Camp Gagnon - Hitler’s Psychotic Nazi Doctor And His Horrific Crimes | Josef Mengele

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Who was Josef Mengele, and was he the most evil doctor on Earth? Today, we take a closer look at the horrific stories of one of the scariest doctors. We’ll talk about Mengele’s early life, his education, arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele’s obsession with heterochromia, the victims of Josef Mengele, his escape from justice, and other interesting topics. Welcome to CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsors: Sleep-Dust and Morgan & Morgan & MorganIf you’re ready to revitalize your sleep Use promo code SLEEP for 20% off. when you visit http://www.sleep-dust.com/👕🧢 GET YOUR CAMP DRIP HERE: http://camp-rd.com🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 Mengele’s Early Life + Racial Education4:12 Arriving at Auschwitz7:13 The Twins of Auschwitz12:21 Mengele’s Obsession w/ Heterochromia15:25 Overnight Extermination of Roma Camp17:57 The Ovitz Family19:26 Mengele Escapes Auschwitz Into Argentina23:58 Mengele Becomes Wolfgang Gherhard27:22 Joseph's Alias Dies + Joseph’s Son Confronts Him29:00 The Coverup of Mengele's Death34:53 What’s Your Thoughts On Mengele?

Yosef Mengele. He wasn't just a Nazi officer. He was a doctor. He was educated. He was well respected. And he was also one of the greatest monsters of all of World War II. At Auschwitz, he decided life or death with just the flick of a finger. He hunted twins. Like there were some type of trophy. And he would cut them open and perform unthinkable experiments. To him, they weren't children. They were just experiments. He even showed up on his days off, not for duty, but for more victims. He was a war hero. He got medals. He was a doctor with. PhDs, but he is ultimately the man who turns science into horror. This is the angel of death. So, sit back and welcome to camp. What's up people and welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon,

and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world ever. As always, I'm joined by my dear friend Christos Papadopados. What's up, Christos? All right, you know what? We don't have time because today we're diving into World War II history, specifically one of the more morbid and dark elements of it. And there are many, and this is one of the top. Yosef Mengle, also known as Joseph Mengle. And he's one of the more disturbing characters that you'll ever read about in a history book. I mean, truly, he was a doctor. He came from a good family. And he became a Nazi. And sure, a lot of people became Nazis, but he was, you know, particularly brutal, particularly twisted

and perhaps was, you know, just a proper serial killer psychopath who happened to have the right credentials at the wrong time. So we're going to dive into his entire story, uncover his motivation, what he did and why he did it. So let's start at the beginning, shall we? Mangalai was born March, 1911, in this little Bavarian town known as Gunsberg. And his family was pretty successful. They owned one of the largest businesses in all of Gunsberg, Carl, Mangalai, and the city. sons. And they made farming equipment. Think like John Deere, but it was German and super successful. His father, Carl Mengley, Sr., built this company from nothing into a massive operation.

And this is right around the time that industrialization is like really sweeping through Germany. It's one of the most industrialized nations. And these guys, you know, the Mangley family, really capitalized. I mean, like threshing machines, plows, all that kind of stuff. You know, everything that a farmer in the region, specifically in Bavaria would need. And by the time that Yosef, was growing up, the Benglays were one of the wealthiest families in all of Bavaria. I mean, he had everything going for him, right? He was smart, came for money, parents who cared about him. He was an excellent student. Like, he didn't just do well in school. He goes overboard with the degrees. I mean, he gets a PhD in anthropology when he's 23. And then he decides to go and get a medical

degree along with it. So by the mid-1930s, he's, you know, young guy with multiple doctorates. And this is where things start to get a little weird. So for what, for a little bit, his dissertation, he's studying jaw measurements and how they supposedly determine race. Yeah, it's like a thing. Like, basically more or less, like there's, you know, an antiquated version of pseudoscience that, you know, basically tries to understand like, you know, racial science. It tries to understand the race of a person or the IQ of a person based off of different features about their physiology. And this specific dissertation was trying to tell someone's ethnicity by measuring their chin. You know, you are a white dude, but we measure your chin actually turns out you're Asian the whole time, that kind of stuff. And this is the kind of thinking that is, you know, very much wrapped into the Aryan Nazi philosophy. So by 1937, he joins the Nazi party and in 1938, he signs up for the SS. Now, just to clarify, the Nazi party is the official political party, while the SS is the enforcer of the ideology held up by the Nazi party. They're essentially the militia, the security force for the Nazis, more or less.

That's the simple version. And it's not like he needs the job security, right? Yosef was already working at this prestigious research institute in Frankfurt under Otmar Fjörjvanshaoher, who was one of the leading voices in Nazi racial science. And Otmar specialized in twin studies and racial hygiene, which will eventually have a massive influence on, I know, Joseph Mengley. So by now his career is taken off and he's got respect in academic circles and everything's going great. Then World War II officially kicks off. And Menglei gets drafted as a medical officer.

He serves on the Russian front, gets wounded, and then receives decorations for bravery. So now he's not just Dr. Mengelay. He's Dr. War hero Mengley with a shiny Iron Cross on his chest. And this is where the story takes maybe the most horrific turn of all. By 1943, somebody in the SS looks at Mengley's file and thinks this guy is great. He's a brilliant doctor. He's obsessed with genetics and racial purity. And he's a war hero and he's a part of the Nazi party.

Let's get him at Auschwitz. So by May of 1943, Mengley steps off the train at Auschwitz and is looking like he's headed to, you know, a country club. He's got like a clean uniform. He's got his polished boots. And the guy sees his place. and his first thought isn't horror, he's like, oh, this is a great opportunity. This is unlimited human subjects, no ethics committee, no paperwork, no one asking me questions about what I can and can't do.

This is so much better than the university setting that I was working before. This is free range. And his main job, you know, on paper was standing on the selection ramp waiting for the cars to show up and basically pointing left or right. Now, if he points left, you go to work in the camps, and if he points right, then you go to the chambers. This is specifically the gas chambers for mass extermination. And Mangley, making these life or death decisions for thousands of people every single day. I mean, talk about a god complex, right? Survivors remember him always wearing like pristine white gloves and carrying like this little

riding crop, kind of like a little like whip. And even sometimes like humming like Brahms or Beethoven while he's literally deciding who lives and who dies. And most of the other SS doctors, they hated selections. They called it the worst part of their job, and they tried to get out of it whenever possible, right? Like, it would make them feel uncomfortable, make them feel badly about what they were doing. Even the Nazis, of the Nazis, people literally committing, you know,

the worst atrocities against humankind, are looking at this and they go, I don't like that part of the job. But Mengele would even show up on his days off. Not because he had to, but because he wanted to. He would scan the crowds looking for very specific people, twins, people with strange or unusual eye colors,

anyone who might benefit his specific. research. So now that we know that this accomplished doctor with two PhDs and a war metal ended up deciding who lives and who dies of, you know, potentially thousands, hundreds of thousand people, what did he do to these so-called patients, which were obviously not patients at all? And why is it so far beyond anything that his PhDs could have ever taught him? Emergency broadcast. We have a brand new channel and that is Mark Gagged on Comedy. If you don't know, I've been a stand-of-comedian for Almost 10 years now, and it is my true passion.

I love doing it. And every time I go on the road, after I finish my show, I like to hear from the audience. We pass out note cards and people submit topics. And me and sometimes my buddy, or sometimes just me alone, we will pick the topics out, and it is a segment that we call You Ask for this. And they are crazy. The topics go across the board, current events, do crazy stories, and we dive in all of them. And if you were interested in checking out the episodes, it would really help me out and help out the channel.

You can check it out in the description. It is Mark Gag on Comedy on YouTube. I'm so excited to be posting more stand-up. I really hope you guys. So, Mangalai gets his selection routine down, but that is just kind of like the day job, right? That's just the paperwork. When he really wants to do is the research,

and Auschwitz gives him, you know, something that no legitimate scientists could ever get, unlimited subjects with zero oversight. So he sets up his own private lab and starts collecting twins. Not just a few pairs here or there. There's about 1,500 sets of twins, about 3,000 children total,

and most of them were small children, not like 20, 25 years old. And the thought part is that the twin kids lived almost better than other people at the camp in Auschwitz. I mean, they got better food, they got clean clothes, they got to, you know, keep their hair, even though everyone else's hair got shaved. Ava Moses Corr, a survivor and a twin from Auschwitz, confirmed that they were housed in separate twins barracks that had, you know, better offerings than some of the other prisoners. Why is this? This isn't because Mangelae had like a soft spot for, you know, these kids. he needed healthy specimens.

This is how sadistic and twisted he is. He wanted these people to be in good conditions so that he could actually perform experiments on them. And you can't get good research data from malnourished sick children. So he kept them fed and clean and healthy. This wasn't kindness. This was like a quality control.

It was like, yeah, it was basically a way for him to control the subjects that he was getting. Now, the daily routine was always the same. Children were, you know, subjected to blood draws and, you know, height measurements and weight and head circumference and they were photographed and they were basically trying to document every tiny little physical detail. And injections were given regularly often with substances that were never identified to any of the patients. I mean, the children

themselves had no understanding of what was even happening to them. And this is what made it so disturbing is that Mangley was genuinely good with these kids. He had like a good bedside manner, probably something that he learned in, you know, medical school and he had like a soft voice and he would bring toys and candy. Miss Ava, who I described before, said basically this exact thing. She says, he would bring chocolate and sweets and stroke our hair, and then the next moment he would send us to the lab to be injected with germs. I mean, like psychopaths shit, like crazy. And he was so nice to the kids outside the experiments, they would run up to him calling him Uncle Mengele and he was like a friend of theirs. He had ruffled a hair and smile at him.

Vera Kreigel, a Czechoslovakian twin survivor, called him the smiling angel of dead. death, someone who made the twins feel special for a moment only to put them into these horrific tests. And from the outside, he looked like a nice doctor trying to help. But here's the thing. The survivors understood something that the kids didn't. This special treatment came with a price. Jonah Locke, a Polish twin survivor, put it perfectly, basically saying that twins were considered

Mangalais' property, meant, which basically means that guards couldn't beat them or kill them or, you know, mistreat them like they could. the other prisoners. She said that, you know, this gave them a warped sense of safety, but it also came with the constant error of, you know, were being saved for something much worse. But that caring doctor routine was just a setup, right? His real interest was this comparative anatomy. He wanted to see how identical twins were the same on the inside and how they would compare to each other. So he would take twins to his lab and inject chloroform into them, kill them. And then he would then perform autopsies to compare their organs. I mean, truly sadistic, evil shit. And then the preserved organs,

or whatever else he would get, would then get shipped to research institutes inside of Germany. The prisoner-doctor Miklos Naisli, who was forced to assist with these autopsies, later wrote about watching Mengleik kill 14 twins in one night, just going child to child, injecting them one after another like it was an assembly line. Now, here's what we need to do in order to separate some fact from fiction. You may have heard stories about him, you know, sewing twins together or, you know, trying to create conjoined twins, but some historians dispute that this had ever happened, not to downplay, obviously, the severity of what Mangalai did, but just in the interest of authenticity. The Auschwitz Museum calls it a myth. So where did this come from? Probably from some survivors that were

seeing twins connected with tubes and needles during blood transfusions. So Mangley would take twin, you know, blood from one twin and put into the other, often without checking any type of compatibility. which of course would kill many kids on their own. Now, what actually happened was bad enough without having to, you know, go to the myth world. And sometimes he would even infect one twin with typhus just to see how the other one would react and surgeries were carried out without anesthesia. I mean, truly awful. And the really sick part, Mengley kept detailed records of everything, charts, graphs, measurements, photographs.

To him, again, these weren't kids, they weren't human beings, they were data. And the data collection was complete that data would get disposed of. So by the time the Soviets started closing in on Auschwitz in early 1945, Mengele had gone through those 1,500 sets of twins. Most didn't survive, and the few that did would spend the rest of their lives dealing with the physical and psychological damage from these experiments. Now, of course, this Mengele and his obsession with genetics didn't stop with twins. He also had another fixation that was equally as disturbing.

It was human eyes. You see, he was fascinated with heterochromia, which is people that have two different color eyes. They might have one that's blue, one that's brown. And he would collect prisoners who had this condition, like they were like trading cards. But what really got him excited was the idea of changing brown eyes to blue eyes because in his twisted Nazi worldview, blue eyes were superior. So he started experimenting, injecting chemicals directly into kids' eyes trying to alter the eye color. And the procedures were brutal and excruciating.

And above all, they didn't work. So Mengle wasn't the type to give up. So when he couldn't change the eye color, he would instead try to harvest eyes. And we would kill the people in Auschwitz and take their eyes. And the Auschwitz archives still have detailed drawings of the eye color variations. And this isn't some, you know, disturbing legend. This is actually documented. This guy actually kept like jars of human eyes in his lab shelves and shipped them to research institutes around Germany.

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And thank you so much for support in the show. We got the link in the description. Now, let's get back to it. Now, Mengele is obviously twisted and disturbed, as we've seen, and his, you know, fixation on twins and, you know, eye experiments was just part of his job. It's, you know, some of his main work was actually as a chief physician of the Roma family camp. Now, this is about 23,000 Roma prisoners living in their own section of Auschwitz. Now, something that a lot of people don't realize is that Auschwitz wasn't just a single camp. You have Auschwitz 1, which is the original camp built in the 1940s, and this was the administrative center of the entire complex, and it was many Polish prisoners.

And then you have Auschwitz 2, which is the Birkenau. This is the largest section. It was built in 1941, just a few kilometers away. And this was the massive concentration camp that had many of the extermination sites. Then you have Auschwitz three, Monowitz, which was established in 1942, which is primarily a labor camp where prisoners were effectively forced to work. many of them working for IG Farben, which is a chemical company. We actually did an episode about this and how IG Farben actually became a proper company that still exists to this day. I did it with David De Jong and his book, Nazi billioners, regardless.

But beyond these three, there was more than 40 smaller subcamps that were spread across the region where prisoners were forced into labor for various industries. And the Roma camp was a part of Auschwitz 2, Birkenau, where this section was different from other parts of Auschwitz. So some families got to stay together. Some kids would be put in different barracks, and they were even given access to some personal belongings. And they were trying to keep some semblance of normalcy because the Nazis wanted to make it look like the model resettlement camp if the Red Cross decided to come snooping around. But by August 1944, the Nazis decided they didn't need to keep up the illusion, right? They were fully on lockdown and fully committed to their genocidal regime.

So on August 2nd, orders came down to basically get rid of the entire Roma family camp. And that night, the SS guards forced 3,000 men, women, and children into the gas chambers at crematoria four and five. And what's crazy, I mean, even more disturbing to this, is that the Roma had actually resisted a separate extermination attempt by using makeshift weapons from hammers and shovels and basically tried to form their own rebellion. But this time, there was no escape. And by Don, the barracks that once held thousands were completely empty, and the entire Roma camp was officially marked as closed the very next day. Now, I think at this point, we've well established that Joseph Mengley is a true monster and beyond even, you know, by Nazi standards, but a, you know, legitimate and improper sociopath, psychopath, and yeah, probably a serial killer that happened to, you know, get into a regime where he could kill with impunity. But there are even more stories that are more disturbing. One is the Ovitz family, which, I mean, for the sake of this episode not getting demonetized, I will only go through some of the details.

But in 1944, an entire family rolled into one of the camps, and it was the Ovitz. And they weren't just any prisoners. They were Jewish entertainers, and they were actually going across Europe to entertain people, and seven of them happened to be dwarves. The rest were about average height, but Mengelais saw this as the perfect lottery. It was a genetic mix of different people, of different unique genetic specifications. and what does he decide to do? He pulls them out of the regular barracks and gives them special treatment

and does everything from, you know, hot water, cold water test to dripping chemicals into their eyes. I mean, all sorts of brutal and atrocious things that I will save for you to look up on your own. And survivors from the family even claimed that taller family members were forced to carry the dwarf family members back and forth

so that the entire family basically became props in this weird genetic study. And maybe the darkest part of, this entire chapter is that Mengeleu supposedly even filmed the Ovitz's during these experiments and torture, although nobody has ever found the footage. And by early 1945, the Soviet army was closing in on Auschwitz and Mangalai knew the camp would eventually fall. But rather than facing trial, he slipped away, beginning a manhunt that would captivate the world for decades. So, it's January in 1945, and Mengley knows the jig is up. So he packed up his specimens and his research notes and

abandons Auschwitz altogether. But here is where the story gets extremely frustrating. American forces capture him. They've literally got one of the worst war criminals ever, in history, in their custody. And they don't know who he is. And why is this? Because most SS officers had their blood type tattooed on their chest or arm, but Mengelea never got the tattooed. when he joined the SS back in 1938. So the Americans are holding this random German officer who claims that he was just like a regular doctor that was trying to help people.

And they check his arms and his chest and they don't see any SS tattoo. And they assume that he must be just like a POW or someone that was like a low-ranking doctor's assistant. They don't really know who he is. And after two months in custody, they just let him go. Just like that. The Auschwitz angel of death, as he was called,

walks free because he didn't have a tattoo or a way to clearly identify him. So, Mangalai spends the next four years underground in Germany, working as a farmhand near Roseheim in Bavaria, and basically just trying to stay invisible. Right? He saw, you know, many of his other Nazi compatriots gets either executed or, you know, kill themselves, and or flee ultimately or go to prison,

and he thought maybe if I just lay low, I can avoid any type of punishment. And his wealthy family is back in Gluensburg, and they knew exactly where he is, but they're not talking. They're just waiting for, you know, all this heat to die down. And he even uses aliases like Fritz Holman to keep himself off the radar. But in 1949, everything changes. With help from his family money and some connections, he's able to escape through German rat lines into Italy. And Mengle gets fake papers, and he boards a ship from Genoa to Argentina under the name Helmut Greger.

These are the same rat lines that smuggle thousands of Nazis out of Europe. And just like that, he's gone and into South America where hundreds of ex-Nazis are now building new lives. Now, here's the crazy part. In Argentina from 1949 to 1959, Mengale isn't hiding in like a jungle hideout. The guy is living openly in Buenos Aires and working at a pharmaceutical company owned by his friend. And it gets even crazier. In 1958, he married his brother Carl's widow, Martha Mengale. under his real name Joseph Mengley.

The wedding announcement even ran in the local newspaper. That's how confident he was that nobody was coming for him. But in 1959, things are getting uncomfortable in Argentina. You see, President Juan Perron, who had welcomed many of the Nazis with open arms, was overthrown in 1955, and their new leader, Pedro Aramburu, wasn't nearly as friendly to the ex-Nazi officials. Suddenly, there are too many questions, too many Nazi hunters nosing around in Buenos Aires, So Menglei sells the shares of his farm and moves to Paraguay, buying citizenship under the name Jose Mengle.

Again, not even trying. Paraguay is the perfect place because the dictator Alfredo Straussner is a guy who's happy to protect fugitive Nazis as long as they got some money. So by the 1960s, things get really interesting. Masad agents, literally the Israeli secret intelligence, are now in Buenos Aires planning the Eichmann operation. You see, Adolf Eichmann is the guy who basically organized the logistics of the Holocaust, and he also slipped out of Europe after the war. And honestly, this needs its own episode, so I'll do a deep dive on that on a different day. But here's what matters for this. These agents knew that Mangley was in Buenos Aires, too.

They've got his address. He confirmed that he's living in the city. But they've only got 11 agents total, and they were already stretched thin with the Eichmann plan. Rafi Aitan, the Mossad agent in charge, later admitted that they had to make a choice. choice. Take both Eichmann and Mengelay and risk losing both or focus on Eichmann and guarantee that they at least get one major war criminals. So they choose Eichmann. And in May 11th of 1960, Mossad snatched Adolf Eichmann off the streets and smuggled him back to Israel for trial. But by the time they came back from Mengele, he was gone. But in 1961, Mengali relocated to Brazil under

the identity of a man named Wolfgang Gerhard. Here, he ends up living with a man. with the Bocert family, Wolfram and Luselette Bocert, who are both Nazi sympathizers and friends near Sao Paulo. They were Austrians who became his main protectors for the next 18 years. While he was with them, he would also use another alias, Peter Hockbickler, just to keep things layered and even more confusing.

They know exactly who he is and what he's done, and they don't really care. Now, one of the things that a lot of people look past is that this isn't some guy in the jungle barely surviving, hiding out. He's living well. He's going to beach resorts. He's on the sand.

He's sipping drinks and, you know, he's checking over his shoulder occasionally, but he's not really that paranoid that someone's just going to sweep him off the streets. Meanwhile, the rest of the world thinks that he's like hiding in a cave and, you know, he's emaciated and barely getting by. Nope. He's, you know, at a beach club and enjoying life. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you a story.

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Well, let's get back to the show. Until 1971, when Wolfgang Gerhard, the real Wolfgang Gerhard, the man whose identity that Mangalai had basically been borrowing. dies. But what does Mangalai do? The guy whose identity he's stealing in order to keep his cover is now gone, he keeps using the name anyway as if nothing ever happened. And this just shows how convinced he was that he would never be caught. A year after this, in 1972, Mangalai's own son, Rolf, visits him in Brazil to confront him about his time at Auschwitz. And this part is crazy. When Rolf finally confronts his father, Mangley tells him straight up, I can't feel guilty, I was doing my duty, I don't have any regrets.

no remorse, no apology, not even trying to justify or rationalize it to his own son, just ice-cold justification for mass murder. You see, at this time, by the 70s, it's a lot more clear what exactly was happening in sort of the fog of war. It wasn't exactly clear to everyone around the world what the atrocities were exactly at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. No one exactly knew. By this time, in the 70s, it was being taught in history books, and people were much more aware of the evils that had occurred in Nazi Germany. So for 34 years from 1945 to 1979, Joseph Mengley lived as a free men. No Nuremberger trials, no handcuffs, no justice,

just a retirement funded by, you know, his family's farm equipment fortune and sheltered by Nazi sympathizers. But even the best disappearing acts eventually come to an end. And Mengley's ending is about as anticlimactic as you can get. So February 7th, 1979, Joseph Mengle is doing what he's been doing for years. He's living the good life in Brazil. He's 67 years old,

staying with the Bocert family at their vacation home in Bertigua, which is just like an hour from Sao Paulo. And Mengle goes for his usual swim in the ocean, and then something goes right. He has a stroke while in the water and he drowns. Just like that. God had to take him. Hashem himself.

No dramatic shootout with Nazi hunters or Mossad or a trial. just a man who tortured thousands, thousands of people, many of them children, dies in a pretty innocuous way. But here's where it gets interesting. The Bocerts are now panicking, the family that housed him, because they know exactly who died in their care, and they know what that means. If the Brazilian authorities figure out that Joseph Mengele just died and that they were the ones that were keeping him, this is going to raise a lot of questions about what's been going on in their home and in Brazil at large. So they make the decision to basically confuse the hell out of everyone for the next 13 years. They bury Mengele at the Embu Cemetery outside Sao Paulo under this name

Wolfgang Gerhardt. Remember, that's the identity that he's been using even after the real Wolfgang died in 1971. So as far as the official record show, some quiet Austrian expat named Wolfgang Gerhard died of natural causes. No one bats an eye. But here's the problem. The Bocerts and a few other people know the truth, but they're keeping. their mouth shuts. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has no idea that the most wanted Nazi just became a corpse rotting in Brazilian soil. So what happens next is the comically tragic. For the next six years from 79 to 85, the international manhunt for Joseph Mangley continues. Nazi hunters like Simon Weissenthal are following up on leads and Mossad is spending resources to track him down.

Governments are offering rewards and survivors are hoping to see him face trial and get justice. just a little bit of justice, if there is any. And the whole time, Mengelais is gone. But oddly enough, there are reported sightings everywhere. People swear that they see him in Paraguay, Chile, in Europe, in the United States. And every few months, some newspaper runs a story about how Mengele, the evil doctor may be hiding in the jungle. I mean, books get written about it. TV documentary, speculate where he may be. This is international news that one of the most prominent in evil Nazis is still on the loose. And he becomes almost a mythical figure, right? This Nazi that got away. But in May of 1985, German investigators made a breakthrough.

They raided the house of Hans Settelmeyer, a longtime friend of the Mengele family in Gunsburg, and that is where they hit the jackpot. Settelmire's house is full of letters and documents on financial records that prove the Mengal family had been sending Joseph finances for decades. More importantly, the documents point to Brazil. Specific addresses, contact information, the protectors, the whole network that basically kept him safe. and so the government got to work. June of 1985, Brazilian police got the news of these findings from the Germans,

so they headed to the cemetery outside Sao Paulo, and they start digging into the burial records. But things don't add up, so they make the decision to exhum the body. And on June 6, they dig up Wolfgang Gerhardt's grave, and what they find is a skeleton that doesn't match the official records for Gerhardt, wrong height, wrong age, wrong dental work. Basically, all the remains they find show that this is not Wolfgang. Gherhardt, so they call on an expert.

An international team of forensic specialists travel to Sao Paulo to examine every bone and tooth and evidence that they can find, and what they found shocked everyone. The dental records and the skull measurements and the height are a perfect match for Joseph Mengele. Sort of ironic

that a guy that dedicated the early part of his career to measuring skulls is now having his own skull measured to prove that he's really the guy that's dead. Two months after the discovery, the team announces this conclusion that this is Joseph Mengley, who had died six years before, and nobody knew. Now, you would think that that would close the case, but it doesn't.

If anything, the announcement sparked more controversy. You see, survivors, Nazi hunters, even some in the government, didn't believe it. After decades of him slipping through the cracks, the idea that he drowned in a swimming accident was just way too anticlimactic and way too convenient. And remember, this is the 80s. DNA testing still isn't a standard tool, so all investigators can do is rely on the traditional forensic methods, right? They can match dental records, but that's kind of it. And the match looks strong, but the skeptics aren't convinced. And this is until 1992 that the final word came down.

By then, DNA testing had advanced enough to answer the question of once and for all, and scientists take genetic samples from the bones and compare them to Rolf Mengelay, Joseph's only son, and the results are undeniable. The DNA matches and it proves that the skeleton in that grave is Joseph Mangley. After the DNA results come in, the case is closed and the Mangalai story should have ended, but once again, it doesn't. His skeleton gets buried again. It didn't get locked away in some government vault. Instead, his bones are kept in Sao Paulo Forensic Institute and for years after, medical students use his skeleton as a teaching tool. And not in a glorifying way. They literally just studied him.

He had a fractured left pelvis, which they were able to link to a motorcycle accident he had in Auschwitz. There was a small hole in his left cheekbone related to long-term sinusitis, and he had signs of dental abscesses which he allegedly treated himself by cutting them with razor blades. So in the end, the so-called angel of death literally became an anatomy lesson himself. Sort of a dark ending that is maybe the slightest bit poetic, that Mengley spent his entire life trying to control human bodies, deciding who lived and who died, who was experimented on. But after everything, Joseph Mengley became the final experiment. And that is. is the life of the evil Joseph Mengley.

I mean, truly disturbing. And it's also, I don't know, I've said this before, that seems like evil men rarely face the repercussions that are due to them. Either they create some type of amnesty deal, they broker some type of barter, or they're able to use their connections to just escape and skirt the law and skirt justice

and live in relatively free conditions. I mean, truly brutal. He strikes me as like even more evil than your average Nazi, right? Like, I've read different stories about, you know, different levels of Nazis. There are some people that are, you know, doing it because they believe in the ideology,

but then when it comes down to actually doing it, they feel bad. Then there's other people that just, you know, are like, I don't even want to be a part of this, but I'm doing it so I don't get exiled. And then there's certain people that are like, I love this and I love doing the Nazi work. And then there's like a level like Mengele

where it's like they're just legit psychopaths. Like if they existed in any other regime, they would just be the same thing. It seems like the Nazi ideology doesn't even matter to him. He's just a proper sociopath that wants to experiment and torture people. And he justifies it through his own warped lens of science or medical data or something. I don't know. It's a different level.

I can't remember who exactly it was. But there was a guy who was a Nazi officer that would talk about killing people. And he was interviewed afterwards. And basically his interview, according to psychologists, they said he matches the exact profile of a serial killer, that he would just have these sort of fits of rage, try to exert his power and control over other people, kill them, and then move on, have a cooling period, and then continue to do it over and over. And within the confines of war, you basically are doing it with impunity because it's not,

you know, serial killing. It's just part of the job. It's just evil stuff, right? Like, it's, I don't know, it's really disturbing to think about. And I think it's important to highlight some of these moments in history to really understand the brutality that human beings can do to each other and hope, that we could, you know, avoid these types of awful methods of torture and experimentation in the future. I mean, one can hope.

Christos, you ever heard of this guy? I haven't heard of him, but it's odd that there's a serial killer Nazi guy that has a specialization in twins. Yeah, yeah. And I can see how he kind of rationalizes the science work where he's like, no, I'm doing twin studies. And basically, he was able to take these twins and do terrible things to one of them and not do terrible things to the other one and just observe what happens. And also that he's mentioned as a sweet guy to these kids. But he's also a monster. But that's like the psychopath shit.

That's why I'm like, he seems more like a Ted Bundy to me. Where like Ted Bundy was like extremely charming and nice and able to seduce these women in order to get what he wants from them and then kill him. You know what I mean? Like it seems more often than not these kinds of guys like these true psychopaths can just put on whatever face they need to put on in order to get what they want. And so if he wants these kids to trust him, him to be compliant, to be good subjects, to do what he ultimately tells them to do,

he's like, oh, just be nice to him. I'll treat them, I'll give them toys. But it's just crazy to me that you can't have any, like, that's why I'm like, yeah, you're just a sociopath. You don't have the capacity to build empathy. Like, if I, like, high five a kid one time, I'm like, I would die for this child. You know what I mean? Like, most normal human beings, if they're, like, around a defenseless person, if something happens to them, you would be like, I will stop everything to make sure this doesn't happen. And this guy is the one that's perpetrating it and also still being nice to them. I mean, it's just, I don't know, it's disturbing. These types of evil people walk among us and, yeah, you hope that they're not a position where they have power

to actually carry out the atrocities that they are probably thinking in their mind. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, this has been another episode of camp. I appreciate you guys for tuning in. I'm in this tent every single week. I'm just talking about the most interesting things from all of history. This is my pursuit to understand everything that's ever happened ever. This is not the only channel we have. We also have history camp. We have religion camp.

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