Historical Narrative Essay

Historical Narrative Essay

Dr. Josef Mengele was an SS physician for the concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz. Dr. Mengele committed crimes against humanity in the Second World War. Like many men before him, Josef Mengele was an intelligent man that went mad with the power he was given. Dr. Mengele is an important character in history to show what happens to science when experiments become unethical and there is no humanity.

However evil Josef Mengele might have been he was still human with a family. Mengele was born the eldest of three children on 16 March 1911 in Bavaria, Germany to an upper middle class family which ran a machine tools business. Mengele's father was a founder of the Karl Mengele & Sons company, a company that produced farm machinery for milling, sawing, and baling. Mengele was married twice, his first marriage to Irene Schönbein produced one son, Rolf, however their marriage only lasted fifteen year before she divorced him. Mengele second marriage was to Martha Mengele, widow of his deceased brother Karl, who he married on July 25 1958.

As a promising student, he was sent to Munich in the 1920's where he was attracted to the racial theories of Alfred Rosenberg, the "philosopher" of National Socialism. As Mengele became an adherent of National Socialist ideology. In 1935, Mengele earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. In January 1937, he moved to Frankfurt-am-Main where he received his medical degree studying under Otmar von Verschuer, the director of the Institute for Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt. At the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he became the assistant of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a leading scientific figure widely known for his research with twins. From his mentor Mengele was introduced to twins and became fascinated. The main emphasis of his research was the importance of heredity within the context of Nazi "race science." By the time Mengele had finished his education he was a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS. He was a extreme anti-Semite and hated the Roma and Gypsies even more than he hated Jews.

In June 1940, Mengele was drafted into the army, and thereafter volunteered into the medical service of the Armed SS. Wounded while on campaign, Mengele returned to Germany in January 1943, and began work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, directed by his former mentor von Verschuer. In April of 1943, he received a promotion to the rank of SS captain; this advancement shortly preceded Mengele's transfer to Auschwitz, on May 30, 1943

When Mengele was at Auschwitz what drew to the arrival ramps at the camps was his "collection" of twins. "Mengele performed this task with relish, appearing at selections to which he had not been officially assigned,