Bones of Mengele, ‘Angel of Death,’ teaching tool in Brazil

SAO PAULO — For more than 30 years, the bones of Josef Mengele, a German doctor who conducted horrific experiments on thousands of Jews at Auschwitz, lay unclaimed inside a blue plastic bag in Sao Paulo’s Legal Medical Institute.

Professor Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, a historian who coordinates the University of Sao Paulo’s Laboratory for the Study of Ethnicity, Racism and Discrimination, said she hopes the classroom learning eventually goes beyond the science to history and ethics.

Students should also learn “how physicians, psychiatrists and other leading scientists were in the service of the Reich, lending their knowledge to exclude the ethnic groups classified as belonging to inferior races,” said Carneiro.