Josef Mengele (German: Josef Mengele; March 16, 1911 - February 7, 1979) was a German physician who received the nickname "Angel of Death" for his actions at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He experimented on people and was in charge of organizing the camps: he sent about 400,000 people to the gas chambers, as did Adolf Eichmann. He was born in Ginzburg, Bavaria.
He fought as a member of the V Division of the SS and received the Iron Cross in the first and second row. He conducted various unethical experiments in Auschwitz. He is credited in some areas with advances in medicine today, but not all of Mengele's experiments were of scientific value, including attempts to change the color of his eyes by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, amputating limbs, and performing surgeries (experiments) on the brains of people without anesthesia and many other brutal surgeries.
Mengele was the eldest son in the family. His father, Carl, was an industrialist who founded the Carl Mengele & Sons Company. He had two brothers. He married twice and had a son, Ralph.
Mengele's subjects were better fed and cared for than ordinary prisoners, and at the time, were safe from the gas chambers. When he visited the children-subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some of the survivors remember that despite his horrific acts, he was also called "The Protector of Mengele". In Children of Flames, there are notes of Mengele's medical experimental activities on some 3,000 twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until his release at the end of the war. Only about 26 pairs of twins survived; Sixty years later, as children who survived his medical experiments and injections, they spoke out about the special privileges they enjoyed at Auschwitz thanks to Mengele's interest in the twins and their resulting suffering.
