Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death
A Biography
Auschwitz was a concentration camp located in Poland. It operated from approximately May of 1940 to January 1945. It was one of the many camps created to imprison and exterminate Jews and other human beings who didn't meet the standards Nazis held for the "perfect" individual in the master race. 1 in 6 Jews during the Holocaust were killed in Auschwitz. Josef Mengele, an SS physician, was one of the top physicians at the camp. He was commonly known as the "Angel of Death". Since Mengele was announced Chief Camp Physician of Auschwitz II, he held the responsibility of selecting those fit to work or those to be sent to the gas chambers. Mengele conducted many experiments on inmates, particularly favoring twins.
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in Gunzburg. Mengele was born into a Bavarian family of wealth and had a strict Catholic lifestyle. In his school life, he adopted a liking for music, skiing, and the arts. After graduating high school in April of 1930, Mengele went off to study Philosophy and Medicine at the University of Munich. After earning his PhD in Anthropology, he transferred to the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1937. Mengele was appointed as the assistant to Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Dr. Otmar had a strange interest in twins which Mengele developed the exact same interest. Mengele entered the concentration camp, Auschwitz, in 1943 to take the opportunity to perform genetic tests/experiments on human subjects. He was placed in Birkenau, which originally was not going to be for extermination. Auschwitz gave Josef the power to decide who was fit to continue into the camp and who would be sent to die. Most of the doctors despised this job as they thought it was one of their most horrible duties in the camp. Mengele, however, loved it and was often seen in a happy, joyful mood while making the selections.
Auschwitz was abandoned by the SS in January, 1945. From there Josef worked as a physician in a few other camps until the Holocaust came to an end. Under a false name, Mengele fled to Buenos Aires and worked in construction. He did well in South America but worried of capture so he regularly moved his location. After Argentina he moved to Paraguay. The hunt went on for the war criminal and he moved once again to Brazil. Mengele died on February 7th, 1979. The assumption is that he either drowned or had a stroke in the middle of a swim in the Atlantic Ocean.
VOCABULARY
1) Auschwitz
2) SS(Schutzstaffel) 3) Birkenau |
1) A Nazi concentration camp for Jews in southwestern Poland during WWII
2) A police force in Nazi Germany founded in 1925; administered the concentration camps 3) The second camp in Auschwitz |