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Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 26, 2020 35 min

Plateau - Slave ship — Slave ship hold. History Channel

29. “The Angel of Death”

Josef Mengele, center, between Auschwitz commandants Richard Baer, left, and Rudolf Hoess, right. Wikimedia

SS extermination camp doctor Josef Mengele (1911 – 1979) became infamously known as the “Angel of Death”. The son of a Bavarian farm machinery manufacturer, Mengele grew up in comfort and developed an early passion for music, skiing, and art. He studied philosophy in 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. It was the start of a dark journey.

Mengele joined the SS in 1938, and served as a combat doctor on the Eastern Front until he was wounded in 1943. After recovering, he was transferred to Auschwitz as camp doctor. There, he 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 to the safety or well-being of his victims. Unfortunately, he got away with it.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.