During the last two years of World War II Josef Mengele (1911-1979), a German physician, conducted atrocious medical experiments and sent tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz/Birkenau, a concentration camp in southwestern Poland. In 1949 he fled Germany for Latin America where, 30 years later, he died by drowning. He was never apprehended and thus was never prosecuted as a war criminal.

The son of an agricultural machinery manufacturer in Günzburg, Bavaria, Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911. Brought up as a Catholic, the popular and talented boy grew into a promising, ambitious student. He received his doctorate in medicine under Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in 1938 with a dissertation on hereditary deformities. Von Verschuer, director of the Frankfurt University Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene--established in 1934 to pursue research in a field strongly supported by the fanatically racist National Socialist regime--made...