29. “The Angel of Death”
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.