Biography

The news on his death was announced in 1985, when his remains were found in São Paulo, Brazil, after an extensive search brought on by a tip from West Germany police when they located a friend of his living in the country and who kept a diary about Mengele's grave, kept secret ever since 1979, the real year of his death. While Mengele was still alive and one of the most wanted Nazi figures, he served as the main topic from Ira Levin's 1976 novel The Boys from Brazil, later turned into a movie in 1978, and at the time of both works he was in fact living in Brazil.

He decided which inmates would be sent to the gas chamber on arrival.

He received his nickname "The Angel of Death" due to his all-white clothing.

Favorite student of Third Reich professor Otmar von Verschuer, a leading German human biologist and eugenicist concerned primarily with "racial hygiene" and twin research. Mengele wrote his dissertation in medicine as Verschuer's student, after he had already written a dissertation in anthropology. In 1942 Verschuer became the director of the 'Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics' ('Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre, und Eugenik; KWIfA') in Berlin and the 'Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene' ('Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene'). Verschuer was never tried for war crimes despite many indications that he not only was fully cognisant of Mengele's work at Auschwitz, but even encouraged some of his most grisly research. Dr. Mengele's inhuman experiments were based on the false and racist theories of Verscheur and others. In the summer of 1944, Mengele and his Jewish slave assistant Dr. Miklos Nyiszli sent "scientific materials" to the KWIfA, including the bodies of murdered Gypsies, internal organs of dead children, skeletons of two murdered Jews, and blood samples of twins infected by Mengele with typhus.

Is portrayed by Gregory Peck in The Boys from Brazil (1978).