Josef Mengele

German physician and member of the Nazi party who was known as the "Angel of Death" at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was the subject of a 40-year international hunt in the postwar years, known for being the butcher who had supervised the torture and death of as many as 400,000 Jews in a maniacal quest for racial purity.

Mengele was born into a prominent family in Gunzburg, a small town half way between Stuttgart and Munich. He was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, an autocratic man, and Walburga, his mother. Mengele had two brothers: Karl, a lawyer, and Alois, who worked in the family farm machinery business. He studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Munich. After obtaining his doctorate, he went to work at the University of Leipzig Medical School in 1936 but soon asked to be transferred to the University of Frankfurt to work in its Institute for Racial Purity. In 1937, attracted by Hitler's racial purity theories, he became a Nazi. He received his M.D. in July 1938. In 1939, he joined the Waffen SS, the military arm of the Schutzstaffel, formed originally as Hitler's personal bodyguard.

Mengele was transferred at the beginning of the Russian assault in June 1941 to the Ukrainian front, and was wounded at Rostov the following year. He was promoted to captain, and on 30 May 1943, transferred to the Auschwitz prison camp in southern Poland as its chief medical officer. Less than a month after his arrival, he developed malaria and injured his hip in a motorcycle accident, July 1943. It was at Auschwitz where he began his grisly genetic research on twins and other subjects.

He escaped from Auschwitz just in advance of the Russian troops on 17 January 1945, and was captured by the Allies in Saxony five months later. Released three months after that, he worked on a farm in Rosenheim for the next few years. In January 1946, his mother died. In August 1948, he returned to Gunzburg.