"Josef Mengele (March 16, 1911?? February 7, 1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He gained notoriety chiefly for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, and for performing human experiments on camp inmates, amongst whom Mengele was known as the Angel of Death.
Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in twins; they would be selected and placed in special barracks. He also recruited Berthold Epstein, a Czech pediatrician. As a doctor, Epstein proposed to Mengele a study into treatments of disease called Noma. This was noted for particularly affecting children from the Gypsy camp.While the cause of Noma remains relatively unknown, it is now known that it has a higher occurrence in children suffering from malnutrition and a lower immune system response. Many develop the disease shortly after contracting another illness such as measles or tuberculosis. Mengele tried to prove that Noma was caused by racial inferiority.
Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably the Ovitz family and a Jewish Romanian artist's family, seven of whose ten members were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. He often called them "my dwarf family;" to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of "the abnorm."
Mengele occupied his time with other numerous acts of the most base cruelty, including the dissection of live infants; the castration of boys and men without the use of an anesthetic; and the administering of high-voltage electric shocks to women inmates under the auspices of testing their endurance. On one occasion Mengele even sterilized a group of Polish nuns with an X-ray machine, leaving the celibate women horribly burned.
Mengele also attempted to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and he performed various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of his time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, either due to the experiments or later infections. Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies.
At Auschwitz Mengele did a number of twin studies, and these twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create Siamese twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resected.
The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas chambers. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his grim acts, he was also called "Mengele the protector." He nonetheless regarded the subjects as material on which to conduct his experiments, not as human beings. On several occasions he killed subjects simply to be able to dissect them afterwards. Mengele was almost fanatical about drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. He is reported to have bled some to death this way.
The book Children of the Flames by Joe E. White chronicles the notorious medical experimental activities of Josef Mengele on approximately three thousand twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during WWII until its liberation at the end of the war. Only a few of the three thousand twins survived and now fifty years later they have told their story of how they were given special privileges in Auschwitz due to Mengele??s interest in twins and how as a result they have suffered during the past fifty years as the children who survived the still unknown and unexplained medical experiments and injections which they were subjected to at the hands of Josef Mengele.
"I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work ?? not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop ?? major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation ?? Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him ?? why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part."- Alex Dekel
After the war, he first hid in Austria under an assumed name, then escaped and lived in South America, first in Argentina (until 1959) and finally in Brazil, in the cities of Serra Negra, Moji das Cruzes, and then died in Bertioga, where he drowned in the sea after suffering a stroke. His identity was confirmed by forensic experts from UNICAMP (Campinas University) using DNA testing on his remains."
I read a book about this sick bastard and it was beyond horrific. One of the many horrors of the Holocaust.