The Angel of Death

Stories of incidents in history fade as those who witnessed the events pass on. While it is good and right to remember and honor people who represent the best of us, it is also right to remember those who stand as examples of the worst.

One such person was Dr. Joseph Mengele a Nazi physician who performed cruel, disgusting, and pointless "medical" experiments on prisoners and specifically on children who were being held at the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz. Mengele escaped from Germany at the end of World War II and fled to Brazil to avoid the trials of Nazi war criminals.

Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, to a family that owned a farm equipment manufacturing company. He attended college and received a medical degree at the University of Frankfurt am Main. A believer in the advanced status of Aryans (Germans) Mengele found support for his beliefs by joining the Nazi party in 1934 and joining the research staff of the Nazi Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. He became a medical officer with the Nazi SS. He was appointed the chief doctor of the Auschwitz death camps in Poland.

Mengele would meet the trains bringing in prisoners to Auschwitz and would yell "right" or "left" directing the prisoners to labor or to the gas chambers. Mengele would select children from those who survived initial selection. In particular Mengele chose twins for special experiments. First Jewish prisoners were subjected to gruesome experiments, and Mengele then moved on to experimenting on twins. Mengele injected, or ordered others to inject, thousands of inmates with everything from petrol to chloroform to study the chemicals' effects. He conducted surgical procedures such as amputations, castrations, organ removal, and most done without any anesthesia.

At war's end Mengele worked on farms until he was able to escape to Paraguay. At some point Mengele moved to Brazil and assumed the identity of an acquaintance named Wolfgang Gerhard, and it was later determined that Mengele/Gerhard had drowned after a stroke on Feb. 7, 1979. An international forensics team identified the remains as those of Mengele in the mid 1980s, and their findings were confirmed by Mengele family members.

We fought World War II to rid the world of these psychopaths yet they are being replaced.

Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.