By performing secret abortions, she saved women from the sadistic experiments of Dr. Mengele. Josef Mengele

The “death factory” of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) acquired more and more terrible fame. If in the remaining concentration camps there was at least some hope of survival, then most of the Jews, Gypsies and Slavs staying in Auschwitz were destined to die either in gas chambers, or from backbreaking labor and serious illnesses, or from the experiments of a sinister doctor who was one one of the first persons meeting new arrivals at the train. It was the Auschwitz concentration camp that gained notoriety as a place where experiments were carried out on people.

Mengele was appointed chief physician in Birkenau - in the inner camp of Auschwitz, where he behaved clearly as the chief. His skin ambitions gave him no rest. Only here, in a place where people do not have the slightest hope of salvation, could he feel like the master of fate.

Participation in the selection was one of his favorite “entertainment”. He always came to the train, even when it was not required of him. Constantly looking perfect (as befits the owner of the anal vector), smiling, happy, he decided who would die now and who would go to work.

It was difficult to deceive his keen analytical eye: Mengele always accurately saw the age and state of health of people. Many women, children under 15 and old people were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Only 30 percent of prisoners were lucky enough to avoid this fate and temporarily delay the date of their death.

Chief physician of Birkenau (one of the inner camps of Auschwitz) and head of the research laboratory, Dr. Josef Mengele.

First days in Auschwitz

Joseph Mengele thirsted for power over people's destinies. It is not surprising that Auschwitz became a real paradise for the Doctor, who was capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands of defenseless people at a time, which he demonstrated in the very first days of work at the new place, when he ordered the extermination of 200 thousand Gypsies.

“On the night of July 31, 1944, a terrible scene of the destruction of a gypsy camp took place. Kneeling before Mengele and Boger, women and children begged for their life. But it did not help. They were brutally beaten and forced into trucks. It was a terrible, terrible sight.", - say surviving eyewitnesses.

Human life has assigned nothing to the Angel of Death. All of Mengele's actions were drastic and merciless. Is there a typhus epidemic in the barracks? This means we will send the entire barracks to the gas chambers. This is the best way to stop the disease. Do the women have lice in the barracks? Kill all 750 women! Just think: one thousand more unwanted people, one less.

He chose who to live and who to die, who to sterilize, who to operate on... Dr. Mengele did not just feel equal to God. He put himself in God's place. A typical crazy idea in a sick sound vector, which, against the backdrop of the sadism of the anal vector, resulted in the idea of ​​wiping unwanted peoples from the face of the earth and creating a new noble Aryan race.

All experiments of the Angel of Death boiled down to two main tasks: to find an effective method that could influence the reduction in the birth rate of unwanted races, and by all means to increase the birth rate of Aryan healthy children. Just imagine how much pleasure it brought him to be in that place that other people preferred not to remember at all.

The head of the labor service of the women's block of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Irma Grese and his commandant SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Joseph Kramer under British escort in the courtyard of the prison in Celle, Germany.

Mengele had his own associates and followers. One of them was Irma Grese - an anal-cutaneous-muscular sound artist, a sadist with a sick sound, working as a guard in the women's block. The girl took pleasure in tormenting the prisoners; she could take the lives of prisoners only because she was in a bad mood.

Josef Mengele's first task in reducing the birth rate of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies was to develop the most effective method of sterilization for men and women. So he operated on boys and men without anesthesia, and exposed women to x-rays...

The opportunity to conduct experiments on innocent people freed up the Doctor's sadistic frustrations: he seemed to derive pleasure not so much from the sonic search for truth as from the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Mengele studied the possibilities of human endurance: he subjected the unfortunate to the test of cold, heat, various infections...

However, medicine itself did not seem so interesting to the Angel of Death, in contrast to his favorite eugenics - the science of creating a “pure race”.

Barrack No. 10

1945 Poland. Auschwitz concentration camp. Children, prisoners of the camp, are waiting for their release.

Eugenics, if you look at encyclopedias, is the doctrine of human selection, i.e. a science that seeks to improve the properties of heredity. Scientists making discoveries in eugenics argue that the human gene pool is degenerating and this must be fought.

In fact, the basis of eugenics, as well as the basis of the phenomena of Nazism and fascism, is anal division into “clean” and “ dirty”: healthy - sick, good - bad, that which is allowed to live, and that which can “harm future generations”, therefore does not have the right to exist and reproduce, from which society must be “cleansed”. This is why there are calls to sterilize “defective” people in order to cleanse the gene pool.

Joseph Mengele, as a representative of eugenics, faced an important task: in order to breed a pure race, it is necessary to understand the reasons for the appearance of people with genetic “anomalies”. That is why the Angel of Death was of great interest in dwarfs, giants, various freaks and other people whose deviations were associated with certain disorders in genes.

Thus, among Joseph Mengele’s “favorites” was the Jewish family of Lilliputian musicians Ovitz from Romania (and later the Shlomowitz family that joined them), for whose maintenance, by order of the Angel of Death, the best conditions were created in the camp.

The Ovitz family was interesting to Mengele, first of all, because along with the Lilliputians, there were also ordinary people in it. The Ovits were well fed, allowed to wear their own clothes and not shave their hair. In the evenings, the Ovitzs entertained Doctor Death by playing musical instruments. Joseph Mengele called his “favorites” by the names of the seven dwarfs from Snow White.

Seven brothers and sisters, originally from the Romanian town of Rosvel, lived in a labor camp for almost a year.

One might think that the Angel of Death became attached to the Lilliputians, but this was not the case. When it came to experiments, he already treated his “friends” in a completely unfriendly manner: the poor fellows had their teeth and hair pulled out, cerebrospinal fluid extracts were taken, unbearably hot and unbearably cold substances were poured into their ears, and terrible gynecological experiments were performed.

“The most terrible experiments of all [were] gynecological ones. Only those of us who were married went through them. We were tied to a table and systematic torture began. They inserted some objects into the uterus, pumped out blood from there, picked out the insides, pierced us with something and took pieces of samples. The pain was unbearable."

The results of the experiments were sent to Germany. Many scientific minds came to Auschwitz to listen to Joseph Mengele's reports on eugenics and experiments on Lilliputians. The entire Ovitz family was stripped naked and displayed in front of a large audience like scientific exhibits.

Doctor Mengele's Twins

"Twins!"- this cry echoed over the crowd of prisoners, when suddenly the next twins or triplets timidly huddled together were discovered. They were kept alive and taken to a separate barracks, where the children were well fed and even given toys. A sweet, smiling doctor with a steely gaze often came to see them: he treated them to sweets and gave them rides around the camp in his car.

However, Mengele did all this not out of sympathy or out of love for the children, but only with the cold calculation that they would not be afraid of his appearance when the time came for the next twins to go to the operating table. That’s the whole price of initial “luck”. "My guinea pigs" The terrible and merciless Doctor Death called the twin children.

The interest in twins was not accidental. Joseph Mengele was worried about the main idea: if every German woman, instead of one child, gave birth to two or three healthy ones at once, the Aryan race could finally be reborn. That is why it was very important for the Angel of Death to study in the smallest detail all the structural features of identical twins. He hoped to understand how to artificially increase the birth rate of twins.

The twin experiments involved 1,500 pairs of twins, of which only 200 survived.

The first part of the experiments on twins was harmless enough. The doctor needed to carefully examine each pair of twins and compare all their body parts. Centimeter by centimeter they measured arms, legs, fingers, hands, ears, noses and everything, everything, everything.

Such meticulousness in the research was not accidental. After all, the anal vector, which is present not only in Joseph Mengele, but also in many other scientists, does not tolerate haste, but, on the contrary, requires the most detailed analysis. Every little detail needs to be taken into account.

The Angel of Death meticulously recorded all measurements in tables. Everything is as it should be for an anal vector: on the shelves, neatly, precisely. As soon as the measurements were completed, the experiments on the twins moved into another phase.

It was very important to check the body’s reactions to certain stimuli. To do this, they took one of the twins: he was injected with some dangerous virus, and the doctor observed: what will happen next? All results were again recorded and compared with the results of the other twin. If a child became very ill and was on the verge of death, then he was no longer interesting: he, while still alive, was either opened up or sent to a gas chamber.

The twins were given each other's blood, internal organs were transplanted (often from a pair of other twins), and dye segments were injected into their eyes (to test whether brown Jewish eyes could become blue Aryan eyes). Many experiments were carried out without anesthesia. The children screamed and begged for mercy, but nothing could stop the one who imagined himself to be the Creator.

The idea is primary, the life of the “little people” is secondary. This simple method is used by many unhealthy sound people. Dr. Mengele dreamed of revolutionizing the world (in particular the world of genetics) with his discoveries. What does he care about some children!

So the Angel of Death decided to create Siamese twins by stitching together gypsy twins. The children suffered terrible torment and blood poisoning began. The parents could not observe this and suffocated the experimental subjects at night in order to alleviate the suffering.

A little more about Mengele's ideas

Joseph Mengele with a colleague at the Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics. Kaiser Wilhelm. Late 1930s.

While doing terrible things and conducting inhuman experiments on people, Joseph Mengele everywhere hides behind science and his idea. At the same time, many of his experiments were not only inhumane, but also meaningless, not bringing any discovery to science. Experiments for the sake of experiments, torture, infliction of pain.

Mengele covered up his cruelty and his actions with the laws of nature. “We know that natural selection controls nature, exterminating inferior individuals. The weaker ones are excluded from the reproduction process. This is the only way to maintain a healthy human population. In modern conditions, we must protect nature: not allow inferior ones to reproduce. Such people should be subjected to forced sterilization.".

People for him are just “human material”, which, like any other material, is divided only into high-quality or low-quality. Poor quality and don't mind throwing it away. It can be burned in furnaces and poisoned in chambers, cause inhuman pain and carry out terrible experiments: i.e. be used in every possible way to create "quality human material", who has not only excellent health and high intelligence, but is generally devoid of all "defects".

How to achieve the creation of a higher caste? “This can only be achieved in one way - by selecting the best human material. Everything will end in disaster if the principle of natural selection is rejected. A few gifted people will not be able to withstand the multi-billion-dollar mass of idiots. Perhaps the gifted will survive, as reptiles once survived, and billions of idiots will disappear, as the dinosaurs once disappeared. We must not allow a massive increase in the number of such idiots.” The egocentrism of the sound vector in these lines reaches its apogee. Looking down on other people, deep contempt and hatred - that’s what motivated the Doctor.

When the sound vector is in a sick state, any ethical standards begin to shift in a person’s head. At the output we get: “From an ethical point of view, the problem is this: it is necessary to determine in which cases a person should be kept alive and in which cases he should be destroyed. Nature has shown us the ideal of truth and the ideal of beauty. What does not correspond to these ideals perishes as a result of selection arranged by nature itself.”

Speaking about the benefits of humanity, the Angel of Death does not at all mean all of humanity as such, for such peoples as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others do not deserve, in his opinion, life at all. He feared that if his research fell into the hands of the Slavs, they would be able to use the discoveries for the benefit of their people.

That is why Joseph Mengele, when Soviet troops were approaching Germany and the defeat of the Germans was inevitable, hastily collected all his tables, notebooks, notes and left the camp, ordering the destruction of traces of his crimes - the surviving twins and midgets.

When the twins were taken to the gas chambers, Zyklon-B suddenly ran out and the execution was postponed. Fortunately, the Soviet troops were already very close, and the Germans fled.

The Ovitz and Shlomowitz families and 168 twins enjoyed their long-awaited freedom. The children ran towards their saviors, crying and hugging. Is the nightmare over? No, he will now haunt the survivors for the rest of his life. When they feel bad or when they are sick, the ominous shadow of the mad Doctor Death and the horrors of Auschwitz will appear to them again. It was as if time had turned back and they were back in their 10th barracks.

Auschwitz, children in a camp liberated by the Red Army, 1945.

For the rest of his life, Mengele skillfully hides from all sorts of agents who want to catch him and bring him to trial. The shadows of the past also haunt the Angel of Death, but not only does he not regret what he did, but on the contrary, he is absolutely confident that he is right, considers the Germans who renounced fascism to be traitors. Forced to run from one place to another, the Doctor develops paranoia. On February 7, 1979, Joseph Mengele, according to Wikipedia and other encyclopedic sources, dies of a stroke that happened to him in the water.

P.S. Not long ago, the last of the surviving twins died. The story of torture and horror of the Angel of Death ends, although many mythologize his figure, claiming that Josef Mengele only faked his death, and is still continuing his experiments somewhere.

We can all agree that the Nazis did terrible things during World War II. The Holocaust was perhaps their most famous crime. But terrible and inhuman things happened in the concentration camps that most people did not know about. Prisoners of the camps were used as test subjects in a variety of experiments, which were very painful and usually resulted in death.
Experiments with blood clotting

Dr. Sigmund Rascher conducted blood clotting experiments on prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. He created a drug, Polygal, which included beets and apple pectin. He believed that these tablets could help stop bleeding from battle wounds or during surgery.

Each test subject was given a tablet of this drug and shot in the neck or chest to test its effectiveness. Then the prisoners' limbs were amputated without anesthesia. Dr. Rusher created a company to produce these pills, which also employed prisoners.

Experiments with sulfa drugs


In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the effectiveness of sulfonamides (or sulfonamide drugs) was tested on prisoners. Subjects were given incisions on the outside of their calves. Doctors then rubbed a mixture of bacteria into the open wounds and stitched them up. To simulate combat situations, glass shards were also inserted into the wounds.

However, this method turned out to be too soft compared to the conditions at the fronts. To simulate gunshot wounds, blood vessels were ligated on both sides to stop blood circulation. The prisoners were then given sulfa drugs. Despite the advances made in the scientific and pharmaceutical fields due to these experiments, prisoners suffered terrible pain, which led to severe injury or even death.

Freezing and hypothermia experiments


The German armies were ill-prepared for the cold they faced on the Eastern Front, from which thousands of soldiers died. As a result, Dr. Sigmund Rascher conducted experiments in Birkenau, Auschwitz and Dachau to find out two things: the time required for body temperature to drop and death, and methods for reviving frozen people.

Naked prisoners were either placed in a barrel of ice water or forced outside in sub-zero temperatures. Most of the victims died. Those who had just lost consciousness were subjected to painful revival procedures. To revive the subjects, they were placed under sunlight lamps that burned their skin, forced to copulate with women, injected with boiling water, or placed in baths of warm water (which turned out to be the most effective method).

Experiments with incendiary bombs


For three months in 1943 and 1944, Buchenwald prisoners were tested on the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals against phosphorus burns caused by incendiary bombs. The test subjects were specially burned with the phosphorus composition from these bombs, which was a very painful procedure. Prisoners suffered serious injuries during these experiments.

Experiments with sea water


Experiments were carried out on prisoners at Dachau to find ways to turn sea water into drinking water. The subjects were divided into four groups, the members of which went without water, drank sea water, drank sea water treated according to the Burke method, and drank sea water without salt.

Subjects were given food and drink assigned to their group. Prisoners who received seawater of one kind or another eventually began to suffer from severe diarrhea, convulsions, hallucinations, went crazy and eventually died.

In addition, subjects underwent liver needle biopsies or lumbar punctures to collect data. These procedures were painful and in most cases resulted in death.

Experiments with poisons

At Buchenwald, experiments were conducted on the effects of poisons on people. In 1943, prisoners were secretly injected with poisons.

Some died themselves from poisoned food. Others were killed for the sake of dissection. A year later, prisoners were shot with bullets filled with poison to speed up the collection of data. These test subjects experienced terrible torture.

Experiments with sterilization


As part of the extermination of all non-Aryans, Nazi doctors conducted mass sterilization experiments on prisoners of various concentration camps in search of the least labor-intensive and cheapest method of sterilization.

In one series of experiments, a chemical irritant was injected into women's reproductive organs to block the fallopian tubes. Some women have died after this procedure. Other women were killed for autopsies.

In a number of other experiments, prisoners were exposed to strong X-rays, which resulted in severe burns on the abdomen, groin and buttocks. They were also left with incurable ulcers. Some test subjects died.

Experiments on bone, muscle and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation


For about a year, experiments were carried out on prisoners in Ravensbrück to regenerate bones, muscles and nerves. Nerve surgeries involved removing segments of nerves from the lower extremities.

Experiments with bones involved breaking and setting bones in several places on the lower limbs. The fractures were not allowed to heal properly because doctors needed to study the healing process as well as test different healing methods.

Doctors also removed many fragments of the tibia from test subjects to study bone tissue regeneration. Bone transplants included transplanting fragments of the left tibia onto the right and vice versa. These experiments caused unbearable pain and severe injuries to the prisoners.

Experiments with typhus


From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, doctors carried out experiments on prisoners of Buchenwald and Natzweiler in the interests of the German armed forces. They tested vaccines against typhus and other diseases.

Approximately 75% of test subjects were injected with trial typhus vaccines or other chemicals. They were injected with the virus. As a result, more than 90% of them died.

The remaining 25% of experimental subjects were injected with the virus without any prior protection. Most of them did not survive. Doctors also conducted experiments related to yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases. Hundreds of prisoners died, and many more suffered unbearable pain as a result.

Twin experiments and genetic experiments


The goal of the Holocaust was the elimination of all people of non-Aryan origin. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals and other people who did not meet certain requirements were to be exterminated so that only the "superior" Aryan race remained. Genetic experiments were carried out to provide the Nazi Party with scientific evidence of Aryan superiority.

Dr. Josef Mengele (also known as the "Angel of Death") was greatly interested in twins. He separated them from the rest of the prisoners upon their arrival at Auschwitz. Every day the twins had to donate blood. The actual purpose of this procedure is unknown.

Experiments with twins were extensive. They had to be carefully examined and every inch of their body measured. Comparisons were then made to determine hereditary traits. Sometimes doctors performed massive blood transfusions from one twin to the other.

Since people of Aryan origin mostly had blue eyes, experiments were done with chemical drops or injections into the iris to create them. These procedures were very painful and led to infections and even blindness.

Injections and lumbar punctures were done without anesthesia. One twin was specifically infected with the disease, and the other was not. If one twin died, the other twin was killed and studied for comparison.

Amputations and organ removals were also performed without anesthesia. Most twins who ended up in concentration camps died in one way or another, and their autopsies were the last experiments.

Experiments with high altitudes


From March to August 1942, prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp were used as test subjects in experiments to test human endurance at high altitudes. The results of these experiments were supposed to help the German air force.

The test subjects were placed in a low-pressure chamber in which atmospheric conditions were created at altitudes of up to 21,000 meters. Most of the test subjects died, and the survivors suffered from various injuries from being at high altitudes.

Experiments with malaria


For more than three years, more than 1,000 Dachau prisoners were used in a series of experiments related to the search for a cure for malaria. Healthy prisoners became infected with mosquitoes or extracts from these mosquitoes.

Prisoners who fell ill with malaria were then treated with various drugs to test their effectiveness. Many prisoners died. The surviving prisoners suffered greatly and basically became disabled for the rest of their lives.

In 1979, a certain Wolfgang Gerhard, a quiet 67-year-old German emigrant who settled here after the Second World War, drowned off the coast of Brazilian Sao Paulo. The old man was buried in a local cemetery and soon forgotten about him. However, 7 years later, Wolfgang’s neighbors accidentally received folders with his archive. Opening the papers, the neighbors gasped - these were descriptions of inhumane experiments on children. Their author was the most wanted Nazi criminal Josef Mengele, a doctor whose medical experiments included thousands of Auschwitz prisoners. Just think: the monster who created a real hell on earth, sending hundreds of people to the next world every day, lived in a real paradise on the Brazilian coast for 35 post-war years. This is the very case when there is no talk of justice.

Josef Mengele was the eldest son in the family. It is a well-known fact that a child is formed in the image and likeness of his parents. Looking at them, he acquires certain traits and qualities that will be fully revealed in adulthood. This is what happened with Joseph. His father paid practically no attention to the children, and his mother was a despotic fury prone to sadism. So the question arises, how should a child grow up when the father pays practically no attention, and the mother does not skimp on beatings at the slightest disobedience or poor grades? The result was a brilliant doctor and a cruel sadist.

Josef was barely 32 years old when he entered service at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The first thing he did was eliminate the typhus epidemic. In a peculiar way, of course: Josef ordered the complete burning of several barracks where the disease was noticed. Effective, to say the least.

But the main thing that Mengele became famous for was his interest in genetics. The Nazi doctor's stumbling block was the twins. Perform experiments without anesthetics? Easily. Dissect still living babies? Exactly what is needed. You can also stitch twins together, change their eye color using chemicals, develop a substance that causes infertility, and so on. The list of inhumane experiments can be continued endlessly.

Another question arises, why was the doctor from hell most interested in the twins? Let's go back to basics. Even in pre-war Germany, the authorities noticed that the birth rate was decreasing and infant mortality was increasing; this pattern was true for representatives of the Aryan nation. Other races and nationalities living in Germany had no problems with fertility at all. Then the German government, frightened by the prospect of the extinction of the “chosen” race, decided to do something. Joseph was one of the scientists tasked with increasing the number of Aryan children and reducing their mortality. Scientists have focused on artificially breeding twins or triplets. However, the offspring of the Aryan race had to have blond hair and blue eyes - hence Mengele's attempts to change the eye color of children through various chemicals.

First, the experimental children were carefully selected. The assistants of the ‘Angel of Death’ measured the height of the children and recorded their similarities and differences. The children then met Josef in person. He infected them with typhus, gave them blood transfusions, amputated limbs and transplanted various organs. Mengele wanted to track how the identical organisms of twins would react to the same intervention in them. Then the experimental subjects were killed, after which the doctor conducted a thorough analysis of the corpses, examining the internal organs.
Mengele himself believed that he was acting for the benefit of science.

Naturally, many legends have developed around such a colorful character. One of them, for example, says that Dr. Mengele’s office was decorated with the eyes of children. However, these are just fairy tales. Josef could simply spend hours looking at body parts in test tubes or spending time doing anatomical research, dissecting bodies, wearing an apron stained with blood. Colleagues who worked with Josef noted that they hated their jobs, and in order to somehow relax, they got completely drunk, which could not be said about the ‘Angel of Death’. It seemed that his work not only did not tire him, but even gave him great pleasure.

Now many are wondering whether the doctor was an ordinary sadist, covering up his atrocities with scientific activity. According to the recollections of his colleagues, Mengele often took part in executions himself: he beat people, threw them into pits with lethal gas.

When the war ended, a manhunt was announced for Josef, but he managed to escape. He spent the rest of his days in Brazil, eventually taking up medicine again. He made his living mainly by performing abortions, which were officially prohibited by the country's authorities. Retribution overtook him only nearly 35 years after the war.

The most amazing thing is that the story of “Doctor Death” does not end there. A few years ago, Argentine historian Jorge Camaraza wrote a book in which he claimed that Mengele took up fertility experiments again after escaping from justice. As an example, the researcher cited the strange story of the Brazilian town of Candido Godoy, where the birth rate of twins suddenly jumped sharply. Every fifth woman in labor gave birth to twins, and blonde ones at that! Kamarasa was sure that this was Mengele’s machinations. Local residents really remembered the strange veterinarian Rudolf Weiss, who came to the city to treat livestock, but examined not only animals, but also people. Whether Doctor Death has anything to do with this phenomenon is not known for certain.

German doctor Joseph Mengele is known in world history as the most brutal Nazi criminal, who subjected tens of thousands of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp to inhumane experiments.

For his crimes against humanity, Mengele forever earned the nickname “Doctor Death.”

Origin

Josef Mengele was born in 1911 in Bavaria, in Günzburg. The ancestors of the future fascist executioner were ordinary German farmers. Father Karl founded the agricultural equipment company Karl Mengele and Sons. The mother was raising three children. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, the wealthy Mengele family began to actively support him. Hitler defended the interests of the very farmers on whom the well-being of this family depended.

Joseph did not intend to continue his father’s work and went to study to become a doctor. He studied at the universities of Vienna and Munich. In 1932 he joined the ranks of the Nazi Steel Helmet stormtroopers, but soon left this organization due to health problems. After graduating from university, Mengele received a doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on the topic of racial differences in the structure of the jaw.

Military service and professional activities

In 1938, Mengele joined the ranks of the SS and at the same time the Nazi Party. At the beginning of the war, he joined the reserve forces of the SS Panzer Division, rose to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer and received the Iron Cross for saving 2 soldiers from a burning tank. After being wounded in 1942, he was declared unfit for further service in the active forces and went to “work” in Auschwitz.

In the concentration camp, he decided to realize his long-time dream of becoming an outstanding doctor and research scientist. Mengele calmly justified Hitler's sadistic views with scientific expediency: he believed that if inhuman cruelty is needed for the development of science and the breeding of a “pure race,” then it can be forgiven. This point of view translated into thousands of damaged lives and even more deaths.

In Auschwitz, Mengele found the most fertile ground for his experiments. The SS not only did not control, but even encouraged the most extreme forms of sadism. In addition, the killing of thousands of Gypsies, Jews and other people of the “wrong” nationality was the primary task of the concentration camp. Thus, Mengele found himself in the hands of a huge amount of “human material” that was supposed to be used up. "Doctor Death" could do whatever he wanted. And he created.

"Doctor Death" experiments

Josef Mengele conducted thousands of monstrous experiments over the years of his activity. He amputated body parts and internal organs without anesthesia, sewed twins together, and injected toxic chemicals into children's eyes to see if the color of the iris would change after that. Prisoners were deliberately infected with smallpox, tuberculosis and other diseases. All new and untested medications, chemicals, poisons and poisonous gases were tested on them.

Mengele was most interested in various developmental anomalies. A huge number of experiments were carried out on dwarfs and twins. Of the latter, about 1,500 couples were subjected to his brutal experiments. About 200 people survived.

All operations on fusion of people, removal and transplantation of organs were performed without anesthesia. The Nazis did not consider it advisable to spend expensive medicines on “subhumans.” Even if the patient survived the experience, he was expected to be destroyed. In many cases, the autopsy was performed at a time when the person was still alive and felt everything.

After the war

After Hitler’s defeat, “Doctor Death,” realizing that execution awaited him, tried with all his might to escape persecution. In 1945, he was detained in the uniform of a private near Nuremberg, but then released because they could not establish his identity. After this, Mengele hid for 35 years in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. All this time, the Israeli intelligence service MOSSAD was looking for him and was close to capturing him several times.

It was never possible to arrest the cunning Nazi. His grave was discovered in Brazil in 1985. In 1992, the body was exhumed and proved that it belonged to Josef Mengele. Now the remains of the sadistic doctor are at the Medical University of Sao Paulo.

Saves lives, but sometimes scientists, hoping for a breakthrough, allow themselves more than necessary. Today, issues of bioethics are paramount, and before taking part in this or that experiment, a person must sign a lot of papers and go through several interviews. Not to mention the fact that some studies, whose ethical appropriateness is questioned, cannot be carried out at all (at least on the basis of an institute or university).

, “Little Albert” is something we hear about quite often. But, unfortunately, the story of terrible experiments in medicine does not end there. We have collected five more creepy studies that you may not have heard of in this material.

Twin separation

In a secret experiment conducted in the 60s and 70s (and allegedly funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health), scientists also separated triplets to see what would happen to them if they were raised as only children. The fact that such an experiment even took place became known in 1980, when three brothers Robert Shafran, Eddie Galland and David Kellman accidentally found each other. Of course, they had no idea that they were born with someone else.

According to the available data, study leaders Peter Neubauer and Viola Bernard had no remorse. They allegedly felt that they were doing something good for these children, giving them the opportunity to grow and develop as individuals.

It is still not clear what results were obtained during the experiment. The fact is that the data on it is stored at Yale University and cannot be made public until 2066, NPR reports. By the way, director Tim Wardle talked about the lives of Robert, Eddie and David in the 2018 film “Three Identical Strangers.”

Mengele's experiments

A separate chapter in the history of medical experiments against humans is devoted to the experiments of Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death” and a German doctor who, during the years, conducted research on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He is known to have dissected live babies, performed castrations without anesthetics, studied the endurance of women by subjecting them to electric shocks, and sterilized nuns using X-rays. But Mengele was especially interested in twins who were trying to change their eye color by injecting chemicals into them, who were being sewn together, and whose different organs were amputated. Of all the twins who ended up in the camp (according to various estimates, there were from 900 to 3,000), only 300 survived.

The Nazis used prisoners for testing and testing new treatments for infectious diseases, some of them being frozen alive during aeronautical research. Many of the doctors who took part in these experiments were declared war criminals. Mengele himself fled to South America, constantly changed his place of residence, and eventually died of a stroke in Brazil in 1979.

Unit 731

Detachment 731 was the name of a Japanese military group created in 1932, which was actively studying biological weapons and conducting experiments on living people in the occupied territory of China. According to a report by The New York Times published in 1995, the death toll could be as high as 200,000.

Detachment 731's "experiments" included wells contaminated with , and , as well as attempts to determine how long a person could live under the influence of factors such as boiling water, food deprivation, water deprivation, gradual freezing, electric shock, and much more. Former members of the detachment told the media that some prisoners were dosed with poisonous gas, which led to the dissolution of the mucous membranes of the eyes, while the person himself remained alive.

According to The Times, after the war the US government helped keep the experiments secret as part of a plan to turn Japan into a Cold War ally.

Westport murders

Until the 1830s, higher education institutions in Great Britain experienced an acute shortage of cadavers for anatomy classes and medical research. This happened because only the bodies of executed criminals were legally available to scientists, of which there were not as many as we would like. It was the demand for highly original goods that led to a series of 16 murders committed in 1827-1828 in the West Port area of ​​​​Edinburgh by William Burke and William Hare.

The owner of the boarding house, Burke, along with his friend Hare, strangled the guests, after which they sold the bodies to anatomist Robert Knox. The latter, apparently, did not notice (or did not want to notice) that the bodies that were brought to him were suspiciously fresh.

William Burke was executed by hanging on January 28, 1829, while Hare was granted immunity from prosecution for his repentance and testimony against Burke. As a result, the case of Burke and Hare prompted the British government to relax the laws, providing scientists with some other corpses for autopsy.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Photo: Federico Beccari / unsplash.com

The most famous failure in medical ethics lasted an impressive forty years. It all started in 1932, when the US Public Health Service launched a study aimed at tracking all stages of the disease in the poor African-American population of Tuskegee, Alabama.

Progression of the disease was observed in 399 men who were told that the cause of the disease was solely due to “bad blood.” In fact, the men never received adequate treatment. And this did not happen even in 1947, when penicillin became the standard drug for treating syphilis. As a result, some men died from syphilis, others infected their wives and children, so that ultimately 600 people were considered “participants” in the experiment.

In this case, it is also striking that the study was stopped only in 1972. And this is because information about him was somehow leaked to the press.