For decades, Yseph Mangala lived like an ordinary man. Nothing about his quiet routine gave away who he used to be at the Awitz concentration camp. But years later, when the truth finally surfaced, everything he had done behind those camp walls left the world stunned. And what happened in his last hours made it even harder to believe.
Ysef Mangalv was born on March 16th, 1911 in Goonsburg, a small town in Bavaria. His family owned a successful farm machinery company, and he grew up with every advantage, including a good education, a comfortable life, and a strong future ahead of him. He was also highly intelligent. He earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935 and later received a medical degree from the University of Frankfurt in 1938.
On paper, he looked exactly like the kind of person you would trust as a doctor. But somewhere along the way, something went terribly wrong. Mangala joined the Nazi party in 1937 and the Struttole in 1938. He truly believed in Nazi racial ideology, not just for political reasons, but as a scientific goal.
He wanted to prove that some races were biologically superior and use that research to shape the future of humanity. In May 1943, he was assigned to Awitz 2 Burkinau, the largest and deadliest Nazi concentration camp. He was 32 years old and spent about 21 months there. He became obsessed with twins, dwarfism, eye color, disease, and heredity.
He wanted to uncover what he called the secrets of genetics. And he was willing to do absolutely anything to get those answers. When trains arrived at Awitz, Mangala was often standing right there on the platform, dressed neatly in his SS uniform, sometimes whistling or quietly humming to himself.
He would stare at terrified people climbing out of the cattle cars and simply point left to right. Left meant the gas chambers. Right meant forced labor inside the camp. It looked so casual and routine that many survivors later said it was even harder to process that open violence. Whenever he spotted twins, his attention immediately changed.
He had them separated from their families and given slightly better food and living conditions, not out of kindness, but because he needed them alive for his experiments. Between 1943 and 1944, Mangala experimented on around 1,500 pairs of twins. The experiments themselves are difficult to even describe.
He injected chemicals directly into children’s eyes in attempts to change their color. He sewed twins together while trying to create artificial conjoined twins. He infected one twin with diseases, then killed the other so he could compare their bodies during autopsies. He performed surgeries without anesthesia. He removed organs. He studied starvation and hypothermia on living people.
He did all of this while pretending it was science, carefully, writing notes, sending samples to colleagues, and treating the entire process like professional research. None of it was real science. It was torture hiding behind a medical uniform. In January 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on Awitz, Mangala grabbed his research files, walked out of the camp, and disappeared into the chaos of collapsing Germany.
He was 33 years old, healthy, educated, and completely free. He was not immediately recognized as a major war criminal. Allied forces actually captured him in June 1945, but he was using a fake identity and the soldiers had no idea who he really was. He was released soon after. For the next several years, he hid in plain sight in Bavaria working as a farmand in Rosenheim under the name Fritz Coleman.
Back in Greensburg, his family still owned the farm machinery company Carl Mangalan’s sons and they quietly protected him by sending money and support. This family network became extremely important and was ignored for decades. The Mangala family were respected businessmen and very few people asked questions.
By 1949, Mangala had obtained a fake international committee of the Red Cross passport under the name Kelmouth Greger and boarded a ship from Genanoa to Buenosares. He was 38 years old and starting a completely new life. Argentina under Juan Peron had become something of a safe place for former Nazis during that period and the government was not aggressively hunting them down.
For the next decade, Mangala lived fairly openly in Argentina. Socially, he often used his real name, spent time with the German expatriate community, and at one point even had his name listed in the Buenosaris phone book. He worked different jobs, including selling his family’s farm equipment, and remarried in 1958. His second wife was Martha Mangala, the widow of his brother Carl Jr.
He was living a mostly normal life and barely hiding at all. That started to change in 1960. On May 11th that year, agents from Mossad captured Adolf Ikeman in Buenosarees. Ikeman had been one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, and his capture shocked the Nazi exile community across South America. If Mossad could pull Iikman off the streets of Argentina, then nobody felt safe anymore.
Mangala had actually known Iikman in Argentina and the two moved in similar social circles. When news of the capture spread, Mangala panicked and escaped. He first fled to Paraguay where he had already received Paraguayan citizenship in 1959 under his real name through connections with local officials and later moved to Brazil in 1961.
At the same time, the world was finally beginning to understand who Mangala really was. The Ikeman trial in Jerusalem in 1961 pushed the Holocaust into the center of global attention. Survivors gave testimony. Names were exposed. Mangala’s name kept appearing again and again. West Germany sent an extradition request to Paraguay in 1960.
Simon Vizenthal made finding Mangala his top mission. Israeli intelligence services also continued searching for him. But by then, Mangala had already disappeared again. In Brazil, he began living a far more isolated life. For a period, he stayed on a farm in Sarenegra owned by a Hungarian couple named Giza and Gita Stammer.
He used the name Peter Hawkpickler. He helped manage the farm, performed physical labor, and stayed extremely quiet. This was a massive fall from his earlier life. No more social gatherings, no more openly using his real name, and no more comfort. At first, the Stalmers did not fully know who he really was. They were told he was a former German army officer hiding from prosecution.
By the time they understood the truth, they were already too involved to easily leave. Mangala was basically living under their protection. And over time, that arrangement created growing bitterness on both sides. Life on the farm was difficult, lonely, and humiliating for a man who had once held absolute power over thousands of people.
He constantly argued with the stmers. People described him as arrogant, demanding, and extremely difficult to live with. He complained about the food, the living conditions, and being treated like an ordinary farm worker. He wrote long, self-pittitying letters to his son, Rolf, back in Germany, filled with excuses and complaints about the war and his situation.
He never showed remorse, not once. By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Mangala’s health was starting to fall apart. He was getting older, more isolated, and far more paranoid. Every knock at the door could be agents from Mossad. Every stranger in the nearby town could be spying on him. He almost never left the farm, and when he did, he constantly looked over his shoulder.
In 1969, the Stalmers bought a new property in Cayeras, north of Sao Paulo, and Mangala moved there with them. By this point, the relationship between Mangala and the Stalmers had completely collapsed. Gza later said that living with Mangala was a nightmare. By the mid 1970s, even the Stalmers could no longer tolerate him.
They basically forced Mangala out of their home. In 1975, he moved to a small house in Elorado where he lived with a Brazilian couple named Wolfrram and Lizolotta Bosett. The Bosetss were German immigrants who had once again been told that Mangala was simply a former soldier hiding from prosecution. They took him in and became the main caretakers during the final years of his life.
His physical condition kept getting worse throughout the 1970s. He suffered from high blood pressure. In 1976, he had a stroke that left lasting damage. He struggled with depression. His letters from this period revealed a lot about his mindset. He constantly wrote about feeling abandoned, unloved, and forgotten.
He became obsessed with his health, carefully recording every ache, pain, and symptom in detail. In a deeply ironic twist, the man who had carried out brutal medical experiments on others was now terrified of dying himself. He visited doctors using fake names, constantly worried about his symptoms, and demanded reassurance that he was not seriously ill.
All of this was happening while the world was still searching for him. In 1977, Simon Visenthal publicly announced that he believed Mangala was still alive and hiding in Paraguay. In 1978, Paraguay finally stripped Mangala of his citizenship after growing international pressure. West Germany renewed its extradition requests. The Israeli government continued receiving tips from different sources.
By early 1979, Mangala was 67 years old and in genuinely poor health. The stroke had weakened him badly. His blood pressure remained dangerously high. On February 7th that year, Mangala was traveling with Wolram and Lizolet Bosert and a few friends from Bertoga, a coastal resort about 70 km from Sa Paulo.
For a man who almost never left hiding anymore, this was a rare outing. Mangala had visited Bert Yoga before, and it was one of the few places where he seemed able to relax. The group went to a beach called Pria Donagia. It was a simple stretch of sand, nothing especially famous by Brazilian standards, but it gave Mangala a chance to sit in the sun, swim a little, and briefly forget that he was one of the most wanted men on Earth.
At some point that afternoon, Mangala walked into the water. The heat was intense. His heart and blood vessels were already badly weakened. Then, without warning, disaster struck. Mangala suffered a massive stroke while swimming. He collapsed in the water. By the time people reached him, he was unconscious. He was pulled from the sea, but it was already too late.
Ysef Mangala, the angel of death of Awitz, died on the beach that day. He didn’t die in prison. He was never executed. He never stood in a courtroom, never looked his victims in the eye. And he never answered for the thousands of deaths connected to him. The cruelty of that is difficult to accept. After his death, the Boserts suddenly faced a major problem.
They couldn’t simply call the authorities and explain who had just died. So, they did what people protecting Nazi war criminals often did. They created a cover story. Mangala was buried on February 10th, 1979 in the municipal cemetery of Embu Dasares, a small town about 30 km from S. Paulo. He was buried under the name Wulfgang Ghard, a real Austrian Nazi supporter who had been a friend of Mangala and had previously given him identity documents before returning to Austria.
The grave carried that false name and for the next 6 years nobody outside the small group protecting him knew the truth. The Boserts attended the funeral along with a few members of the German Brazilian community. Nobody else was told. Mangala’s son Rolf, who had secretly traveled to Brazil in 1977 to visit his father, the only time they ever met as adults, was informed privately.
His family back in Germany knew he was dead, but the rest of the world did not. While Simon Visenthal was publishing books arguing that Mangala was still alive. While West Germany continued issuing extradition requests, while newspapers across the world printed stories about the hunt for Mangala, while Awit’s survivors were still awake at night knowing their tormentor had escaped justice, he had already been buried for years.
However, their secret could not stay hidden forever. In 1985, something major finally happened. A joint investigation involving West German authorities, the Simon Visenthal Center, and American Nazi hunters was growing more intense. Mangala had become the top target. It was also the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, and media attention was enormous.
On June 6th, 1985, West German and Brazilian police raided two locations connected to the Bolerts and the Stammers at the same time. Inside, they found letters, photographs, and documents that clearly pointed to Mangala. What happened next became one of the most dramatic moments in the post-war hunt for Nazi war criminals. Brazilian authorities received information leading them to the grave in Ambuas Arches.
Workers dug up a body from the cemetery. The skeleton was photographed, measured, and examined by forensic experts from several countries. The investigation was extensive. A team led by Dr. L. Lavine, an American forensic dental expert, and Dr. Ellis Curley, a specialist in skeletal analysis, carefully studied the remains.
They compared dental records, bone measurements, and photographs with known records of Mangala. On June 21st, 1985, the team announced with strong confidence that the remains belonged to Joseph Mangala, who had died back in February 1979. But not everyone accepted it immediately. Some Holocaust survivors, Nazi hunters, and even governments remained suspicious.
The idea that Mangala had simply died quietly and been secretly buried felt unbelievable to many people. It felt too easy. Rumors continued for years, claiming the body was fake, that Mangala had staged his own death or that he was still alive somewhere. Those doubts finally ended in 1992. That year, German authorities carried out DNA testing on the remains, comparing samples from the skeleton with a blood sample provided by Mangala’s son, Rolf.
The mitochondrial DNA matched completely. There was no longer any room for doubt. When that news broke, many people expected survivors to feel relief. But for a lot of them, the reaction was the complete opposite. Eva Mortis Core was one of the most outspoken survivors of Mangala’s twin experiments. She and her twin sister Miriam were only 10 years old when they arrived at Awitz in May 1944.
Miriam survived the war, but later died in 1993 from kidney damage linked to the experiments. Apha spent decades speaking publicly about what had happened and pushing for justice. When she learned that Mangala had already been dead for years before the world even found his grave, she described it as a terrible injustice. And many survivors agreed.
The entire idea behind the postwar trials was that even powerful people would eventually be held accountable. But Mangala escaped that completely. Many survivors had spent years giving testimony, identifying photographs, and helping investigations because they believed one day he would finally sit in court and hear exactly what he had done.
That moment never came. Mangala’s son, Rolf, later said he confronted his father about Awitz, but Mangala showed no real remorse. Even near the end of his life, he still believed his actions had been scientifically justified. After the body was identified in 1985, Roth publicly confirmed his father’s death.
No family members were prosecuted. The family mostly stayed silent and the company continued operating for years afterward. The city of Gunsburg also struggled with its connection to Mangala. For decades, there was very little public acknowledgement of his crimes. Local history books barely mentioned him and serious discussion only started after years of outside pressure and efforts from local activists.
After the identification, the next concern was what would happen to all of his research from Awitz. Some of his materials had been sent during the war to Utmar Fryer vonver at the Kaiser Vilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. Vonver was Mangala’s mentor and received samples and research data from Awitz.
After the war, he distanced himself from Mangala, claimed he didn’t know where the materials truly came from, and continued his academic career in Germany until his death in 1969. Mangala’s personal research files mostly disappeared after he fled Awitz in January 1945. Some historians believe they were destroyed either by Mangala or by people protecting him.
Others think they may still exist somewhere in private collections or forgotten archives, but no complete collection has ever been found publicly. What is clear is that almost none of the work had real scientific value anyway. The experiments were chaotic, brutal, and completely unethical. They were acts of torture carried out by someone with medical training, not legitimate science.
Mangala’s remains were not given a public grave or memorial. Instead, his skeleton was donated to the University of Sa Paulo Medical School, where it is still used for forensic anthropology studies. There’s something darkly fitting about that. The man who treated human beings like research material ended up as a skeleton in a university lab studied by students learning how to identify remains.
His letters and diaries from years in hiding were later collected by historians. In 2017, a German publisher released a compilation of his writings titled Tagabusher 1960 to 1975. The decision was controversial with many survivors questioning whether his words deserved any wider audience. The house in El Dorado, where he spent his final years, still exists.
It’s small and unremarkable. There’s no plaque or public sign explaining who once lived there. The beach in Bertoga where he died has no memorial. The cemetery in Ambu Dasarts, where he was first buried, still remains, but his old grave no longer has any marker. After the body was removed, the burial plot was left
