Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele (1911-1979) was a Nazi SS Hauptsturmfuhrer and physician at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, involved in direct killings and nonconsensual medical experiments on humans. He escaped prosecution and died, in 1979, while swimming in Paraguay.

Mengele has been described as supporting Nazi race and biological ideology, which variously categorized some people as "life unworthy of life", and also that the Jews and other groups needed to be physically exterminated. His questionable actions fell into three categories:

1. Participation in the established procedures of the Nazi genocide program, such as selecting camp arrivals for forced labor or immediate killing; these activities were under the immediate direction of camp Chief Medical Officer Eduard Wirths, who reported to camp commander Rudolf Hoess, and part of the overall program of the Final Solution.
2. Involuntary medical experiments, under the sponsorship of Otmar von Verscheur of the Kaiser William Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics
3. Killings and other actions that may have been for personal gratification

He was not a policy-making official, but committed individual crimes. Mengele was relatively little known immediately after the war, but an increasing body of historical writing drew attention to him. Lifton observes that he has acquired "mythic" proportions as a war criminal, and indeed conducted atrocities. Nevertheless, he was one of the Nazi doctors that took advantage of eugenic opportunities in the camps, and “[i]n ordinary times, Mengele could have been a slightly sadistic German professor.” Lifton emphasizes that von Verschuen had much influence on his actions.

Early life

Born in Guenzburg, Germany to a wealthy Roman Catholic family, he grew up under strict discipline. He matriculated at the University of Munich in 1930, and, while considered a "loner", appeared to enjoy parties. His first foray into right-wing politics came in 1931, when, at age 20, he joined the paramilitary Freikorps, the Stahlhelm. Thinking it more a wave of the future, he joined the SA in January 1934, but, after the June purge, he resigned in October, for reasons of "kidney trouble. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938, and the SS Medical Corps in 1940.

Assigned to the SS Viking Division, he served as a combat physician and was wounded in action. His recovery was insufficient for him to be approved for front-line service.

SS career

After being injured in the field, he transferred to Auschwitz between May 1943 and January 1945, and both served as a general medical officer and conducting experiments under the sponsorship of Otto von Verscheur Subsequently, he moved to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Most of his work, however, was at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Postwar

There is debate whether or not he spent any time in U.S. detention camps.

Other Nazi physicians, charged with equivalent acts, were sentenced in the Medical Case at the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. The chief research analyst of the U.S. Office of War Crimes recommened that he "...be placed on the wanted list and indicted for war crimes." The same analyst, however, did not list von Verschur.

The governments of Germany, Israel, and the United States agreed, in 1992, that he was dead.