A doctor at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous death camps of World War II, Josef Mengele performed numerous horrors upon those imprisoned within these camps, later earning him the nickname "Angel of Death".
Mengele was particularly interested in twins. Both fraternal and identical. About 3000 twins actually came to Auschwitz, most of which were children, but only about 200 survived. Often, many parents would try to hide their twins and take them with them to the gas chambers instead of letting Mengele get his hands on them. However, the twins that were separated from their parents were automatically "Mengele's children". They were experimented on but they did get some special benefits that others did not get. To the children, especially the younger ones, the Angel of Death was not scary at all. In fact, many of the children called him "Uncle Mengele" as Mengele often played with them, treated them affectionately and even sometimes gave them chocolates.
In terms of the experiments, some of the experiments performed on these children were absolutely horrific. Every day the children would get their blood drawn. Many twins would have drops or injections of chemicals in their eyes in an attempt to create blue eyes. Even more horrifying, Mengele would sometimes inject one twin with a disease killing him or her and then soon after killing the other twin in order to examine the difference between the two after death. Mengele would also perform a variety of surgeries such as amputations and organ removal on these children without anesthesia. Unfortunately, these weren't the only things Mengele did at Auschwitz, he performed numerous other monstrosities.
After the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, Mengele fled. As Mengele did not have an SS blood group tattoo, a tattoo that identified one as an armed wing of the Nazi Party, Mengele was never caught. He was never put on the major war criminal list. He later registered himself under a false name and essentially lived out the rest of his life before dying in 1979 at the age of 67.
CITE:
https://www.thoughtco.com/mengeles-children-twins-of-auschwitz-1779486
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
Claire, your post was, in one word, chilling. To have a man, a doctor even, use humans as guinea pigs for his "research," is absolutely horrifying. Most shocking to me was the fact that many children called him "Uncle Mengele," as he takes their innocent nature and performs sadistic experiments with their bodies. Around Christmas of 1944, Mengele fled from Auscwitz, somehow slipping out of the grasp of U.S. counterintelligence agents. Astonishingly, he returned to his hometown to live under his own name, and although he was mentioned during the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials, nobody made an attempt to arrest him. Finally, in 1949, West German authorities went after him, only to find that he had slipped away yet again. He turned up in Buenos Aires, living under his own name as a representative of the family business, Karl Mengele & Sons. In 1954, under the alias of Dr. Helmut Gregor, he became and Argentine citizen. In 1959 the West German government requested Mengele’s extradition, but an Argentine court delayed for more than a year before ordering his arrest. By then the doctor was in Paraguay, where the Supreme Court of Justice awarded him citizenship under his own name. During the next quarter century, he was reportedly seen in Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, West Germany, Austria, Portugal, Miami, and Westchester County, NY. Then, West German Police found a couple, Austrian-born Lieselotte and Wolfram Bossert, who claimed to have sheltered Mengele in Sao Paulo and were with him when he drowned in 1979. While experts examined the remains of the man buried under the pseudonym Wolfgang Gerhard, Mengele’s son Rolf claimed that the body was his father’s. In the link below are a few stories of people that actually met him and were subject to some of his experiments while in Auschwitz.
ReplyDeletehttp://people.com/archive/cover-story-the-life-and-crimes-of-a-nazi-doctor-vol-23-no-25/
This post is very interesting, but very horrifying at the same time. I've heard about his experiments before, but hearing them again in more detail reminded me of how many things happening in Auschwitz were unknown to the world until its liberation. Besides the websites you looked at, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website is also interesting to look at. This website states that there were three different categories of experiments. The first was freezing experiments to test hypothermia, the second was testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses, and the third was "thought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview". It's absolutely horrifying to know that not only Josef Mengele was conducting the experiments, but many other scientists were working together to commit horrible crimes on these innocent children.
ReplyDeleteHere's the link for the page on experiments:
Deletehttps://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005168