The Angel of Death:
Josef Mengele's Nazi Medical Experiments
A number of German doctors and physicians conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of prisoners without consent during World War II. Many were killed, some left without limbs, and others left with permanent physical and psychological damage until the day they pass on. Memories of these horrific experiments and terrible things done to them will be etched into their minds. There were many men behind these unthinkable crimes and inhumane treatment of these groups of people, but arguably none was worse than Josef Mengele.
Josef Mengele was born March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg Germany to Karl and Warlberga "Hupfaure" Mengele. In 1935 he earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Munich. At that time Munich was where the headquarters of the Nazi party was located He later became the assistant to Dr. Otmar Von Verschuer in January 1937. Mengle, a leading scientific figure, was particularly interested in the study of people with two different eye colors, dwarfs, people with abnormalities and especially identical twins. This is where his fascination with twins began. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937, the Schutzstaffel organization, better known as the "SS" in 1938 and in June 1940 Mengele was drafted into the army shortly after volunteering in the medical services. On May 30th, 1943 he received a promotion to SS Captain and was then transferred to Auschwitz where his reign of terror began. He was one of 30 doctors and physicians at the Auschwitz camp. In the spring of 1943, he was put in charge of the gypsy camp the chief camp physician of Birkenau.
The victims of his experiments were, as mentioned before, people who had certain characteristics that he was obsessed with and looking for such as identical and fraternal twins, people with two different eye colors and Jewish people. He also managed a gypsy camp before transferring to the Auschwitz concentration camp so he used people from their too. Mengele would wait at unloading stations and keep his eye out for people who were eligible to be used as test experiments. He also played a huge part in determining the fate of new prisoners being unloaded from the trains and railways. Witness accounts say that one flick of his wrist to the right or the left would determine the fate of thousands and thousands of people.
He would lure his test subjects, which included children, under a false sense of security by giving them sweets and taking them to his laboratory himself which was built right next to the crematorium in Auschwitz. He then performed tests of unspeakable horror. He performed blood transfusions, surgery without anesthesia, injected his subjects with different germs and diseases to see how they fought them off along with so many other acts. Mengle also had an obsession with heterochromia which is when people's eyes are two different colors. He collected the eyes of his victims after they were killed so he could study them. He also sent the eyes to different medical facilities as "experimentation material".
After World War II had ended, Mengele was put on a list of wanted war criminals along with many others. He changed his identity along with his given name. As a result, he fled to Argentina with the help of a family who housed him until he could make his escape. With the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, he resulted in moving once more to Brazil to avoid capture. There he lived out the rest of his days vacationing and managed to stay undetected for 40 years or possibly more. He suffered a stroke while swimming near a resort and drowned while in the water. The people who housed him told the FBI where he had been staying and went and identified the body as Josef Mengele using DNA testing and witnesses accounts throughout his journey of escaping facing the accounts of his crimes. In conclusion, Josef Mengele played a huge and very horrific part in determining the lives of thousands upon hundreds of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and more.
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Writing this was depressing but I hope you learned something
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