Josef Mengele

Template:Short description Template:Redirect Template:Good article Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use American English Template:Infobox military person

Josef Mengele (Template:IPA; 16 March 1911Template:Spaced ndash7 February 1979), often dubbed the "Angel of Death" (Template:Langx), was a Nazi German Template:Lang (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Soviet front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.Template:Sfn He conducted research and experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers.Template:Efn

Before the war, Mengele received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and he began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service in early 1943. He was assigned to Auschwitz, where he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects. With Red Army troops sweeping through German-occupied Poland, Mengele was transferred Template:Convert away from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on 17 January 1945, ten days before the arrival of the Soviet forces at Auschwitz.

After the war, Mengele fled to Argentina in July 1949, assisted by a network of former SS members. He initially lived in and around Buenos Aires, but fled to Paraguay in 1959 and later Brazil in 1960, all while being sought by West Germany, Israel, and Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal, who wanted to bring him to trial. Mengele eluded capture despite extradition requests by the West German government and clandestine operations by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming off the coast of Bertioga, and was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard. His remains were disinterred and positively identified by forensic examination in 1985 and DNA analysis in 1992.

Early life

Mengele was born into a Catholic familyTemplate:Sfn in Günzburg, Bavaria, on 16 March 1911, the eldest of three sons of Walburga (née Hupfauer) and Karl Mengele.Template:Sfn His two younger brothers were Karl Jr. and Alois. Their father was the founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company (later renamed Template:Ill), which produced farming machinery.Template:Sfn In 1915, the company expanded, and switched to producing military equipment such as specialized wagons for military transport and parts for deploying naval mines. Karl joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and the SS in 1935, primarily as a way to advance his career in local politics. He served as a district economic advisor, and was found during denazification proceedings after World War II to have not been a committed Nazi.Template:Sfn

Mengele was successful at school and developed an interest in music, art, and skiing.Template:Sfn In 1924, he joined the Template:Ill, a right-wing youth group, and remained a member until 1930, serving as leader of the local chapter from 1927.Template:Sfn He completed secondary school in April 1930 and went on to study medicine at the University of Munich.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn After two semesters, he switched to the University of Bonn,Template:Sfn where he took his medical preliminary examination.Template:Sfn In 1931, he joined Template:Lang, a paramilitary organization that was absorbed into the Nazi Template:Lang ('Storm Detachment'; SA) in 1934.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He spent part of 1933 studying at the University of Vienna,Template:Sfn and earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935,Template:Sfn studying for four years under Template:Ill, a physical anthropologist and proponent of the pseudoscience of scientific racism. Mengele's dissertation, titled Rassenmorphologische Untersuchung des vorderen Unterkieferabschnittes bei vier rassischen Gruppen ("Racial morphological study of the anterior segment of the mandible in four racial groups"), attempted to prove that measurements of the lower jaw could be used to determine race.Template:Sfn

In January 1937, he joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where he worked for Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist with a particular interest in researching twins.Template:Sfn As Verschuer's assistant, Mengele focused on the genetic factors that result in a cleft lip and palate or a cleft chin.Template:Sfn His thesis on the subject earned him a Template:Lang doctorate in medicine (MD) from the University of Frankfurt in 1937.Template:Sfn Template:Efn In a letter of recommendation, Verschuer praised Mengele's reliability and his ability to verbally present complex material clearly.Template:Sfn Template:Efn In 1938, he hired him as a permanent assistant at his institute. As part of his duties, he assessed the racial heritage of applicants for the Aryan certificate, a document required before a person could qualify for government jobs or German citizenship.Template:Sfn

On 28 July 1939, Mengele married Irene Schönbein, whom he had met while working as a medical resident in Leipzig.Template:Sfn Their only child, a son they named Rolf, was born in 1944.Template:Sfn

Military career

Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the Template:Lang (SS) in 1938. He received basic training in 1938 with the Template:Lang (mountain light infantry) and was called up for service in the Template:Lang (Nazi armed forces) in June 1940, some months after the outbreak of World War II. He soon volunteered for medical service in the Template:Lang, the combat arm of the SS, where he served with the rank of SS-Template:Lang (second lieutenant) in a medical reserve battalion until November 1940. He was next assigned to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Poznań, where one of his assignments was evaluating candidates for Germanization.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

At the end of 1940, Mengele was assigned to the engineering battalion of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, initially as an assistant medical officer and as primary medical officer from October 1941.Template:Sfn His unit was sent to the Ulm area for training in April 1941 and were eventually sent to an area southeast of Lublin to await the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The unit crossed into Ukraine on 30 June. On 2 July, the commander of the division's Westland Regiment was killed by a sniper. In response, members of the Wiking Division killed several thousand Jews. This was the beginning of a pogrom by the Wiking Division that continued into Zolochiv and nearby areas until 4 July. German historian Kai Struve estimates the total number of Jewish civilians killed by the Wiking Division in their first week of action during Barbarossa was 4,280 to 6,950 people. Historian David G. Marwell states that while Mengele did not participate in these killings, he must have known what was taking place.Template:Sfn Mengele was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class on 14 July for bravery.Template:Sfn The unit continued to see action in Ukraine and Russia as part of Case Blue (June to November 1942) and was ordered to move towards Stalingrad in late December.Template:Sfn

After rescuing two German soldiers from a burning tank, he was decorated with the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Wound Badge in Black, and the Medal for the Care of the German People. He was declared unfit for further active service in mid-1942, when he was seriously wounded in action near Rostov-on-Don. Following his recovery, he was transferred to the headquarters of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Berlin. He was promoted to the rank of Template:Lang (captain) in April 1943.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn For four months in early 1943, he also worked as an assistant to Verschuer, who was now at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin.Template:Sfn

Auschwitz

In 1942, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, originally intended to house slave laborers, began to be used instead as a combined labour camp and extermination camp.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Prisoners were transported there daily by rail from all over Nazi-controlled Europe.Template:Sfn By July 1942, SS doctors were conducting selections where incoming Jews were segregated, and those considered able to work were admitted into the camp while those deemed unfit for labor were immediately murdered in the gas chambers.Template:Sfn Those selected to be killed, about three-quarters of the total,Template:Efn included almost all children, women with small children, pregnant women, all the elderly, and all of those who appeared (in a brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor) to be not completely fit and healthy.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In early 1943, Verschuer encouraged Mengele to apply for a transfer to the concentration camp service.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Mengele's application was accepted and he was posted to Auschwitz in May 1943,Template:Sfn where he was appointed by SS-Template:Lang Eduard Wirths, chief medical officer at Auschwitz, to the position of chief physician of the Romani family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The SS doctors did not administer medical treatment to the Auschwitz inmates, but supervised the activities of inmate doctors forced to work in the camp medical service.Template:Sfn As part of his duties, Mengele was one of the doctors who made weekly visits to the hospital barracks and ordered any prisoners who had not recovered after two weeks in bed to be sent to the gas chambers.Template:Sfn

Mengele's work also involved carrying out selections of new arrivals. This involved sorting new arrivals into those who would be admitted to the camp from those who would be killed immediately. He would sometimes visit the selection ramp when not on duty in the hope of locating sets of twins for his experiments.Template:Sfn He also looked for physicians, pharmacists, and other medical professionals who could potentially assist him in his research.Template:Sfn In contrast to most of the other SS doctors, who viewed selections as one of their most stressful and unpleasant duties, he undertook the task with a flamboyant air, often smiling or whistling.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He was one of the SS doctors responsible for supervising the administration of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide that was used for the mass killings in the Birkenau gas chambers. He served in this capacity at the gas chambers located in crematoria IV and V.Template:Sfn

When a typhus epidemic began in the women's camp, Mengele cleared one block of six hundred Jewish women and sent them to be killed in the gas chambers. The building was then cleaned and disinfected, and the occupants of a neighboring block were bathed, deloused, and given new clothing before being moved into the clean block. This process was repeated until all of the barracks were disinfected. Similar killings and disinfections were used for later epidemics of scarlet fever, measles, and other diseases.Template:Sfn For these actions, Mengele was awarded the War Merit Cross (Second Class with swords) and was promoted in 1944 to First Physician of the Birkenau subcamp.Template:Sfn

Human experimentation and research

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Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his anthropological studies and research into heredity, using inmates for medical experimentation.Template:Sfn For this purpose, he set up his research facility in the Romani family camp.Template:Sfn He was particularly interested in identical twins, people with heterochromia iridum (eyes of two different colors), people with dwarfism, and people with physical abnormalities.Template:Sfn He also studied blood proteins, did anthropological studies of the Romani population, and collected specimens for forwarding to the SS Medical Academy in Graz.Template:Sfn A grant was provided by the German Research Foundation at the request of Verschuer, who received regular reports and shipments of specimens from Mengele. The grant was used to build a pathology laboratory attached to Crematorium II at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.Template:Sfn Miklós Nyiszli, who was forced to work on Mengele's behalf due to his pathologist background, prepared specimens and performed autopsies for this laboratory.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

When an outbreak of noma—a gangrenous bacterial disease of the mouth and face—struck the Romani camp in 1943, Mengele initiated a study to determine the cause of the disease and develop a treatment.Template:Sfn He enlisted the assistance of prisoner Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician and professor at Prague University. The patients were isolated in separate barracks.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The treatment involved administering vitamins and antibiotics to afflicted children, who saw significant improvement. However, once he was satisfied that it was effective, he discontinued treatment, and the children immediately fell ill again.Template:Sfn The preserved heads and organs of several afflicted children were sent to the SS Medical Academy in Graz and other facilities for study.Template:Sfn This research was still ongoing when the Romani camp was liquidated and its remaining occupants murdered in 1944.Template:Sfn

In his search for genetic markers to indicate race, Verschuer had Mengele provide him with blood samples from around 200 racially diverse Auschwitz prisoners. The hypothesis was that each race had unique proteins that could be identified by laboratory testing. Most of the documentation from these experiments has not survived.Template:Sfn

Twin research was of particular interest to Mengele. One twin could serve as a subject with the other as the control.Template:Sfn Mengele viewed the opportunity to undertake twin research at Auschwitz as unique, as it is normally difficult to locate and study a significant number of subjects.Template:Sfn The research was conducted on behalf of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology and the German Research Foundation.Template:Sfn Most of the twins he studied were children between the ages of two and sixteen. Historian Nikolaus Wachsmann estimates Mengele may have studied as many as a thousand sets of twins. Some were siblings who passed themselves off as twins to avoid being killed.Template:Sfn The research largely involved taking dozens of physical measurements and recording the characteristics of various anatomical features. Each examination could take several hours.Template:Sfn Mengele generally ordered the twins to undertake weekly physical examinations.Template:Sfn Nyiszli and others suggested that twin studies may have been pursued to uncover strategies for 'racially desirable' Germans to produce more twins.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The actual purpose of Mengele's twin research is unknown.Template:Sfn

In his 1945 deposition, Nyiszli testified that he watched Mengele kill 14 twins in a single night, first by injecting evipan to induce sleep, and then injecting their hearts with chloroform.Template:Sfn Nyiszli described it differently in his book; there, he said that he smelled chloroform in the hearts of twins he dissected. He added that he feared Mengele might have him killed for knowing this secret.Template:Sfn

Mengele's research subjects were better fed and housed than the other prisoners, and temporarily spared from death in the gas chambers.Template:Sfn His research subjects lived in their own barracks, where they were provided with a marginally better quality of food and somewhat improved living conditions than other areas of the camp.Template:Sfn When visiting his young subjects, he offered them sweets. Some children referred to him as "Uncle Mengele".Template:Sfn

A former Auschwitz inmate doctor said of Mengele:

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Mengele's eye research involved introducing chemicals or hormones into the eyes of subjects. Although there has been speculation that Mengele was attempting to "Aryanize" prisoners' eyes by making them blue with dyes or other chemicals, this idea has been rejected by Marwell. He argues that Mengele would not be interested in a "cosmetic change" with "no genetic meaning".Template:Sfn According to Marwell, Mengele was most likely administering adrenaline drops into the eyes of subjects while researching the condition heterochromia (color differences of the iris), as part of his collaboration with biologist and eugenicist Karin Magnussen, who carried out Reich-funded research on eye color at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. Magnussen was testing whether drugs or hormones such as adrenaline could alter pigmentation of the eyes of rabbits, as well as studying the anatomy of the eye and the genetics underlying heterochromia.Template:Sfn

Mengele's collaboration with Magnussen also included compiling genealogical records and documenting the eye characteristics of prisoners.Template:Sfn He sent eyes removed from Auschwitz prisoners to her lab in Berlin for histological study. After the war, Magnussen stated she believed that the specimens were from prisoners who had died of natural causes.Template:Sfn The inmate pathologist, Nyiszli, said that some of the samples were from the bodies of people who had been killed by lethal injection.Template:Sfn

Myths and apocryphal anecdotes

Some testimonies regarding Mengele have been rejected or challenged by historians, including the claim that Mengele sewed two twins together to create conjoined twins.Template:Sfn Agnieszka Kita, a historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has described this as a myth.Template:Sfn Marwell has rejected other stories about Mengele, including the suggestion that he surgically "connected the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon", or that he attempted to "make boys into girls and girls into boys" using "cross transfusions", or that he attempted to change people's eye color.Template:Sfn

After Auschwitz

Along with several other Auschwitz doctors, Mengele transferred to Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia on 17 January 1945, taking with him two boxes of specimens and the records of his experiments at Auschwitz. Most of the camp medical records had already been destroyed by the SSTemplate:Sfn Template:Sfn by the time the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on 27 January.Template:Sfn He was assigned as SS garrison physician on 5 February, but the camp was evacuated shortly thereafter, as the Soviet army arrived on 13 February. He and other camp personnel may have moved at this time to Reichenau concentration camp, located near Rychnov u Jablonce nad Nisou, or to one of the other Gross-Rosen subcamps.Template:Sfn He later traveled westward to Žatec in Czechoslovakia, where he became part of a field hospital unit, which meant he could wear the uniform of a Template:Lang officer rather than his SS uniform.Template:Sfn He temporarily entrusted his incriminating documents to a nurse with whom he had struck up a relationship.Template:Sfn He and his unit then hurried west to avoid being captured by the Soviets, but were taken prisoners of war by the Americans in June 1945. Although Mengele was initially registered under his own name, he was not identified as being on the major war criminal list due to the disorganization of the Allies regarding the distribution of wanted lists, and the fact that he did not have the usual SS blood group tattoo.Template:Sfn He had also developed a convincing backstory that did not include his SS background or his service at Auschwitz.Template:Sfn He was released by the US military authorities at the end of July and obtained a false clearance certificate under the name "Fritz Ulmann", which he later altered to read "Fritz Hollmann".Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

After several months on the run (including a trip back to the Soviet-occupied area to recover his Auschwitz records), Mengele found work near Rosenheim as a farmhand.Template:Sfn He was in contact with members of his family, including his brother and his wife. She pretended to outsiders that he was dead and talked to him about getting a divorce.Template:Sfn He left Germany on 17 April 1949,Template:Sfn Template:Sfn convinced that his capture would mean a trial and death sentence. Assisted by a network of former SS members, he used the ratline to travel to Genoa, where he obtained a passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross under the alias "Helmut Gregor", and sailed to Argentina in July 1949.Template:Sfn His wife refused to accompany him, and they divorced by proxy in Düsseldorf in 1954.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In South America

Mengele worked as a carpenter in Buenos Aires while lodging in a boarding house in the suburb of Vicente López.Template:Sfn After a few weeks, he moved to the house of a Nazi sympathizer in the neighborhood of Florida Este. He next worked as a salesman for his family's farm equipment company, Karl Mengele & Sons, and in 1951, he began making frequent trips to Paraguay as a regional sales representative for the firm.Template:Sfn He moved into an apartment in central Buenos Aires in 1953, used family funds to buy a part interest in a carpentry concern, and then rented a house in the suburb of Olivos in 1954.Template:Sfn Files released by the Argentine government in 1992 indicate that while living in Buenos Aires, Mengele may have practiced medicine without a license, including performing abortions.Template:Sfn

After obtaining a copy of his birth certificate through the West German embassy in 1956, Mengele was issued an Argentine foreign residence permit under his real name. He used this document to obtain a West German passport using his real name and embarked on a trip to Europe.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He met with his son Rolf (who was told Mengele was his "Uncle Fritz")Template:Sfn and his widowed sister-in-law Martha for a ski holiday in Switzerland. He also spent a week in his home town of Günzburg.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn When he returned to Argentina in September 1956, Mengele applied for and received an Argentinian identity card under the name José Mengele, a variation of his real name.Template:Sfn Martha and her son Karl Heinz followed about a month later, and the three began living together. Josef and Martha were married in 1958 while on holiday in Uruguay, and they bought a house in Buenos Aires.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Mengele's business interests now included part ownership of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical company.Template:Sfn Along with several other doctors, he was questioned in 1958 on suspicion of practicing medicine without a license when a teenage girl died after an abortion, but he was released without charge. Aware that the publicity could lead to his Nazi background and wartime activities being discovered, he took an extended business trip to Paraguay on a 90-day visitor's permit issued 2 October 1958.Template:Sfn He returned to Buenos Aires several times to settle his business affairs and visit his family. Martha and Karl lived in a boarding house in the city until December 1960, when they returned to West Germany.Template:Sfn They later lived in Switzerland and Italy.Template:Sfn

Mengele's name was mentioned several times during the Nuremberg trials in the mid-1940s, but the Allied forces believed that he was probably already dead.Template:Sfn Irene Mengele and the family in Günzburg also claimed that he had died.Template:Sfn Meanwhile, author Ernst Schnabel was forwarded a letter from a woman who read his 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage. She said a maid in the Mengele household had been told by Herr Mengele that his son was in South America, working as a doctor. Schnabel wrote to the state prosecutor in Ulm to pass along this information.Template:Sfn The court in Freiburg issued an arrest warrant on 25 February 1959.Template:Sfn That same month, Mengele may have traveled to West Germany to see his sick father.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Working in West Germany, Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Hermann Langbein collected information from witnesses about Mengele's wartime activities. In a search of public records, Langbein discovered Mengele's divorce papers, which listed an address in Buenos Aires. He and Wiesenthal pressured the West German authorities into starting extradition proceedings, and a second, revised arrest warrant that included data about Mengele's wartime activities was drawn up on 5 June 1959.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn West Germany also offered a reward for Mengele's capture,Template:Sfn but did not actively search for him before the end of the year.Template:Sfn Argentina initially refused the extradition request because the fugitive was no longer living at the address given on the documents; by the time extradition was approved on 30 June, Mengele had already fled to Paraguay and was living on a farm in Hohenau, near the Argentine border.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Mengele reportedly worked as a veterinary surgeon under the alias of 'Francisco Fischer' while living in Hohenau.Template:Sfn

In preparation for leaving Argentina, Mengele sold his shares of the Fadro Farm in March 1959 and granted Martha power of attorney to act on his behalf in legal matters. He made the move to Paraguay sometime before May 1959 and received his citizenship under the name José Mengele.Template:Sfn The extralegal capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 meant that Paraguay's lack of any extradition treaties could no longer keep him safe. He decided to move to Brazil and live under an assumed name. With the help of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, he obtained an identity card with the name "Peter Hochbichler", and arrived in Brazil in October 1960.Template:Sfn

After a request from Paraguayan Attorney General Clotildo Jimenez, the Supreme Court of Paraguay annulled Mengele's citizenship in August 1979.Template:Sfn

Mengele stayed temporarily with Nazi supporter Wolfgang Gerhard on his farm near São Paulo. Gerhard helped Mengele cross the border into Brazil. In 1961, he relocated Mengele with Hungarian expatriates Géza and Gitta Stammer on their farm in Nova Europa. With the help of an investment from Mengele, he and the Stammers bought a coffee and cattle farm in Serra Negra in 1962, with Mengele owning a half interest.Template:Sfn Gerhard had initially told the Stammers that the fugitive's name was "Peter Hochbichler", but they discovered his true identity in 1963. Gerhard persuaded the couple not to report Mengele's location to the authorities by convincing them that they themselves could be implicated for harboring a fugitive.Template:Sfn By 1963, the Brazilian police requested the complete 100-page long file on Mengele from the Argentinian authorities,Template:Sfn which was seen by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk journalists in 2025 but has not been released to the public.Template:Sfn

Efforts by Mossad

In May 1960, Isser Harel, director of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, personally led the successful effort to capture Eichmann in Buenos Aires. He was hoping to track down Mengele so that he too could be brought to trial in Israel.Template:Sfn Under interrogation, Eichmann provided the address of a boarding house that had been used as a safe house for Nazi fugitives. Surveillance of the house did not reveal Mengele or any members of his family, and the neighborhood postman claimed that although Mengele had recently been receiving letters there under his real name, he had since relocated without leaving a forwarding address. Harel's inquiries at a machine shop where Mengele had been a part owner also failed to generate any leads, so he was forced to abandon the search.Template:Sfn

In February 1961, West Germany widened its extradition request to include Brazil, having been tipped off by Wiesenthal to the possibility that Mengele had relocated there.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Meanwhile, Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents who had been involved in the Eichmann capture, was placed in charge of a team of agents tasked with tracking down Mengele and bringing him to trial in Israel. Their inquiries in Paraguay revealed no clues to his whereabouts, and they were unable to intercept any correspondence between Mengele and his wife, Martha, who by this time was living in Italy. Agents who were following Rudel's movements also failed to produce any leads.Template:Sfn Aharoni and his team followed Gerhard to a rural area near São Paulo, where they identified a European man whom they believed to be Mengele.Template:Sfn This potential breakthrough was reported to Harel, but the logistics of staging a capture, the budgetary constraints of the search operation, and the priority of focusing on Israel's deteriorating relationship with Egypt led the Mossad chief to call off the manhunt in 1962.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In 1964, Meir Amit, the new head of the Mossad, authorized a clandestine search of Martha Mengele's apartment in Bavaria. When they finally searched the premises in 1966, they found nothing to indicate she was currently in contact with Mengele. They tried again in May 1967, but again learned nothing specific. However, the contents of conversations monitored in Martha's home led them to believe that the two were still communicating. They decided to enlist the aid of Martha's boyfriend, a dentist named Siegfried Pereda. An Israeli agent posing as a patient visited his workplace to enlist his aid, but this line of inquiry produced no results either. The Mossad removed the listening devices from Martha's home on 27 October 1967, and an order calling for reduced efforts to catch Nazi war criminals was passed in Israel on 31 December 1968. No further investigations took place until 1977, when the government of Menachem Begin decided to resume the hunt for Nazis, and Mengele in particular. Operations included installing listening devices in the home of Mengele's son Rolf as well as contacting him in person to try to trick him into revealing his father's whereabouts, but again they obtained no information.Template:Sfn

Later life and death

In 1969, Mengele and the Stammers jointly purchased a farmhouse in Caieiras, with Mengele as half-owner.Template:Sfn When Wolfgang Gerhard returned to Germany in 1971 to seek medical treatment for his ailing wife and son, he gave his identity card to Mengele.Template:Sfn The Stammers' friendship with Mengele deteriorated in late 1974, and when they bought a house in São Paulo, he was not invited to join them.Template:Efn The Stammers later bought a bungalow in the Eldorado neighborhood of Diadema, São Paulo, which they rented out to Mengele.Template:Sfn Rolf, who had not seen his father since the ski holiday in 1956, visited him at the bungalow in 1977; he found an "unrepentant Nazi" who claimed he had never personally harmed anyone and only carried out his duties as an officer.Template:Sfn

Mengele's health had been steadily deteriorating since 1972. He suffered a stroke in 1976,Template:Sfn experienced high blood pressure, and developed an ear infection which affected his balance. On 7 February 1979, while visiting his friends Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert in the coastal resort of Bertioga,Template:Sfn Mengele had a second stroke while swimming and drowned.Template:Sfn His body was buried in Our Lady of the Rosary cemetery in Embu das Artes under the name "Wolfgang Gerhard",Template:Sfn whose identification Mengele had been using since 1971.Template:Sfn Other aliases used by Mengele in his later life included "Dr. Fausto Rindón" and "S. Josi Alvers Aspiazu".Template:Sfn

Exhumation

Sightings of Mengele were reported all over the world in the decades following the war. Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960,Template:Sfn in Cairo in 1961,Template:Sfn in Spain in 1971,Template:Sfn and in Paraguay in 1978, eighteen years after he had left the country.Template:Sfn He insisted as late as 1985 that Mengele was still alive—six years after he had died—having previously offered a reward of US$100,000 (Template:Inflation) in 1982 for the fugitive's capture.Template:Sfn Worldwide interest in the case was heightened by a mock trial held in Jerusalem in February 1985, featuring the testimonies of over one hundred victims of Mengele's experiments. Shortly afterwards, the West German, Israeli, and U.S. governments launched a coordinated effort to determine Mengele's whereabouts. The West German and Israeli governments offered rewards for his capture, as did The Washington Times and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.Template:Sfn

On 31 May 1985, acting on intelligence received by the West German prosecutor's office, police raided the house of Hans Sedlmeier, a lifelong friend of Mengele and sales manager of the family firm in Günzburg.Template:Sfn They found a coded address book and copies of letters sent to and received from Mengele. Among the papers was a letter from Wolfram Bossert notifying Sedlmeier of Mengele's death.Template:Sfn German authorities alerted the police in São Paulo, who then contacted the Bosserts. Under interrogation, they revealed the location of Mengele's graveTemplate:Sfn and the remains were exhumed on 6 June 1985. Extensive forensic examination indicated with a high degree of probability that the body was indeed that of Josef Mengele.Template:Sfn Rolf Mengele stated on 10 June 1985 that the body was his father's and that news of his father's death had been concealed to protect people who had sheltered him.Template:Sfn

In 1992, DNA testing confirmed Mengele's identity beyond doubt,Template:Sfn but family members refused repeated requests by Brazilian officials to repatriate the remains to Germany.Template:Sfn The skeleton is stored at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine, where it is used as an educational aid during forensic medicine courses at the University of São Paulo's medical school.Template:Sfn

Later developments

In 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received as a donation the Höcker Album, an album of photographs of Auschwitz staff taken by Karl-Friedrich Höcker. Eight of the photographs include Mengele.Template:Sfn In February 2010, a 180-page volume of Mengele's diary was sold by Alexander Autographs at auction for an undisclosed sum to the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. The unidentified previous owner, who acquired the journals in Brazil, was reported to be close to the Mengele family. A Holocaust survivors' organization described the sale as "a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from the writings of one of the most heinous Nazi criminals".Template:Sfn Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center was glad to see the diary fall into Jewish hands, calling the acquisition significant.Template:Sfn In 2011 (centenary of Mengele's birth), a further 31 volumes of Mengele's diaries were sold—again amidst protests—by the same auction house to an undisclosed collector of World War II memorabilia for US$245,000.Template:Sfn

Publications

Rassenmorphologische Untersuchung des vorderen Unterkieferabschnittes bei vier rassischen Gruppen ("Racial morphological study of the anterior segment of the mandible in four racial groups"). This dissertation, completed in 1935 and first published in 1937, earned him a PhD in anthropology from Munich University. In this work, Mengele sought to demonstrate that there were structural differences in the lower jaws of individuals from different ethnic groups, and that racial distinctions could be made based on these differences.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn
Genealogical Studies in the Cases of Cleft Lip-Jaw-Palate (1938), his medical dissertation, earned him a doctorate in medicine from Frankfurt University. Studying the influence of genetics as a factor in the occurrence of this deformity, Mengele conducted research on families who exhibited these traits in multiple generations. The work also included notes on other abnormalities found in these family lines.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn
Hereditary Transmission of Fistulae Auris. This journal article, published in Template:Lang ('The Genetic Physician'), focuses on fistula auris (an abnormal fissure on the external ear) as a hereditary trait. Mengele noted that individuals who have this trait also tend to have a dimple on their chin.Template:Sfn

Informational notes

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Citations

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Bibliography

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External links

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Josef Mengele

Contents

Early life

Military career