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Josef Mengele Birth
Josef Mengele was born in Gunzburg Germany -
Coming under the influence
Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, coming under the influence of the racial ideology of Alfred Rosenberg, and then took a medical degree at the University of Frankfurt am Main. -
He enlisted in the Sturmabteilung
He enlisted in the Sturmabteilung in 1933 -
Schooling
he joined the research staff of a newly founded Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1934. -
Experiments
In 1943 he was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labor or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility. His chief interest, however, was research on twins. Mengele’s experiments often resulted in the death of the subject. -
After the war
After the war, Mengele escaped internment and went underground, serving for four years as a farm stableman near Rosenheim in Bavaria. Then he reportedly escaped, via Genoa, Italy, to South America in 1949. -
Name change
He married (for a second time) under his own name in Uruguay in 1958 and, as “José Mengele,” received citizenship in Paraguay in 1959. -
Later life
In 1961 he apparently moved to Brazil, reportedly becoming friends with an old-time Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard, and living in a succession of houses owned by a Hungarian couple. -
Death
In 1985 a team of Brazilian, West German, and American forensic experts determined that Mengele had taken Gerhard’s identity, died in 1979 of a stroke while swimming, and was buried under Gerhard’s name. Dental records later confirmed the forensic conclusion. -
Work Cited
“Josef Mengele | Biography, Death, Angel of Death, & Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josef-Mengele.