Resident agony aunt Maggie Clayton
Josef Mengele was the infamous inspiration for the horrifying novel The Boys From Brazil.
The movie version saw Gregory Peck play Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor known as the Angel of Death, pursued by Laurence Olivier playing a character closely based on legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
The far-fetched plot revolves around Mengele creating clones of Adolf Hitler but, in truth, the real-life tale of Mengele’s atrocities at Auschwitz, his escape to South America and subsequent attempts to evade capture would provide more than enough material for a movie in its own right.
Before the war, Mengele – born in 1911 – obtained doctorates in medicine and anthropology and also joined both the Nazi Party and the SS.
In 1943, he applied for transfer to the concentration camp service and was assigned to Auschwitz where, as well as selecting thousands to be sent to the gas chambers, he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects.
A sadistic anti-Semite, Mengele was particularly interested in twins and his experiments showed no consideration for the suffering of his victims.
He was transferred just before the Red Army liberated the camp and fled west where he was captured by the Americans.
Mengele wasn’t identified as being on the list of war criminals because of disorganisation and the fact he didn’t have the usual SS blood group tattoo.
Released in July 1945, he obtained false papers and escaped Germany in 1949 along a ratline to Genoa from where he sailed to Argentina.
After obtaining a copy of his birth certificate through the West German embassy in 1956, Mengele incredibly used the document to receive a passport in his own name and visited Europe for a skiing trip, where he met his son Rolf, who was told he was “Uncle Fritz”.
He lived under his own name in Buenos Aires where he part-owned a pharmaceutical firm but he was investigated for practising medicine without a licence and, aware the publicity could see his Nazi past uncovered, fled to Paraguay as Jose Mengele.
Mengele’s name was mentioned during the Nuremberg Trials but the Allies believed him dead until Wiesenthal compiled a dossier and a colleague discovered divorce papers that listed his Buenos Aires address.
Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, tried to track him down but were stymied by a wall of silence.
Unrepentant to the end, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming off Brazil in 1979, aged 67, his remains being exhumed and identified six years later.