Mengele’s staff included respected Jewish physicians
As a senior doctor it was not Mengele’s role to treat inmates who were ill, but to supervise staff serving in the hospital. Most of these were Jewish themselves, including many distinguished doctors and scholars with whom Mengele had corresponded before the war. Mengele mandated that any hospitalized prisoner not recovering from illness or injury in two weeks be sent to the gas chambers.
Most of the doctors assigned to work for him were prisoners themselves, relegated to a temporary role as medical practitioners while awaiting their own turn to become part of the Final Solution. A few were Germans who, like himself, were no longer considered fit for front-line duty.
An epidemic of a bacterial disease struck the camp in 1943 and Mengele used it as an opportunity to develop antibacterial medications. His research included the execution of children stricken with the disease, at varying levels of infection, and the preservation of their internal organs to facilitate research studies at facilities outside the camp. Mengele was partnered for a time in this research by a pediatrician formerly of the University of Prague, a Jewish doctor of the name Berthold Epstein.
More than 3,000 inmates died as a direct result of this research, though Epstein would survive the war, eventually serving as the chair of the pediatrics department at a Prague hospital, and dying of natural causes in 1962. Dozens of Jewish were forced to serve at the Auschwitz hospital.
Mengele welcomed a typhus epidemic in the camp by disinfecting barracks after first moving all of their occupants to the gas chambers, usually in groups of 500 or more. Mengele would continue the disinfection process until all prisoner blocks were cleaned and disinfected, demonstrating the need to eliminate typhus from the environment and not just its victims to prevent its spread.
For this effort – repeated during outbreaks of scarlet fever and other diseases – Mengele was promoted to the position of Head Physician of the Birkenau camp and awarded the War Merit Cross. In a letter to his wife, Mengele referred to the award as the “typhus medal“.