Composition and Origins
Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman wrote "Angel of Death" after reading books about Nazi physician Josef Mengele while on tour with the band: "I remember stopping someplace where I bought two books on Mengele. I thought, 'This has gotta be some sick shit.' So when it came time to do the record, that stuff was still in my head—that’s where the lyrics to 'Angel of Death' came from."
The lyrics detail Mengele's surgical experiments on patients at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Mengele's explorations were conducted on such groups as dwarfs and twins, and included both physical and psychological examinations. Among the tests he performed that are mentioned in "Angel of Death" are experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusion of blood between twins, isolation endurance, gassing, injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs, and abacination.
"Sewn together, joining heads. Just a matter of time 'til you rip yourselves apart", a line from the penultimate verse, is a reference to the allegation Mengele stitched together twins, one of them deformed; "the hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too." This claim was first made by Auschwitz survivor Vera Alexander at the 1961 trial of SS-Hauptscharfuehrer Adolf Eichmann the "architect of the Holocaust", where it was asserted that Mengele "sewed the veins together" and turned "them into Siamese twins." This allegation became more widely known when Vera Alexander was featured in the 1985 documentary The Search for Mengele, which has been cited by several authors including Gerald Posner, an expert on Mengele.
Towards the end of the song, there is a line "Feeding off the screams of the mutants he's creating", which was taken from the film The Boys from Brazil in which Dr. Mengele was the villain.
Read more about this topic: Angel Of Death (song)
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