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 a job as assistant to the director of the Frankfurt University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. The institute had been created in 1934 after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power to establish scientific "evidence" of German racial superiority. During World War II, Mengele served with the German army's medical corps in a mountain troop unit and with a Panzer division. He was made battalion surgeon and a captain in the Schutzstaffel (SS) but was wounded in Russia in the spring of 1943. He was relieved of battlefield duties and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, one of the largest of the Nazi extermination sites, to be its health director.
Mengele inspected the trainloads of deportees as they arrived at Auschwitz and conducted experiments on inmates, taking a particular interest in twins and dwarfs. He extracted eyes from victims and sent them to his former boss at the Frankfurt Institute. Nazi ideology held that blue eyes represented the Aryan ideal, and Mengele wondered if eye color could be changed. He injected the eyeballs of children in agonizing experiments, and many were permanently blinded. To determine if twins died with the same speed, he injected both with chloroform into the heart. He also formed a circus of dwarves for his own entertainment. On one occasion, the health director was vexed that a block of female inmates continued to be infested with lice despite treatment, so he ordered all 750 women to be gassed.
Mengele disappeared from Auschwitz when its SS commanders abandoned the camp. He was supposedly arrested in 1947 by two American soldiers in Vienna but then released, and there were hints that the British had wanted to use him as a spy. He even lived in his Bavarian hometown for a time but disappeared from Germany in 1949, sailing to South America via Italy. He was thought to have lived ten years in Argentina, then moved on to Paraguay, which was run by a right-wing dictatorship. Paraguay ignored extradition requests from West Germany asking for Mengele, and by the mid-1980s Nazi hunters had placed a bounty of $3 million for his capture. A man named Wolfgang Gerhard had died in a drowning accident at a Brazilian beach resort in 1979, and in June of 1985, this body was exhumed and an autopsy performed. A team of Brazilian, German, and American forensic experts concluded that the corpse was that of Mengele, but others disputed the findings. There were reports that he had been seen since 1979, and though the Mengele survivors in West Germany confirmed the autopsy findings, Nazi hunters claimed that if Mengele--who had been financially supported by the family for years--had really died, they would have reported it then in order to end the notoriety and to settle an inheritance claim.
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