Random Chilling Facts About Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele (21 items)

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  (#1) Mengele Was Obsessed With Studying Twins

  One of the most well-known facts about Mengele is his chilling fascination with twins. His experiments began as a way to further explore the Nazi Party's pet concept of eugenics, a philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through a systematic weeding out of perceived negative parts of DNA. After working with Professor Otmar Freiherr von Vershuer, Mengele believed that in studying twins, he could gain insight into understanding how one goes about physically removing genetic makeup.

  Because twins were valuable to Mengele, they were afforded some basic human rights that other of the prisoners at Auschwitz were denied, like keeping their hair and wearing clothes. That's where the benefits of being considered one of "Mengele's Children" ended. The twins were subjected to brutal experiments that ultimately seemed to be more about inflicting terror than genuine scientific investigation. 
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  (#2) He May Have Created A Village Of Twins In South America

  In 2009, Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa claimed that Josef Mengele used the Brazilian farming enclave of Candido Godoi as a laboratory to continue his experiments with twins. Camarasa's evidence is mostly predicated on the fact that beginning in 1963, the town's twin birthrate skyrocketed.

  According to people who lived in Candido Godoi, Mengele came to town under the auspices of being a "rural doctor" who went from house to house helping with minor medical ailments and withdrawing vials of blood from everyone he treated. Since Camarasa floated this theory, researchers have argued about the possibility of something like this even occurring, with most scientists claiming that the insular nature of the community has more to do with the twin birth rate than a mad scientist. 
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  (#3) The US Actually Had Him In Custody

  This is definitely one of the most frustrating parts of the Mengele story, and it shows just how chaotic things were at the end of the war. Immediately after Germany surrendered in 1945, Mengele was held in US custody. However, because US officials were unaware that Mengele was on a list of wanted war criminals, they released him.

  Then, from the Summer of 1945 until Spring 1949, the physician worked as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria, under false papers before his wealthy family helped him flee to South America.
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  (#4) He Gave People With Medical Anomalies Preferential Treatment In Auschwitz

  Mengele based a lot of his experiments around subjects with physical abnormalities. This may have been partially because he thought the key to perfecting eugenics lay somewhere in the bodies of the deformed, disabled, and different. He also may have just been fascinated with genetic outliers. So much has been written about Mengele's love for twins that people gloss over his odd fascination with a specific family who arrived in Auschwitz. Mengele was obsessed with the Ovtizes, a Transylvanian family with 10 children, seven of whom were dwarves. 

  He allowed them to keep their clothes and their hair while siphoning their blood, removing their teeth, and placing them under intense psychological scrutiny. Though their time in the camp was torturous, the entire Ovitz family survived their time in the camp.
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  (#5) He Took Another Man's Identity To Live In Anonymity

  After World War II, Mengele escaped Germany and made a move across the Atlantic to South America, where he bumped into an Austrian named Wolfgang Gerhard, an avid Nazi supporter. Gerhard was so thrilled to meet a prominent figure like Mengele that he gave the doctor his ID card.

  To remain in hiding, Mengele used the Austrian's identity for the rest of his life and, after his death in 1979, was even buried under a headstone bearing Gerhard's name. It wasn't until a a 1985 interview that Mengele's son exposed the charade. 
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  (#6) Mengele's Son Knew Where He Was After The War

  One of the longest-standing rumors about Mengele is that his family, specifically his son Rolf, knew exactly where their patriarch was after the fall of the Nazi party. According to a 1985 interview, Rolf stayed in contact with his father throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s.

  Even though he didn't agree with what his father had done, Rolf still didn't want him to face execution for his crimes. He admitted that his family sent Josef between 300 and 500 deutsche marks every month.
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  (#7) Mengele Experimented With People's Irises In Attempts To Change Their Eye Color

  Along with all of the other weird stuff that Mengele was into, he had a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which an individual's two irises were different colors. In his personal eyeball experiments, he would try to change the color of a subject's eyes by injecting chemicals into their irises. 

  When that method didn't work, he would just rip out the entire eyeball and send it off to his colleague, eye-pigmentation expert Karin Magnussen, for further research. 
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  (#8) Mengele Performed Horrific Tasks With Absolute Calm

  According to the survivors of Auschwitz, one of the things that made Mengele such a terror at prison camp was his lack of consideration for human life. Sam Pivnik, a 14-year-old at the time of the Holocaust, noted in an interview with the Sunday Express that when Mengele was deciding the fate of new arrivals, he would often silently flick his gloves to the right to keep a prisoner alive or to the left if they were doomed to die. 
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  (#9) He Never Accepted Guilt For His Crimes

  It's unclear whether Mengele's son Rolf always knew that his father was alive and well and living in South America, or if he tracked him down later. What we do know is that in 1977, Rolf visited his dad in Brazil and found an older and somehow even more abhorrent Nazi. In their meeting, Josef Mengele told his son that he “had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life," which shows the amount of delusion he cultivated when working to not only torture human beings in his cruel experiments, but when serving as a major component of the machine hellbent on destroying an entire race of people. 
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  (#10) After His Disappearance, He Became An Urban Legend

  After Mengele evaded capture in the wake of the Holocaust, he entered into a realm of legend that would go on to permeate numerous conspiracy theories. Some of the theories, like the possibility that he was the real Zodiac Killer, are about as far-fetched as you can get, but there are some theories that hold some kernels of truth inside the wild inaccuracies.

  The most popular myth is that after Mengele escaped to South America, he began to assist the CIA in creating the brainwashing techniques that become known as MK-Ultra. That probably didn't happen, but what did happen is that the American military brought over about 1,500 German scientists and engineers to work in the government. 

  It's easy to see how more conspiratorially-minded citizens could make the (admittedly very big) jump from America employing top German scientists to Mengele working side-by-side with the CIA to destroy people's brains. He was one of the highest profile Nazis that didn't answer for their crimes, so people could see the specter of his evil in any tragic or devious story.
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  (#11) He Played Nice To Trick Children Into Trusting Him

  A wolf in sheep's clothing might not be enough to describe the misleading front that Mengele used to put the children of Auschwitz at ease. Not only would he give them candy, but he also founded a kindergarten at the camp and played the violin to children in order to lull them into a false sense of security. When it came time to take the children away, he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car.
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  (#12) Mengele Used Prisoners As Assistants

  Rather than using the technically skilled physicians and soldiers that he had at his disposal, Mengele sometimes played psychological games with the prisoners of Aushwitz by "hiring" them to assist him during his experiments. Despite the sadistic nature of his hiring practices, they're actually the reason we have so much information about what he did in the camp.

  One of the men he hired, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner-physician who assisted Mengele under duress, published his experiences in the book His Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.
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  (#13) Mengele's Early Work Was Focused On Cleft Palates

  Before he was known as the Angel of Death, Mengele held a respectable position as a physician who focused on oral embryology and in the developmental anomalies of cleft palate and harelip. This curiosity about fixing genetic anomalies may have been a precursor to his evil experimentation.
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  (#14) He Wasn't The Chief Medical Officer Of Auschwitz

  While his infamy may paint Mengele as some kind of Nazi science super star, he wasn't actually in charge at Auschwitz. His actual rank was Chief Camp Physician of Auschwitz II, and he worked under the jurisdiction of SS captain Dr. Eduard Wirths.
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  (#15) He Hoarded Body Parts

  In 2015, a member of the Max Planck Psychiatric Institute in Munich discovered a cache of body parts and brains stashed away in their archives. The hoarded remains were either used in or the results of wartime experiments, many conducted by Mengele at Auschwitz. The Institute immediately began set out to identify the remains while reminding people that their research had nothing to do with all of the brains found in their office.

  In a statement published on its website, the Institute wrote: “We are embarrassed by these findings, and the blemish of their discovery in the archives."
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  (#16) Historians Found A Collection Of Mengele's Daily Documents From The War

  In 2010, a collection of food receipts from Auschwitz were found in the attic of a house close to the camp. The receipts paint a picture of the day-to-day lives of the men and women who ran the camp. The records show that Mengele bought butter and sugar while at the camp, among other mundane details.
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  (#17) He Was Well Known For Whistling Famous Classical Music While Deciding Which New Prisoners Should Be Gassed

  Mengele was known as a well-educated music enthusiast who embodied the "cultured" ideal of the Third Reich. When he wasn't "working", he would often relax by listening to compositions by famous German and Austrian composers, notably Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. In the memoirs of multiple Birkenau survivors, they recounted Mengele standing on the train platform, whistling famous classical arias while choosing which new arrivals were to be sent to the gas chambers.

   
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  (#18) His Family May Have Laundered Money For Him After World War II

  After World War II, Mengele had to get out of Europe or face a trial and likely execution as a war criminal. Over the course of a decade, the doctor made his way to South America, where he lived out the rest of his life. How did he afford all that travel? It turns out that his family may have been funneling money from their business, Karl Mengele & Sons, into a Swiss bank account in order to help Mengele lay low.

  The entire story is conjecture, and because of the chaos at the end of the war and the ease with which records could be destroyed in the mid-20th century, it's hard to definitively prove – or disprove – that the Mengele family was working together to keep Josef out of a noose. 
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  (#19) He Died While Swimming

  Josef Mengele spent more than 30 years on the run or living under an alias in South America. That ended on February 7, 1979, when Mengele either drowned or suffered a stroke while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil. He was 67. 
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  (#20) A Brazilian Professor Won The Right To Study Mengele's Bones

  In 2016, Dr. Daniel Romero Muniz finally won the rights to examine Josef Mengele's bones. The professor from the University of São Paulo donated the bones to the students at his facility, saying, "They will be used to help train new doctors and will be particularly good for those students who are studying post-mortem examinations." 

  It's not clear what motivated Dr. Muniz's legal fight to acquire these particular bones since there doesn't seem to be any special medical and educational benefit to using the deceased doctor's remains for this purpose over anyone else's.
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  (#21) His Research Was Supported By The Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute

  It's nearly impossible to find a long-standing German institution without any ties to the country's xenophobic past. That said, in 2005, it came to light that the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute supported Mengele's work, even though they weren't crazy about the German super-race component of his research.

  To be fair, in 1997, the Institute decided on their own to delve into their murky past to expose any skeletons that might be hiding in their closets. According to The project's Director of Research, Dr. Susanne Heim, told The Guardian in 2005:

  We wanted to discover how and why the limits of science were crossed and why there was such a blur between animal and human trials. It was formerly believed that scientists in Germany were oppressed by the Nazi regime, that there were only a few guilty people. But in truth, these doctors were in paradise[...] I appreciate our revelations must be disturbing for the Max Plank Institute, but the institute should be wary not to sit back and think that they have done their bit. They should use these findings as a platform to discuss science today and make sure that researchers keep within the ethical boundaries.

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