Josef Mengele, also known as Todesengel ("Angel of Death" in German), was born on March 16, 1911 in Günzburg, Germany, and died on February 7, 1979 in Enseada da Bertioga, near São Paulo, Brazil.

Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. Mengele selected prisoners to be executed in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on them.

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Josef Mengele's father was the founder of a company that produced agricultural machinery, the Karl Mengele & Söhne Company, located in the village of Günzburg in Bavaria. Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, influenced by the racial ideology of Alfred Rosenberg, and then graduated with a degree in medicine from Goethe University in Frankfurt. Mengele enlisted in the Sturmabteilung (Assault Battalions) in 1933.

Josef Mengele was a convinced Nazi and was fascinated by twins

A convinced Nazi, Josef Mengele joined the research teams of the new Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1934. During World War II, Mengele was a medical officer in the Waffen-SS (the "armed" branch of SS) in France and Russia. In 1943, Mengele was appointed by Heinrich Himmler as a military doctor at the so-called "gypsy camp" in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, Mengele and his subordinates selected Jews for work or extermination .

Michał Liborski, prisoner with no. 40472 of the Auschwitz camp. Dr. Josef Mengele insisted that the pictures of the prisoners should always be taken in three poses, and in one of them the prisoners should always have their heads covered. Photo source: Profimedia

At the same time, Josef Mengele supervised medical experiments on prisoners to discover ways to increase fertility (to increase the German "race"). However, Josef Mengele's main interest was research on twins. His experiments often resulted in the death of subjects.

The "Angel of Death" was never caught after the end of the war

After the war, Josef Mengele escaped and managed to hide, working for four years as a stableman on a farm near Rosenheim, Bavaria. Mengele then fled through Italy to South America in 1949. Mengele married for the second time under his real name in Uruguay in 1958.

Under the name "José Mengele", he received citizenship in Paraguay in 1959. In 1961, Mengele allegedly moved to Brazil and began a friendship with a Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard. Mengele allegedly lived in several houses owned by a couple from Hungary, according to Britannica .

In 1985, a team of Brazilian, German and American forensic experts determined that Josef Mengele had taken over Gerhard's identity, died in 1979 of a heart attack while swimming, and was later buried under Gerhard's name. Experts later confirmed this with dental fingerprints.