Nazi prominent personalities

 I write this blog with the sole objective of informing about the catastrophes that took place in Germany during the years 1930-1945, with total respect and with each of the victims in my mind and heart.

Josef Mengele

childhood and upbringing 

Josef was born on March 16, 1911 in Gunzburgo. The first son of Karl Mengele (owner of an agricultural machiner producer) and Walburga Theresa Hupfaue. 

He was a very diligend student but but he also enjoyed doing activities like the rest of the boys his age such as listening to music, painting and skiing.

Everything changed a bit when he started studying medicine at the University of Munich, place where they were already leading the far-right policies led by Adolf Hitler, moviment to which after one year of studies he decided to join. The group he joined followed the name of:  Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten It was one of the many paramilitary organizations

that emerged after the defeat of Germany in World War I.

Studies and career

In 1935 he received a doctorate in anthropology and in 1937 he left the institution for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt.

In these race courses "scientific" justifications were made for the unjustifiable horrendous ideas that these people defended

between the years 1935-1939 Nazi ideologies increased enormously and the crazy idea of ​​a superior or perfect Nordic race was heard more and more,

Measures were put in place to control reproduction between people of the Aryan race and people who did not belong to it, since according to Nazi doctors (such as Mengele) this "contaminates the blood"

Megele had a high interest in Genetics, she studied the genetic factors that gave rise to the appearance of cleft lip and chin and her thesis on this subject was praised in such a way that it earned her a doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt in 1938.

Since the Nazi ideology established concepts of racial hygiene and inheritance, genetics was of great importance, and the contributions that Mengele could make were manifold

Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He received basic training with the mountain infantry and was drafted into the German armed forces.

He volunteered for the Waffen-SS medical service in a medical reserve battalion until November 1940. He was then assigned to the SS Race Office, where he evaluated candidates for Germanization

arrival at Auschwitz, the field of horror

In late 1941, Hitler decided that the Jews of Europe should be exterminated. For this reason, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which in principle had to house slave workers, became a combination of a labor camp and an extermination camp.

Prisoners (innocent people victim of the twisted minds that were in command) all over German-occupied Europe arrived there by train daily. By July 1942 the SS were already carrying out "selections", which consisted of segregating capable and incapable Jews: those who could work were admitted to the labor camp and those who could not they were immediately sent to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Mengele's role in this field was to select the people arriving on the train and distribute them, deciding their fate. The worst thing about this is that Mengele was not obliged to carry out this task but he did it with the hope of finding twins, people with dwarfs or any pathogen that he may be interested in studying.

His level of cynicism reached the point of seeing Jews as "guinea pigs" or objects with which he could shamelessly investigate, without limits

he visited the hospital barracks weekly and sent prisoners who had not recovered after two weeks in bed to the gas chamber.

Mengele participated in the research of the Aryan race, for example, injecting chemicals into people's eyes to test whether they could change color, but he was mainly interested in people with physical abnormalities

Mengele sent periodic reports and various samples to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). The money awarded to him was used to build a pathology laboratory attached to crematorium II at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Mengele's 'medical' ward

Twin studies were also motivated by a desire to improve the reproduction rate of the German race through increased fertility and the chances of fathering twins from racially desirable people

The prisoners Mengele used in his experiments were better fed and housed than the rest of the camp inmates and were also less likely to end up in the gas chamber while under investigation

Mengele's experiments included unnecessary limb amputations, intentional inoculations with typhus and other diseases to one of the twins, and blood transfusions from one brother to another.

Many of the victims died in the course of the procedures. Once the tests were completed, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected.

One night Mengele personally killed fourteen twins by injecting chloroform directly into their hearts. twins died from the disease they had been inoculated with, Mengele killed the other brother for post-mortem comparative reports

Near the end

By early 1945 when the end of the war approached Mengele and other doctors were transferred to the Gross-rosen camp, There he took two boxes with specimens and the records of his experiments, while the rest of the medical documents from the field were destroyed by the SS

A few weeks later before the arrival of the Soviets, Mengele flees, changing all his documentation and identification

Due to the fact that he did not have the usual SS tattoo with his blood group, they did not identify him as one of the names on the list of the main war criminals, and he changed his name to Fritz Hollmann

(tattoo with his blood group)

After several months on the run, in which he had time to venture into Soviet-controlled territory to retrieve his Auschwitz files, Mengele found work as a farmer nearby and some time later fled Germany on April 17, 1949 with the help from a network of former SS members

MENGELE IN ARGENTINA

When he entered Argentina he changed his name to Gregor Helmuth

In Buenos Aires, Mengele worked as a carpenter and lived in a boarding house, after a while he moved in with a friend sympathetic to the Nazis and worked in an agricultural machinery company.

In 1953 he began to live in an apartment in Buenos Aires

In 1958, Mengele and other doctors were questioned and later cleared of suspicion of practicing medicine without a license after a teenage girl died during an abortion. Concerned that this case would expose his Nazi past and his wartime activities, he undertook a long business trip to Paraguay

Mengele´s house in Brazil

When West Germany offered a reward for his capture and the press reported on his wartime activities - accompanied by photos of him - Mengele decided to change residence once more. Rudel put him in contact with Nazi sympathizer Wolfgang Gerhard, who helped him cross into Brazil where year later he died

MY CONCLUSION

As Mengele never obtained a punishment for the atrocities he committed (although no punishment would be enough), what remains for us as a society is to look at the victims and the events that happened and make sure that this does not happen again, work on having a more egalitarian society, based on respect and love.

The fact that there are currently no concentration camps does not mean that discrimination does not exist, it happens every day and in broad daylight, we have to stop violence and improve a lot as a society, but the important thing is that history does not be repeated, never again.

thanks for reading!