On January 27th, 1945, Soviet soldiers pushed open the gates of Awitz. What they found broke hardened combat veterans. Grown men, men who had survived years of brutal Eastern front warfare, collapsed to their knees and wept. Inside the barracks lay 7,000 living skeleton, barely breathing, staring up with hollow eyes.
But the man responsible for much of their suffering was already gone, vanished like smoke into the winter air, carrying the blood of over 400,000 people on his hands. His name was Joseph Mangallay. And for the next 34 years, the world would hunt him. Before we go any further, if you’ve never heard the full story of what this man actually did inside those barracks, what happened to his victims, and how he ultimately died, you are in the right place. This is Untold War Stories.
Hit that subscribe button right now because we don’t sanitize history here. We tell it exactly as it happened. Let’s get into it. Joseph Mangala was born on March 16th, 1911 in the quiet Bavarian city of Gunsburg, Germany. From the outside, his childhood looked completely ordinary.
His father, Carl Mangala, ran a successful farming equipment company. The family was wealthy, respected, and deeply rooted in their community. Young Joseph was intelligent, well-dressed, and ambitious, the kind of student teachers remembered. He enrolled at the University of Munich, where he studied medicine and physical anthropology.
He earned a doctorate in physical anthropology in 1935 and passed his state medical licensing exams in 1936. By every conventional measure, he was a rising star in German academia. But beneath the polished surface, something deeply disturbing was taking root. In 1937, Meneli began working at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt under Dr.
Dao Amarvon Versure. One of Germany’s most influential geneticists known for his controversial research on twins. Bersure recognized Mangala’s sharp mind and academic drive. He mentored him closely. Under Verse’s guidance, Mangala completed a second doctorate in 1938, cementing his status as a serious biomedical researcher.
But Bersure wasn’t just a scientist. He was a committed racial ideologist. And his mentorship didn’t just shape Mangala’s academic career. It shaped his worldview in ways that would lead to mass murder. Here’s the detail most people miss about Menela. He didn’t join the Nazi party before it rose to power in 1933. He wasn’t a political radical from childhood.
He was a scientist who gradually became radicalized through academic institutions that normalized racial pseudocience. By the time he formally joined the Nazi party in the SS in 1938, Mangala had fully embraced the ideology of biological racism. the false and scientifically discredited theory that human races are genetically distinct and hierarchically ranked.
He genuinely believed Germans were biologically superior. He believed this not as political theater, but as scientific fact, that distinction matters enormously because it explains how a man with two doctoral degrees could walk onto a selection ramp and send children to their deaths with a smile on his face.
Mangaland his mentor virtu also served a deeply disturbing bureaucratic function. They provided expert opinions to Nazi authorities determining whether individuals qualified as German under the Nuremberg race laws of 1935. Think about that for a moment. Two respected academics sitting in Frankfurt offices using medical credentials to decide who was legally human.
That is the quiet institutional face of genocide. and it often gets overlooked in favor of the dramatic horror of the camps. When World War II began on September 1st, 1939, Mangula was drafted into the Vermach, the German armed forces. A month later, he voluntarily transferred to the Waffan SS medical service, the military arm of Hitler’s dreaded SS organization.
He served on the Eastern Front after operation Barbar Roa launched on June 22nd, 1941, the single largest military invasion in human history. Mangala witnessed extraordinary brutality. He also participated in it. In the opening weeks of the campaign, Mangal’s division was directly involved in the massacre of thousands of Jewish civilians in Soviet occupied territories.
Despite this, Mangali earned Germany’s most prestigious military honor. After pulling two wounded German soldiers from a burning tank under enemy fire, he was awarded the Iron Cross, both second and first class and promoted to SS Halped Sternfurer, equivalent to captain. He returned to Germany in January 1943 as a decorated war hero.
Then on May 30th, 1943, the SS assigned Mangala to Awitz Burkanau. There is compelling evidence that Mangala actively requested this assignment himself because it offered him what no university laboratory ever could an unlimited supply of human research subjects with no legal protections whatsoever. Awitz Burkina was not merely a prison camp.
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It was the largest killing facility in human history. Between 1940 and 19440 the SS deported 133 million people there. At least one 1 million of them were murdered. The majority were Jewish. Transported from across occupied Europe in sealed cattle cars, arriving after days without food or water, stepping onto a concrete platform called the ramp. And there stood Joseph Mangala.
Prisoners described him as immaculate, perfectly pressed uniform, white gloves, riding crop in hand, sometimes whistling a Mozart tune while conducting the selections. With a casual flick of his gloved hand, he decided who would live and who would die. Left meant the gas chambers.
Right meant forced labor for however long your body held out. Prisoner Dr. Jacella Pearl, a Jewish gynecologist forced to work in the Burkanau Infirmary, later testified, “We feared his visits more than anything else because we never knew whether we would be permitted to live. He was free to do whatever he pleased with us. All pregnant women who arrived at Burkanau were sent immediately to the gas chamber.
Mothers with young children were sent directly to their deaths.” Mangle rationalized this with a statement that captures the chilling bureaucratic logic of genocide. He claimed it would be inhumane to gas a child without its mother present. During a typhus outbreak in the women’s camp, Menela solved the problem the way the SS always solved problems.
He marched 600 Jewish women out of one block and sent them to the gas chambers. The building was disinfected. Then he repeated the process across the entire camp. When scarlet fever broke out later, he did it again. Infected prisoners weren’t treated. They were exterminated. This is where the history becomes almost unbearable. But it must be told.
Mangali organized a research complex inside Burkanau. Multiple barracks converted into laboratories staffed by prisoner physicians working under constant threat of death. He sourced state-of-the-art instruments from Germany and set up a functioning pathology lab. He was conducting what he considered legitimate science.
That is one of the most disturbing truths of the entire Holocaust. His primary obsession was twins. Before the war, twin studies had been an emerging field of genetic research. Ethical researchers used twins to study hereditary diseases, always with consent, always with limits. Mangala had no such constraints. He collected hundreds of pairs of twins from the arriving transports, pulling them aside on the ramp with surprising gentleness, promising them better treatment.
He kept his word in the most twisted way imaginable. The twins lived in separate barracks. They received slightly better food. Menula visited them personally, brought them chocolate, called himself their uncle Pepe, and then he conducted experiments on them that no ethical framework in human history would have permitted. He performed unnecessary amputations.
He transfused blood from one twin into the other. He intentionally infected one twin with typhus or tuberculosis to observe disease progression, then killed the healthy twin for comparative autopsy. Witness fear Alexander testified that Mensley surgically sewed two Romani twins together backto back in a grotesque attempt to create artificial conjoined twins.
Both children died from gang green within days. Survivor Moshoffer recalled how Mangala inserted pins into his and his brother’s skulls after surgeries performed without adequate anesthesia. His brother TB was taken away one day and returned with his head wrapped in bandages. He died in Mosha’s arbs. Prisoner Dr. Michlo Nicely, a forensic physician forced to assist Meneli, witnessed him personally inject chloroform directly into the hearts of 14 twin children in a single night, killing them all so he could conduct simultaneous autopsies and
compare results side by side. Beyond twins, Menela sought people with physical abnormalities. Dwarfs, those with gigantism, those with heterocchromia, a condition where each eye is a different color. He pulled their teeth, drew their blood, irradiated them unnecessarily, and photographed every centimeter of their bodies.
Survivor Elizabeth Oitz, one of the Oitz family of seven dwarfs, the largest the largest family group to survive Ashwitz, later said, “It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain we suffered,” which continued for many days after the experiment ceased. One of Mangala’s colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had a particular fixation on heterocchromia.
Mangal had prisoners with differently colored eyes killed so their eyes could be removed and shipped to Berlin. He kept the remainder pinned to his laboratory wall, hundreds of human eyes which he reportedly described as resembling a collection of butterflies. Itsakan, a Greek Jewish survivor deported to Awitz at age 20, reported in 2009 that Mangala removed his kidney without anesthesia and sent him back to forced labor without painkill.
Czech survivor Ruth Elias gave birth inside Awitz. Mangali ordered her breasts bound tightly so he could document clinically how long a newborn infant survives without food. She watched her baby starve for days before a compassionate prisoner doctor gave her a morphine overdose to end the infant’s suffering. Throughout his tenure at Ashvitz, Mangala regularly shipped blood samples, organs, skeletons, preserved fetuses, and eyeballs back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
He was simultaneously conducting research for the institute and accumulating material for a professorship application. He wanted a university chair. He was publishing, networking, and careerbuilding, using the bodies of murdered children as his raw material. As Soviet forces advanced through Poland in January 1945, Mangala fled Avitz with the other SS personnel.
He spent the final weeks of the war cycling through various units before dawning a standard German army uniform and surrendering to American forces at war’s end. Here is where the story takes a turn that still haunts historians. The Americans held Mangel as a prisoner of war, but had no idea who he was.
His name was already on Allied war crimes lists, but the screening process failed. In early August 1945, American forces released Joseph Mangula. He walked out a free man. For the next four years, he lived under a false name as a farm hand near Rosenheim, Bavaria, just hours from Munich, practically hiding in plain sight.
When US war crimes investigators finally closed in, Mingala’s family fed them deliberate lies. The investigators concluded he was dead and closed the file. With his family’s financial backing, the Mangallay family business in Gonberg was thriving in postwar West Germany. Ysef Mangala obtained false documents and in July 1949 boarded a ship to Argentina.
He lived comfortably in Buenosiris for years. By 1956, he felt so secure that he legally obtained Argentine citizenship under his real name. The audacity is staggering. But in 1959, West German prosecutors identified him and requested his arrest. Mingali fled to Paraguay, obtained citizenship there, too.
Then in May 1960, Israeli intelligence, the MSAD, pulled off one of history’s most dramatic operations, abducting SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Ikeman off a Buenosari street and flying him to Israel for trial. Menchel correctly reading the writing on the wall, fled Paraguay immediately. For the rest of his life, he hid near Sao Paulo, Brazil, supported by an underground network of former Nazi and funded quietly by his family.
His son Ralph visited him there in 1977. Ralph later described his father as completely unrepentant, a man who maintained until his dying breath that he had never personally harmed anyone and had only followed orders. On February 7th, 1979, Ysef Mangala, aged 67, suffered a stroke while swimming at a beach resort near Bert Yoga, Brazil. He drowned.
He was buried in a suburb of Sa Paulo under the name Wolf Gang Ghard. His grave went undiscovered until 1985 when Brazilian police and international investigators exumed the remains. DNA testing in 1992 finally confirmed the identity beyond any doubt. The man who sent over 400,000 people to their deaths never faced a single day of criminal trial.
He died on a beach. Joseph Mangala evaded justice for 34 years. He lived, traveled, fathered a child, and died peacefully in the water. While his victim’s families spent decades demanding accountability that never came, the institutions that created him, the universities, the scientific journals, the respected research institutes largely escaped scrutiny, too.
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