Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s skeleton is now a teaching aid for medical students
The killer performed vile experiments on concentration camp inmates and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers
THE skeleton of a Nazi scientist dubbed the 'Angel of Death' for his sickening experiments on thousands of Jews at Auschwitz is now used to teach Brazilian students to fight crime.
For more than 30 years, the bones of German doctor Josef Mengele lay unclaimed inside a blue plastic bag in Sao Paulo's Legal Medical Institute.
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5Mengele died nearly four decades ago when he drowned off the coast of the state of Sao Paulo. He had been on the run for years, hiding while being pursued for performing vile experiments on inmates and sending thousands of them to the gas chambers during the Second World War.
But Dr Daniel Romero Munoz, who led the team that identified Mengele's remains in 1985, saw an opportunity to put them to use.
Several months ago, the head of the Department of Legal Medicine at the University of Sao Paulo's Medical School obtained permission to use them in his forensic medical courses.
Today, his students are now learning their trade studying Mengele's bones and connecting them to his life story.
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5"The bones will be helpful to teach how to examine the remains of an individual and then match that information with data in documents related to the person," Munoz said.
Mengele's life on the run, and the mystery surrounding his whereabouts, are part of what make his bones a useful teaching tool, Munoz said.
"For example, examining Mengele's remains, we saw a fractured left pelvis," he said, adding that "information found in his army record said that he fractured his pelvis in a motorcycle accident in Auschwitz," the notorious Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.
Holding Mengele's skull, Munoz pointed to a small hole in the left cheek bone, which he said was the result of long-term sinusitis.
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5Munoz said that a German couple who harboured Mengele in Brazil told police that he often suffered from dental abscesses that he himself would treat with a razor blade.
"I don't know what I feel" about Mengele's bones being studied, said Cyrla Gewertz, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor.
"I already have too many painful memories of him and what he did to me and others at Auschwitz. These are memories I cannot erase from my mind."
After the war, Gewertz, who said she was also interned in other concentration camps like Ravensbruck and Malchow, went to Sweden, where she lived for seven years and where she met and married her husband with whom she came to Brazil in 1952.
Originally from Poland, Gewertz has a tattoo on her left arm identifying her as an Auschwitz prisoner: A24840. She said she came face to face with Mengele on several occasions.
WHO WAS THE ANGEL OF DEATH?
Josef Mengele was a German SS officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.
He was a notorious member of the team of docs responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners. Arrivals deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labour were immediately killed in the gas chambers. He was obsessed with twins and other genetic traits and murdered children to conduct autopsies. Mengele would infect one twin with a fatal disease, then kill the other to compare the bodies. Mengele left Auschwitz on 17 January 1945, shortly before the arrival of the liberating Red Army troops. Assisted by a network of former SS members, Mengele sailed to Argentina in July 1949. He initially lived in and around Buenos Aires, then fled to Paraguay in 1959 and Brazil in 1960. In spite of extradition requests by the German government and clandestine operations by Mossad, Mengele eluded capture. He drowned while swimming off the Brazilian coast in 1979 and was buried under a false name. His remains were disinterred and positively identified by forensic examination in 1985.
"(Mengele) told me to strip and step inside a large vat with extremely hot water," said Gewertz during an interview in her Sao Paulo apartment. "I said the water was too hot and he said if I didn't do what he ordered, he would kill me. After that I had to step into a vat with freezing water."
Gewertz said she once saw Mengele kill a newborn baby girl by throwing her off the roof of the camp's barracks.
"He was an evil, perverse man," she said "He was a torturer."
After the war, as leading members of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Mengele fled to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires for a decade.
He moved to Paraguay after Israeli Mossad agents captured Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was also living in Buenos Aires.
In 1960, he arrived in Sao Paulo, where he received shelter from German couple Wolfram and Lisolette Bossert and a family of Hungarian immigrants.
Mengele, then 67, died while swimming off a beach in the coastal town of Bertioga in 1979. The Bosserts buried him in Embu on the outskirts of Sao Paulo under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard.
Years later, German authorities intercepted a letter sent by the couple to Mengele's family with news of his death. They alerted Brazilian authorities.
In 1985, his body was exhumed. Teams from Germany, Israel, the United States and Brazil confirmed it was Mengele, using methods including the vetting of personal accounts from people who knew him in Brazil, comparing handwriting in seized letters and analysing the recovered cranium to see if it matched old photos of Mengele.
Professor Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, a historian who coordinates the University of Sao Paulo's Laboratory for the Study of Ethnicity, Racism and Discrimination, said she hopes the classroom learning eventually goes beyond the science to history and ethics.
Students should also learn "how physicians, psychiatrists and other leading scientists were in the service of the Reich, lending their knowledge to exclude the ethnic groups classified as belonging to inferior races," said Carneiro.
"An exclusion that culminated in genocide."
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