The evil life and the mysterious end of Josef Mengele, the Angel of Auschwitz death

In Bertioga, a small coastal town in the state of São Paulo, they resembled each other every day. His few inhabitants spent their afternoons on the beach. It was a peaceful and hot summer. Until this afternoon, which marks today forty years, an event has disarmed the daily tranquility.

The body rests in the sand. An older man has been recruited by the sea. He is surrounded by three people. Dominate the silence. No one is doing too much to revive it. It is obvious that the man is already dead.

A policeman comes and tries a maneuver. He does it without hope: he follows only one vague protocol. If there were no witnesses, if this senior couple did not leave the body and that seemed very worried, the officer would not even have tried to fight against l & # 39; inexorable.

Then, the steps of the rigor. The transfer of the corpse, the act of death, the identification of the body, the burial. At Bertioga, in 1979, lived a few thousand people. For the identification, they used documents that brought two of these three people close to the body on the beach: Stammer, a couple of Hungarian origin who lived with the deceased.

According to the doctor 's transcript, the man who had died at the hospital morgue was 54 years old and named Wolfgang Gerhard. He seemed much older. It may be for this reason that, due to its poor physical state at the age of consignment, it seemed natural that the death was due to a heart attack during a swim in cold water. He did not drown. He had no signs of those who are defeated by the sea.

It took more than 6 years for the truth to be known. Qhe died at sunset in São Paulo, his name was not Wolfang, he was not a mechanic as his friends said. The deceased was 68 years old and was one of the most wanted Nazi criminals in recent decades.

The dead man was Josef Mengele, the angel of death.

Doctor and anthropologist, he joined the Nazi Party in 1938. He enlisted in the German army and participated in several campaigns. He was decorated several times for his actions on the front until an injury that lasted several months. He could no longer accompany the troops as a doctor.

He got an administrative position but soon became bored. He asked to be sent to Auschwitz. He arrived at the infamous concentration camp in 1943. Very quickly, he added functions and gained power. A few months later, he was responsible for "The selection". I decided the fate of newcomers in crowded trains.

In the midst of death and hunger, Mengele was shining with his white apron always flawless, his gloves the same color and a long and narrow stick in one of his hands. He separated – with a single movement of a rod, a bad in the air – those who were fit for work (slave) and those who were going to be thrown, that they would kill immediately, following a path that seemed normal but was only an organized and cruel corridor leading to the gas chambers.

It was not a difficult task. Everyone can do it. It was very obvious who belonged to each group, even if the war continued and the Allies and Russians approached, the screen became less and less demanding. Some witnesses, some survivors, say that what distinguishes Mengele is the concreteness with which he performed his task. His way of performing it had another peculiarity. People with obvious disabilities, whom others would have immediately sent to the gas chambers, were separated by him into a third group. They would be from that moment their guinea pigs, meat of the most cruel experiences that we know.

Before the war, Mengele had specialized in the study of so-called clefts. He had badyzed, with the limits of time, several cases of cleft lip and palate. I wanted to search for the hereditary model in these anomalies.

At Auschwitz, he found the perfect place to continue his research in genetics. His presence at the arrival of the trains was not necessary but he did not want his "potential experiences" to escape him. Twin brothers, dwarves and people with physical abnormalities. For whom he chose, he subjected them to the most cruel and macabre treatment, according to him for scientific progress.

Their experiences, in search of a perfect lineage, in search of the creation and perpetuation of the superior race, were criminal.

He inoculated patients with typhus, injected substances in the eyes of several children to try to change their color, removed the eyes of living people to see how they were inside, to try to understand their functioning, killed people in order to harvest organs, killed children in front of them He even sewed two twin brothers to recreate the behavior of the Siamese: the seams were infected and the gangrene consumed the brothers.

This supposed scientific task, with samples sent to Berlin, voluminous annotations and their important tunes, was not a test or an experiment. These were tortures, mutilations and homicides. Many of which it is executed. A monster who found in this dehumanized environment, in which life had no value, the perfect excuse to develop their evil.

One of the happiest days of Mengele at Auschwitz took place on May 19, 1944. That day, he did not follow the training of the wagons. He was with his papers in the office when one of his badistants called him screaming. He could not miss what had happened at the concentration camp. He was referring to the Ovitz family, an artistic troupe made up of nine brothers who traveled across Europe with their musical and varied show stopped in Hungary and drifted to Auschwitz. The particularity was that seven of them were dwarves.

Mengele, that morning, felt the most fortunate man in the world. Seven dwarven brothers to perform their tests. And two other sisters of normal size. He separated the Ovitz from the others, ordered them to feed them, and undertook an eight-month ordeal for what Mengele called "scientific evidence," but it was only torture for the Ovitz.

I drew blood several times a day. They had their teeth and nails torn, their hair cut, sharp elements pierced their skin to find out who he had healed first and several other similar tortures. Mengele did not know what he was looking for but he continued the torment in the middle of his obsession. The Ovitz managed to survive the monster and Auschwitz.

Mengele escaped from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 with the rest of the Nazis. Then began a course that was repeated in thousands of cases. His life during those months, like that of so many Nazi officers, was reduced to trying to dodge Allied soldiers, to go unnoticed and to convince all those who had captured him that his role had been less during the war.

It fell into the hands of the Americans but they saved it by not wearing the tattoo that identified the SS with their blood type and health status. He had already adopted a false identity: it was Fritz Hollmann.

No one would have thought that being with a frayed mustache and a faint look was a war criminal. Until 1949, he devoted himself to flight and hiding in rural and sparsely populated areas. Then came the great opportunity to escape and get lost forever. His name had already appeared in the Nuremberg trials and in other trials that had opened in Germany..

He left, like so many other Nazi leaders, with a fake pbadport from the Red Cross, via Genoa to Buenos Aires. The Argentine capital at that time was the perfect hideout of the Nazis on the run.

Adopted a new false identity: Helmut Gregor. Under her, she even managed to meet the president Juan Perón He worked in a carpentry shop, made educational toys, sold farm equipment, and even had a small pharmaceutical company. In 1956 he wrote papers at the Embbady of Germany and found his real name.only his name was Argentinian. It turned out to be José Mengele. Identity card number 3,940,484.

He felt calm and safe. He did not see how they could find him, hidden, leading a gray life in a country as far away as south. At that time, it was almost impossible to cross information. up he had the luxury of traveling to Europe and bringing his sister-in-law, the wife of his deceased brother, with whom he would get married in Buenos Aires.

At the end of the 50s He was arrested and charged with illegal practice of medicine and abortions. His tranquility was over by then and he began a flight that would last two decades. Their destinations would be Paraguay and Brazil.

The agents of Mossad who captured Eichmann in Buenos Aires, they wanted to do the same thing with Mengele. But according to several testimonials he escaped them a few hours. From that moment, his name was spread and he had no choice but to escape. Everyone already knew Mengele, the Angel of Death, the sadistic doctor of Auschwitz.

After a stay in Paraguay, the Nazi network once again helped to make this happen in Brazil. There, he devoted himself to agriculture and went several times to praise his captors in order to find him. Most of these years have been spent with the couple Stammer, a couple from Hungary, the same ones who were with their corpse on the beach this afternoon of February 7, 1979.

His activities in this country remain a mystery. Some attribute an epidemic of twins, all blond and blue eyes, in a lost city of Brazil: in a few years were born forty couples.

Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, became obsessed with finding him. So much so that, several times, he seemed to lose his mind. He repeatedly stated that Mengele had been seen in places he had never been to. In Central America, Eastern Europe, Colombia and several other countries. So much so that he speculated with these clues even after Mengele's death.

Mengele's son, Rolf, said that he was ashamed of being his son. But he left Wiesenthal and the world to continue looking for his father, even knowing that he had been dead for years.

Barely six years after Mengele's death in 1985, Rolf warned of the death and indicated the place in Brazil where he had been buried. After several forensic tests, including teething, the experts determined that the Nazi criminal had drowned on the beach of São Paulo in 1979.

It took another 7 years for genetic tests to confirm the situation before clearing doubts. The attitude of his son during those years only served to formulate hypotheses and theories of the plot on sediments. As in many other famous Nazi cases, several researchers argue that Mengele did not die forty years ago.

The body of Josef Mengele, that of macabre and inhuman experiences, the fugitive of three decades, He has not been repatriated or claimed by his family. Nobody wanted sick people and fanatics to go on pilgrimage to the place of their burial, or make it a sanctuary of evil and evil.