The name Dr. Josef Mengele stands out among the dark stories of the men and women who perpetrated the Holocaust.
The Nazi doctor is most commonly known as the architect of cruel and unnecessary medical experiments, which he performed on concentration camp inmates including twin children.
He was fascinated by people whose eyes were two different colors and kept a collection of eyes from his victims.
At the end of May 1943, Mengele was transferred to Auschwitz, where he would earn the nickname the “Angel of Death.”
Like all SS doctors there, Mengele worked shifts on the arrival ramps, where he would choose those newly arrived prisoners who would be gassed immediately and those who would be given a job and be temporarily allowed to live.
Even when he was not working on selection duty, Mengele could be spotted at the ramp, searching for twins.
Interested in the age-old question of nature versus nurture, he had performed legitimate research on twins prior to World War II. But at Auschwitz, the bounds of ethics were broken and there were no repercussions when he maimed or killed a subject of his experiments, including young Jewish or Roma twins.
Mengele believed Nazi racial theory. Many of his experiments aimed to illustrate the lack of immune resistance of subjects considered racially inferior, such as Jewish prisoners.
Among Mengele’s research subjects were twins René and Renate Guttmann from Prague. Renate was experimented on and René was kept as a control. Renate was measured and x-rayed. She received injections and was cut. Once, after she got sick from an experiment, she was supposed to be killed, but a nurse hid her and she was spared.
Mengele also selected seven-year-old Hungarian Jewish twins Lea and Yehudit Csengeri for medical experimentation upon their arrival in Auschwitz in 1944. Nazi physicians took the girls’ blood, measured their bodies, and injected them with different pathogens. Both survived the Holocaust.
Photo 1: USHMM, courtesy of anonymous donor
Photo 2: USHMM, courtesy of Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme
Photo 3: USHMM, courtesy of Yehudit Csengeri Barnea
We hope that you have enjoyed reading our blog on the world history and facts. If you enjoy this blog please let us know in the comments below. If you are interested in history, we recommend you check out our other blogs here on the world history and facts. Thank you for reading.
Leave a Reply