Mengele Essay, Research Paper

Mengele promoted medical experimentation on inmates, especially dwarfs and twins. He is said

to

have supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create

Siamses

twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resected.

(Snyder)

Cohen tells us:

“The only firsthand evidence on these experiments comes from a handful of survivors

and from a Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who worked under Mengele as a

pathologist. Mengele subjected his victims – twins and dwarfs aged two and above – to

clinical examinations, blood tests, X rays, and anthropological measurements. In the

case of the twins, he drew sketches of each twin, for comparison. He also injected his

victims with various substances, dripping chemicals into their eyes (apparently in an

attempt to change their color).

He then killed them himself by injecting chloroform into their hearts, so as to carry out

comparative pathological examinations of their internal organs. Mengele’s purpose,

according to Dr. Nyiszli, was to establish the genetic cause for the birth of twins, in

order to facilitate the formulation of a program for doubling the birthrate of the ‘Aryan’

race. The experiments on twins affected 180 persons, adults and children.

Mengele also carried out a large number of experiments in the field of contageous

diseases, (typhoid and tuberculosis) to find out how human beings of different races

withstood these diseases. He used Gypsy twins for this purpose. Mengele’s

experiments combined scientific (perhaps even important) research with the racist and

ideological aims of the Nazi regime. which made use of government offices, scientific

institutions, and concentration camps.

From the scanty information available, it appears that his research differed from the

other medical experiments in that the victims’ death was programmed into his

experiments and formed a central element in it.” (Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, 964)

MENGELE, JOSEF (1911- ?). Camp doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp. ..appointed chief

doctor in 1943 by Himmler … joined other doctors (Koenig, Thilon, Klein) in the task of choosing

employable Jews to operated the industrial machines and sending others to the gas chambers.

The

selection was haphazard. The inmates were paraded before Mengele, who called either “Right!”

(work squads) or “Left!” (gas chambers). …[he] promoted medical experimentation on inmates,

especially twins … supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to

create Siamese twins … hands of the two children became badly infected where the veins had

been

resected.

Witnesses at the Frankfurt Trial told of [his] standing before his victims with his thumb in his

pistol

belt and choosing candidates for the gas chambers. When it was reported that one block was

infected with lice, [he] solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.

Work Cited

Snyder, Dr. Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989. ISBN

1-55778-144-3

THE ANGEL OF DEATH: JOSEF MENGELE

“Right, left”, what man could send people to their death with a flick of

a cane, without batting an eye? Josef Mengele. The stories and

pictures of Auschwitz tell a gruesome tale of death and torture. Stories

of the abused, used, and killed, the tales of the torturees have been

told, but what about the torturers? The SS, the “doctors”, the ones

who carried out the deeds, what was their life like? That is what this

paper will focus on. What went on inside the pathology lab, and what

went on inside the pathologist.

Millions of people passed through Auschwitz, Mengele’s domain,

during the Holocaust. Early in 1945, it was recorded that over

700,000 people were currently “living” (dying) there. Over 1 million

people were killed at Auschwitz, about a fifth of all the Jews killed.

People were brought to Auschwitz in cattle cars, hundreds of people

would be put into a car and then not let out for days, without food or water. Even when the trains

arrived at Auschwitz they would often sit on the track for days until all the many trains which had

come before were unloaded. After this hellish journey, the first thing that people saw was Josef

Mengele, the angel of Auschwitz standing in his immaculate SS uniform, shining boots, perfectly

brushed and pressed shirt and pants, and glistening silver skulls.

Josef Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz, he performed experiments, made selections, and is

responsible for sending thousands of people to the crematorium. As a person he was “split”, one

side

of him was the heartless, uncaring, medical-atrocities side, while the other was a gentle, almost

human side. When these two side overlapped was when Mengele was most horrible. Often when

taking small children to the gas chamber, he would give them candy and make a game out of,

“walking to the chimney”. Another example of false kindness is well put in the words of Moshe

Offer,

a test subject of Mengele.

“They took X-rays of us, then Doctor Mengele came in. And he gave us sweets. He wore a white

gown, but beneath it you could see the SS trousers. He gave us candy, and then gave us some

horribly painful injections.”

Josef Mengele was very high up in Nazi status, he reported to Heinrich Himmler, who reported

directly to Adolf Hitler. The attraction of Auschwitz to Mengele was the limitless supply of human

test subjects. Mengele was able to perform ANYTHING he wanted on live, human subjects. Life

was good for Mengele at Auschwitz, everyday he got luxuries: a fifth of a liter of vodka, a dozen

cigarettes, and German sausage. Auschwitz was a regular world for SS officers, there were

houses

with white picket fences to live in, a soccer stadium, a theater, and an SS officers club where the

officers got gourmet meals. It was not uncommon for an SS officer to dine on roasted chicken

and

potatoes, while the prisoners were starving and dying.

Mengele served many purposes at Auschwitz, he made selections of the newly arriving

prisoners,

those who could work to the right, and those who couldn’t to the left (gas chambers), and he

performed experiments. Mengele wanted to create a “pure” Aryan race, and to make German

mothers give birth to as many German babies as possible.

Doing selections gave Mengele access to any prisoner he wanted, he could hand pick his test

subjects-and he did. “Zwillinge, Zwillinge, Zwillinge!” Twins, Twins, Twins! Mengele picked twins,

dwarfs, and people who had deformities to do experiments on. He wanted to erase these traits

from

the “pure” Aryan race. Mengele was very interested in doing autopsies on twins who had died at

the

exact same time, in the real world one twin might die at 7 while the other might die at 77, but in

this

closed environment he could study twins who had died at the same moment.

Many of Mengele’s experiments were based on literally creating a blond hair blue eyed race. One

reason why Mengele might have been obsessed with “German” looks is because his brown hair

and

eyes, and his gypsy-esque look didn’t define him as a “pure” Aryan. One of his most famous

experiments was with eye color. Mengele or one of his assistants would inject dyes into the

unanesthetized eye of a child, preferably a set of twins. The dyes often resulted in injury,

sometimes

complete blindness, not to mention excruciating pain.

Another set of experiments were designed to create better equipment for German soldiers, better

gear for the cold, and for high altitudes. A set of freezing experiments were performed to make

clothing for navy crew who might fall in the water. People were placed in vats of ice water,

naked, to

see the fatal temperature of a human. People were locked outside, in snow and ice, also naked,

to

collect more information on human body temperature. Also sometimes after he had chilled

someone

Mengele would try to warm the person up, back to normal functioning levels-this almost never

worked.

One of the more gruesome experiments was a pressure chamber. Prisoners were locked inside a

pressure chamber that would simulate flying at high altitudes. The person’s breathing pattern was

meticulously recorded, until they died. People would often kill themselves by throwing

themselves

against the walls of the chamber, so that they would not die a more horrible death, suffocation

and

sometimes explosion. As in the words of Anton Pacholegg, an Austrian prisoner who assisted Dr.

Rascher in the Dachau camp;

“I have personally seen through the observation window of the decompression chamber, when a

prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured.”

One can not help but wonder what kind of a person could ever consider doing things so horrible,

much less carry them out. Who could ever kill an innocent child by injecting chloroform into their

heart, causing the blood to coagulate and kill the child. Who could ever imagine sewing a set of

twins

together to try and make siamese twins? These acts just seem to be out of the human realm. Yet

Josef Mengele did all of these acts, and more. When the Nazis realized that the Allied forces

were

getting closer, the Nazis covered up their deeds by destroying most of the gas chambers and the

pathology lab next to them that was occupied by the “doctor” Mengele. We may never know the

extent to which the experiments went.

Mengele covered up his past as well as the Nazis covered up Auschwitz, and better. Josef

Mengele

left Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 after being there since 1943. Mengele secretly joined a

normal

German infantry, and was released after the Allies found the soldiers in which Mengele was

hiding.

There had always been a strong Nazi presence in South America, so with funds from his family,

he

went off the Argentina. Mengele lived with a farming family in Argentina for a while, but Mengele

was

very scared of being caught, so between 1945 and 1979 Mengele moved to and from different

countries in South America. There was a great hunt for the elusive Doctor Mengele, there were

rewards, warrants, and even Nazi Hunters after him, but no one ever found him. No one knew it

when he died. Josef Mengele was living in Brazil with the Bossert family, when for the first time,

he

went out in the sun in a public place. Mengele was paranoid that he would be caught, so he often

only went out at night. On January 7, 1979, the Bossert family persuaded him to go for a swim to

ease his mind. He did, but while out at sea he had a stroke, Mengele’s body was paralyzed, and

he

started to drown. People managed to drag him out of the water, but it was too late, the infamous

Doctor Mengele was dead.

People didn’t find out until the mid-1980’s that Mengele was dead, I think that’s quite fitting to the

seemingly ever-present Josef Mengele. People say that they saw Mengele at the selection night

and

day. He was a mythological creature at Auschwitz, he could come at any time day or night to

take

test subjects from the barracks. Mengele was the symbol of the Nazis, evil, lurking, and always

there.