In 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.
He found a medical form signed by Dr. Josef Mengele, a notorious Nazi doctor from Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Dated 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.
Marwell, then working for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which investigated Nazi crimes, was deeply shaken.
What kind of twisted curiosity would lead a doctor to send a child’s head to a lab?
Years 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.
In 1985, he was in São 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.
Thirty-five years after that, in 2020, Marwell published a remarkable biography, Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” (W.W.
Norton), about the man behind that horrific document.
Marwell’s book is clear, well-organized, and carefully researched, placing Mengele’s life within the broader context of 20th-century German history.
Its greatest strength is its restraint.
Mengele, who decided who lived or died at Auschwitz and conducted experiments on humans, could easily be portrayed as a crazed sadist.
Instead, Marwell avoids sensationalism, showing Mengele as a cold, rational man who justified his actions with a distorted version of science.
This makes his crimes even more terrifying-not the acts of a deranged mind, but the calculated results of a warped worldview.
Mengele’s Cruel Experiments
Marwell’s research revealed that Mengele’s request for the child’s head wasn’t driven by random cruelty.
At Auschwitz, he was studying noma, a bacterial disease that caused swelling and tissue death in the mouths of malnourished Romani children.
Using Jewish prisoner-doctors, Mengele tested treatments combining drugs, vitamins, and better nutrition, which could stop the disease’s spread.
But the research was inherently perverse: noma thrives in starving children, so the treatment only addressed a problem caused by Auschwitz’s inhumane conditions.
Marwell notes that basic sanitation and adequate food could have prevented the outbreak entirely.
Tragically, none of the “cured” children survived the camp.
Mengele’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.
Mengele used this power to pick “specimens” for his racial studies, especially twins and dwarfs.
He set up a special barrack for twins, subjecting them to tests and measurements.
When he was done, he sometimes ordered them killed to study their organs.
These experiments weren’t the work of a lone madman.
They were part of Nazi Germany’s racist scientific programs.
Mengele collaborated with his university mentor, Otmar von Verschuer, a leading twin researcher at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics.
He also worked with Karen Magnussen, studying eye color.
Contrary to earlier myths, Mengele didn’t inject dye into twins’ eyes to make them “Aryan” blue.
Instead, 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.
Mengele 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.
In another case, Mengele found a hunchbacked man and his teenage son with a foot deformity among new arrivals.
After extensive exams, both were killed, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin’s Anthropological Institute.
Mengele’s Life and Escape
Born in Günzburg, Germany, to a wealthy industrialist, Mengele inherited his father’s extreme nationalism but didn’t join the Nazi Party until 1937.
As an SS medical officer, he served with the Viking Division in Ukraine and Russia from 1941 to 1943, earning two medals.
While there’s no evidence he directly participated in massacres of Jews, he was likely aware of them.
In 1943, he took the role that made him infamous: a doctor at Auschwitz, the heart of the Holocaust.
When 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.
Captured 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.
In Buenos Aires, Mengele thrived, becoming a partner in a pharmaceutical company.
He mingled with German exiles, even meeting Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Jewish genocide (Mengele found him unimpressive).
Feeling safe, he visited Germany in 1956, divorced his first wife, and married his brother’s widow to secure the family fortune.
But in 1959, as Germany sought his extradition, he fled to Paraguay and then, in 1960, to Brazil.
The Hunt for Mengele
Marwell dedicates much of his book to the decades-long effort to find Mengele.
In the late 1950s, German authorities mistakenly used Günzburg’s local police-loyal to Mengele’s family, whose factory supported the town-to investigate, tipping him off to flee Argentina.
Israel’s Mossad, which captured Eichmann, came close in 1962, locating Mengele near São Paulo but abandoning the mission without full confirmation.
It 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.
A letter found in a Mengele associate’s home, sent from Brazil, mentioned “our mutual friend’s” death, leading to the Embu grave.
Identifying Mengele’s remains was challenging.
Marwell notes the Brazilian authorities’ carelessness-the gravedigger damaged the skull-but praises Federal Police chief Romeu Tuma.
Ironically, the skeleton’s “Caucasoid” classification used techniques similar to Mengele’s own racial studies.
DNA testing in 1992 finally confirmed it was him.
No Remorse
Mengele died at 67 on February 7, 1979, suffering a stroke while swimming at Bertioga beach in Brazil.
He never expressed regret.
In 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.
German 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.”
The story of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who experimented on children in concentration camps
Published in 04/23/2025 19h51
Text adapted by AI (Grok) and translated via Google API in the English version. Images from public image libraries or credits in the caption.
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