JOSEF MENGELE – Doctor and Executioner

The first French-language biography of "The Angel of Death".

This book comprehensively traces the extraordinary life of a particularly cruel Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. How did this man come to break the Hippocratic oath in such a monstrous way? The author of The Doctors of Auschwitz recounts Mengele's childhood in Günzburg, his promising future in medicine, his meeting with his future wife and their marriage — a first period turned toward life.

A soldier in Hitler's service from 1940, it was as a doctor that he began his sinister career as an executioner in 1943 — first at Auschwitz, then at the Gypsy camp, and finally at Birkenau, orchestrating atrocious and often lethal experiments on prisoners. Deeply antisemitic, the German torturer showed no regard for the lives or human dignity of the deportees; for this doctor of anthropology, Jews had to be eliminated, all in the service of science.

At the end of the war, Mengele embarked on a long flight that would take him from one hiding place to the next, from Munich to Brazil, via Argentina and Paraguay. During his many years on the run, he regularly declared that he was still alive, and witnesses claimed to spot him in all corners of the globe. The man his victims called "The Angel of Death" died on 7 February 1979, having managed to evade justice. It was not until 1985 that the world learned of the fugitive's disappearance, kept secret until then by his protectors. Josef Mengele never answered for his abominable acts, but this exemplary work ensures they are not forgotten.