Original subtitles

A man is about to live his final day.

He will die of a stroke while swimming.

But this was no ordinary man.

Once an SS Captain...

a doctor...

..a fugitive.

He spent over 30 years on the run,

evading justice as one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals.

- Every stupid person can do evil,

and there is nothing good after that.

Only more evil comes.

- Without any moral,

ethical boundaries will lead you,

and it leads you down a very, very dark path.

- Uh... No, I... I couldn't possibly forgive.

- There were no breaks to his... to his ambition.

But who was this man really?

How did a young, ambitious medical student...

become one of the most reviled figures in modern history?

How did he rise to embody

Nazi pseudoscience and brutality?

- His main aim is to get ahead,

to be the first, to be the best.

NARRATOR: He conducted horrific experiments

in one of history's most infamous prison camps.

His work remains a chilling testament

to how ideology can corrupt science,

leaving a dark and lasting legacy.

And after the war, how could he escape justice

and remain hidden for so long?

With the support of his powerful family,

he lived comfortably in South America

under false identities.

How did the world allow a man

responsible for such atrocities to live in freedom,

eluding capture for decades?

This is the story of a man...

..of a criminal.

This is the story of Josef Mengele.

In the collective imagination,

Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz,

embodies Nazi cruelty.

His name is synonymous

with barbaric experiments on prisoners,

particularly children.

Mengele has become

one of the most repugnant figures of the 20th century.

But was he truly the dark figure depicted

in numerous documentaries and countless books?

Or had he become a scapegoat

for the atrocities committed by the Nazis?

- Mengele is born in 1911

in a little town called Gunzburg

in Bavaria in southern Germany.

Mengele writes in his memoirs about

how he was born on a very stormy night.

- And, you know, he gives the impression

that maybe when he's born, it's a very momentous event.

So, I think, you know, we begin to see how big his ego is.

- Early in my career, I was assigned

to the investigation of Josef Mengele when I worked

as a Chief of Investigative Research

for the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations.

So I spent more than one year really trying to find Mengele.

- Mengele grew up in a quite prosperous home.

He was the oldest of three sons

born to Karl Mengele,

who was the owner of a company that made farm equipment

that really had some success in the First world War,

making wagons for the... for the German army.

- His family business, his parents' family business,

was THE major employer in the town.

And even today, if you go to Bavaria,

you'll still see some tractors with the name Mengele on the side.

- He grew up in a rather conservative Catholic home.

- But it's not a major influence in Mengele's life.

And, certainly, some Nazi war criminals

who come from very strongly Catholic backgrounds,

someone like Klaus Barbie, for example,

the "Butcher of Lyon" who wanted to be a Catholic priest.

Mengele was certainly not the type of man

who wanted to be a Catholic priest.

- He had a relatively uneventful childhood.

I mean, there was nothing in his childhood that would lead you

to believe that he would later become

the infamous physician at Auschwitz.

There's nothing to suggest

in the not very voluminous evidence about his childhood

that he exhibited any kinds of unusual personal conduct.

People imagine that he would torture

pet animals in the backyard,

and there's no evidence of that.

- What you have here is a kind of normal boy

who's a bit sick.

He's of average intelligence,

and there is no sign of any kind of evil to him.

He did have one thing that had a large impact on his youth,

and that was an illness that he had

when he was a young person in his early teenage years.

Maybe he was climbing an apple tree -

or something like that - fell...

- ..had a crushing trauma to his leg,

which then resulted in osteomyelitis,

which is an infection of the bone

and also sepsis and, uh... nephritis.

Bacteria entered the body and then settled in the... in his bones,

causing, you know, a great deal of pain.

And he had to miss school for a long period of time.

That's registered in his school records.

So he went to an academic school, a Gymnasium.

So, he was slated to have a university experience.

His marks were kind of maybe high average,

not some kind of brilliant genius.

- There's not one grade that I've seen

in any of Mengle's reports that make you to go,

"Wow, this guy is some genius!"

He's... a perfectly average student.

He has no particular aptitude for science.

He has no particular aptitude for languages.

His illnesses meant that his mother,

who was very much a... a firm matriarch of the family,

had actually, basically,

discussed with his father and said,

"I don't think Josef is right to take over the family business.

We'll leave that to a brother."

- When he went to the university in Munich in the summer semester,

which means April of 1930, I believe,

he didn't really know what he wanted to do.

He thought perhaps he'd want to be a dentist.

There was no dentist, apparently, in his hometown.

He thought this would be a good experience.

There is no apparent

psychological anomaly in his background.

Yet, the atrocities he committed in Auschwitz are chilling.

What drove this transformation?

- What did you inject into our bodies?

And why did you do it? What was the scope?

What was the idea behind these experiments?

My name is Eva Mozes Kor.

But I prefer to use the short one, Eva Kor.

Miriam and I were twins.

And Miriam was the older among the two.

- It was maybe the first week of school.

We were just still very excited about going to the school.

But there was one of those days

that the kids started calling us names,

Miriam and me.

"Dirty Jews."

I was very shocked to hear that from them

cos these were kids I played with in the village.

And we could not do anything.

Then, finally, they began taunting us

and beating us over the face.

That was the first time I went to the teacher

and told the teacher...

..that the kids were beating us up and harassing us,

and the teacher did nothing.

She took a handful of corn kernels

and threw it...

..in that corner of the room...

and made us kneel there...

on the corn kernels for an hour

while the rest of the kids were permitted

to come and make fun of us.

- When he arrives in Munich,

Mengele is... is initially down to read dentistry.

Um... He thinks he can make a good living

being a... a dentist back in Gunzburg.

- And then, as he recounts in his autobiography,

he, um... meets a student

who had been to his Gymnasium in Gunzburg

a year or two before,

and who was now studying this.

And this guy said, "You don't want to be a dentist."

"You should be a physician." That...

That's... That's important.

This was a kind of "aha" moment where he thought about it

and then decided, "Well, that's what I'm gonna do."

And from that moment on, he devoted himself to this study.

- And that begins the career of Josef Mengele.

His father even bought him a car.

He lived a really happy life because of his wealth.

He was really privileged compared with other students.

And he was really dedicated to his studies.

He was very interested in Anthropology,

which, at the time,

was a different kind of Anthropology from today.

It was focussed on physical appearance

and racial differences

and NOT on culture and traditions.

There was also this idea of racial hygiene,

that races should be pure.

There should be no what was called miscellany.

No intermarrying between black people and white people,

between Chinese, Asiatic people and white people.

There is absurd idea...

of purity and racial separation.

- We don't really see a...

a political awakening in Mengele

until when he's at university.

As a teenager, Mengele had joined nationalist youth groups,

a common occurrence among millions of other adolescents

in Germany during the same period.

However, he was not particularly drawn to politics.

- The Mengele family were very important part

of Gunzburg society.

It's difficult to say whether they were Nazis.

I don't think so.

They were certainly traditional.

Politics was not what they were most interested in.

They were interested in growing their property,

in making money, but not in politics.

When Hitler comes to Gunzburg, for example,

Mengele's father, Karl, was there.

He even spoke to Hitler.

But he wasn't a real National Socialist.

- Now, you might think that the first thing

that Mengele does is join the Nazi party.

He doesn't. He actually joins the Stahlhelm,

the Steel Helmets, which is a much more

kind of paramilitary organisation than the Nazi party.

So, it's important to remember

that Mengele does not become a Nazi,

you know, in 1933.

He wasn't one of... of the original Nazis.

- He entered university

right before this big election in September 1930,

when the support for the Nazi Party surprised everyone.

So his university experience

and his experience with the science of anthropology

and the science of medicine

at a time when these were being elevated to a new status,

it all came together for him

so that his entire university career

was stamped by the political environment,

which had an impact on the scientific environment,

which had an impact on him.

- And then, what is also interesting,

Mengele had a diary.

And he wrote in his diary every day,

so we can reconstruct his early life.

- Mengele was a very self-confident young man.

And one of his school friends remember him saying, you know,

"One day, you're going to see me," you know,

"read about me in an encyclopaedia."

Mengele was indeed correct...

but not for the reasons he believed.

He is infamous for his experiments on children at Auschwitz...

..treating them as nothing more than mere guinea pigs.

- I recall one case,

one occasion when he came to the barracks.

I don't know why.

There must have been a reason why he came,

but, at some point, he decided... ..to show his prowess.

I don't know how to call it,

the power of his memory, if you like.

I recall a case, uh...

an instance, when he lined us all up

and basically telling Spiegel, our leader,

"Now, I'm going to point out all the ones

that I personally selected at the ramp."

And he pointed all the pairs, including our... us,

to show his power of recollection, his memory.

I don't know why he did that.

I mean, uh...

what... what did he try to prove to us,

you know, subhumans?

It is during his university years

that we begin to see a shift in Mengele's personality,

a gradual dehumanisation.

This transformation is likely tied to his deep immersion

in theories of racial hygiene

and the ideology of racial supremacy,

which became central to his academic focus

and, ultimately, his worldview.

- He experienced really, you know, world-class university instruction

from people who had already won the Nobel Prize.

There were people who would eventually win the Nobel Prize.

The centre is occupied

by Eugen Fischer and Theodor Mollison...

..and Otmar von Verschuer and other great luminaries.

Mengele is still on the fringe, but it's...

it's the group he wants to be part of.

- What's extraordinary

when you look at Mengele's academic record at university -

and he went to quite a few universities -

is that he went in to do a medical degree.

And while he was doing his medical degree,

he did a doctorate, a PhD in Anthropology,

at the same time.

- So we know that he was

an ambitious and talented young scientist.

Many professors noticed his abilities,

and Mengele used the opportunity

to start building his academic career.

- And Mengele, after he had finished his PhD

in anthropology under Theodor Mollison,

he goes to Frankfurt to study with von Verschuer.

NARRATOR: Von Verschuer was aligned with a prevailing belief

in German medical circles and beyond,

which categorised races into different hierarchies,

placing Aryans at the top.

- We'll call him a geneticist or racial hygiene expert

who became the founding director

of the Institute for Racial Hygiene of Frankfurt.

In Germany, you know,

your supervisor for your doctoral work,

they call them "Dr Vater," Dr Father.

This gives you some suggestion of the important of that supervisor

in not only your academic life, but in your... your whole life.

- He is absolutely sort of...

very influential on Mengele's thinking.

He's helping him realise and teaching him

that there are all these racial differences.

- So, Mengele did his dissertation which was accepted quite favourably

and was published in a very good journal.

The dissertation was about the defects

in the palate, the upper palate.

So, he looked carefully at the cases of...

..maybe close to 120 different people.

So, he did what was considered to be a very careful job of research.

The cleft palate was considered

to be something that was racially suspect.

So Mengele's research allowed them

to determine genetically whether someone was more apt to...

to have a cleft palate or not.

And people who had this condition then, in some cases,

were not allowed to marry or... or had to submit to sterilisation

so they couldn't pass on this characteristic.

- What Mengele is doing is helping to provide

the medical backbone

to what the Nazis want to do politically.

- What's most important to note is

that Mengele was a child of his times,

a reflection of that period.

Mengele's thesis in the 1930s

was not only politically correct,

but also represented the knowledge and mentality of the time.

- Mengele's mentor, Otmar von Verschuer,

was very well respected and famous in his field.

Verschuer was interested in twins.

He did numerous studies and experiments in this field

and asked Mengele to become his assistant.

- Mengele became an assistant of... of Verschuer and became...

I don't know if you call him his prize student,

but that's... that's probably not too much of an exaggeration

that he was one of his good students.

This bond between von Verschuer

and Mengele would never falter...

..not even as Mengele awaited his victims

on the ramp at Birkenau.

And they loaded us onto freight cars.

They counted how many of us we were in the wagons.

And then, with chalk, they marked:

seventy-four, seventy-five.

They unloaded us on the street first

on the second day...

TRANSLATOR: ..to dump out the rubbish,

the barrels with faeces and so.

And someone saw a chalk writing on the wagon.

Auschwitz.

They took me to the camp,

and I ended up in front of Mengele.

I didn't know anything about him - Mengele -

before that day.

I hadn't even heard of him.

I have accumulated 91 years.

Throughout this long time,

I have introduced myself as Oleg Mandic...

..the last child of Auschwitz.

Every time I come back here,

in a way, I feel good.

I don't know. I have this feeling. It's my home.

I was born here, in this house.

In 1944...

..on the 15th of May...

..they took me away from here.

And they took away my childhood.

It never came back.

How did Nazi racial thinking come about?

Who was Hitler inspired by?

Where did the madness of Auschwitz originate?

All these questions can be answered with one term...

..Eugenics.

- Eugenics was born in England.

The term was coined by Francis Galton,

outstanding British, uh... scientist.

And also, he worked out

the theory about, uh... eugenics.

So about improving of human race.

It was very attractive at the time.

It was the second part of the 19th century,

when the Darwinism also was very attractive theory

Because they strongly believe

that the science makes people better.

And the science is like a promise for the better world.

World without sufferings,

world without people with a different,

uh... biological defectiveness,

disabled people, uh... ill people.

- It's this idea that there are inferior human beings,

uh... racially,

and that there are inferior human beings in terms of their health.

- Eugenics can be seen

as something first before the genetics.

It is the beginning of the genetics.

Yes, most doctors maintained

that almost all diseases are...

hereditarily, you know, passed.

And, as we know,

eugenicists put the proposal

to segregate people

and to deprive some groups

of people from their own rights

and to kerb their fertility...

..and to sterilise those

who are physically or, uh... psychiatric unfit.

If we start sterilise ill people,

we achieve better model of society.

- Now, you might apply that

if you are breeding pigs or cows.

Are you really going to apply that morally

if you're going to breed human beings?

- Eugenics was so important in interwar years

because of the new phenomenon of welfare state.

I mean, the state which provide free medical care,

eight-hour work day,

and who take care about developing of hospitals,

etcetera, etcetera.

But because of that,

state has also...

right to decide

about the offsprings,

about decision

which previous belongs only to the individuals.

In the annals of human ambition,

the quest for genetic improvement extends

far beyond the dark spectre of Naziism.

The aspiration to breed

for the betterment of the race predates Naziism

and spread rapidly throughout the developed nations,

particularly in England, France,

and especially the United States.

- Let's not think that what's going on in Germany is unique.

And let's not think that the thinking

that Mengele is exposed to is exceptional for the time.

It's really important to recognise

that medical thinking in the 1920s,

1930s in Germany, uh...

Britain, the United States, all over the world,

was informed by this idea of eugenics.

- Eugenics is a question concerning

the most advanced industrialised country.

Like in England, United States of America,

also France, uh... also Belgium,

and many, many other countries.

- Some of the research in Germany was funded

by the Rockefeller foundation.

- Some American eugenicists cooperate

very strongly with the German eugenicists.

They expressed terrible opinion about the unfit,

about people who were perceived

as heavy for modern societies.

But, in spite of that,

they never made such a move like Nazi Germany

because they didn't build a gas chamber.

They didn't kill people because of that.

All eugenics movement was based on the theory,

which was very dangerous for human rights.

But only one type of eugenics lead

to concentration camp and gas chamber.

It was the German eugenics.

- In Germany,

there's a much stronger sense of... of the health of the nation,

and that you should cut out anybody

who is not going to contribute to the health of the nation.

- For instance, under Nazi criminal law,

it was a criminal offence for a German

to have sexual relations with a Jew.

This was criminal.

You could be thrown in jail for having done that.

Why? Because they believed that this would have

an impact on your racial quality.

These racial concepts did not end with the end of Naziism.

In the United States,

it was only in the late 1960s

that it was possible to have interracial marriage.

And the Apartheid regime in South Africa only ended in 1991.

And still today, how many cases of racism are there?

- The father of race and...

..Nazi eugenics was Eugen Fischer.

So he described the offsprings

of so called mixed races.

They are less intelligent,

often in a conflict with the law.

They don't want to learn.

And they are less adult.

And generally, the conclusion is

that the mixing of race cause

very serious physical and mental defects.

- Medicine in Germany in the '20s

has basically influenced Nazism

to think of people as being different,

and inferior, and superior.

The ideas of racial hygiene, eugenics,

a healthy nation getting rid of its diseased people,

these are ideas that predate the Nazis.

And then, when the Nazis come to power,

they feed that back to the world of medicine,

and the world of medicine acts upon it.

- Mengele's pursuit of medicine and anthropology,

which was an allied science, in a way,

came exactly at the time that this field was elevated

by the political atmosphere and environment in Germany...

..by the personal ideology of Adolf Hitler,

which became the ideology of the Nazi movement

and then of the Nazi state.

- Mengele is the medical embodiment of Nazi thinking,

and it's that Nazi thinking about human beings

that's come from the world of medicine.

So, you have this full circle.

- And Mengele accepted this.

This became part of the way he looked at the world.

There's no question about that. And his whole career, from...

from the moment that he began the study,

his career followed this kind of... red thread.

- So everything is connected

because they perceived the society

and the nation in biological terms.

How to sterilise people.

How to kill people effectively,

economically, quickly,

and to obtain the desired, uh... aim.

- It's under the Nazis that you start seeing

people being killed

and sterilised for being "defective."

- The T4 project was

the State-sponsored euthanasia project, which...

..where the medical profession was enlisted

in identifying those individuals

who, by their own definitions,

had congenital diseases or some kind of...

..racial problem.

- It was program against patients

of psychiatric hospitals

and people with a physical defect,

which was led in Germany against their own citizens.

And hundreds, thousands of people were just gassed.

- This is the most horrific expression of medicine

that has ever taken place.

So, for the good of humanity,

for the good of the nation...

you kill them; it's very simple.

And Mengele,

whether he had direct knowledge of the euthanasia program -

and it's likely he did - but would have seen this

as a perfectly acceptable way of...

of doing good for humanity.

Officially, the T4 Program was closed down in September 1941.

However, the Nazis secretly continued

to eliminate "Lives Unworthy of Living."

According to Nuremberg Trial sources,

there were at least 200,000 victims

of the T4 Program.

- They initiated Holocaust as a system

of murdering people.

- The euthanasia program became the training ground

for the staffs at the concentration camps.

The procedures used,

the way that they fooled people into thinking

that they would be having a shower

rather than going to the gas chambers.

The Nazis' atrocities began long before the outbreak

of the Second World War.

Many perpetrators, like Josef Mengele,

sought to evade responsibility.

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld,

a passionate couple advocating for justice,

dedicated their lives to capturing these criminals...

..and popularised the legendary term 'Nazi hunter'.

- So you see here...

..five boxes with, uh...

our main target Brunner...

who died in Syria...

..where we went four times.

Mengele, Walter Rauff in Chile,

Klaus Barbie in Bolivia.

- I was born in Germany, and, uh...

our apartment was bombed

when the war ended.

My father was in the army. He was working in a Buro,

in an office for the party, for the... for the Wehrmacht.

And when he was arrested, he was arrested by the British.

And, uh... he, uh... was then released really quite fast,

and he came to find us. - So...

my father as a French soldier

and the father of Beate... - In the Wehrmacht.

- ..as a German soldier.

Hunting Nazis...

it's a period of our life, you know,

until the end of the 20th century.

But, also, it was in order to reconciliate

German and... and French people.

We started to be interested

in the case of Mengele in 1973

because Beate was already twice

in South America.

I was also in South America

in 1972...

to try to kidnap Klaus Barbie

and bring him to... to France.

- We were offering money, you know, in the newspapers in South America

to obtain the possibilities from people

to know where Mengele is, you know, at the time.

In the pursuit of hunting Nazis,

one embarks on a profound exploration into their psyches,

endeavouring to grasp

the intricate layers of their personalities.

What propelled Josef Mengele

to commit such appalling crimes against humanity?

- I think we should talk about Mengele's personality here.

He's an ambitious man,

probably with a narcissistic personality.

His main aim is to get ahead,

to be the first.

To be the best was really important to him.

This is why he decided to join the SS.

It was not out of a militaristic spirit,

but because it was an elite core

that placed him in a privileged position.

- It's a bit of a surprise, um...

because he doesn't look like the classic SS man.

He's an average height. He's very dark.

He's got a slight abnormality

with this big gap between his two front teeth.

So, he's not like the classic, physical specimen

that you would expect, you know, in the master race of the SS.

- If you wanted to be successful, if you wanted to be recognised,

if you wanted to have advantages, if you wanted to get the best job,

and... then, you were drawn to these elite formations.

You embraced the ideology,

and you tried to exploit it for your own benefit as well.

- By enlisting, Mengele knew that he could make a career for himself

because the SS was looking for educated people

and especially doctors.

- It's really important to realise that,

of all the professions in the Third Reich,

medicine had the highest percentage take-up of SS membership.

7% of physicians and those

with kind of medical and...

and biology degrees joined the SS.

You know, it... it was astonishingly high.

This link between Nazism and medicine is,

for him and many other medics, a very virtuous loop.

So joining the SS is a natural result of that.

On September the 1st, 1939,

the Second World War commenced.

Yet, initially, this event held no immediate implications

for Josef Mengele's life.

- Mengele was exempted from the draft

because of his important position with Verschuer.

But in, I believe, later that spring,

early summer of 1940, he joins the... the Army.

He doesn't like the experience.

He decides that he will join the Waffen SS.

- Mengele joins an SS engineering battalion.

He's a junior officer.

And he's also the medic with his unit.

He was part of the Fifth SS Viking Division.

- In June of 1941,

the German Army decides to invade the Soviet Union.

Mengele's unit is at the very...

south of the southern sector.

So they're in the south of Ukraine,

and he moves with his unit to the front.

- Now, he has not got a lot of experience of surgery.

He even writes back asking for someone to send him

a kind of physician's, surgeon's handbook.

- He writes to his wife and says,

"I have to treat all of these soldiers here.

And, you know, I'm... I'm a racial doctor.

I'm not a... I'm not a general practitioner,

and it's a little too much for me.

And I could... could use the... the help."

Because he... he treated as a battalion physician,

he... he wasn't treating necessarily wounded people,

except maybe first aid for wound.

But he treated them for bunions on their feet

or for intestinal disorders or normal problems

that people of that age group would have.

And so, he was confronted with a medical challenge

that he wasn't really experienced at doing.

He was looking at people, the shape of people's eyes

and not figuring out what kind of malady they had.

So... So, his wife sends him the book.

- Mengele started his war campaign in Russia.

Germany against Russia wasn't a typical war.

It was more like political war.

And the aim of both parties,

especially Nazi Germany,

was to destroy the enemy.

- He was involved in this unit...

throughout the first 18 months of the War.

Mengele saw constant and unrelenting action,

um... as part of this, uh... combat unit,

often in... in the very front of the German advance.

We know from records that he distinguished himself,

that he received an Iron Cross second class,

and then, later on, an Iron Cross first class.

- I believe he saw all the atrocities of the War,

not only as a doctor, but as a soldier.

We know about the countless war crimes

committed on the Russian front by the Einsatzgruppen,

the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen SS.

- We can certainly say

that the experience of the front changed him profoundly.

- This is an SS division going around slaughtering Jews.

This is going around hanging partisan.

This is performing some of the most savage

and bestial acts you can imagine.

What we don't know is specifically

whether Mengele took part in any of these actions himself.

I think that's unlikely.

But there's no doubt that, as it does to a lot of people,

the experience of war really brutalised Josef Mengele.

- He has learned about violence.

He's not just heard about it, but he has seen it,

perhaps even participated in it.

And then, he gets used to it.

He gets brutalised, hardened to it,

and then, it's easy to replicate it.

- You look at some of the witness testimony

about Mengele's behaviour at Auschwitz,

there are instances of almost spontaneous violence

without any proximate cause, you know?

Kind of just, uh...

..walking up to someone and shooting them, or...

or extreme cruelty,

even not behind the... the curtain of science,

but just... just sadism.

Then, you must also, I think, believe

that there was something that happened to him

because his earlier life didn't

exhibit any of these characteristics.

- We've seen that he's been influenced by the ideas of medicine,

such as eugenics, racial hygiene.

That's enough to send you on a pretty murderous path.

But then, you send someone with that... now that philosophy

into one of the most violent fronts

that's ever been in any war,

and you put them into all that violence and atrocity,

you're brutalising them.

In mid-January 1943,

Mengele was deemed unfit for service...

..likely due to injury, though the specifics remain unclear.

Consequently, he was transferred from the front lines

and returned to Berlin.

Wasting no time, he promptly contacted his mentor,

Otmar von Verschuer,

who had taken over the leadership

of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin.

- The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was

one of the leading, uh... genetic research institutes.

Verschuer writes to Fischer, who is his mentor, in a way.

And he says, "I've heard from my former assistant Mengele,

who has just been air evacuated

from around the Stalingrad debacle."

Mengele then finds a kind of collegial home at the Institute.

He's not a formal member of the Institute,

but he spends a lot of time there.

NARRATOR: And von Verschuer's greatest influence

on Mengele came in 1943

when he instructed him to go to Auschwitz.

For Verschuer, Auschwitz was an endless source

of subjects for his experiments,

particularly those conducted on twins.

- Generally, the SS doctors or the Nazi doctors,

they perceived concentration camps

as, uh... opportunity

to use more human materials for their own research.

- Mengele certainly sees Auschwitz as a new career prospect.

Here, he could continue his own research...

and send all the samples von Verschuer needed

to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

- And what Verschuer did, both in Frankfurt and then later in Berlin,

was he created a registry of twins.

He had contacts in all of the hospitals, and so,

if a twin was born, they would register it in a card.

- This environment is going to offer

huge opportunities to study humanity,

but to study humanity

without any moral breaks at all,

with no moral limits.

You can do what you want.

- If we can kill...

..animals for food, for a meat,

why we can't kill people for a goodness of science?

I got to Auschwitz

sometime in the middle of October 1942 from Sachsenhausen.

They loaded us into a wagon.

The train then stood in Katowice,

and some railwaymen appeared beside.

So I asked them, "Where are we?"

And they said, "In Katowice.

Auschwitz. Wrong, wrong.

Gas, gas, gas."

- On the 30th of May, 1943,

SS Captain Josef Mengele walks

through the gates of Auschwitz.

The story of Josef Mengele continues.

In the next episode, we will witness how this man transforms

into the "Angel of Death,"

one of the most chilling symbols of the Holocaust.

- This is the very heart of the Mengele story right here.

It... It's the ultimate inversion

of... of what medicine should be about.

- As I looked around, I realised that my father

and my two older sisters were not with us.

They disappeared in the crowd.

Never, ever did I see them again.

- "You, the left. You to the right.

How old are you?" "I'm... I'm...

I'm 72."

"You in good shape?

Well, over there."

Subtitles by Sky Access Services