Josef Rudolf Mengele, better know as the “Angel of Death,” was a German SS officer and physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschiwitz. He first became famous for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving Jews - determining who was to be killed or put to work. He later bloomed into notoriety for his human experiments, mostly on children and his favorite being twins.
This man was completely out of his mind.
His first joy was to shout “Zwillinge heraus! Zwillinge heraustreten!” meaning “Twins out! Twins step forward!” Then he would draw a line on the wall about 5 feet from the ground and whatever leftover children’s heads didn’t reach the line were immediately sent to the gas chambers. He would give these kids candy and personally walk them to the gas chamber doors.
Mengele had special barracks built to house twins. He would sow them together and pour chemicals in their eyes in attempt to change their eye colors. He would operate on these children using no anesthesia, performing vivisections which is basically like turning a person inside out. Remember being in science class and having to dissect a frog or worm? Imagine doing this to a small child.
He would cut their hearts out or tiny pieces of their stomachs. One night alone he rounded up 14 different sets of female twins under the age of 15 and placed them nude on his polished marble dissection table. He then injected chloroform into all their hearts - killing them. He would then spend hours dissecting them and sowing random organs together.
He never once gave the children anything for the pain. He liked to cut out their hearts and watch them die. Nobody ever questioned him. He professed to do everything in the name of science, but was clearly 100% insane.
Hitler loved him.
Another Auschwitz doctor was once quoted saying, “He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives and to do things we would genuinely admire. And then, next to that, the crematoria smoke and these same children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there.”
He liked for the children to think of him as a friend before slaughtering them. Surviving twins would later recall his friendly manner towards them and his great gifts of chocolates, but the older ones saw him for what he truly was. They could see his kindness as a deception - yet another of his perverse experiments to test their mental endurance. He would also kill them without hesitation, sometimes shooting them himself before dissecting them immediately after.
He would later claim, “I personally have not killed, injured or caused bodily harm to anyone.”
After the fall of Nazi Germany, he avoided capture by escaping to South America where he specialized in illegal abortions. He would be questioned by the police only once after a woman died during one of his operations. A manhunt soon followed and Mengele fled to many other countries - avoiding a lifetime of a capture in the process. He was never punished in any way, shape or form.
His death is for the most part unknown.
In February of 2010 Mengele’s diary, kept from the years 1960 - 1979, was sold at an auction in Connecticut for 200,000 dollars. The buyer, described as an East Coast Jewish philanthropist, wished to remain anonymous. This auction caused a major protest as most Holocaust survivors described the diary as, “a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from the writings of one of the most heinous Nazi criminals.”
I’ve been interested in writing a biography themed movie script and Josef Rudolf Mengele could be my first topic. Since so much is unknown, I get to mold him into whatever personality color I wish.
