{"id":1585,"date":"2025-04-23T19:51:44","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T19:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jagsystem.com\/"},"modified":"2025-04-23T19:51:44","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T19:51:44","slug":"uma-descoberta-perturbadora-sobre-josef-mengele-o-anjo-da-morte","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/israelagora.com.br\/en\/?page_id=1585","title":{"rendered":"A disturbing discovery about josef mengele, the ‘angel of death’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Josef Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937 and gained notoriety among the regime’s leading figures due to his genetic experiments. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Anonymous Donor<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
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\r\n\t#Mengele<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>

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\r\n\tIn the early 1980s, American historian David G Marwell made a chilling discovery while researching in Bad Arolsen, a German town housing a major Holocaust archive.<\/strong><\/p>

He found a medical form signed by Dr. Josef Mengele, a notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.<\/p>

\r\nDated June 29, 1944, the form requested that the SS laboratory prepare tissue samples from the head of a 12-year-old child for microscopic analysis.<\/p>

\r\nMarwell, then working for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which investigated Nazi crimes, was deeply shaken.<\/p>

\r\nWhat kind of twisted curiosity would lead a doctor to send a child’s head to a lab?\r\n<\/p>

\r\nYears later, Marwell joined an OSI team tasked with tracking down Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who had been on the run since World War II ended.<\/p>

\r\nIn 1985, he was in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, with an international team of forensic experts who confirmed that a skeleton exhumed from a grave under a false name in Embu das Artes was indeed Mengele’s.<\/p>

\r\nThirty-five years after that, in 2020, Marwell published a remarkable biography, Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” (W.W.<\/p>

\r\nNorton), about the man behind that horrific document.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nMarwell’s book is clear, well-organized, and carefully researched, placing Mengele’s life within the broader context of 20th-century German history.<\/p>

\r\nIts greatest strength is its restraint.<\/p>

\r\nMengele, who decided who lived or died at Auschwitz and conducted experiments on humans, could easily be portrayed as a crazed sadist.<\/p>

\r\nInstead, Marwell avoids sensationalism, showing Mengele as a cold, rational man who justified his actions with a distorted version of science.<\/p>

\r\nThis makes his crimes even more terrifying-not the acts of a deranged mind, but the calculated results of a warped worldview.\r\n<\/p>

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Doctor Otmar von Verschuer, Mengele’s mentor, uses a color scale to measure the eye color of twin brothers. This is an example of the type of anthropometric racial study that was carried out in Germany at the time. Photo: Reproduction \/ Kaiser Wilhelm Institute \/ Max Planck-Gesellschaft<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
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Mengele’s Cruel Experiments<\/b>\r\n<\/p>

\r\nMarwell’s research revealed that Mengele’s request for the child’s head wasn’t driven by random cruelty.<\/p>

\r\nAt Auschwitz, he was studying noma, a bacterial disease that caused swelling and tissue death in the mouths of malnourished Romani children.<\/p>

\r\nUsing Jewish prisoner-doctors, Mengele tested treatments combining drugs, vitamins, and better nutrition, which could stop the disease’s spread.<\/p>

\r\nBut the research was inherently perverse: noma thrives in starving children, so the treatment only addressed a problem caused by Auschwitz’s inhumane conditions.<\/p>

\r\nMarwell notes that basic sanitation and adequate food could have prevented the outbreak entirely.<\/p>

\r\nTragically, none of the “cured” children survived the camp.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nMengele’s main interests weren’t diseases like noma but genetics, anthropology, and “racial hygiene.” As a doctor at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, he was responsible for selecting which arriving prisoners would be sent to forced labor and which-elders, the weak, pregnant women, and young children-would go straight to the gas chambers.<\/p>

\r\nMengele used this power to pick “specimens” for his racial studies, especially twins and dwarfs.<\/p>

\r\nHe set up a special barrack for twins, subjecting them to tests and measurements.<\/p>

\r\nWhen he was done, he sometimes ordered them killed to study their organs.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nThese experiments weren’t the work of a lone madman.<\/p>

\r\nThey were part of Nazi Germany’s racist scientific programs.<\/p>

\r\nMengele collaborated with his university mentor, Otmar von Verschuer, a leading twin researcher at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics.<\/p>

\r\nHe also worked with Karen Magnussen, studying eye color.<\/p>

\r\nContrary to earlier myths, Mengele didn’t inject dye into twins’ eyes to make them “Aryan” blue.<\/p>

\r\nInstead, he and Magnussen explored whether hormones could change iris color and were fascinated by heterochromia, a rare condition where each eye is a different color.<\/p>

\r\nMengele meticulously studied a Romani family with this trait, documenting their genealogy and measuring four pairs of twins, who were later killed with chloroform injections to harvest their eyes for Magnussen’s research.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nIn another case, Mengele found a hunchbacked man and his teenage son with a foot deformity among new arrivals.<\/p>

\r\nAfter extensive exams, both were killed, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin’s Anthropological Institute.\r\n<\/p>

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Twin Jewish children used for Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. They were liberated alive by the Red Army in 1945. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
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Mengele’s Life and Escape<\/b>\r\n<\/p>

\r\nBorn in G\u00fcnzburg, Germany, to a wealthy industrialist, Mengele inherited his father’s extreme nationalism but didn’t join the Nazi Party until 1937.<\/p>

\r\nAs an SS medical officer, he served with the Viking Division in Ukraine and Russia from 1941 to 1943, earning two medals.<\/p>

\r\nWhile there’s no evidence he directly participated in massacres of Jews, he was likely aware of them.<\/p>

\r\nIn 1943, he took the role that made him infamous: a doctor at Auschwitz, the heart of the Holocaust.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nWhen Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in 1945, Mengele had already fled, joining a regular army medical unit and discarding his SS uniform to avoid being identified as a war criminal.<\/p>

\r\nCaptured by American forces, he was released and lived under a false name in Bavaria until 1949, when he escaped to Argentina, a haven for Nazi fugitives.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nIn Buenos Aires, Mengele thrived, becoming a partner in a pharmaceutical company.<\/p>

\r\nHe mingled with German exiles, even meeting Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Jewish genocide (Mengele found him unimpressive).<\/p>

\r\nFeeling safe, he visited Germany in 1956, divorced his first wife, and married his brother’s widow to secure the family fortune.<\/p>

\r\nBut in 1959, as Germany sought his extradition, he fled to Paraguay and then, in 1960, to Brazil.\r\n<\/p>

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An alleged image of Mengele (left) in Embu, where his bones were found buried. The image was the subject of investigation, but it was never confirmed that it was actually him. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg \/ Liaison \/ Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
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The Hunt for Mengele<\/b>\r\n<\/p>

\r\nMarwell dedicates much of his book to the decades-long effort to find Mengele.<\/p>

\r\nIn the late 1950s, German authorities mistakenly used G\u00fcnzburg’s local police-loyal to Mengele’s family, whose factory supported the town-to investigate, tipping him off to flee Argentina.<\/p>

\r\nIsrael’s Mossad, which captured Eichmann, came close in 1962, locating Mengele near S\u00e3o Paulo but abandoning the mission without full confirmation.<\/p>

\r\nIt wasn’t until 1985, spurred by the 40th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation and pressure from survivors like Eva Kor, a twin experimented on by Mengele, that Germany, Israel, and the U.S. intensified their search.<\/p>

\r\nA letter found in a Mengele associate’s home, sent from Brazil, mentioned “our mutual friend’s” death, leading to the Embu grave.\r\n<\/p>

\r\nIdentifying Mengele’s remains was challenging.<\/p>

\r\nMarwell notes the Brazilian authorities’ carelessness-the gravedigger damaged the skull-but praises Federal Police chief Romeu Tuma.<\/p>

\r\nIronically, the skeleton’s “Caucasoid” classification used techniques similar to Mengele’s own racial studies.<\/p>

\r\nDNA testing in 1992 finally confirmed it was him.\r\n<\/p>

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The Italian passport in which Mengele presents himself under a false name after fleeing after the end of World War II. Photo: jackdawson1970 \/ Creative Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
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No Remorse<\/b>\r\n<\/p>

\r\nMengele died at 67 on February 7, 1979, suffering a stroke while swimming at Bertioga beach in Brazil.<\/p>

\r\nHe never expressed regret.<\/p>

\r\nIn a letter to his son, he insisted he acted for the good of the German nation, writing, “I don’t feel the slightest need to justify or apologize.” Marwell suggests that the unease over Mengele’s unpunished death-dying leisurely at the beach-fuels conspiracy theories.<\/p>

\r\nGerman investigator Hans-Eberhard Klein captured this frustration in 1992, saying, “We prosecutors in Frankfurt (?) tell Holocaust survivors and victims of Mengele’s inhumane experiments: we would have preferred to bring him to trial alive to prove his guilt.”<\/p>

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\r\nThe story of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who experimented on children in concentration camps

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Published in 04\/23\/2025 19h51<\/em><\/p>\r\n

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Portuguese version<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n

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Text adapted by AI (Grok) and translated via Google API in the English version. Images from public image libraries or credits in the caption.<\/p>\r\n\t\t

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Reference article:<\/p>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\r\n\r\n