Josef Mengele—Otmar von Verschuer

The relationship between Josef Mengele and Otmar von Verschuer joined academic patronage to a research program built on racial hierarchy. Von Verschuer helped advance Mengele from a promising student to a university research assistant, then directed him to Auschwitz as a source of material for twin research. Their connection therefore reached beyond mentorship: Mengele supplied research materials from the camp, while von Verschuer held a senior institutional position in the field to which that work was directed. After the war, their paths diverged sharply. Mengele remained a fugitive, while von Verschuer returned to professional prominence and did not answer his former assistant’s appeals.

Academic Patronage and Advancement

Mengele’s career developed within the German academic world of the 1930s, when he studied in Munich, Vienna, and Frankfurt. He worked industriously while classmates socialized and pursued status in the S.A. His thesis, a racial-morphological examination of the anterior lower jaw in four racial groups, received the highest distinction. Eugen Fischer and the heredity specialist Mollinson recognized his work; Mollinson recommended him to von Verschuer, then one of Germany’s best-known geneticists and a specialist in twins.

Von Verschuer’s recommendation proved decisive. At twenty-six, Mengele became his research assistant and was soon a favored member of the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. When von Verschuer became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin, he sent Mengele to Auschwitz, presenting the camp as an exceptional opportunity to investigate multiple births. He also financed the research. The sequence made the mentor–assistant relationship an institutional channel: von Verschuer provided backing and direction, and Mengele’s camp position furnished access to human subjects and research materials unavailable through ethical medical practice.

Auschwitz Research and Institutional Exchange

During twenty-one months at Auschwitz, Mengele sent von Verschuer samples and experimental results. The materials included marrow, eyes, blood, organs, and skeletons. Organs were also mailed to the Berlin institute, with packages marked as urgent war material. The movement of specimens tied violence inside the camp to research conducted beyond it; the institute was not merely the setting of Mengele’s earlier training but a destination for material obtained through his camp role.

The surviving account of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor forced to assist Mengele, describes experiments on twins and dwarfs that included a range of medical tests. The account also reports that twins could be killed at the same time so that their bodies could be compared. This testimony sets the actual conditions of the research against its scientific framing: the subjects were imprisoned people, not volunteers, and their lives were subordinated to Mengele’s experimental aims. Nyiszli depicts Mengele returning to the dissection room after selections, examining the records of twins and working among laboratory equipment even as the camp’s killing continued. The contrast between meticulous research practice and the treatment of the people studied exposes the violence concealed by the language of scientific advancement.

Mengele also carried out selections on the arrival ramp, directing deportees toward forced labor or death. He later described his Auschwitz actions to his son as military duty in service of German science and the biological community, claiming that selection had saved lives and that he had been only one part of a larger system. That account was a postwar defense, not a neutral description of what happened. Nyiszli’s testimony records the selections and experiments from the position of a coerced witness, while the documented transfer of samples establishes a material connection between Mengele’s work and von Verschuer’s institute. Together, those strands make it impossible to treat the research relationship as detached from the camp’s violence.

Shared Ideology and Postwar Separation

The relationship also rested on a shared commitment to Nazism. Mengele remembered watching the antisemitic film Der ewige Jude with von Verschuer while they joined the audience in its hostile response to Jews onscreen. The book presents this recollection as evidence of their common political and ideological outlook, not simply of professional acquaintance. Von Verschuer had praised Hitler as a statesman attentive to biological inheritance and racial hygiene; Mengele’s later defense of his work likewise framed it through the supposed duties of a racialized state.

After the war, von Verschuer rebuilt his academic standing. He became Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster, later served as its dean, and ran what the account describes as West Germany’s largest genetic research centre. Mengele, meanwhile, wrote to him several times from Argentina. Von Verschuer did not respond. He had destroyed their correspondence and incriminating archives at the end of the war, leaving no reciprocal postwar relationship in the account: Mengele sought contact, but his former mentor remained silent. Von Verschuer was not prosecuted.

The contrast continued as public and legal scrutiny grew. In 1964, the universities of Frankfurt and Munich withdrew Mengele’s doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology because of his crimes at Auschwitz and his violation of medical ethics. That consequence did not extend to von Verschuer, who retained his professional standing and died in a car accident in 1969. The account’s juxtaposition of Mengele’s academic disgrace with von Verschuer’s continued career underscores the unequal postwar reckoning between the camp doctor and the senior academic who had sponsored his research and received its materials.