days at Auschwitz, 'Each day I was submerged in hot water. Whenever I tried to put my head out of the water in order to breathe I was forced back into the water by Dr. Josef Mengele’s stick. He was enjoying himself. This lasted for 10 minutes. I was immediately afterwards put into cold water and the same procedure was repeated.'Josef Mengele was a mass murderer that did not care about the lives that were lost but only about the research he gained. This man was very impulsive and wanted what he wanted when he wanted. One instance, a woman refused to be separated with her 14-year-old daughter after Mengele told her she was going to be murdered. As a result, Mengele shot both the woman and her daughter and sent everybody else to the gas chambers to be killed. Josef Mengele did not take “no” for an answer and became very angry when someone disagreed with him.

As time went on, Mengele knew that what he was doing was wrong, but that did not stop him. The Soviet Union began to move through Germany which made Mengele nervous. He fled the camp and moved to Gross Rosen but after that camp was evacuated he moved west. Ironically, the U.S captured Mengele but were unaware that he was on the wanted list so they released him. Josef Mengele lived under the name Fritz Hollmann and moved to Argentina. He did not have a passport but officers were very kind when allowing Nazis to cross the border into other countries. In the 1950s, Mengele opened up an illegal medical shop that specialized in abortions but he was arrested after killing one of his patients. He was sent to jail but was released after his close friend gave money to the judge as bribery. For years Josef Mengele evaded his captors until 1979 when he went for a swim in the ocean where he had a stroke and died. Mengele’s remains were found and they were buried. Later on, the family of Mengele confessed to them knowing his whereabouts but did not want to give him up.