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The nazi scientist nicknamed "The angel of death" Josef Mengele carried out multiple horrendous studies on jewish prisoners'. Josef searched out many different groups and types of people, some that were twins, some dwarfism and gigantism, he regularly sent the bodies and parts to certain places and people in germany. Most of his studies happened on children, one example is Moshe Ofer, she recalled "[Mengele] visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or a syringe, he would say: 'Don’t be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you…' ...he injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi’s spine. After the experiments he would bring us gifts...In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms". So as we can infer, mengele was a very cruel and unforgiving man with horrible intentions even though he acted kind to kids.

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Josef Mengele is one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust. His service at Auschwitz and the medical experiments he conducted there have made him the most widely recognized perpetrator of the crimes committed at that camp. His postwar life in hiding has come to represent the international failure to bring the perpetrators of Nazi crimes to justice.

Because of his infamy, Mengele has been the subject of numerous popular books, films, and television shows. Many of these portrayals distort the real facts of Mengele's crimes and take him out of his historical context. Some portray him as a mad scientist who conducted sadistic experiments with no scientific basis.

The truth about Mengele is even more disturbing. He was a highly trained doctor and medical researcher, as well as a decorated war veteran. He was respected in his field and worked for one of the leading research institutions in Germany. Much of his medical research at Auschwitz supported the work of other German scientists. He was one of dozens of biomedical researchers who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. And he was one of a number of medical professionals who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mengele acted within the norms of German science under the Nazi regime. His crimes represent the extreme danger posed by science when it is conducted in the service of an ideology that denies the rights, dignity, and even humanity of certain groups of people.

Mengele before Auschwitz

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in the Bavarian city of Günzburg, Germany. He was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming equipment.

Mengele studied medicine and physical anthropology at several universities. In 1935, he earned a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. In 1936, Mengele passed the state medical exams.

In 1937, Mengele began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, Germany. There, he was an assistant to the director, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer was a leading geneticist known for his research on twins. Under Verschuer's direction, Mengele completed an additional doctorate in 1938.

Embracing Nazi Ideology

Mengele did not actively support the Nazi Party before it came to power. However, in 1931, he joined the , the paramilitary of another right-wing party, the German National People's Party. Mengele became a member of the Nazi Stahlhelm SA when it absorbed the Stahlhelm in 1933, but he ceased actively participating in it in 1934.

During his university studies, however, Mengele embraced racial science, the false theory of biological racism. He believed that Germans were biologically different from and superior to members of all other races. Racial science was a fundamental tenet of Nazi ideology. Hitler used racial science to justify the forced sterilization of persons with certain physical or mental diseases or physical deformities. The Nuremberg Race Laws, which outlawed marriage between Germans and Jewish, Black, or Romani peoples, were also based upon racial science.

In 1938, Mengele joined the Nazi Party and the SS. In his work as a scientist, he sought to support the Nazi goal of maintaining and increasing the supposed superiority of the German "race." Mengele's employer and mentor, Verschuer, also embraced biological racism. In addition to conducting research, Verschuer and his staff - including Mengele - provided expert opinions to Nazi authorities who had to determine whether persons qualified as German under the Nuremberg Laws. Mengele and his colleagues also evaluated Germans whose physical or mental condition might qualify them to be forcibly sterilized or barred from marriage under German law.

Serving on the Eastern Front

In June 1940, Mengele was drafted into the German army ( At first, he worked for the Wehrmacht ). A month later, he volunteered for the medical service of the Waffen -SS (the military branch of the SS). SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in German-occupied Poland. There, Mengele evaluated the criteria and methods used by the SS to determine whether persons claiming to be of German descent were racially and physically suitable to qualify as Germans.

Around the end of 1940, Mengele was assigned to the engineering battalion of the SS Division " " as a medical officer. For about 18 months beginning in June 1941, he saw extremely brutal fighting on the Wiking eastern front. In addition, in the first weeks of Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, Mengele's division slaughtered thousands of Jewish civilians. Mengele's service on the eastern front earned him the Iron Cross, both 2nd and 1st Class, and promotion to SS captain (SS- Hauptsturmführer ).

Mengele returned to Germany in January 1943. While awaiting his next Waffen - SS assignment, he began to work again for his mentor Verschuer. Verschuer had recently become the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin.

Assigned to Auschwitz

On May 30, 1943, the SS assigned Mengele to (literally, "Gypsy camp"). Beginning in 1943, nearly 21,000 Auschwitz. There is some evidence that Mengele himself requested this assignment. He worked as one of the camp physicians at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Auschwitz camps and also served as a killing center for Jews deported from throughout Europe. In addition to other duties, Mengele had responsibility for Birkenau's Zigeunerlager Romani men, women, and children (pejoratively referred to as Zigeuner or "Gypsies") were sent to Auschwitz and imprisoned in the Zigeunerlager . When this family camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, Mengele participated in selecting the 2,893 Romani prisoners who were to be murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed chief physician for the part of the Auschwitz camp complex called Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II. In November 1944, he was assigned to the Birkenau hospital for the SS.

"Angel of Death": Selecting Prisoners to be Murdered

As part of their camp duties, medical staff at Auschwitz performed so-called selections. The purpose of the selections was to identify persons who were unable to work. The SS considered such persons useless and therefore murdered them. When transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau, the camp medical personnel selected some of the able-bodied adults to perform forced labor in the concentration camp. Those not selected for labor, including children and older adults, were murdered in the gas chambers.

Camp physicians at Auschwitz and at other concentration camps also conducted periodic selections in the camp infirmaries and barracks. They conducted these selections in order to identify prisoners who were injured or had become too ill or weak to work. The SS used various methods to murder these prisoners, including lethal injections and gassing. Mengele routinely carried out such selections at Birkenau, leading some prisoners to refer to him as the "angel of death." Prisoner Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist at Birkenau, later recalled how Mengele's appearance in the women's infirmary filled the prisoners with terror:

We feared these visits more than anything else, because [. . .] we never knew whether we would be permitted to live [. . . .] He was free to do whatever he pleased with us.

- Quoted according to Gisella Perl's memoir I was a Doctor in Auschwitz 1

After World War II, Mengele became infamous for his work at Auschwitz thanks to the accounts of prisoner physicians who had worked under him and of prisoners who had survived his medical experiments.

Mengele was one of some 50 physicians who served at Auschwitz. He was neither the highest ranking doctor in the Auschwitz camp complex nor the commander of the other doctors there. Nevertheless, his name is by far the best known of all the doctors who served at Auschwitz. One reason for this was Mengele's frequent presence on the ramp where selections took place. When Mengele did not himself perform selection duty, he often still appeared at the ramp, looking among the prisoners for twins for his experiments and physicians for the Birkenau infirmary. Consequently, many survivors who underwent selection upon arrival at Auschwitz assumed that Mengele was the doctor who had selected them. However, Mengele performed this task no more often than his colleagues.

Biomedical Researchers at Auschwitz

The SS authorized German biomedical researchers to conduct unethical and often lethal human experiments in the concentration camps. Auschwitz provided prisoners for human experiments conducted at various other camps. It also served as the site of a variety of human experiments. This is because of the number of prisoners sent there. The SS sent 1.3 million men, women, and children from many different national and ethnic backgrounds to Auschwitz. Researchers looking for human subjects who met specific criteria could more easily find them at Auschwitz than at other camps.

Mengele was one of more than a dozen SS medical personnel who conducted experiments on people imprisoned at Auschwitz. These doctors included:

Eduard Wirths, the head Auschwitz physician;

Carl Clauberg, a noted specialist in the treatment of infertility;

Horst Schumann, who gassed thousands of patients with disabilities during the Nazi Euthanasia Program;

SS physician Helmut Vetter, who conducted drug trials for the Bayer subsidiary of IG Farben on prisoners at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps;

Johann Paul Kremer, a professor of anatomy.

These doctors saw their appointment to Auschwitz as an exciting opportunity to advance their research.

Types of Experiments Conducted

The experiments in the concentration camps permanently maimed many victims or caused them to die. In some experiments, death was the intended outcome for the victims. The medical professionals who conducted experiments at Auschwitz did not seek the prisoners' consent or inform them of their treatment or possible effects. The types of experiments conducted at Auschwitz included:

Testing methods of mass sterilization;

Inflicting wounds on prisoners or infecting them with diseases to study the effects and test treatments;

Conducting unnecessary surgeries and procedures on patients for research purposes or to train medical professionals;

Murdering and dissecting prisoners for anthropological and medical research.

Mengele's Experiments at Auschwitz

Separate from his regular duties at Auschwitz, Mengele conducted research and experiments on prisoners. His mentor Verschuer may even have arranged Mengele's assignment to Auschwitz for the purpose of supporting the research of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (KWI-A). Throughout his time at Auschwitz, Mengele sent his colleagues in Germany blood, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses. These were all taken from Auschwitz prisoners. Mengele collaborated on his colleagues' research projects by conducting studies and experiments for them using prisoners.

In addition to his work with the KWI-A, Mengele also conducted his own experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. He hoped to publish the results and thereby gain the credentials to qualify for a university professorship.

In the course of his service at Auschwitz, Mengele organized a research complex located in a number of barracks. He chose his staff from among the prisoners who were medical professionals. Mengele was able to obtain up-to-date instruments and equipment for his research and even set up a pathology lab.

Research Goals

Mengele's own research and the research he conducted for the KWI-A generally focused on how genes develop into specific physical and mental traits. When conducted ethically, this is a legitimate and important field of genetic research. However, the work of Mengele, Verschuer, and their colleagues was warped by their belief in a pseudoscientific theory of race that was fundamental to Nazi ideology. This theory held that human races are genetically distinct from each other. It established a hierarchy of races and stressed that "inferior" races are genetically more likely to exhibit negative traits than members of "superior" races. These negative hereditary traits supposedly included more than just physical and mental illnesses and deficiencies. They also supposedly included socially unacceptable or immoral behaviors, such as vagrancy, prostitution, and criminality. According to the false theory of race, intermarriage between races passed negative traits to "superior" races and undermined them.

Mengele sought to identify specific physical and biochemical markers that could definitively identify the members of specific races. Mengele and his colleagues believed that finding such markers was vitally important for preserving the supposed racial superiority of the German people. For Mengele and his colleagues, the importance of the research justified conducting harmful and lethal experiments on people - in this case Auschwitz prisoners - whom they considered to be racially inferior.

Who were Mengele's Victims?

Mengele drew his victims mainly from two ethnic groups: Roma and Jews. These groups were of particular interest to biomedical researchers in Nazi Germany. Nazi ideology considered both Roma and Jews to be "subhuman" and to pose a threat to the German "race." For this reason, Nazi scientists did not consider medical ethics to apply to members of these groups.

While Mengele served at Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 20,000 Roma were imprisoned there and hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived there on transports. Nowhere else in the world could scientists have access to so many members of these groups concentrated in one place. And nowhere else did they have the power to experiment on human beings in whatever way they wanted. Mengele commented to a colleague that it would be a crime not to take advantage of the opportunities for human experimentation at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Roma

In addition to choosing Roma as subjects for his medical experiments, Mengele conducted an anthropological study of the Roma men, women, and children in the Zigeunerlager . When there was an outbreak of Noma, a gangrene of the mouth, among Roma children in the camp, he assigned prisoner physicians to study it. Noma is a bacterial infection that primarily afflicts extremely malnourished children. However, Mengele believed that the Roma children at Auschwitz suffered from Noma because of their heredity rather than because of the conditions at the camp. The prisoner physicians discovered how to cure Noma, which was normally fatal. Nevertheless, all of the children who were cured were eventually murdered in the gas chambers.

Twins

In the 1930s, twins were a major focus of human genetic research. Before World War II, Verschuer and other biomedical researchers used twins to study the hereditary basis of diseases. These earlier researchers obtained the consent of the twins or their parents, but it was difficult for researchers to enlist many twins for these studies. At Auschwitz, Mengele collected hundreds of pairs of twins from among the Jews who arrived there on transports and from among the Roma imprisoned there. No researcher had ever been able to study and experiment on such a large number of twins.

Mengele ordered his staff to measure and record every aspect of the twins' bodies. He drew large amounts of blood from the twins and sometimes performed other painful procedures on them.

[...] They also gave us injections all over our bodies. As a result of these injections, my sister fell ill. Her neck swelled up as a result of a severe infection. They sent her to the hospital and operated on her without anesthetic in primitive conditions. (...)

From the account of Lorenc Andreas Menasche, camp number A 12090. 2

Mengele also murdered sets of twins at the same time in order to conduct autopsies of their corpses. After he studied the autopsies, Mengele sent some of their organs to the KWI-A.

Persons with Congenital Anomalies

When he conducted selections of arriving Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mengele looked for people with physical abnormalities. These people included dwarfs, people with gigantism, or persons who had a club foot. Mengele studied these people and then had them murdered. He sent their bodies to Germany for study by researchers.

Mengele also sought out Roma and Jews with heterochromia, a condition in which a person's eyes differ from each other in color. One of Mengele's colleagues at KWI-A was particularly interested in this condition. Mengele had persons with heterochromia murdered at Auschwitz and sent their eyes to this colleague.

Children

Most of the victims of Mengele's medical experiments were children. The children Mengele selected for experiments lived in separate barracks from the other prisoners and received somewhat better food and treatment. Mengele was friendly toward the children. Moshe Ofer, a survivor of Mengele's experiments, recalled in 1985 that

[Mengele] visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or a syringe, he would say: 'Don't be afraid, nothing is going to happen to you...' ...he injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi's spine. After the experiments he would bring us gifts...In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms. 3

Mengele used children for his own experiments and also to support the work of the KWI-A. He collaborated in a study of the development of eye color by putting a substance supplied by one of his colleagues in the eyes of children and newborns. The results ranged from irritation and swelling to blindness and even death.

A prisoner who was assigned to care for Jewish twins selected for Mengele's experiments later described how the children reacted emotionally and physically to their treatment:

Samples of blood were collected first from the fingers and then from the arteries, two or three times from the same victims in some cases. The children screamed and tried to cover themselves up to avoid being touched. The personnel resorted to force. (...) Drops were also put into their eyes....Some pairs of children received drops in both eyes, and others in only one. ....The results of these practices were painful for the victims. They suffered from severe swelling of the eyelids, a burning sensation.... 4

Evading Justice

In January 1945, as the Soviet Red Army advanced through western Poland, Mengele fled Auschwitz with the rest of the camp's SS personnel. He spent the next few months serving at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and its subcamps. In the final days of the war, he donned a German army uniform and joined a military unit. After the war ended, the unit surrendered to US military forces.

Posing as a German army officer, Mengele became a US prisoner of war. The US Army released him in early August 1945, unaware that Mengele's name was already on a list of wanted war criminals.

From late 1945 until spring 1949, Mengele worked under a false name as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria. From here he was able to establish contact with his family. When US war crimes investigators learned of Mengele's crimes at Auschwitz, they tried to find and arrest him. Based on lies told by Mengele's family, however, the investigators concluded that Mengele was dead. The US effort to arrest him forced Mengele to recognize that he was not safe in Germany. With financial support from his family, Mengele immigrated to Argentina under yet another false name in July 1949.

By 1956, Mengele was well established in Argentina and felt so safe that he obtained Argentine citizenship as José Mengele. In 1959, however, he learned that West German prosecutors knew he was in Argentina and were seeking his arrest. Mengele immigrated to Paraguay and obtained citizenship there. In May 1960, Israeli intelligence agents abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel to be tried. Correctly guessing that the Israelis were also looking for him, Mengele fled Paraguay. With support from his family in Germany, he spent the rest of his life under an assumed name near São Paulo, Brazil. On February 7, 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried in a suburb of São Paulo under the assumed name "Wolfgang Gerhard."

The Discovery and Identification of Mengele's Body

In May 1985, the governments of Germany, Israel, and the United States agreed to cooperate in tracking down Mengele and bringing him to justice. German police raided the home of a Mengele family friend in Günzburg, Germany, and found evidence that Mengele had died and been buried near São Paulo. Brazilian police located Mengele's grave and exhumed his corpse in June 1985. American, Brazilian, and German forensic experts positively identified the remains as those of Josef Mengele. In 1992, DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion.

Mengele eluded arrest for 34 years and was never brought to justice.

Last Edited: Feb 21, 2023

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Prominent SS physician Josef Mengele, called the "angel of death" by his victims, conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners in the Auschwitz camp.

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Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.

Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.

Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany's defeat in World War I.

Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country's devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic "traitors" at home-a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler's rise.

Nazi Party

After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers' Party, which aimed to unite the interests of the working class with a strong German nationalism. His skilled oratory and charismatic energy helped propel him in the party's ranks, and in 1920 he left the army and took charge of its propaganda efforts.

In one of Hitler's strokes of propaganda genius, the newly renamed National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party, adopted a version of the swastika-an ancient sacred symbol of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism -as its emblem. Printed in a white circle on a red background, Hitler's swastika would take on terrifying symbolic power in the years to come.

By the end of 1921, Hitler led the growing Nazi Party, capitalizing on widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty. Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich would join the Nazis, notably Ernst Röhm, who recruited the "strong arm" squads-known as the Sturmabteilung (SA)-which Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch

On the evening of November 8, 1923, members of the SA and others forced their way into a large beer hall where another right-wing leader was addressing the crowd. Wielding a revolver, Hitler proclaimed the beginning of a national revolution and led marchers to the center of Munich, where they got into a gun battle with police.

Hitler fled quickly, but he and other rebel leaders were later arrested. Even though it failed spectacularly, the Beer Hall Putsch established Hitler as a national figure, and (in the eyes of many) a hero of right-wing nationalism.

'Mein Kampf'

Tried for treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but would serve only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg Castle. During this period, he began to dictate the book that would become " Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"), the first volume of which was published in 1925.

In it, Hitler expanded on the nationalistic, anti-Semitic views he had begun to develop in Vienna in his early twenties, and laid out plans for the Germany-and the world-he sought to create when he came to power.

Hitler would finish the second volume of "Mein Kampf" after his release, while relaxing in the mountain village of Berchtesgaden. It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler's rise it became Germany's best-selling book after the Bible. By 1940, it had sold some 6 million copies there.

Hitler's second book, "The Zweites Buch," was written in 1928 and contained his thoughts on foreign policy. It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of "Mein Kampf." The first English translations of "The Zweites Buch" did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title "Hitler's Secret Book."

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic "purity," Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called "Aryan race" at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

"Mein Kampf" also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by "inferior" Slavic peoples-including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

The Schutzstaffel (SS)

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party. He established the Hitler Youth to organize youngsters, and created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a more reliable alternative to the SA.

Members of the SS wore black uniforms and swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. (After 1929, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS would develop from a group of some 200 men into a force that would dominate Germany and terrorize the rest of occupied Europe during World War II.)

Eva Braun

Hitler spent much of his time at Berchtesgaden during these years, and his half-sister, Angela Raubal, and her two daughters often joined him. After Hitler became infatuated with his beautiful blonde niece, Geli Raubal, his possessive jealousy apparently led her to commit suicide in 1931.

Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her.

The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic. Determined to achieve political power in order to affect his revolution, Hitler built up Nazi support among German conservatives, including army, business and industrial leaders.

The Third Reich

In 1932, Hitler ran against the war hero Paul von Hindenburg for president, and received 36.8 percent of the vote. With the government in chaos, three successive chancellors failed to maintain control, and in late January 1933 Hindenburg named the 43-year-old Hitler as chancellor, capping the stunning rise of an unlikely leader.

January 30, 1933 marked the birth of the Third Reich, or as the Nazis called it, the "Thousand-Year Reich" (after Hitler's boast that it would endure for a millennium).

Reichstag Fire

Though the Nazis never attained more than 37 percent of the vote at the height of their popularity in 1932, Hitler was able to grab absolute power in Germany largely due to divisions and inaction among the majority who opposed Nazism.

After a devastating fire at Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, in February 1933-possibly the work of a Dutch communist, though later evidence suggested Nazis set the Reichstag fire themselves-Hitler had an excuse to step up the political oppression and violence against his opponents.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving full powers to Hitler and celebrating the union of National Socialism with the old German establishment (i.e., Hindenburg).

That July, the government passed a law stating that the Nazi Party "constitutes the only political party in Germany," and within months all non-Nazi parties, trade unions and other organizations had ceased to exist.

His autocratic power now secure within Germany, Hitler turned his eyes toward the rest of Europe.

In 1933, Germany was diplomatically isolated, with a weak military and hostile neighbors (France and Poland). In a famous speech in May 1933, Hitler struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone, claiming Germany supported disarmament and peace.

But behind this appeasement strategy, the domination and expansion of the Volk remained Hitler's overriding aim.

By early the following year, he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations and begun to militarize the nation in anticipation of his plans for territorial conquest.

Night of the Long Knives

On June 29, 1934, the infamous Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had Röhm, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and hundreds of other problematic members of his own party murdered, in particular troublesome members of the SA.

When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, military leaders agreed to combine the presidency and chancellorship into one position, meaning Hitler would command all the armed forces of the Reich.

Persecution of Jews

On September 15, 1935, passage of the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, and barred them from marrying or having relations with persons of "German or related blood."

Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 1936 Berlin Olympics (in which German-Jewish athletes were not allowed to compete), additional decrees over the next few years disenfranchised Jews and took away their political and civil rights.

In addition to its pervasive anti-Semitism, Hitler's government also sought to establish the cultural dominance of Nazism by burning books, forcing newspapers out of business, using radio and movies for propaganda purposes and forcing teachers throughout Germany's educational system to join the party.

Much of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other targets occurred at the hands of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GESTAPO), or Secret State Police, an arm of the SS that expanded during this period.

Outbreak of World War II

In March 1936, against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine.

Over the next two years, Germany concluded alliances with Italy and Japan, annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia-all essentially without resistance from Great Britain, France or the rest of the international community.

Once he confirmed the alliance with Italy in the so-called "Pact of Steel" in May 1939, Hitler then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland, finally prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

Blitzkrieg

After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. The blitzkrieg ("lightning war") attack began on May 10; Holland quickly surrendered, followed by Belgium.

German troops made it all the way to the English Channel, forcing British and French forces to evacuate en masse from Dunkirk in late May. On June 22, France was forced to sign an armistice with Germany.

Hitler had hoped to force Britain to seek peace as well, but when that failed he went ahead with his attacks on that country, followed by an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany's alliance with Japan demanded that Hitler declare war on the United States as well.

At that point in the conflict, Hitler shifted his central strategy to focus on breaking the alliance of his main opponents (Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) by forcing one of them to make peace with him.

Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, including a notorious camp at Dachau, near Munich, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After war broke out, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion, while the existing concentration-camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.

In addition to forced labor and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments carried out by eugenicist Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death." Mengele's experiments focused on twins and exposed 3,000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews-some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war's end.

End of World War II

With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad, as well as the landing of U.S. troops in North Africa by the end of 1942, the tide of the war turned against Germany.

As the conflict continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medications administered by his personal physician.

Several attempts were made on his life, including one that came close to succeeding in July 1944, when Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that exploded during a conference at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split British and American forces.

But after January 1945, he holed up in a bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler made plans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan.

How Did Adolf Hitler Die?

At midnight on the night of April 28-29, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. After dictating his political testament, Hitler shot himself in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. Their bodies were burned according to Hitler's instructions.

With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, 1945, bringing the war in Europe to a close.

In the end, Hitler's planned "Thousand-Year Reich" lasted just over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the history of Germany, Europe and the world.

Sources

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
iWonder - Adolf Hitler: Man and Monster, BBC.
The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Adolf Hiter: Rise to Power, Impact & Death

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Adolf Hitler was leader of the Nazi Party who rose to become dictator of Germany. Hitler used his power to orchestrate the deaths of 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II.

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Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.

The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler's particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract " Mein Kampf " (or "my struggle"), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan," and with the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party's status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany's supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000-just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an "Aryanization" of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass" in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, starting World War II. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler's SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution) to "the Jewish question."

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and urged the German leaders and people to follow "the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples"-the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide. Germany's formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz, the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat."

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust-known in Hebrew as "Shoah," or catastrophe-were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust's bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people's responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.
Sources
The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum.
What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums.
Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe.
Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations.

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Holocaust: Definition, Remembrance & Meaning - HISTORY

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The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, Romani people, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime from 1933-1945.

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This horrible fence keeps us locked away in this horrible camp. hope that the power of God will save us once more, I hear the distant screams of fellow Jews getting thrown into the crematorium, the scent of burning bodies fills the air. I'm stuck in this barbed fence as I'm covered in dirt and grime, I believe in the savior but yet he punishes us with this monster of a man being in control. One last shower the first one in months, my body aches from working in the construction field; mining and carrying stone bricks to lay more barracks, for more torture more grief. one last goodbye to sanity, to freedom, to believing.

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Wires sharp as bullets cutting through air, the big towers watching over our every single move. Don't think about running, or else you'll get mowed down in an instant. Every command is engrained into us by intense yells. We are beaten and worked to the bone, beating like the ants we are to them, we are worth nothing in their eyes. Miles and Miles on horrible and sharp rocks and gravel, all with the threat of going to get murdered. Even with everything against us, we keep going incase we can escape and get out of this hell.

-feb 15th 1944

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Hitler killed himself in his underground bunker along with his newlywed wife Eva Braun.

As the Soviet Union Red Army came crashing down on Berlin, The commander of the Third Reich Adolf Hitler took to hiding in his bunker underneath the old Reich Chancellery building whilst his forces desperately fought.

But on April 30th, 1945, Hitler took a cyanide pill along with shooting himself in the head, along with his wife Eva Braun who also took a cyanide capsule.

This ultimately led to Germany unconditionally surrendering to the Allied forces, this surely must have been a crushing defeat for the Axis powers, but now only Japan remains, we will surely inform you all about that later.