How do men become monsters? How does a doctor decide that racial purity or military
superiority was more important than doing no harm? These are the questions that a paper about Josef Mengele demands answers but will come up short in the answers. In this paper on the “Angel of Death at Auschwitz” will lead to more question and the dark pit of the Nazi regime. People are not born monsters, they are made a monster. This paper will determine how one monster existed in this dark world, and what his life can teach us about ourselves.
Josef Mengele was born March 16th, 1911, to Karl and Walburga Mengele in Günzburg Bavaria Germany, the oldest of three children. The German he was born into considered themselves to be a world power and dominant force in Europe with German militarism approaching its zenith. In only a few short years, the nation of German was in ruin, crushed military, financially, and their once swollen pride in pieces. The defeat leads over and over again to debt and lack of belief in the nation as a whole. People in that state will do anything except take the blame for their own defeat. The idea, which had pledged Europe for centuries, was to blame the communists and the Jews for their destruction. Antisemitism has always been an issue in Europe but with the rise of national socialism, hatred for Jews became feverish. The Nazis told the people two basic ideas. First, the German people are not just valuable, but they were part of a master race. Then secondly, Jewish banker caused the humiliation of the defeat in World War 1 and that the Jews were the antithesis of the master race I.e. basically subhuman. Furthering this attitude was the rise of eugenics in German at the same time. The study of eugenics is a mixture of anthropology and genetics with the belief that human being could be bred into a perfect existence. By eliminating genetic disorders from being passed on to offspring by sterilization or elimination, the human race as a whole would improve. The negative traits would be selectively eliminated and on the other side, positive traits would be encouraged to reproduce for example the Aryan ideal of blonde hair and blue eyes.
It is in this time and atmosphere that Mengele was educated and matured. He graduated high school in 1930 and studied medicine at Goethe University in Frankfurt and philosophy in Munich, the headquarters of the Nazi party. In 1931, He joined the paramilitary organization that was absorbed into the Nazi called Sturmabteilung a forerunner to the SS. In 1935, Mengele earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Munich. In 1937, he became an assistant to Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was conducting genetic research with an interest in twins. It was under Verschuer that he did research on the genetic factors of cleft lip, palate, and cleft chin with definite eugenic overtones on eliminating such traits from society.
The Nazis combined their ideology and the need of the German people to reclaim their status as a world power to rebuild the German military. Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the Schutzstaffel in 1938. He received basic training in 1938 with the Gebirgsjäger and was called up for service in the German armed forces in June 1940, some months after the outbreak of World War II. He soon volunteered for medical service in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, where he served with the rank of SS-Untersturmführer in a medical reserve battalion until November 1940. He was next assigned to the SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt in Posen, evaluating candidates for Germanisation.
In June 1941, Mengele was posted to Ukraine, where he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. In January 1942, he joined the fifth SS Panzer Division Wiking as a battalion medical officer. He rescued two German soldiers from a burning tank and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, as well as the Wound Badge in Black and the Medal for the Care of the German People. He was seriously wounded in action near Rostov-on-Don in mid-1942 and was declared unfit for further active service. After recovery, he was transferred to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin. He also resumed his association with von Verschuer, who was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Mengele was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer.
During the early parts of the war, Jews were transported to ghettos and work camps. The idea was to humiliate, starve, and slowly eliminate the Jews from society. German propaganda had convinced many that the jew was subhuman and they deserved what they got. However, the tremendous number of Jews especially in Eastern Europe, lead to the final solution. The Final Solution was a Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not limited to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geo-
political terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Jewish Poles, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. The belief that tasing the Jews would be more efficient and less psychology taxing on soldiers. So places like Auschwitz changed their main purpose from work camp to a death camp.
By July 1942, SS doctors, including Mengele, were conducting "selections". Incoming Jews were segregated; those deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were immediately killed in the gas chambers. The group selected to die, about three-quarters of the total, included almost all children, women with small children, pregnant women, all the elderly, and all those who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be completely fit. Mengele undertook this work even when he was not assigned to do so, in the hope of finding subjects for his experiments. He was particularly interested in locating sets of twins. In contrast to most of the doctors, who viewed undertaking selections as one of their most stressful and horrible duties, Mengele undertook the task with a flamboyant air, often smiling or whistling a tune.
Mengele convinced his superiors about the value of human experimentations, his thesis was that human differences were genetic, not environmental. Therefore he began to observe and experiment on twins. Mengele performed his studies on over 1500 people. About 200 people survived these studies. The twins were arranged by age and sex and kept in barracks between experiments, which ranged from injection of different dyes into the eyes of twins to see whether
it would change their color to sewing twins together in attempts to create conjoined twins. Often times, one twin would be forced to undergo experimentation, while the other was kept as a control. If the experimentation reached the point of death, Nazi's would bring in the second twin to kill them at the same time. Doctors would then look at the effects of experimentation and compare both bodies. Twins were subjected to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes by Mengele or one of his assistants. Experiments performed by Mengele on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or other diseases, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures. After an experiment was over, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. A victim recalled one occasion where Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night by injecting chloroform in their hearts. If one twin died of disease, Mengele killed the other so that comparative post-mortem reports could be prepared. At the war’s end, his nickname stuck and he fled the war crimes trial he so richly deserved.