Also known as The Angel of Death, Josef Mengele was known to conduct inhumane experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Güzburg, Germany.
Mengele studied philosophy under Alfred Rosenberg, and Mengele was influenced by his racial theories and agreed with them. Mengele became a member of the Nazi party in 1937 and became a staff member at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.
During this time, he was the assistant of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer; he was the leading scientific figure in his research of twins. So it is no surprise that on May 24, 1943, Mengele joined the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Here he had the opportunity to advance his medical career by experimenting on live patients, aka Jewish prisoners. While Mengele was at Auschwitz, part of his job was where the medical staff immediately performed ¨selections¨ those who lived or died.
It was rumored that he enjoyed his career and would often show up when he was ¨off-duty¨ to help the doctors on duty, and he was always searching for twins.
Mengele had two types of experiments set up for twins; according to a personal account by Eva Mozes-Kor, she recalls being told that Mengele had two kinds of research programs, one that death with genetics and one that death with germ warfare.
In the germ experiments, Mengele would inject one twin with the germ, and if and when the twin died, he would kill the other to compare the autopsy. They were to be used as part of Mengele's ¨laboratory¨.
Some of the other experiments on the twins were being used to see how much blood could be removed from one of the children before they would die. Another experiment involved a 19-year-old twin that received cross transfusions of blood in an attempt to "make boys into girls and girls into boys." Some of the boys were castrated, and transfusion reactions were studied.
For Mengele's genetic study, he would collect dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, and anyone with any defect or abnormality. He attempted to ¨purify¨the ¨Aryan superrace¨.
During one experiment, he sowed a set of Gypsy twins together to create a Siamese twin, connecting organs and blood vessels; the twins died three days later. Some of the other experiments performed by Mengele included:
The freezing experiment. The victim was first studied to see how long it would take to lower the body temperature until death, and the second part involved how to resuscitate a frozen victim. The victim was forced to strip naked and then have a probe inserted into the rectum to measure body temperature. Unfortunately, most victims lost consciousness and died when the temperature dropped below 25 Celcius.
The opposite of the cold torture was the hot bath. The subject placed into warm water, and the water temperature was slowly increased; most died if they were warmed up too quickly.
One of the ways to purify the Aryan superrace involved changing the eye color of the children and curing heterochromia. Once those with heterochromia died, he would remove their eyes and send them to be studied. Mengele also tried to change eye color by injecting adrenaline into the eyes of his living victims.
The human experiments on heterochromia among Gypsies represent one of the most horrific crimes among the many that Josef Mengele committed in the Auschwitz camp.
At one point, there was a pregnant woman named Ruth Elias, and she gave birth to a baby girl, Mengle ordered her breasts to be bound, and he stated:
"We can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food."
A few days later, a female doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child's torture.
Joseph Mengele earned his title as Angel of Death and, unfortunately, did not ever pay for his crimes. He was wanted for war crimes but was not successfully caught and fled to South America.
Living in Brazil in February 1979, he suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming near Bertioga, Brazil. A man so evil most likely never had any remorse for the pain and suffering he caused; may his soul never rest.
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