Josef Mengele

Dr. Josef Mengele was a German physician and anthropologist who became one of the most notorious Nazi camp doctors at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust. Born in Günzburg in 1911, he studied medicine and anthropology and worked as an assistant to the racial hygienist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt before volunteering for the Waffen-SS and later serving as a camp doctor.

From 1943 to 1945 he served as SS-Lagerarzt in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he conducted inhumane medical and anthropological experiments on prisoners, especially on twins, Roma and Sinti, and people with physical anomalies, while also participating in selections for the gas chambers. After the war he evaded prosecution, living for decades in Argentina and Brazil under various identities until his death by drowning in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979. There is no evidence of legitimate salaried postwar employment, identifiable real estate holdings or businesses tied to him that can be reliably quantified, so financial estimates such as net worth or salary cannot be meaningfully or ethically inferred in his case.

Available information about him focuses almost entirely on his role as a Nazi war criminal, his pseudoscientific experiments, and his long-term escape from justice.