In 1936, the University of Munich, an institution richly endowed by Hitler, awarded a PhD to a young medical researcher for his thesis concerning the “racial morphology” of the human jaw—an attempt to prove that the anatomy of the jaw was racially determined and genetically inherited. The newly minted “human geneticist,” Josef Mengele, would soon rise to become the most epically perverse of Nazi researchers, whose experiments on prisoners would earn him the title Angel of Death.
