Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele

      Dr Joseph Mengele, born on March 16, 1911. In his adult years, he earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich and also held a doctoral degree in genetic medicine. In January 1937, he became the assistant of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. He would later be the most infamous "doctor" at the Auschwitz concentration camp, known for his cruel and inhumane tests on the prisoners of the camp. Mengele used Nazi racial theory to justify the wide spectrum of experiments on Jews and Roma (Gypsies).
      Mengele began his career at Auschwitz in the spring of 1943 as the medical officer responsible for Birkenau's “Gypsy camp.” Several weeks after its liquidation, in November 1943 Mengele undertook a new position as Chief Camp Physician of Auschwitz II (Birkenau). When the Jewish people would arrive on trains to the camp some of his medical staff were in charge of making sure that a variety of them was selected and pulled aside to be used for his cruel experiments. Mengele is also known as the “Angel of Death,” due to his coldly cruel demeanour on the ramp. The pervasive image of Mengele at the ramp in so many survivors accounts has also to do with the fact that Mengele often appeared in the selection area whenever trainloads of new prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, searching for twins. During the 1930s, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the factors of human heredity, because of this Mengele and his mentor performed a number of tests using twins as subjects throughout the 1930s. At Auschwitz, with full access to hurt or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma twins, most of them children.

Heterochromia

      He had a wide variety of other research interests. Among these was a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which the irises of an individual's eyes differ in coloration. Throughout his stay in Auschwitz, Mengele collected the eyes of his murdered victims, in part to furnish “research material” to colleague Karin Magnussen, a KWI researcher of eye pigmentation. He also conducted several experiments in an attempt to unlock the secret of artificially changing eye color.