Josef Mengele was a German national who served as a physician and anthropologist during the tumultuous years of World War II, and his actions and decisions would later be scrutinized and condemned as those of a war criminal.
He was born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Kingdom of Bavaria, and grew up in a family of modest means. Mengele's fascination with medicine and the natural sciences led him to pursue a career in medicine, and he earned his medical degree from the University of Munich in 1935.
Mengele's early career was marked by a strong interest in genetics and anthropology, and he conducted research on twins and other genetic abnormalities. He also became increasingly involved with the Nazi Party, and in 1938, he joined the Sturmabteilung (SA),the Nazi paramilitary organization.
In 1940, Mengele was drafted into the German military and served on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded in 1942. After his recovery, he was assigned to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he became the chief physician and was responsible for conducting medical experiments on prisoners, often with fatal results.
Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz were designed to test the effects of various treatments on prisoners, including twins, gypsies, and others deemed "undesirable" by the Nazi regime. He was particularly interested in the effects of sterilization and other forms of eugenics, and he conducted numerous experiments on prisoners, often without their consent and with devastating consequences.
After the war, Mengele fled to South America, where he lived in hiding for several years before his death in 1979. He was never brought to justice for his crimes, and his actions remain a stain on the reputation of the medical profession and a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust.
