Joseph Mengele: The Angel of Death

EXPERIMENTS IN AUSCHWITZ
 OVERVIEW:
JOSEPH MENGELE: the head doctor at the
Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII
WHAT HE DID: performed experiments on twins
in the camp in order to discover the secrets of
genetics, and in turn, be able to produce the perfect
Aryan
THE EFFECTS: out of 3000 children
subjected to Mengele’s experiments, only
200 survived
WHERE HE IS NOW: after the war,
Mengele escaped to Argentina, a safe haven
for many Nazis. He lived for another 35
years under various aliases and was never
apprehended. He died of a heart failure in
1979.
 In the Beginning:
Prior to the Nazi era, ethical norms had
existed that prohibited doctors from
performing physical experiments on twins;
and they had been limited to observing their
behavior only
Then, in Auschwitz, with such norms long
swept away by the Nazis, a man named
Professor von Verschuer saw the perfect
opportunity to experiment on twins, and
planned to execute his plan using his
protégé, Dr. Joseph Mengele
•Mengele came with the mission to search
for the secrets of heredity, believing that
the Nazi ideal would directly benefit from
the help of genetics:
•If Aryan women could assuredly give
birth to children who were sure to be
blond haired and blue eyed, the future
of the Aryan race could be saved.
Between 1943-1944, 1500 sets of twins were
tested by Mengele. By the end of the war,
only 200 of these 3000 children had
survived.
When the families first arrived at the camps,
Mengele would search for twins and yell
“Zwillinge!” ( twin in German ) when he located a
set.
On their arrival, the children were tattooed with a
special set of numbers that included the letters
ZW for zwillinge.
These are the children subjected to
Mengele’s experiments. Here, Mengele
simultaneously became to them a symbol of
life and death, as he annihilated their
parents in the gas chambers and yet, spared
their lives.
THE EXPERIMENTS:
•Mengele took daily blood samples from the
children, then injected the blood from one twin
into another child with a different blood type,
recording the reaction.[this usually resulted in
a searing headache and a high fever that lasted
for several days] Younger children, those
whose arms and wrists were small, had to have
the blood drawn from their necks.
•In order to determine if eye color could be
genetically altered, Mengele injected dyes into
the children’s eyes, resulting in painful infections
and often blindness. If the child died of such an
infection, Mengele would remove the eyeballs
and hang them on his wall, much like biologists
do with insect specimens.
• Young children were placed in what Mengele
called “isolation cages”, then subjected to
various painful stimuli, so that Mengele could
record their reactions
•Many of the twins had limbs removed in
surgeries, or were castrated. None of these such
operations were done with an anesthetic
• Still other twins were injected with various
diseases to see how long it would take for them
to succumb to the disease
•Typhus and Tuberculosis were purposely given
to one twin and not the other. When the
diseased twin died, Mengele would kill the
healthy one in order to perform an autopsy on
both and “research” the effects of the disease.
•
•Mengele often forced incestuous
impregnantions
• He attempted to perform sex change
operations
• Clamps were applied to see how long the child
could stand the pain
• Chemicals were applied to the skin
ONE SUCH STORY:
Twins Tito and Nino were taken away by the
SS officers after it was discovered that one of
the boys was a hunchback. Three days later,
the boys were returned to the barracks. They
had been cut and sewn back together, back to
back, at the hunch and the wrists. Stories like
this were not uncommon.
“ Our whole being concentrated on
Mengele’s hands. Those hands had the
power to condemn us to immediate
execution or to prolong our miserable
life for a few days.”- Gisella Perl (a
survivor of Mengele’s experiments)
CONCLUSION:
Did Mengele find his answer? Was he able to genetically engineer the
perfect Aryan? No. Not only did his experiments fail, but they left a mark in
history as crimes that will never be forgotten.
In his wake, over 2500 children died. Mengele’s methods and experiments
must be remembered as a learning tool for the future. In 1947, The
Nuremberg Code was erected, stating, among other things, that the
voluntary consent of the human is essential. Hopefully, such laws will
prevent such things from happening in the future. But remembering
Mengele’s children is important, for they were not only a scientific mistake,
but also an ethical one.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Lynott, Douglas B. (2004) Dr. Joseph Mengele. Court TV’s Crime Library.
www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/history/mengele/index_1.html ( 4-13-
04 )
• Unknown. (2003) Victims of Mengele. The Holocaust: Crimes, Heroes and
Villans. http://auschwitz.dk/Mengele/id17.htm ( 4-13-04 )
• The Candles Musuem Website. ( 1997 ) Mengele. Candles Holocaust
Museum. http://www.candles-museum.com/mengele.htm ( 4-14-04 )
• Uknown. Angel of Death- Joseph Mengele. Holocaust History.
http://home8.inet.tele.dk/aaaa/Mengele.htm ( 4-15-04 )
• Bloch, F. ( 2-15-86) Medical Scientists in the Nazi era. National Library of
Medicine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dop