Age, Biography, and Wiki
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Germany. He earned his medical and philosophy degrees, becoming an assistant to Prof. Otmar von Verschuer in the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Mengele is best known for his role as a Nazi SS officer and physician at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1945, where he conducted brutal experiments on prisoners.
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 16 March 1911 |
| Age | 114 Years |
| Birth Place | Günzburg, German Empire |
| Horoscope | Pisces |
| Country | Brazil |
| Date of death | 7 February, 1979 |
| Died Place | Bertioga, São Paulo, Brazil |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is no reliable information available on Mengele's height, weight, or other physical measurements.
Mengele was successful at school and developed an interest in music, art, and skiing. In 1924, he joined the Greater German Youth League, 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 philosophy in Munich, where the headquarters of the Nazi Party was located. He attended the University of Bonn, where he took his medical preliminary examination. In 1931, he joined Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, a paramilitary organization that was absorbed into the Nazi Sturmabteilung ('Storm Detachment'; SA) in 1934. He spent the summer of 1933 studying at the University of Vienna, and earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935, studying for four years under Theodore Mollison, a physical anthropologist and proponent of the pseudoscience of scientific racism. 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.
Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1938. He received basic training in 1938 with the Gebirgsjäger (mountain light infantry) and was called up for service in the Wehrmacht (Nazi armed forces) in June 1940, some months after the outbreak of World War II. He soon volunteered for medical service in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, where he served with the rank of SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) in a medical reserve battalion until November 1940. He was next assigned to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Poznań, evaluating candidates for Germanization.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Mengele was married to Irene Schönbein, with whom he had a son, Rolf Mengele, born in 1944. The couple divorced by proxy in 1954.
His two younger brothers were Karl Jr. and Alois. Their father was the founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company (later renamed Mengele Agrartechnik), 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 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.
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, disguised as a Wehrmacht 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 Düsseldorf in 1954.
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.
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.
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.
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| Husband | Irene Schönbein (m. 1939-1954) Martha Mengele (m. 1958) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Mengele did not have a public social network presence, as he lived in hiding after the war. His life was marked by secrecy and isolation.
Career, Business, and Investments
Mengele's career is marked by his involvement with the Nazi regime. He conducted inhumane medical experiments at Auschwitz, focusing on twins and individuals with dwarfism. After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he lived under various aliases until his death on February 7, 1979.
Before the war, Mengele received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party 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. His experiments focused primarily on twins, with no regard for the health or safety of the victims. With Red Army troops sweeping through German-occupied Poland, Mengele was transferred 280 km away from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on 17 January 1945, ten days before the arrival of the Soviet forces at Auschwitz.
In early 1943, Von Verschuer encouraged Mengele to apply for a transfer to the concentration camp service. Mengele's application was accepted and he was posted to Auschwitz, where he was appointed by SS-Standortarzt Eduard Wirths, chief medical officer at Auschwitz, to the position of chief physician of the Zigeunerfamilienlager (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 made weekly visits to the hospital barracks and ordered any prisoners who had not recovered after two weeks in bed to be sent to the gas chambers.
Mengele worked as a carpenter in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while lodging in a boarding house 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 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, 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.
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 São Paulo 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.
Education
Mengele received his medical and philosophy degrees. He was a doctor of medicine and philosophy, and his academic background was prominently linked to his work in hereditary biology and racial hygiene.
In January 1937, he joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where he worked for Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist with a particular interest in researching twins. As Von 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 cum laude doctorate in medicine (MD) from the University of Frankfurt in 1938. (Both of his degrees were revoked by the issuing universities in the 1960s.) In a letter of recommendation, Von Verschuer praised Mengele's reliability and his ability to verbally present complex material in a clear manner. The American author Robert Jay Lifton notes that Mengele's published works were in keeping with the scientific mainstream of the time, and would probably have been viewed as valid scientific efforts even outside Nazi Germany. On 28 July 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met while working as a medical resident in Leipzig.
In June 1941, Mengele was posted to Ukraine, where he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. In January 1942, he joined the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking as a battalion medical officer. 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 Berlin, at which point he resumed his association with Von Verschuer, who had become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Mengele was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) in April 1943.
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. Several afflicted children were killed so that their preserved heads and organs could be sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz and other facilities for study. This research was still ongoing when the Romani camp was liquidated and its remaining occupants murdered in 1944.
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 procedures were used for later epidemics of scarlet fever and other diseases, with infected prisoners being murdered in the gas chambers. 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.
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.
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.
* Racial-Morphological Examinations of the Anterior Portion of the Lower Jaw 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.
