Auschwitz's Angel of Death
Sixty years after the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazism, Josef Mengele has become one of the most famous perpetrators of the Holocaust. But if you just look at what he did on paper, his story sounds like story of thousands of other concentration camp guards, Nazi soldiers, or party members. In 1943, Mengele, an injured Waffen SS Captain, requested transfer at the age of thirty-two 
to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oswieçim, Poland. With the support (both financial and intellectual) of his mentor, Otto von Verscheur of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Mengele conducted genetic experiments on the camp prisoners, focusing on twins and on individual human mutations. He worked in Auschwitz for almost two years before fleeing days before the Russians liberated the camp in January 1945. After that he was forgotten.
After the War
After the war, he was released by American troops as a captured German soldier, and he lived under his own name for a time both in Germany and in South America. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that his crimes were brought to public attention and he became a wanted war criminal. In 1985, upon the discovery of his body in South America, “People” magazine wrote a cover story, opening a long article with this quotation:
Who was Mengele? A demon risen from the cracks of hell? An ordinary face in the human mass, yet another victim of conflict and chance? Most of the countless thousands he tormented are silent. Let history speak. It is eloquent enough.1
Infamous
In 1999, he was ranked fifth in a New York Post survey of the most evil person of the millennium, surpassing Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Idi Amin.2 How did this shift in historiography happen? How did Mengele go from just another anonymous Nazi doctor to being ranked the fifth most evil person of the millennium in the court of public opinion?
Why Infamous?
The answer lies in the cruel yet fascinating nature of his crimes, the dramatic attempts to capture him, and the amount of public interest in the discovery of his body in 1985. The public is generally interested in unconscionable crimes, all the more captivating when carried out by a doctor, a man whose profession is dedicated to healing. When mixed with the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust, popular subjects due to the public’s inability to comprehend how the crimes could have happened, it is logical that Mengele’s story would become infamous.
Different Views of Mengele
The context in which he is placed, however, differs between the historians and authors who write about him. Some see him in his role as a doctor and researcher, a pupil of Otto von Verschuer, and a prime example of the many doctors who were conducting human experimentation in concentration and labor camps. Others, albeit fewer in number, highlight his humanity within the camps, noting his experiments, but also detailing instances in which he acted as a doctor should, saving lives.
The Popular View
The overwhelming majority of texts, however, especially the mass-marketed biographies of Gerald Astor and Gerald Posner, treat Mengele as an aberration, evil personified, the “Angel of Death.” To these authors, Mengele was “The Angel of Death; The Angel of Extermination; Dr. Death; The Butcher, Shöne Joseph (sic).”3 More shoddily researched and sensationalistic and ignoring the larger lessons to be learned by Mengele’s story, these popular works have nevertheless seriously influenced public perception of Josef Mengele.
This Website
.jpg)
This website will explore how Mengele has been viewed by various historians and how his crimes have been interpreted and understood throughout the world. He is one of the most notorious figures of the Holocaust, though he was of low rank, was not the chief physician at Auschwitz, and never participated in a war crimes trial. In fact, his notoriety grew only in the decades after the war, culminating in the 1980s, when his body was discovered. He is now so infamous that movies such as "The Boys from Brazil" can be made under the assumption that the viewer has knowledge of Mengele's life and crimes. But how did it get to be this way?
