Angel of Death

Angel of Death

Forensics Efren Saldivar, a respiratory therapist who worked in the Glendale Adventist hospital in California, who once called himself the 'Angel of Death,' pled guilty in March 2002 to murdering 6 elderly patients and attempting to kill a 7th. The guilty plea helped him avoid the death penalty; the 32-year-old will serve 6 consecutive life sentences. Saldivar told police in 1998 that he may have contributed to the deaths of 100 to 200 deaths and actively killed up to 50 patients with drugs or by withholding medical treatment. He confessed to the murders, recanted his confession, and then confessed a second time.

Physician criminals Josef Mengele (1911-1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau who became a notorious war criminal. He held a doctorate in anthropology from Universität München and a degree in medicine from Universität Frankfurt. After being wounded in 1942 on the Russian front and pronounced medically unfit for combat, Mengele was assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he personally selected 400,000 prisoners to die in the gas chambers. He performed pseudoscientific experiments and took a particular interest in twins. Of the 3,000 twins who passed through the camp during World War II, only 26 pairs survived. In addition to the twin studies, he burned some prisoners in an oven to determine the time required for getting 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-degree burns; in others he assessed the amount of force need to crush a human skull