28. “The Angel of Death”
Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979) was an SS extermination camp doctor, who became infamously known as the “Angel of Death“. The son of a Bavarian farm machinery manufacturer, Joseph grew up in comfort, and developed an early passion for music, skiing, and art. He studied philosophy at university, and joined the Brown Shirts in 1934. A year later, he got a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Munich, which got him into the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.
Mengele joined the SS in 1938, and served as a combat doctor on the Eastern Front until he was wounded in 1943. Upon recovery, he was transferred to Auschwitz, as a camp doctor. There, Mengele greeted new arrivals, cursorily sorting out those who got to live as slave laborers from those to be sent immediately to the gas chambers. He was also a sadist who conducted gratuitously cruel and deadly human experiments upon the camp’s prisoners, with little regard for the safety or well-being of his victims. Unfortunately, he got away with it.
