Who was Josef Mengele? Josef Mengele also known as the "Angel of Death" was a German officer and physician in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp during World War 2.
Dr Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, he is the eldest of three sons of Karl and Walburga Mengele. He studied philosophy at Munich and medicine at Frankfurt University. In 1935 his dissertation dealt with racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw. He was a notorious member of the team of doctors responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners.
At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies and these twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. He went to …show more content…
The reasons Mengele misused his knowledge included the following:
The first reason was because Josef Mengele was a highly ambitions man. He seemed to desire accolades and status as a top scientist. He never ever saw the cars full of Jewish prisoners arriving daily at the Auschwitz concentration camp as an atrocity but rather as an opportunity. To him these Jewish prisoners were an endless supply of fresh material on which he could experiment. Mengele saw his genetic and medical experiments as necessary and useful rather than illegal.
The second reason why Josef Mengele misused his knowledge had to do with him being in Germany at that specific time. He completed his academic training in an extremely racialized society where Nazi orators, politicians, and law makers had converted Jewishness from a cultural and religious identity into a racial identity. He became an Auschwitz officer thinking next to nothing of Jewish people and prisoners, leading him to thinking that it was okay to treat them as guinea pigs suitable for such deadly