Photo: DON EMMERT / AFP / Getty Images
Born on 16 March 1911 in Bavaria, Josef Mengele studied philosophy with Alfred Rosenberg, whose racial theories greatly influenced him. In 1934, already a member of the Nazi Party, he joined the research staff of the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.
An SS officer, Mengele was sent at the start of World War II to the Eastern Front to repel the Soviets and was awarded an Iron Cross for his bravery and service. After being wounded and declared unfit for active duty, he was assigned to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, and eager to further his medical career by publishing “innovative” work, began experimenting on living Jewish prisoners.
Under the guise of medical “treatment”, he injected, or ordered others to inject, thousands of inmates with everything from gasoline to chloroform. He also had a predilection for studying twins, whom he used to dissect.
Mengele managed to escape imprisonment after the war, first by working as a stable boy on a farm in Bavaria and later by going to South America.
Became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959. He later moved to Brazil, where he met another former Nazi party member, Wolfgang Gerhard.
In 1985, a multinational team of Forensic experts traveled to Brazil in search of Mengele. They determined that a man named Gerhard, but believed to be Mengele, had died of a stroke while swimming in 1979.
Dental records later confirmed that Mengele had, at some point, assumed the identity of Gerhard and was, in fact, the victim of the stroke.
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