Random Chilling Facts About Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele (21 items)

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  (#16) Historians Found A Collection Of Mengele's Daily Documents From The War

  In 2010, a collection of food receipts from Auschwitz were found in the attic of a house close to the camp. The receipts paint a picture of the day-to-day lives of the men and women who ran the camp. The records show that Mengele bought butter and sugar while at the camp, among other mundane details.
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  (#18) His Family May Have Laundered Money For Him After World War II

  After World War II, Mengele had to get out of Europe or face a trial and likely execution as a war criminal. Over the course of a decade, the doctor made his way to South America, where he lived out the rest of his life. How did he afford all that travel? It turns out that his family may have been funneling money from their business, Karl Mengele & Sons, into a Swiss bank account in order to help Mengele lay low.

  The entire story is conjecture, and because of the chaos at the end of the war and the ease with which records could be destroyed in the mid-20th century, it's hard to definitively prove – or disprove – that the Mengele family was working together to keep Josef out of a noose. 
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  (#11) He Played Nice To Trick Children Into Trusting Him

  A wolf in sheep's clothing might not be enough to describe the misleading front that Mengele used to put the children of Auschwitz at ease. Not only would he give them candy, but he also founded a kindergarten at the camp and played the violin to children in order to lull them into a false sense of security. When it came time to take the children away, he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car.
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  (#9) He Never Accepted Guilt For His Crimes

  It's unclear whether Mengele's son Rolf always knew that his father was alive and well and living in South America, or if he tracked him down later. What we do know is that in 1977, Rolf visited his dad in Brazil and found an older and somehow even more abhorrent Nazi. In their meeting, Josef Mengele told his son that he “had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life," which shows the amount of delusion he cultivated when working to not only torture human beings in his cruel experiments, but when serving as a major component of the machine hellbent on destroying an entire race of people. 
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  (#14) He Wasn't The Chief Medical Officer Of Auschwitz

  While his infamy may paint Mengele as some kind of Nazi science super star, he wasn't actually in charge at Auschwitz. His actual rank was Chief Camp Physician of Auschwitz II, and he worked under the jurisdiction of SS captain Dr. Eduard Wirths.
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  (#7) Mengele Experimented With People's Irises In Attempts To Change Their Eye Color

  Along with all of the other weird stuff that Mengele was into, he had a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which an individual's two irises were different colors. In his personal eyeball experiments, he would try to change the color of a subject's eyes by injecting chemicals into their irises. 

  When that method didn't work, he would just rip out the entire eyeball and send it off to his colleague, eye-pigmentation expert Karin Magnussen, for further research. 

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