Josef Mengele (The Grey Zone)

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Evil-doer
Full Name	Josef Rudolf Mengele
Alias	None
Origin	The Grey Zone
Occupation	SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Physician
Powers / Skills	Medical knowledge
Goals	Continue his experiments on prisoners
Crimes	Genocide War crimes Crimes against humanity Unethical experimentation
Type of Villain	Genocidal Torturer

“	Josef Mengele: This isn't our war. Miklos Nyiszli: Not mine. Mengele: Nor mine. I can assure you. But, to allow this all to go to waste. Nyiszli: I understand your position. Mengele: Clearly you do more than that. Nyiszli: As you wish. Mengele: Meaning? Nyiszli: There is no meaning. Mengele: We're going to be increasing the volume of our research. Nyiszli (teary-eyed): I shall need more staff. Mengele: Then you shall have more staff.	„
	~ Mengele announcing his intentions to upgrade his experiments to Nyiszli.

Josef Mengele is the secondary antagonist of the 2001 historical drama The Grey Zone. Like the real-life war criminal of the same name, he is a physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp who performs experiments on human subjects.

He was portrayed by Henry Stram, who also played Eli Madison in Law & Order.

Biography

Mengele is an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer at Auschwitz-II Birkenau, a Nazi extermination camp for Jewish prisoners. His main function at the camp is performing medical experiments on live human subjects ostensibly for anthropological research. He is assisted in his experiments by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who has been press-ganged into assisting him by Oberscharfuhrer Erich Muhsfeldt in return for he and his family being spared.

Mengele's only major appearance is near the beginning of the film when he is seen with Nyiszli. They discuss the ongoing war, which is starting to turn against the Nazis. Mengele remarks that it isn't their war but they shouldn't allow the situation to go to waste. He then tells Nyiszli that they will be increasing their experiments and allocates more staff to help him.

Mengele only appears once more in the film, when he is briefly shown participating in the torture of a prisoner suspected of smuggling gunpowder. However, his experiments feature throughout the film as Muhsfeldt, who has taken a morbid interest in Mengele's experiments, visits Nyiszli while he is handling the dissected remains of some of Mengele's victims.

At the end of the film, Muhsfeldt orders Nyiszli, who is growing increasingly disturbed at having to work with Mengele, to continue their work together in order to punish Nyiszli for defying him. Mengele's fate is not revealed in the epilogue, but he presumably escaped justice until his death by drowning, as he did in real life.