Josef Mengele was a doctor and genetic researcher who carried out gruesome experiments on prisoners of Nazi German concentration camps between 1943 and 1945. He was nicknamed the "Angel of Death" because of his inspections of prisoners as they arrived at the Auschwitz/Birkenau facility: Mengele declared who was fit for work and who should be sent to the camp's gas chambers immediately. He was deemed responsible for 400,000 deaths, but Mengele was never prosecuted and even remained in Germany for a few years after the war. Nazi hunters traced him to Brazil, where the results of a highly publicized 1985 exhumation declared that Mengele had died six years earlier.

Mengele was born in 1911 in Bavaria, into a well-to-do family. He showed great promise as a youth and studied medicine, anthropology, and philosophy at the universities of Frankfurt and Munich. His 1938 dissertation concerned hereditary deformities, and Mengele's interest in genetics landed him...