Josef Mengele: Professor 'wins right' to use bones of Nazi doctor to be used for research by students

'The bones will be a really good example for our students to learn from'

Josef Mengele escaped capture until his death by accidental drowning in Sao Paulo (Rex Features)

A Brazilian doctor has reportedly won the right to examine the bones of one of Nazi Germany's most notorious physicians.

Dr Daniel Romero Muniz has opened the bag containing the bones of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor responsible for torturing thousands of Auschwitz inmates, for the first time in 30 years, according to the Mail Online.

Known as the "Angel of Death", Mengele was a German SS officer who also performed deadly human experiments on prisoners.

He fled to South America after the war and, although designated a war criminal, evaded capture for the rest of his life.

However, his remains were identified as lying in an anonymous Sao Paulo grave in 1985 and, despite offers to collect them, his family never did.

Now Dr Muniz, a professor of medicine at the University of Sao Paulo, reportedly plans for the bones to be donated to students to learn from.

"[Mengele's] bones will be a really good example for our students to learn from," he told the Mail Online.

"They will be used to help train new doctors and will be particularly good for those students who are studying post mortem examinations."

Mengeles had a stroke while swimming off the Sao Paulo coast in 1979 and was found by a retired policeman.

The lettering 'Arbeit macht frei' (work makes you free) at the entrance of the memorial site of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland. (JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

German authorities later linked a letter he sent to his family in Germany to him, and after exhuming his grave kept his bones in a bag at the Sao Paulo Police Legal Medical Institute morgue for more than 30 years.

The bag was first opened again by Dr Muniz in front of TV cameras on the weekend of March 19 this year, and his ribs, humerus, ulna and radius on the medical table.

Some 15 to 20 million people were killed by the Nazis, who came to power in 1933 and ended with the Second World War in 1945, according to research carried out by Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This increased previous estimates of some 12 million people being killed, at least half of them Jewish.