josef mengele experiments in detail

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Josef Mengele: What Were the Human Experiments?

Josef Mengele was an anthropologist and SS physician, who is infamous for his inhuman medical experiments on the prisoners in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. He used to be an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a scientist who did a lot of research on twins, and did his own thesis on the genetic factors that can cause a cleft chin or cleft palate, for which he earned a cum laude doctorate. All of this may have been his inspiration for the “research” he did on the Jewish and Gypsy twins at Auschwitz.

Josef Mengele – Type of Experiments

Josef Mengele was not the head physician at Auschwitz , but he was part of a team of doctors that had to select which people were suitable for work and which had to be gassed right away. With so many subjects to experiment on, he grabbed the opportunity to continue his previous research on genetics. He was particularly interested in twins as twin research was seen at the time to be the ideal way to determine how the environment or human heredity influence the human body. Most of his subjects were children, and he would reportedly do blood transfusions from the one twin to the other, do amputations and try to sew it onto the other twin, stitch two twins together to form Siamese twins, infect one twin with typhus or another disease and many other experiments. More often than not, the twins died during the procedures or he would have them killed afterwards so he can do an autopsy. If one twin died from a disease, Josef Mengele would often kill the other as well to mark the differences between the sick and healthy subjects.

Mengele was also very interested in heterochromia, where people have irisis of different colors and he would collect eyes and bodyparts of his victims and send it through for research. He would also inject chemicals in victims’ eyes to attempt to change their eye color. Other subjects of interests included dwarfs, people with deformities and he also documented a disease that broke out in camp, Noma. He also experimented on pregnant women before sending them off to the gas chambers (they were not fit for work, after all) and caused incestuous pregnancies, which he researched. He tried sex change operations, removing organs and operating on victims without anaesthesia. He also tried to prove that Jewish and Gypsy people were genetically inferior through several experiments. The Mengele experiments were all done in secrecy but most of the information we have today are because of the accounts of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner-physician who was forced to assist Josef Mengele.

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The Macabre Story Of Josef Mengele, The Nazi ‘Angel Of Death’

A notorious ss officer and physician, josef mengele sent over 400,000 people to their deaths at auschwitz during world war ii — and never faced justice..

One of the most notorious Nazi doctors of World War II, Josef Mengele performed gruesome medical experiments on thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Guided by an unwavering belief in the unscientific Nazi racial theory, Mengele justified countless inhumane tests and procedures on Jewish and Romani people.

From 1943 to 1945, Mengele built up a reputation as the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz. Like other Nazi doctors on-site, Mengele was tasked with choosing which prisoners would be murdered immediately and which ones would be kept alive for grueling labor — or for human experiments. But many prisoners remembered Mengele as being particularly cruel.

Not only was Mengele known for his cold demeanor on the arrival platform of Auschwitz — where he sent about 400,000 people to their deaths in the gas chambers — but he was also infamous for his brutality during his human experiments. He saw his victims as mere “test subjects,” and gleefully embarked on some of the most monstrous “research” of the war.

But as World War II came to a close and it became clearer that Nazi Germany was losing, Mengele fled the camp, was briefly captured by American soldiers, attempted to take up work as a farmhand in Bavaria, and eventually escaped to South America — never facing justice for his crimes.

On June 6, 1985, Brazilian police in São Paulo dug up the grave of a man named “Wolfgang Gerhard.” Forensic and later genetic evidence conclusively proved that the remains actually belonged to Josef Mengele, who had apparently died in a swimming accident in Brazil a few years prior.

This is the horrific true story of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who terrorized thousands of Holocaust victims — and got away with everything.

Inside Josef Mengele’s Privileged Youth

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele came from a wealthy family and appeared to have been destined for success at an early age.

Josef Mengele lacks a terrible backstory to which one can point a finger when attempting to explain his vile acts. Born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Germany, Mengele was a popular and rich child whose father ran a successful business at a time when the national economy was cratering.

Everybody at school seemed to like Mengele and he earned excellent grades. Upon graduating, it seemed natural that he would go on to university and that he would succeed at anything he put his mind to.

Mengele earned his first doctorate in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. According to the New York Times , he did his post-doctoral work at the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene under Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was a Nazi eugenicist.

The ideology of National Socialism had always held that individuals were the product of their heredity, and von Verschuer was one of the Nazi-aligned scientists whose work attempted to legitimize that assertion.

Von Verschuer’s work revolved around hereditary influences on congenital defects such as cleft palates. Mengele was an enthusiastic assistant to von Verschuer, and he left the lab in 1938 with both a glowing recommendation and a second doctorate in medicine. For his dissertation topic, Mengele wrote about racial influences on the formation of the lower jaw.

But before long, Josef Mengele would be doing far more than simply writing about topics like eugenics and Nazi racial theory.

Josef Mengele’s Early Work With The Nazi Party

Wikimedia Commons Before he worked on horrific experiments at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele thrived as an SS medical officer.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Josef Mengele had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, at the age of 26, while working under his mentor in Frankfurt. In 1938, he joined the SS and a reserve unit of the Wehrmacht. His unit was called up in 1940, and he seems to have served willingly, even volunteering for the Waffen-SS medical service.

Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, Mengele practiced eugenics in Poland by evaluating Polish nationals for potential “Germanization,” or race-based citizenship in the Third Reich.

In 1941, his unit was deployed to Ukraine in a combat role. There, Josef Mengele quickly distinguished himself on the Eastern Front. He was decorated several times, once for dragging wounded men out of a burning tank, and was repeatedly commended for his dedication to service.

But then, in January 1943, a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. And that summer, another German army was eviscerated at Kursk. Between the two battles, during the meatgrinder offensive at Rostov, Mengele was severely wounded and rendered unfit for further action in a combat role.

Mengele was shipped back home to Germany, where he connected with his old mentor von Verschuer and received a wound badge, a promotion to captain, and the assignment that would make him infamous: In May 1943, Mengele reported for duty to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The “Angel Of Death” At Auschwitz

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Yad Vashem Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp of World War II. Over 1 million people died there.

Mengele got to Auschwitz during a transitional period. The camp had long been the site of forced labor and POW internment, but the winter of 1942-1943 had seen the camp ramp up its killing machine , centered on the Birkenau sub-camp, where Mengele was assigned as a medical officer.

With the uprisings and shutdowns in the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, and with the increased tempo of the killing program across the East, Auschwitz was about to get very busy, and Mengele was going to be in the thick of it.

Accounts given later by both survivors and guards describe Josef Mengele as an enthusiastic member of the staff who volunteered for extra duties, managed operations that were technically above his pay grade, and seemed to be almost everywhere at the camp at once. There’s no question that Mengele was in his element in Auschwitz. His uniform was always pressed and neat, and he always seemed to have a faint smile on his face.

Every doctor in his part of the camp was required to take a turn as the selection officer — dividing incoming shipments of prisoners between those who were to work and those who were to be immediately gassed — and many found the work depressing. But Josef Mengele adored this task, and he was always willing to take other doctors’ shifts on the arrival ramp.

Other than determining who would be gassed, Mengele also managed an infirmary where the sick were executed, assisted other German doctors with their tasks, supervised inmate medical staff, and conducted his own research among the thousands of inmates whom he had personally selected for the human experiment program that he also started and managed.

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele often targeted twins for his brutal medical experiments at Auschwitz.

The experiments Josef Mengele devised were ghoulish beyond belief. Motivated and energized by the seemingly bottomless pool of condemned human beings placed at his disposal, Mengele continued the work he had started at Frankfurt by studying the influence of heredity on various physical traits. According to the History Channel , he used thousands of prisoners — many of whom were still children — as fodder for his human experiments.

He favored identical twin children for his genetics research because they, of course, had identical genes. Any differences between them, therefore, must have been the result of environmental factors. In Mengele’s eyes, this made sets of twins the perfect “test subjects” for isolating genetic factors by comparing and contrasting their bodies and their behavior.

Mengele assembled hundreds of pairs of twins and sometimes spent hours measuring various parts of their bodies and taking careful notes on them. He often injected one twin with mysterious substances and monitored the illness that ensued. Mengele also applied painful clamps to children’s limbs to induce gangrene, injected dye into their eyes — which were then shipped back to a pathology lab in Germany — and gave them spinal taps.

Whenever a test subject died, the child’s twin would be immediately killed with an injection of chloroform to the heart and both would be dissected for comparison. On one occasion, Josef Mengele killed 14 pairs of twins this way and spent a sleepless night performing autopsies on his victims.

Josef Mengele’s Volatile Temperament

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele (center) with fellow SS officers Richard Baer and Rudolf Höss outside of Auschwitz in 1944.

For all of his methodical work habits, Mengele could be impulsive. During one selection — between work and death — on the arrival platform, a middle-aged woman who had been selected for work refused to be separated from her 14-year-old daughter, who had been assigned death.

A guard who tried to pry them apart got a nasty scratch on the face and had to fall back. Mengele stepped in to resolve the matter by shooting both the girl and her mother right on the spot. After murdering them, he then cut short the selection process and sent everybody to the gas chamber.

On another occasion, the Birkenau doctors argued over whether a boy they had all grown fond of had tuberculosis. Mengele left the room and came back an hour or two later, apologizing for the argument and admitting that he had been wrong. During his absence, he had shot the boy and then dissected him for signs of the disease, which he hadn’t found.

In 1944, Mengele’s zest and enthusiasm for his gruesome work earned him a management position at the camp. In this capacity, he was responsible for public health measures at the camp in addition to his own personal research at Birkenau. Again, his impulsive streak surfaced when he made decisions for the tens of thousands of vulnerable inmates.

When typhus broke out among the women’s barracks, for example, Mengele solved the problem in his characteristic way: He ordered one block of 600 women gassed and their barracks fumigated, then he moved the next block of women over and fumigated their barracks. This was repeated for each women’s block until the last one was clean and ready for a new shipment of workers. He did it again a few months later during a scarlet fever outbreak.

Yad Vashem/Twitter Josef Mengele, pictured while conducting one of many horrific human experiments.

And through it all, Josef Mengele’s experiments continued, becoming more and more barbaric as time went on. Mengele stitched pairs of twins together at the back, gouged out the eyes of people with different-colored irises, and vivisected children who once knew him as the kindly old “Uncle Papi.”

When a form of gangrene called noma broke out in a Romani camp, Mengele’s absurd focus on race led him to investigate the genetic causes he was sure were behind the epidemic. To study this, he sawed off the heads of infected prisoners and sent the preserved samples to Germany for study.

After most of the Hungarian prisoners were killed off during the summer of 1944, the transports of new prisoners to Auschwitz slowed down during the autumn and the winter and eventually stopped altogether.

By January 1945, the camp complex at Auschwitz had been mostly dismantled and the starving prisoners force-marched to — of all places — Dresden (which was about to be bombed by the Allies). Josef Mengele packed up his research notes and specimens, dropped them off with a trusted friend, and headed west to avoid capture by the Soviets.

A Shocking Escape And An Evasion Of Justice

Wikimedia Commons A photo taken from Josef Mengele’s Argentine identification documents. Circa 1956.

Josef Mengele managed to avoid the victorious Allies until June — when he was picked up by an American patrol. He was traveling under his own name at the time, but the wanted criminal list hadn’t been efficiently distributed and so the Americans let him go. Mengele spent some time working as a farmhand in Bavaria before deciding to escape Germany in 1949.

Using a variety of aliases, and sometimes his own name again, Mengele managed to avoid capture for decades. It helps that almost nobody was looking for him and that the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay were all highly sympathetic to the escaping Nazis who sought refuge there.

Even in exile, and with the world to lose if he got caught, Mengele just couldn’t lay low. In the 1950s, he opened an unlicensed medical practice in Buenos Aires, where he specialized in performing illegal abortions.

This actually got him arrested when one of his patients died, but according to one witness, a friend of his showed up in court with a bulging envelope full of cash for the judge, who subsequently dismissed the case.

Bettmann/Getty Josef Mengele (center, at edge of table), pictured with friends in the 1970s.

Israeli efforts to capture him were diverted, first by the chance to capture SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann , then by the looming threat of war with Egypt, which drew the Mossad’s attention away from fugitive Nazis.

Finally, on February 7, 1979, the 67-year-old Josef Mengele went out for a swim in the Atlantic Ocean, near São Paulo, Brazil. He suffered a sudden stroke in the water and drowned. After Mengele’s death, his friends and family members gradually admitted that they had known all along where he had been hiding and that they had sheltered him from facing justice.

In March 2016, a Brazilian court awarded control over Mengele’s exhumed remains to the University of São Paulo. It was then decided that his remains would be used by student doctors for medical research.

After learning about Josef Mengele and his terrifying human experiments, read about Ilse Koch , the notorious “Bitch of Buchenwald.” Then, meet the men who helped Adolf Hitler rise to power .

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Josef Mengele

While Clauberg and Schumann were busy with experiments designed to develop methods for the biological destruction of people regarded by the Nazis as undesirable, another medical criminal, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D., was researching the issues of twins and the physiology and pathology of dwarfism in close cooperation with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem. He was also interested in people with different colored irises (heterochromia iridii), and in the etiology and treatment of the gangrenous disease of the face known as noma Faciei (cancrum oris, gangrenous stomatitis), a little understood disease endemic to the Roma and Sinti prisoners in Auschwitz.

In the first phase of the experiments, pairs of twins and persons with inherited anomalies were put at the disposal of Dr. Mengele and subjected to all imaginable specialist medical examinations. They were also photographed, plaster casts were made of their jaws and teeth, and they were toe- and fingerprinted. As soon as these examinations were finished, they were killed with lethal injections of phenol to the heart so that the next phase of the experimentation could begin: autopsies and the comparative analysis of their internal organs.

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Josef Mengele

(1911-1979)

An ardent Nazi, In 1943 Josef Mengele was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labor or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”).

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Josef Mengele
• Birth Year: 1911
• Birth date: March 16, 1911
• Birth City: Günzburg
• Birth Country: Germany
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp who selected prisoners for execution in gas chambers and led medical experiments on inmates.
• Science and Medicine
• Astrological Sign: Pisces
• University of Frankfurt am Main
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1979
• Death date: February 7, 1979
• Death City: Enseada da Bertioga
• Death Country: Brazil

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Josef Mengele Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scientists/josef-mengele
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 16, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Josef Mengele

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• The History Learning Site - Biography of Joseph Mengele
• The Holocaust - Josef Mengele
• BBC News - The twins of Auschwitz
• Jewish Virtual Library - Biography of Josef Mengele
• William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History - Mengele's Medical Experiments
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - The professional origins of Dr. Joseph Mengele
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - Biography of Josef Mengele
• Josef Mengele - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Josef Mengele (born March 16, 1911, Günzburg, Germany—died February 7, 1979, Enseada da Bertioga, near São Paulo , Brazil) was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45) who selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies.

Mengele’s father was founder of a company that produced farm machinery , Firma Karl Mengele & Söhne, in the village of Günzburg in Bavaria . Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, coming under the influence of the racial ideology of Alfred Rosenberg , and then took a medical degree at the University of Frankfurt am Main . He enlisted in the Sturmabteilung ( SA ; “Assault Division”) in 1933. An ardent Nazi, he joined the research staff of a newly founded Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1934. During World War II he served as a medical officer with the Waffen- SS (the “armed” component of the Nazi paramilitary corps) in France and Russia. In 1943 he was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labour or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”). His chief interest, however, was research on twins. Mengele’s experiments often resulted in the death of the subject.

After the war, Mengele escaped internment and went underground, serving for four years as a farm stableman near Rosenheim in Bavaria. Then he reportedly escaped, via Genoa , Italy, to South America in 1949. He married (for a second time) under his own name in Uruguay in 1958 and, as “José Mengele,” received citizenship in Paraguay in 1959. In 1961 he apparently moved to Brazil , reportedly becoming friends with an old-time Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard, and living in a succession of houses owned by a Hungarian couple. In 1985 a team of Brazilian, West German, and American forensic experts determined that Mengele had taken Gerhard’s identity, died in 1979 of a stroke while swimming, and was buried under Gerhard’s name. Dental records later confirmed the forensic conclusion.

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Science and Suffering: Victims and Perpetrators of Nazi Human Experimentation

Exhibition Type: Online Exhibition

Introduction

Under the Nazis, medical research supported a new vision for a ‘racially pure’ Europe. Science and Nazi ideology worked together to shape this new world. Nazi policy eroded the legal basis for the protection of individual rights, including control over one’s own body, to promote the body politic  Volkskörper .

Scientists seized the opportunity to advance medical research. They performed cruel and often fatal experiments on thousands of Jews and other ‘undesirables’.

Medical research relied on experimentation. Animals were soon replaced by human beings.

This exhibition examines coerced experimentation in Nazi-dominated Europe. Portraits of victims and perpetrators show how widespread and destructive the experiments were. The exhibition explores the legacy of medical research under Nazism and its  impact on bioethics and research today .  

The exhibition launched on 17 May 2017, and is based on the extensive research of  Professor Paul Weindling , Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. We are grateful to the Wellcome Trust and Wiener Library donors for their support of this exhibition and related programming.

With special thanks to University of Bristol & University of Southampton PhD Candidate Chad MacDonald for adapting this online exhibition.

From Eugenics to Experiments

Guidelines for New Therapy and Human Experimentation, 28 February 1931 [excerpt]

• Experimentation shall be prohibited in all cases where consent has not been given;
• Experimentation involving human subjects shall be avoided if it can be replaced by animal studies…
• Experimentation involving children or young persons under 18 years of age shall be prohibited in if it any way endangers the child…
• Experimentation involving dying subjects is compatible with the principles of medical ethics and shall therefore be prohibited…

The international eugenics movement became popular in the early twentieth century. It intended to promote physical and mental health. Eugenics advanced the idea that some people were ‘genetically superior’. Volunteer blogger Kirsty Dear recently published a post on the international eugenics movement on the Wiener Library blog, entitled Hitler’s Debt to America: The International Eugenics Movement.

Eugenics policies sought to prevent ‘inferior’ individuals from having children, often by forced sterilisation (removal or destruction of reproductive organs). ‘Superior’ individuals and groups were encouraged to have more children to create a more law-abiding, ‘fitter’ population. Eugenics became linked to theories about race. The Nazis absorbed eugenic ideas into their racist platform.

Experimental medicine was on the rise in Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s. Often, researchers experimented on the poor, the mentally and terminally ill, and other vulnerable groups. Nazi Germany invested extensive skilled personnel, equipment and facilities into such experiments.

The German Minister of the Interior’s guidelines on human experimentation were not enforceable by law. Once psychiatric patients and racial ‘inferiors’ lost their status as ‘human subjects’, life and limb were at risk.

Image credit (below centre): American Eugenics Society Records, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, USA. Image credit (below right): Vogel, Alfred. Erblehre, Abstammungs, und Rassenkunde in bildlicher Darstellung. Stuttgart, 1938.

Nazifying Medical Research

Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked – those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different…We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, 1938

The medical field proved vital to the Nazis as they consolidated power and reorganised the German state and society from 1933. The medical profession was ‘co-ordinated’ and Jewish practitioners were purged. Nazi priorities shaped medical ethics, and medicine offered a means of control.

Racial hygiene fixated on ‘cleansing’ the German hereditary stream. In July 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases . This law imposed sterilisation on people deemed to have hereditary illnesses or disabilities. Physicians sterilised those with schizophrenia, Huntington’s chorea and epilepsy, as well as so-called ‘mental defectives,’ chronic alcoholics and the blind and deaf.

The law marked a break with democratic structures of public health provision. The Nazis also targeted for sterilisation groups of ‘mixed race’, Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’), and those showing ‘antisocial behaviour’.

The Nazis pushed for a radicalised research agenda. Ambitious researchers saw new opportunities for coerced experiments. German medical education was oriented toward research and experimentation. German doctors demanded powers to screen, segregate and operate on victims in the name of science.

Image credit (below left): Volk und Rasse, VII, 1936. Image credit (below right): Rechenbuch für Volksschulen:Gaue Westfalen-Nord und -Süd: Ausgabe B für wenig gegliederte Schulen: Heft 5: siebentes und achtes Schuljahr . Edited by Adolf Schiffner. Leipzig: F. Hirt & Sohn Crüwell, 1941.

‘Life Unworthy of Life’ and Brain Research

The Nazis justified the murder of ‘undesirables’ they viewed as a drain on national resources. They targeted infants and children with birth defects as the first victims of their plans for ‘mercy killing’. From 1939 to 1945, medical staff murdered about 10,000 children in special wards created at hospitals and clinics.

After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler ordered the ‘euthanasia’ (or ‘T4’) programme for the ‘incurably ill’. Medical staff selected adult victims, whom they transferred to designated killing centres. There they were gassed.

The launch of the so-called euthanasia programme brought new opportunities for research on patients before they were killed. After medical staff killed the victims, physicians investigated their brains and neural tissue. They wanted to prove links between brain abnormalities and clinical forms of illness.

One was really on one’s own, and totally alone with one’s fears. For any child, this is horrible. And the term “unworthy [of] life” is still ringing in my ears. There is still a sign above my life that says: strictly speaking, you have no right to live. Leopoldine Maier, survivor of the Spiegelgrund clinic.

War, Genocide and ‘Research Opportunity’

As war and the genocide against the Jews and others unfolded, medical research intensified. Medical and racial experts preyed on the blood and bodies of people who came under Nazi rule.

German scientists set out to conquer new frontiers. Professional ambition drove forward ruthless agendas to advance careers. In most cases, medical researchers or industrial interests initiated experiments.

Medical professionals planned experiments, and administrators and funding agencies authorised them. The Reich Research Council and the German Research Fund approved and financed medical research and experiments.

War and occupation provided opportunities to study infectious diseases, immunity and race. Industry, the military and public health agencies supported the experiments in an effort to prevent infections and promote productive labour.

This inhuman Nazi [Claus Schilling] shut me inside a glass cage for two hours daily, and I had to bear thousands of anopheles mosquitoes on my body. When I could bear the pain no longer I [tried] to drive the blood poisoned mosquitoes off…but the doctor…had in a mirror seen my efforts. For that I was put under strict arrest for seven days. Before I was taken away to serve the seven days I received 25 strokes with a bloodstained bull-pizzle covered with leather. Heinz Reimer, survivor of Schilling’s malaria experiments in Dachau.

Industry and Science

Shoe Testing

The longest-running coerced experiments were carried out from June 1940 to February 1945 on a shoe-testing track in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The victims were political prisoners, British prisoners of war, and one Irish prisoner of war.

Inmates had to run up to 40 kilometres per day on the track. They often carried heavy rucksacks. Physicians tested performance-enhancing drugs and stimulants, such as cocaine, on the victims.

The research aimed to benefit civilian and military needs. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research, the German Leather Institute and the Department of Rubber Research tested artificial shoe soles. Shoe factories, such as Salamander, Freudenberg and Fagus, commissioned the tests. Temmler-Werke, a pharmaceutical company, tested the amphetamine Pervitin on the inmates.

Wartime Expansion: Rascher’s Experiments

Sigmund Rascher, an ambitious rising star in medical research, joined the SS in 1939. In 1941, as captain of the Luftwaffe Medical Service, Rascher sought permission to conduct high altitude and low pressure experiments on human beings.

More than 540 Dachau inmates, including Soviet prisoners-of-war and Polish prisoners, were used in the experiments. Luftwaffe medical services, civilian aviation medical researchers, university academics and the SS Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Study of the ‘Aryan’ Race , cooperated in the research.

Rascher conducted another set of deadly experiments on low temperature and freezing, during which he studied the process of death. The freezing experiments tried to recreate conditions for German airmen whose planes had come down at sea.

Rascher killed at least eighty inmates during the experiments. While the Luftwaffe became drawn into experimental research at Dachau, the extent to which it used Rascher’s results remains controversial.

Two warders pushed me to a bathroom. Three doctors and about ten students were already gathered there. After a heart examination I was injected with some red stuff and put into a bath-tub with a thermometer. They switched on a ventilator. I was covered in water all but head and hands. Two of the physicians took my wrists, controlling my pulse and making notes. I was able to describe the agony I felt being completely helpless in the hands of the so unscrupulous tormentors to whom the life of a concentration camp inmate meant less than nothing. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was that a slight ice-covering began to appear on the surface of the water. Iwan Ageew, survivor of freezing experiment in Dachau.

The Ravensbrück ‘Rabbits’

Experiments and resistance.

The ‘Rabbits’ were 74 female inmates of Ravensbrück concentration camp . The women, all Polish political prisoners, endured severe wound experiments between 1942 and 1943. The women were called ‘Rabbits’, the German language equivalent of a test ‘guinea pig’.

Ordered by Heinrich Himmler, the experiments formed part of SS surgeon Dr Karl Gebhardt’s research on treating infected war wounds. Gebhardt and other researchers wanted to test the effectiveness of sulphonamide drugs on war wounds versus traditional surgery.

There were two sets of experiments on treatment war wounds, particularly gangrene, in Ravensbrück and Dachau. Homeopathic treatment was used in Dachau and sulphonamide drugs were tested in Ravensbrück. The physicians used surgery to inflict injuries, rather than as a treatment.

The women protested against their treatment and encouraged other inmates to do the same. They smuggled letters – written in urine – outside the camp. The letters reached the Polish underground and the Polish government-in-exile in London , which published information about the experiments.

We, the undersigned, Polish political prisoners, ask Herr Commander whether he knew that since the year 1942 in the camp hospital experimental operations have taken place…We ask whether we were operated on as a result of sentences passed on us because, as far as we know, international law forbids the performance of operations even on political prisoners. Protest by the ‘Rabbits’ to Ravensbrück commandant Suhren, March 1943

Auschwitz Block 10

‘reproductive’ research.

On the brink of their annihilation, Jews were targeted for experimentation. The arrival of Jews at Birkenau for selections for slave labour or gassing meant that large groups of men, women and children were subjected to experiments.

Professor of Gynaecology Dr Carl Clauberg approached SS chief Heinrich Himmler for research opportunities in Auschwitz. He wanted to devise a surgery-free method to sterilise en masse women deemed ‘unworthy’ of children.

Using more than 500 Jewish women as subjects, Clauberg injected toxic chemicals to seal the Fallopian tubes. He used X-ray machines, developed by Siemens, to sterilise with high X–ray doses. In the process of testing, researchers burned many of the women with radiation. The experiments caused severe pain and sometimes death.

Doctors also carried out racial research in Block 10. They selected some of the women for death so their skeletons could be used for anthropological and ‘racial’ study.

In the final days of the war, Clauberg also conducted experiments on women in Ravensbrück concentration camp. He transferred there as Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and other camps.

Dr Clauberg performed sterilisation experiments on my person without my consent…Clauberg performed his first experiment on me. The sterilisation was done by injection and it was a very large size syringe that was injected subcutaneously into my vagina and a white substance was then injected into me. Most likely this substance was injected into my uterus. The syringe was about 30 cm long. The procedure occurred rather rapidly… Such injections were done to me three times with breaks of 3 to 4 months. After such an injection I had a terrible burning session in my abdomen. Rosalinde de Leon, Witness Testimony for Clauberg’s Trial, 1956.

Mengele and Twin Research

Scientists were eager to examine hereditary pathology, research the German Research Fund supported. SS physician Josef Mengele saw an opportunity to advance his research when he became the doctor in charge of the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring 1943.

At first Mengele focused on therapies for ‘Noma’, a gangrene infection of the mouth. ‘Gypsy’ twins were sought. Mengele collaborated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in the research and killing of eight members of the Sinto family Mechau, because they had different coloured eyes. He selected research subjects for death so that their bodies and organs could be further experimented on.

Mengele improvised a research facility at Auschwitz. He obtained blocks to house twins and dwarves arriving from Hungary in Auschwitz from May 1944. He established a pathological laboratory next to the crematoria in June 1944, and recruited prisoner doctors, anthologists and artists to work with him.

When over 430,000 Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring and summer 1944, his research intensified. He made selections from the streams of people deported to the camp as material of scientific interest.

Most of the Hungarian twin experiment victims were children aged between one-and-a-half and thirteen years. Between 650 and 732 Jewish twins were experimented on.

Mengele and his assistants X-rayed, photographed and drew pictures of them. They conducted hearing and eye tests. They extracted blood and brain fluid. The tests were painful and humiliating. Mengele selected certain twins for murder and some did not survive.

One day at midnight SS officers woke us and led us to the dissecting room, where Dr Mengele was already waiting for us…There were 14 Gypsy twins under SS guard, sobbing bitterly. Without saying a word, Dr. Mengele prepared a…syringe. From a box he took out Evipan, from another he placed chloroform in…vials on a table. Then the first twin was brought in, a young girl of around fourteen. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress her and place her on the autopsy table. Then he administered an intravenous injection of Evipan in the right arm. After the child lost consciousness, he touched for the left heart ventricle and injected 10 cm3 of chloroform. The child was dead after a single convulsion and Dr. Mengele had her taken to the morgue. The murder of all fourteen twins happened in the same way that night. Dr. Mengele asked us if we could perform…autopsies. Deposition of prisoner Dr Miklós Nyiszli, July 1945.

Image credit (below left): USHMM, courtesy of Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme. Image credit (below centre): USHMM archive, courtesy of Yehudit Csengeri Barnea. Image credit (below right): USHMM archive, courtesy of Belarusian State.

Legacies of Nazi Medical Research

German scientists viewed coerced experiments as a benefit to the war effort, to science, and ‘racial purity’. More than 15,000 people, but possibly up to about 27,000, were experimented on during the Nazi period. This includes between 3,166 and 3,991 Jews. Research on identifying victims and their fates is still ongoing. The legacy of the experiments persists.

An American military tribunal held proceedings against 23 German physicians and administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Medical Trial opened on 9 December 1946. It was part of the subsequent Nuremberg trials.

The verdict was announced on 29 August 1947: 16 doctors were found guilty, with 7 sentenced to death. The Medical Case was the only Nuremberg Trial to end with a set of judicial guidelines: the  Nuremberg Code . The Code outlined conditions for ‘permissible medical experiments’ involving voluntary consent of research subjects.

Some medical staff of the ‘euthanasia’ centres were also tried after the war. Out of 265 known perpetrators, 9 died or were killed during the Second World War. 72 were tried after the war (25 were executed, 4 served life imprisonment, 31 were convicted to varying prison terms and 12 were acquitted). 125 evaded justice, 20 committed suicide, while the post-war fate of 39 is not known.

Surviving Victims and Compensation

Coerced experiments caused permanent disabilities, infertility, incapacity and death. Those who survived were forever marked by their experiences. While some survivors recovered, many lives never returned to normality.

In July 1951, the German government offered compensation to victims of medical experiments under National Socialism.  Most victims received 3,000 marks or less as a single payment . Rather than compensate pain and suffering, the Federal Finance Ministry calculated loss of earning capacity. This meant that X-ray sterilisation victims, including many women who did not work outside the home, received only minimal compensation, or none at all.

Officials refused to compensate twins experimented on by Mengele until after Mengele’s death, arguing that a ‘twin experiment’ was not a medical experiment. Eventually, meagre sums were disbursed. Matters improved when Poland and Hungary requested adjudication by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Sums between 30,000 and 50,000 marks were awarded to victims in Eastern Europe.

The United Kingdom’s Foreign Office did not support claimants or negotiate for additional compensation for experiment victims who resided in the UK. Many victims were thus never monetarily compensated, even minimally, for their suffering.

Research uses and human remains

The scientific usefulness of research results gained from Nazi human experimentation remains meagre. Yet the extended use of victims’ remains has not been fully clarified.

For instance, Dr Heinrich Gross, who conducted research on and selected children for ‘euthanasia’ in the  Spiegelgrund clinic  in Vienna, carried on with his research after the war. He became a celebrated forensic psychiatrist until he was stripped of the Austrian Medal for Science in 2003.  

Slides of brain tissue prepared by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society’s Julius Hallervorden were uncovered at the  Max Planck Society  (the successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) in the 1980s. In 2015, concern arose over brain tissues, some from ‘euthanasia’ victims, stored in the Max Planck Society archives. In 2016, the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry recognised that it has brain specimens from ‘euthanasia’ victims in its collections. The victims will be commemorated by name and their body parts given dignified burial.

The medical and scientific elite rarely confronted the destruction caused by their field during the Nazi period.

In 2012, the  German Medical Assembly  apologised for the role of German medical practitioners in coerced sterilisation, ‘euthanasia’ and experiments under Nazism. In 2017, the Max Planck Society opened its archival collections for research on its history of unethical, coerced research.

Today bioethics, research, and some medical practices remain controversial and contested. Debates surround abortion, stem cell research, assisted suicide, end of life care, the role of pharmaceutical companies, and genetically engineered births.

How can the past frame our understanding of these debates – and the consequences of our choices – today?

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• The Scope of Urology Newsletter
• Issue 1 - Spring 2020
• Mengele's Experiments

BATTLEFIELD UROLOGY TALK PREVIEW

Mengele's medical experiments.

Before the war, Josef Mengele had received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service and assigned to Auschwitz in May 1943; there he saw the opportunity to conduct medical research on human subjects. His experiments focused primarily on twins, with little or no regard for the health or safety of the victims.

Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele frequently assumed an enthusiastic posture on the railroad platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as trainloads of captives arrived from across German-occupied Europe. Pointing in one direction, the SS-physician sent the healthiest prisoners to factory work as slave laborers; pointing in the opposite direction, he sent countless women, children, the frail and the elderly to die in gas chambers and be cremated.

The entrance to Auschwitz, taken in 2014.

A third group, primarily twin children, who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments, were delivered to well-supplied barracks where Mengele conducted grisly and often fatal surgical experiments in a pseudoscientific quest to uncover the secrets of genetics. Mengele’s mocking smile and soft but deadly touch earned him the title “The Angel of Death”. Dr. Olga Lengyel, a prisoner at the concentration camp, revealed that Mengele supervised the birth of a child with meticulous care. Within an hour, mother and child were sent to the gas chamber. Dr. Gisela Perl, a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist, described the aftermath of one brutal killing by Mengele. “He took a piece of perfumed soap out of his bag and, whistling gaily with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face, he began to wash his hands”. One witness described how Josef Mengele ripped an infant from its mother`s womb, then hurled it into an oven because it wasn`t a twin as he had hoped. A third witness recounted how Mengele kept hundreds of human eyes pinned to his lab wall ''like a collection of butterflies”.

Mengele was fascinated with twins. He was interested in differences between identical and fraternal twins as well as how genetic diseases originated and affected them. His experiments also distinguished between genetic traits and those developed by the environment of the child. He operated on children to find genetic weaknesses in the makeup of Jewish or Gypsy people, thereby providing scientific evidence for the ideas of the Nazi party. Mengele hypothesized that his subjects were particularly vulnerable to certain diseases because of their race, and that they had degenerative blood and tissue.

Young prisoners held at a Nazi concentration camp.

Mengele or one of his assistants subjected twins to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes. He performed experiments such as unnecessary amputation of limbs. He intentionally infected a twin with typhus or another disease and transfused the blood of the infected twin into the other. Many of his subjects died while undergoing these procedures. After an experiment was complete, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner doctor at Auschwitz, recalled one occasion where Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night through a chloroform injection to the heart. If one twin died of disease, Mengele killed the other so that comparative reports could be prepared after death.

He was known for experimenting with eyes. One of his studies regarded heterochromia iridum , a condition in which people's eyes are differently colored. After he killed heterochromatics, Mengele removed their eyes and sent them for study to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Genetics in Berlin under the helm of Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler. Mengele also attempted to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects.

His experiments on dwarfs and people with physical abnormalities included taking physical measurements, drawing blood, extracting healthy teeth, and treatment with unnecessary drugs and X-rays. Many of the victims were sent to the gas chambers after about two weeks, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin for further study.

Mengele firmly endorsed Nazi racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments aiming to illustrate the susceptibility among Jews or Gypsies to various diseases. He attempted to demonstrate the “degeneration” of Jewish and Gypsy blood through the documentation of physical oddities and the collection and harvesting of tissue samples and body parts. Many of his “test subjects” died as a result of the experimentation or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination. Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two Gypsy twins together back-to-back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. The children died of gangrene after several days of suffering.

Mengele was also interested in the etiology and treatment of noma (a form of gangrene affecting the face, usually caused by a bacterial infection and typically occurring in young children suffering from malnutrition or other disease). This latter disease, widespread in Mengele’s “Gypsy Family Camp”, had been previously almost unknown in Europe. Mengele’s first experimental subjects were Gypsy children.

On Mengele's orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria.

In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toe prints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy.

Although gynecology was not his specialty, Mengele conducted experiments on pregnant women. He had them infected with typhoid in order to determine whether their children would be born with the infection too.

Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Theresienstadt (Nazi ghetto located in Czechoslovakia) to Auschwitz. She said, “I delivered a beautiful big blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, “We can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food”. After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female Czech doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child’s agony.

Forced sterilization experiments by means of X-ray, surgery and various drugs were also conducted at Auschwitz. The targets for sterilization included Jewish and Gypsy prisoners. The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization, which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort.

On the night of January 17, 1945, as the Soviet army approached Poland from the east, Mengele left Auschwitz, salvaging what records he could from his experiments on twins, cripples and dwarfs. From that night, he never stopped running. He fled westward, where he joined a retreating unit of Wehrmacht soldiers, exchanging his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht officer’s. American soldiers arrested him in Weiden, Germany, more than 400 miles west of Auschwitz, and held him for two months in two prisoner camps. But the Americans released Mengele when they failed to identify him as the same Josef Mengele listed on “wanted for mass murder and other crimes” circulars compiled by the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Allied High Commission in Paris. For that, he had his vanity to thank. It was Mengele’s decision not to have his blood group tattooed on his chest or arm when he joined the SS in 1938 that clinched his freedom.

Josef Mengele's skull, used to identify his body.

With luck, assistance from his prosperous family and a network of friends, he evaded recapture and fled to South America (Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil). In February 1979, aged 67, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried in Embu on the outskirts of São Paulo under the fictive name of Wolfgang Gerhard . His body was exhumed in 1985. An American scientist, Lowell Levine, a forensic scientologist brought to Brazil to work on the skull – one of dozens of experts assembled for the task – declared, “There is absolutely no doubt at all that this is Josef Mengele.”

Josef Mengele was dead. Four decades after World War II ended, there was still a clear message in 1985: The horrors inflicted by the Nazis SS Hauptsturmführer doctor had not been forgotten nor dismissed as acceptable wartime behavior.

Erwin W. Rugendorff, MD, PhD

Olga Lengyel: Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz. Chicago Review Press, Incorporated,2005 John Martin: In Evil Footsteps. World War II, October 2019, PP 26 – 37 David G. Marvel: Mengele – Unmasking the “Angel of Death”. W.W. Norton & Company, 2020 Eva Moses Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri: Surviving the Angel of Death. Tanglewood. Terre Haute. IN, 2009 Miklós Nyiszli: I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. Translated from Polish by Witold Zbirohowski-Koṥcia, 2010 Gerald L. Posner and John Ware: Mengele: The Complete Story. Cooer Square Press, 2000 Wikipedia: Josef Mengele

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True Story Behind Human Centipede – Nazi Camp Experiments

Lesson introduction.

The lesson explores the disturbing origins of the film *The Human Centipede*, which draws inspiration from the real-life atrocities committed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known for his inhumane experiments on twins and individuals with physical abnormalities during the Holocaust. It emphasizes the importance of ethical standards in medical research, highlighting the need for strict guidelines to protect human rights and dignity, and serves as a reminder of the potential for scientific advancement to be misused. The legacy of Mengele’s actions and the broader context of unethical experimentation underscore the critical lessons we must learn from history to prevent future atrocities.

Lesson Article

The film The Human Centipede is often regarded as one of the most unsettling horror movies ever made. Renowned critic Roger Ebert was so disturbed by it that he refused to give it a star rating, stating, “I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” The movie centers around a chilling premise: a deranged doctor kidnaps unsuspecting tourists and surgically connects them in a grotesque manner to unify their digestive systems, creating what he calls a human centipede.

The Origins of a Disturbing Concept

The idea for the film came from a conversation between director Tom Six and a friend about potential punishments for the most heinous criminals. However, the primary inspiration for the film’s mad doctor character, Dr. Josef Heiter, was drawn from one of history’s most notorious figures: Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Mengele’s real-life actions were far more horrifying than the film’s fiction.

Josef Mengele: The “Angel of Death”

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Germany. He earned his PhD in physical anthropology in 1935 and joined the Nazi Party in 1938. Mengele’s beliefs in racial science led him to participate in the selection process at Auschwitz, where he decided who would live and who would die. He became infamously known as the “Angel of Death” due to his role in these selections and his involvement in inhumane medical experiments.

Experiments on Twins

Mengele’s experiments often focused on twins, whom he saw as ideal subjects for studying genetic traits. He conducted various unethical and painful procedures on them, including blood transfusions between twins, spinal taps without anesthesia, and deliberately infecting one twin with diseases to study the effects. Many of his subjects suffered immensely, and the experiments often resulted in death.

Survivors of Mengele’s experiments have recounted their harrowing experiences. One survivor, Eva Mozes Kor, described being subjected to painful examinations and experiments alongside her sister. Mengele’s extreme cruelty included sewing twins together and conducting other horrific surgeries without anesthesia.

Targeting Physical Abnormalities

Mengele also targeted individuals with physical abnormalities, conducting painful tests and ultimately sending many to their deaths. Despite his heinous actions, he managed to evade capture after the war, living under assumed identities in South America until his death in 1979.

Justice and Ethical Reflections

While Mengele escaped justice, other Nazi doctors were held accountable for their crimes during the Nuremberg Trials. Many were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with some receiving the death penalty for their actions.

The legacy of unethical human experimentation extends beyond Nazi Germany. In the United States, various unethical medical experiments were conducted on marginalized groups, including prisoners and mental patients, often without consent. These actions highlight the potential for individuals to commit atrocities under the guise of scientific advancement, raising important ethical questions about medical research and human rights.

Learning from the Past

The story of Josef Mengele and the unethical experiments conducted during the Nazi era serve as a stark reminder of the importance of ethical standards in medical research. It underscores the need for strict ethical guidelines and oversight to protect human rights and dignity in scientific endeavors. As we advance in science and medicine, it is crucial to remember these lessons from history to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated.

Lesson Vocabulary

History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – The professor emphasized the importance of understanding history to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Psychology – The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context. – In her psychology class, she learned about the cognitive processes that influence decision-making.

Experiments – Scientific procedures undertaken to test a hypothesis, discover something unknown, or demonstrate a known fact. – The experiments conducted by early psychologists laid the groundwork for modern theories of human behavior.

Ethics – Moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. – The ethics of psychological research require that participants give informed consent before taking part in a study.

Trauma – A deeply distressing or disturbing experience, often with long-lasting psychological effects. – The course on trauma and recovery explored how historical events can impact collective memory and identity.

Justice – The quality of being fair and reasonable, often in the context of law and society. – The history seminar focused on the evolution of justice systems across different civilizations.

Racism – Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. – The psychology lecture addressed how racism can affect mental health and societal structures.

Humanity – The human race; human beings collectively, often considered as a whole. – The history of humanity is marked by both remarkable achievements and devastating conflicts.

Research – The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. – Her research in social psychology provided new insights into group dynamics and behavior.

Survival – The state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an ordeal or difficult circumstances. – The documentary explored the survival strategies of communities during historical famines.

Discussion Questions

• How did the article change your perception of the film “The Human Centipede” and its underlying themes?
• What emotions did you experience while reading about Josef Mengele’s experiments, and how do they influence your understanding of historical atrocities?
• In what ways do you think the portrayal of real-life figures like Josef Mengele in media can impact public awareness and historical memory?
• How do the ethical violations discussed in the article inform your views on current medical research practices and the importance of ethical guidelines?
• What lessons do you believe society should learn from the history of unethical human experimentation, as highlighted in the article?
• How can stories like those of Mengele’s victims contribute to contemporary discussions about human rights and medical ethics?
• Reflect on the role of accountability and justice in addressing past atrocities. How important is it for society to pursue justice for historical crimes?
• How do you think the legacy of unethical experiments during the Nazi era influences current debates on scientific responsibility and human dignity?

Lesson Activities

Research and presentation on ethical guidelines in medical research.

Research the current ethical guidelines that govern medical research, such as the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report. Prepare a presentation that outlines these guidelines and discusses their importance in preventing unethical practices like those conducted by Josef Mengele. Present your findings to the class and facilitate a discussion on how these guidelines are applied in modern research.

Case Study Analysis: The Nuremberg Trials

Analyze the Nuremberg Trials, focusing on the prosecution of Nazi doctors. Write a report that examines the charges, the defense arguments, and the outcomes of the trials. Reflect on how these trials have influenced international law and medical ethics. Share your analysis with your peers and discuss the lasting impact of these trials on contemporary ethical standards.

Debate: Balancing Scientific Advancement and Ethical Responsibility

Participate in a debate on the topic: “Is it ever justifiable to compromise ethical standards for the sake of scientific advancement?” Prepare arguments for both sides and engage in a structured debate with your classmates. After the debate, reflect on the challenges of balancing scientific progress with ethical responsibility and write a short essay summarizing your thoughts.

Interview Project: Survivors and Their Stories

Conduct interviews with individuals who have experienced unethical medical practices or who have family members affected by such practices. Document their stories and create a multimedia presentation that highlights their experiences and the lessons learned. Share your project with the class to foster empathy and understanding of the human impact of unethical research.

Workshop: Developing Ethical Research Proposals

Participate in a workshop where you will develop a research proposal on a topic of your choice. Work in groups to ensure that your proposal adheres to ethical guidelines and includes measures to protect participants’ rights and well-being. Present your proposal to the class and receive feedback on its ethical considerations and feasibility.

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Watch CBS News

From the 60 Minutes archives: Survivors of Josef Mengele's twin experiments

By Brit McCandless Farmer

March 27, 2022 / 7:17 PM EDT / CBS News

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl reports on an innovative project that uses artificial intelligence technology to allow people to talk with Holocaust survivors, even after their death. 

For Stahl, it meant continuing a conversation she started with a survivor three decades ago.

• Speaking with Holocaust survivors who've died
• How a father's final message motivated a Holocaust survivor to record his memories

This high-tech initiative is a project of the USC Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization created to collect testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other instances of genocide. The organization has interviewed nearly 55,000 Holocaust survivors so far, and their new project aims to go a step further.  

The project's creators film lengthy interviews with Holocaust survivors, then enter all the recorded answers into a database. When a person asks a spoken question, voice recognition technology identifies what the person is asking, then artificial intelligence identifies the best answer to the question and pulls up the video of that response. The resulting exchanges feel like real conversations.     "I wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor like I would today, with that person sitting right in front of me and we were having a conversation," the project's co-creator, Heather Maio, told Stahl on the broadcast.   Stahl used the technology for something never before seen on 60 Minutes: She interviewed people who are no longer alive. One of the survivors she digitally spoke with was Eva Kor, an identical twin who survived the brutal experiments of Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. 

Kor died in July 2019 at the age of 85, yet there she was, in a life-like projection, willing to answer Stahl's questions — even her recollections of Mengele: "When I looked into his eyes, I could see nothing but evil," the digital Kor told Stahl. "People say that the eyes are the center of the soul, and in Mengele's case, that was correct."

It was not the first time Stahl had spoken with Kor. In 1992, 60 Minutes reported on Mengele's twin experiments, and Stahl interviewed the living Kor at her home in Terre Haute, Indiana. At the time, Kor recalled how her twin sister, Miriam, helped sustain her life at Auschwitz.

"I was continuously fainting out of hunger; even after, I survived," Kor said. "Yet Miriam saved her bread for one whole week. Now can you imagine what willpower does it take?"

Kor told Stahl it had taken her 40 years before she was able to speak with her sister about the atrocities they experienced at Auschwitz. Now with the USC Shoah Foundation's innovative new project, people will be able to ask her about it for decades to come. 

To watch Lesley Stahl's 60 Minutes report "Talking to the Past," click here.

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Dr. Josef Mengele, the cruel staff doctor at Auschwitz death camp, acquired a certain legendary quality even before his death in 1979. His gruesome experiments on helpless inmates are the stuff of nightmares and he is considered by some to be among the vilest men in modern history. That this notorious Nazi doctor evaded capture for decades in South America only added to the growing mythology. What is the truth about the twisted man known to history as the “Angel of Death?”

The Mengele Family Was Wealthy

Josef’s father Karl was an industrialist whose company produced farm machinery. The company prospered and the Mengele family was considered well-to-do in prewar Germany. Later, when Josef was on the run, Karl’s money, prestige, and influence would greatly help his son escape from Germany and establish himself in Argentina.

Mengele Was a Brilliant Academic

Josef earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935 at the age of 24. He followed this by working in genetics with some of the leading medical minds of Germany at the time, and he earned a second, medical doctorate with honors in 1938. He studied genetic traits such as cleft palates and his fascination with twins as experiment subjects was already growing.

Mengele Was a War Hero

Mengele was a dedicated Nazi and joined the SS around the same time he earned his medical degree. When World War II broke out, he was sent to the eastern front as an officer to fight the Soviets. He earned an Iron Cross Second Class for bravery in combat in Ukraine in 1941. In 1942, he saved two German soldiers from a burning tank. This action earned him the Iron Cross First Class and a handful of other medals. Wounded in action, he was declared unfit for active duty and sent back to Germany.

He Was Not in Charge of Auschwitz

One common misconception of Mengele is that he was in charge of the Auschwitz death camp . This is not the case. He was actually one of several SS doctors assigned there. He had a great deal of autonomy there, however, because he was working under a sort of grant given to him by the government to study genetics and diseases. His status as a war hero and prestigious academic also gave him a stature not shared by the other doctors. When it was all put together, Mengele had a great deal of freedom to conduct his ghoulish experiments as he saw fit.

His Experiments Were the Stuff of Nightmares

At Auschwitz , Mengele was given absolute freedom to conduct his experiments on the Jewish inmates, who were all slated to die anyway. His grisly experiments were notoriously cruel and callous and utterly inhuman in their scope. He injected dye into the eyeballs of inmates to see if he could change their color. He deliberately infected inmates with horrible diseases to document their progress. He injected substances such as gasoline into the inmates, condemning them to a painful death, just to watch the process.

He liked to experiment on sets of twins and always separated them from the incoming train cars, saving them from immediate death in the gas chambers but keeping them for a fate which was, in some cases, far worse.

More than 70 medical research projects were undertaken in Nazi concentration camps between 1839 and 1945.

His Nickname Was the "Angel of Death"

One of the more distasteful duties of the doctors at Auschwitz was standing on the platforms to meet the incoming trains. There, the doctors would divide the incoming Jews into those who would form labor gangs and those who would proceed immediately to the death chambers. Most of the Auschwitz doctors hated this duty and some even had to get drunk in order to do it.

Not Josef Mengele. By all accounts, he enjoyed it, putting on his best uniform and even meeting trains when he wasn’t scheduled to do so. Because of his good looks, snappy uniform and obvious enjoyment of this horrible task, he was nicknamed “the Angel of Death.”

Based on historical and documentary evidence, a total of 15,754 people were killed in the course of Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz. People who survived the experiments number at least 20,000, and they were often seriously disabled and handicapped for the remainder of their lives. 

Mengele Escaped to Argentina

In 1945, as the Soviets moved eastward, it became apparent that the Germans would be defeated. By the time Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945, Dr. Mengele and the other SS officers were long gone. He hid out in Germany for a while, finding work as a farm laborer under an assumed name. It wasn’t long before his name began appearing on lists of most-wanted war criminals and in 1949 he decided to follow many of his fellow Nazis to Argentina. He was put in contact with Argentine agents, who aided him with necessary papers and permits.

At First, His Life in Argentina Wasn't Bad

Mengele found a warm reception in Argentina. Many former Nazis and old friends were there, and the Juan Domingo Perón regime was friendly to them. Mengele even met President Perón on more than one occasion. Josef's father Karl had business contacts in Argentina, and Josef found that his father's prestige rubbed off on him a bit (his father's money didn't hurt, either). He moved in high circles and although he often used an assumed name, everyone in the Argentine-German community knew who he was. It was only after Perón was deposed and his father died that Josef was forced to go back underground.

He Was the World's Most-Wanted Nazi

Most of the most notorious Nazis had been captured by the Allies and were tried at the Nuremberg Trials. Twenty-three physician and non-physician defendants were tried at Nuremberg for their roles in the experiments. Seven were acquitted, seven were executed, and the rest received prison sentences. 

Many mid-level Nazis escaped and with them a handful of serious war criminals. After the war, Jewish Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal began tracking these men down in order to bring them to justice. By 1950, two names were at the top of every Nazi hunter's wish list: Mengele and Adolf Eichmann , the bureaucrat who had overseen the logistics of sending millions to their deaths. Eichmann was snatched off a Buenos Aires street by a team of Mossad agents in 1960. The team had been actively looking for Mengele, too. Once Eichmann was tried and hanged, Mengele stood alone as the most-wanted former Nazi.

His Life Was Nothing Like the Legends

Because this murderous Nazi had evaded capture for so long, a legend grew around him. There were unconfirmed Mengele sightings everywhere from Argentina to Peru and several innocent men with a passing resemblance to the fugitive were harassed or questioned. According to some, he was hiding in a jungle laboratory in Paraguay, under the protection of President Alfredo Stroessner, surrounded by former Nazi colleagues and bodyguards, perfecting his idea of the master race.

The truth was completely different. He lived his final years in poverty, moving around in Paraguay and Brazil, staying with isolated families where he frequently wore out his welcome due to his acrimonious nature. He was helped by his family and an ever-dwindling circle of Nazi friends. He became paranoid, convinced that the Israelis were hot on his trail, and the stress greatly affected his health. He was a lonely, bitter man whose heart was still filled with hatred. He died in a swimming accident in Brazil in 1979.

Discovering Mengele

In 1979, a man drowned in a swimming accident and was buried under the name of the deceased Austrian Wolfgang Gerhard in the cemetery of Nossa Senhora do Rosario at Embu in southern Brazil. Acting on information that he was, in fact, Josef Mengele, forensic anthropologists exhumed the body in 1985; forensic pathological analysis of the dental records and skeletal features led the team to conclude that the body was Mengele's beyond a reasonable doubt. 

However, the Israeli police cast doubt on the investigations, noting inconsistencies in the testimony of the witnesses and the presence of fractures which did not match Mengele's historical records. DNA investigations of the skeleton's remains were compared to DNA from living relatives—Mengele's son was still alive at the time and blood samples were drawn from him. That provided additional supporting evidence that the exhumed remains were Mengele's. 

Identifying Mengele's remains was one of the earliest uses of the process of forensic identification in the prosecution of war crimes. 

• Craig, Anne L., and Sukumar P. Desai. " Human Medical Experimentation with Extreme Prejudice: Lessons from the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg. " Journal of Anesthesia History 1.3 (2015): 64–69. Print.
• Helmer, R. "Identification of the Cadaver Remains of Josef Mengele ." Journal of Forensic Sciences 32.6 (1987): 1622–44. Print.
• Jeffreys, Alec J., et al. " Identification of the Skeletal Remains of Josef Mengele by DNA Analysis ." Forensic Science International 56.1 (1992): 65–76. Print.
• Keenan, Thomas, and Eyal Weizman. "Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics." Berlin: Sternberg and Portikus, 2012. 
• Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Dekel, Sheila C. "Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz." New York: William Morrow, 1991
• Weindling, Paul, et al. " The Victims of Unethical Human Experiments and Coerced Research under National Socialism ." Endeavour 40.1 (2016): 1–6. Print.
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Nazi Medical Experiments - Photograph

This content is available in the following languages, nazi physician carl clauberg (left).

Nazi physician Carl Clauberg (at left), who performed medical experiments on prisoners in Block 10 of the Auschwitz camp. Poland, between 1941 and 1944.

Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical experiments

A Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical experiments to make seawater safe to drink. Dachau concentration camp, Germany, 1944.

Nazi doctor Victor Brack on trial

Victor Brack, one of the Nazi doctors on trial for having conducted medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Nuremberg, Germany, August 1947.

Sentencing of Herta Oberheuser

Herta Oberheuser was a physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. This photograph shows her being sentenced at the Doctors Trial in Nuremberg. Oberheuser was found guilty of performing medical experiments on camp inmates and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Nuremberg, Germany, August 20, 1947.

Waldemar Hoven, head SS doctor at Buchenwald

Waldemar Hoven, head SS doctor at the Buchenwald concentration camp, testifies in his own defense at the Doctors Trial . Hoven conducted medical experiments on prisoners. Nuremberg, Germany, June 23, 1947.

Jadwiga Dzido testifies at the Doctors Trial

Concentration camp survivor Jadwiga Dzido shows her scarred leg to the Nuremberg court, while an expert medical witness explains the nature of the procedures inflicted on her in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on November 22, 1942. The experiments , including injections of highly potent bacteria, were performed by defendants Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Ernst Fischer. December 20, 1946.

Wladislava Karolewska testifies at the Doctors Trial

Wladislava Karolewska, a victim of medical experiments at the Ravensbrück camp, was one of four Polish women who appeared as prosecution witnesses at the Doctors Trial . Nuremberg, Germany, December 22, 1946.

Arriving in Nuremberg to testify

Four Polish women arrive at the Nuremberg train station to serve as prosecution witnesses at the Doctors Trial . From left to right are Jadwiga Dzido , Maria Broel-Plater, Maria Kusmierczuk, and Wladislawa Karolewska . December 15, 1946.

A witness testifies about the murder of Catholic priests at Dachau

Friedrich Hoffman, holding a stack of death records, testifies about the murder of 324 Catholic priests who were exposed to malaria during Nazi medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, November 22, 1945.

Nazi physician Carl Clauberg

Nazi physician Carl Clauberg, who performed medical experiments on prisoners in Block 10 of the Auschwitz camp. Place and date uncertain.

Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele , German physician and SS captain.  He was the most prominent of a group of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments that often caused great harm or death to the prisoners.  In November 1943 Mengele became "Chief Camp Physician" of Auschwitz II (Birkenau).  Many of those subjected to Mengele's experiments died as a result or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination. 

11-year-old girl who was a victim of medical experiments at Auschwitz

United Nations personnel vaccinate an 11-year-old concentration camp survivor who was a victim of medical experiments at the Auschwitz camp. Photograph taken in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp , Germany, May 1946.

Soviet soldiers inspect a box containing poison

Soviet soldiers inspect a box containing poison used in medical experiments . Auschwitz , Poland, after January 27, 1945.

Survivor Helena Hegier's disfigured leg

A war crimes investigation photo of the disfigured leg of a survivor from Ravensbrück, Polish political prisoner Helena Hegier (Rafalska), who was subjected to medical experiments in 1942. This photograph was entered as evidence for the prosecution at the Medical Trial in Nuremberg. The disfiguring scars resulted from incisions made by medical personnel that were purposely infected with bacteria, dirt, and slivers of glass.

Victim of medical experiments at Neuengamme

A Soviet prisoner of war, victim of a tuberculosis medical experiment at Neuengamme concentration camp. Germany, late 1944.

A victim of a Nazi medical experiment

A victim of a Nazi medical experiment is immersed in icy water at the Dachau concentration camp. SS doctor Sigmund Rascher oversees the experiment. Germany, 1942.

Eduard, Elisabeth, and Alexander Hornemann

Eduard, Elisabeth, and Alexander Hornemann. The boys, victims of tuberculosis medical experiments at Neuengamme concentration camp, were murdered shortly before liberation. Elisabeth died of typhus in Auschwitz . The Netherlands, prewar.

Seven-year-old Jacqueline Morgenstern

Photograph of seven-year-old Jacqueline Morgenstern in Paris, France, 1940. Jacqueline was later a victim of tuberculosis medical experiments at the  Neuengamme concentration camp. The SS took 20 of the children who had been victims of medical experiments at Neuengamme to a school building in Hamburg. Situated on Bullenhuser Damm, this location was a subcamp of Neuengamme. Jacqueline and the other children in the group (10 boys and 10 girls, all Jewish) were killed there.

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Mengele at Auschwitz: Reconstructing the Twins

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How many twins did SS doctor Josef Mengele collect for his research and who were they? The evidence from Auschwitz and a range of post-war sources support estimates of around 700 children who were mostly twins. The two largest groups of twins―Czechoslovak and Hungarian―indicate that Mengele’s twin research occurred from 1944 rather than from his arrival in Auschwitz on 30 May 1943. There is evidence of stockpiling of twins from early March 1944 and for research commencing in June 1944. This evidence contradicts the claim of the geneticist Benno Müller-Hill that hereditary research began shortly after Mengele’s arrival in Auschwitz, or that the research was fully funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or indeed any SS research agency. The prisoner pathologist Miklós Nyiszli provided details as regards the dispatching of body parts. The evidence indicates that Mengele improvised a prisoner research staff and the holding of the twins. Sinti and Roma twins were killed, as well as selected Jewish twins. The cessation of the research occurred in December 1944, when the remaining Jewish twins were allowed to live for unclear reasons.

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Experimenting in the Biosocial: The Strange Case of Twin Research

Bioethics, population studies, and geneticophobia

Biology and Genetics of Dizygotic and Monozygotic Twinning

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Weindling, P. (2020). Mengele at Auschwitz: Reconstructing the Twins. In: Bardgett, S., Schmidt, C., Stone, D. (eds) Beyond Camps and Forced Labour. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56391-2_2

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10 Facts About Josef Mengele

04 Aug 2022

Dubbed the “Angel of Death” by its inmates and survivors, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is infamous for his actions and cruel medical experiments as chief physician at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp that almost beggar belief.

Whilst other camp physicians carried out experiments, Mengele is known to have particularly revelled in the opportunities and power that Auschwitz presented him. His subsequent postwar escape, prolonged successful evasion from capture and ultimate elusion of justice have further reinforced his evil notoriety.

Here are 10 facts about Josef Mengele.

1. Mengele’s early work focused on cleft palates

After gaining a medical degree, Mengele trained as a physical anthropologist, and in 1933 worked in Munich under anthropologist Theodor Mollison. Following his subsequent PhD in anthropology, Mengele joined the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1937 – a research body closely aligned with Nazi ideology . Here he worked for Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist interested in researching twins.

Like his mentor, Mengele was vehemently racist and a devoted Nazi Party member. Mengele focused on the heritability and genetic factors that result in a cleft lip and palate. This curiosity about fixing genetic anomalies reinforced Nazi legislation requiring the sterilisation of Germans with genetic disorders, and Mengele was soon considered an expert consultant on racial types .

2. He received the Iron Cross twice

When war broke-out, Mengele was a medical officer in the Waffen SS. In June 1941, he was posted to Ukraine and awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. He then joined the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking as a battalion medical officer. After rescuing two German soldiers from a burning tank, he received the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Wound Badge in Black, and the Medal for the Care of the German People.

Seriously wounded in action, in 1942 Mengele was declared unfit for further active service. He resumed his association with von Verschauer, who encouraged him to transfer to the concentration camp service. In May 1943, Himmler posted Mengele to Auschwitz .

3. Mengele wasn’t the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz

Mengele worked under the jurisdiction of SS captain Dr Eduard Wirths – his actual rank was chief physician of the Romani family camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), a sub-camp located on the main Auschwitz complex.

It was only after 1944 when the remaining population of the Roma camp were sent to the gas chambers that Mengele was promoted to first physician of the entire Birkenau sub-camp.

Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, and Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, 1944

Image Credit: Bernhard Walther or Ernst Hofmann or Karl-Friedrich Höcker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

4. He conducted medical experiments on prisoners

Eager to advance his medical career by publishing ‘groundbreaking’ work, Mengele began experimenting on live prisoners, including exposing around 3,000 children at Auschwitz-Birkenau to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical ‘research’.

Mengele sometimes played psychological games with prisoners by ‘hiring’ them to assist him, injecting thousands of prisoners with many substances (including petrol, ink in the eyes, and chloroform to the heart) to study the effects, destroying women’s fallopian tubes with acid and experimenting on people with cleft palates.

Mengele even established his own research institute at Auschwitz, affiliated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. A grant was also provided by the German Research Foundation, at the request of von Verschuer, who received regular reports and shipments of specimens from Mengele.

5. He was obsessed with twins and physical abnormalities

Mengele wanted to continue the twin experiments he’d begun with von Verschuer. Abandoning medical ethics and research protocols, he started conducting horrific experiments on up to 1,500 sets of twins, many of them children.

At the time, identical twins were widely seen as the clue to understanding genetics. Mengele used one twin as a control and subjected the other to blood transfusions, forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins killed and subjected to the same scrutiny. Only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived.

Mengele based lots of experiments around subjects with physical abnormalities. He had a fascination with heterochromia (where someone’s irises are different colours). Mengele tried to change the eye colour of those in the camp with the condition by injecting their irises with chemicals. When that failed, he removed the eyeballs and sent them to eye-pigmentation expert Karin Magnussen.

‘Selection’ of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Birkenau, May/June 1944

Image Credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mengele was also fascinated by dwarves, particularly a Transylvanian family called the Ovtizes – whom seven of their ten children were dwarves. Allowed to keep their clothes and hair, they were placed under intense psychological scrutiny, their blood siphoned and their teeth removed. Miraculously, the entire Ovitz family survived.

6. He had a sinister calm

Unlike most other SS doctors who viewed selections as one of their most unpleasant duties, Mengele undertook this task easily. Mengele would often listen to music by Schumann and Schubert, and many Birkenau survivors recounted how he would whistle famous classical tunes while standing on the train platform, deciding who to send to the gas chambers with a flick of his glove. Of those selected to live, he conducted cruel, race-inspired medical experiments.

Mengele would often ‘play nice’ with the children of Auschwitz, giving them sweets, founding a kindergarten and playing them the violin to lull them into a false sense of security – before sending them to his medical laboratory.

7. Mengele became the most wanted Nazi

Mengele later transferred to Gross-Rosen camp. At the war’s end, he fled, disguised as a Wehrmacht officer.

In June 1945 Mengele was captured and held in US custody. As he had no SS blood group tattooed on his arm, and due to the chaos at the war’s end, US officials were unaware Mengele was on a list of major war criminals and released him. He obtained false papers and worked as a farmhand in Bavaria before escaping to South America in 1949.

8. Fake identity

Mengele remarried under his own name in Uruguay in 1958, and became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959, as ‘José Mengele’. In 1961 he settled in Brazil, protected by a makeshift network of German and Austrian expats, including former Nazi party member, Wolfgang Gerhard.

In the 1970s, Gerhard offered Mengele his ID card, which Mengele used from then on as his fake identity, sharing a coffee-and-cattle operation in Brazil with a Hungarian couple who kept his secret and housed him.

Rumours that Mengele’s son Rolf knew his father’s whereabouts proved correct when in a 1985 interview, Rolf revealed he had been in contact with his father (whom he initially knew as ‘Uncle Fritz’).

9. He never accepted guilt for his crimes

Rolf secretly visited his father in Sao Paulo in 1977, where Mengele told him that he “personally had never harmed anyone in his life”, declaring that he hadn’t invented Auschwitz – highlighting the extent of his delusions about his sadistic crimes.

Photograph from Mengele’s Argentine identification document (1956)

Throughout the postwar years Mengele expressed no remorse, remaining oblivious or rationalising the enormity of his crimes, justifying his actions as doing his duty and carrying out orders as the Jews were already ‘dead upon arrival’.

10. He died of a stroke while swimming in Brazil

Mengele died on 7 Feburary 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. His friends buried him under his assumed name. Later, pressured by the West German and Brazilian police, they revealed his grave’s location.

In 1985, a multinational team of forensic experts travelled to Brazil, and determined through dental records that Mengele had indeed taken Gerhard’s identity and was dead.

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