Mengele's experiments - terrible things in Auschwitz. Josef Mengele: the beast in the guise of a doctor

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von Verschuer is a world authority in the field of twin research; from Mengele he received a large number of human specimens: eyes of twin children, blood samples of “people of a different race,” heads of beheaded children, skeletons of Jews

Until recently, it was thought that the doctor, a Nazi criminal who used thousands and thousands of Auschwitz prisoners for terrible and deadly experiments, acted alone. On the contrary, he was a performer and a diligent collaborator of some of the leading German scientists of the time. At least two of them continued their careers quietly after the war: Nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt and Dr. Othmar von Verschuer. The weekly Der Spiegel talks about this, publishing the results of an investigation conducted by a commission of historians, writes the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (The translation of the article is published by the website Inopressa.ru).

The subject of the investigation was Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany's leading institute for biological, medical and biotechnological research. Before the war, this establishment was called Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. “The red bloody thread of prisoners linked the splendor of Villa Dahlem, a wealthy quarter of Berlin, with the barracks of Auschwitz.” A German institute conducted experiments on organs that were cut out from children by “Doctor Death.”

Butenandt, whose research into sex hormones and proteins ranks among the most important scientific achievements of the 20th century, is accused of conducting human experiments on the effects of certain types of mold on liver cells. Heavy clouds of doubt also hung over his “hemopetin project,” research into substances that could improve the blood quality of Luftwaffe pilots and allow them to survive in cold water or cold climates.

There is no doubt that von Verschuer, a world authority in the field of twin research, received a large number of human specimens from Mengele: eyes of twin children, blood samples of “people of a different race,” heads of beheaded children, skeletons of Jews, newborns in formaldehyde. Mengele usually, without any anesthesia, cut off part of the liver or other vital organs from Jewish children and killed them with monstrous blows to the head, if there was a need for the newly deceased “guinea pig”. He injected chloroform into the hearts of many children; he infected his other subjects with typhus or terrible diseases that destroy tissue. Mengele injected deadly bacteria into the ovaries of many Jewish women.

Some twins with different eye colors had colorants injected into their eye sockets and pupils to change their eye color and explore the possibility of producing Aryan twins with blue eyes. In the end, the children were left with granular clumps instead of eyes. The kids died in terrible agony. “Mengele, through criminal methods, turned Auschwitz into the largest biotechnology laboratory in the world with human beings instead of experimental animals,” says expert Ernst Klee. The experiments on the twins at Auschwitz were followed with great interest in Berlin.

Of the 900 pairs of twins handed over to Mengele at Auschwitz, only 50 survived. Many died as a result of the experiments. Many of them were killed by lethal injections by Mengele in the summer of 1944. A Nazi doctor handed over their eyes, carefully preserved in formaldehyde, to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft.

Adolf Butenandt and Dr. Othmar von Verschuer were renowned as world-class scientists and science editors of the New York Times. The first was president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in 1972, the second headed the German Society of Anthropology in the new Federal Republic. Neither of them was ever responsible for the notorious connections with Mengele. "Doctor Death" fled to South America, lived calmly and happily, in abundance, and died by accident, drowning a few meters from the shore of one of the beautiful Brazilian beaches.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor-criminals, was born in Bavaria in 1911. Mengele studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at Frankfurt University. In 1934 he joined the SA and became a member of the National Socialist Party, and in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Dissertation topic: "Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races."

After the outbreak of World War II, he served as a military doctor in the SS Viking division in France, Poland and Russia. In 1942, he received the Iron Cross for saving two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners soon nicknamed him the “angel of death.”

In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply dissatisfied - concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." The range of "scientific" interests of Joseph Mengele was unusually wide. He began with work on “increasing the fertility of Aryan women.” Then the leadership of the Nazi Party set the doctor a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Having mutilated tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was very simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered with ice on all sides, and “doctors” in SS uniform constantly measure body temperature. When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

The Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, commissioned the research

Congenital deformity saved an entire family from death in a gas chamber

At midnight on May 19, 1944, another train carrying Jews arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The SS guards habitually herded people into groups, and the shepherd dogs burst into hoarse barking. And suddenly seven midgets appear at the door of the carriage: five women dressed as if for a ball and two men in elegant suits. Not at all embarrassed by the situation, they look around with interest, and one of them begins to hand out business cards to the stunned guards: let them know that the world famous “Lilliput Troupe” has come to this strange place!

Having found out that all these kids were brothers and sisters, the SS officer ordered his subordinates to urgently wake up the doctor Joseph Mengele. Everyone knew that he was “assembling” his own cabinet of curiosities and simply adored all sorts of deviations from the norm. And here are seven Lilliputian relatives at once. Mengele, having listened to what was the matter, immediately jumped out of bed.

Music connected them

The dwarfs did not yet know that the “doctor” they were expecting preferred to treat using radical methods. For example, when a typhus epidemic began in one of the women's barracks, he simply sent 498 of its inhabitants to the gas chambers. And they also didn’t know about the monstrous experiments on living people. Therefore, when Herr Mengele began to ask questions, they gladly told the story of their family.

Shimshon Ovitz from the Romanian town of Roswell was a Lilliputian, which did not stop him from marrying women of normal height twice. Seven of his children were born small, three - ordinary. The head of the family died when the youngest, Perla, was not even two years old. Shimshon's second wife, Batya-Berta, was left alone with ten offspring in her arms. It occurred to her that children should learn music, and she was right. Everyone quickly mastered various instruments, created a family ensemble and began touring. Troupe Ovitsev was a great success and, accordingly, a good income. They could even afford a car, a rarity in those days. But in 1940, part of Romania came under the control of Nazi Hungary, and restrictions on Jews came into force. In particular, they were forbidden to speak in front of representatives of other nationalities. The team temporarily stopped giving concerts, and during the downtime, the Ovits were able to provide themselves with fake documents in order to start performing again. But in 1944, the secret became clear, and the entire family - 12 people aged from 15 months to 58 years - were sent to Auschwitz.

Saved by the Devil

Dr. Mengele's family members were of little interest in the musical abilities. But the union of a dwarf with an ordinary woman and the ratio of normal offspring to children with disabilities is incredible! Therefore, he ordered not to touch the Ovits. Confidently lying to the monster about his close relationship with an unusual family, their neighbor Simon Shlomowitz saved his own - ten people. All of them were housed separately from other prisoners. They were allowed to wear their own clothes and not shave their heads. Sometimes they even fed us not gruel, but more or less decent food.

“Perhaps we amused him and he wants us to put on a show here,” the Ovitz thought. Therefore, when they were called to the doctor, the women dressed up and put on makeup (they were allowed to keep their makeup with them). However, in the laboratory they simply took blood from everyone. A week later again. And then again and again. Such volumes were pumped out of the poor Lilliputians that they fainted. But as soon as they came to their senses, the execution was repeated.

They made careless punctures, and blood splashed in all directions. We often felt sick. When we returned to the barracks, we fell onto the bunks. But before we had time to regain our strength, we were called to a new cycle,” she recalled Perla Ovitz.

Family members were checked for the functioning of their internal organs, looked for for typhus, syphilis and other diseases, their healthy teeth were pulled out and their eyelashes were torn out. Psychiatrists endlessly asked questions, supposedly testing intelligence. But the most terrible torture was the infusion into the ears: boiling water, followed by ice water, and so on in a circle. The most offensive thing is that Joseph Mengele himself did not understand how to use the results of his monstrous experiments and what they could tell him about the mystery of this family. But at the same time, he enthusiastically asked the wife of the eldest of the dwarfs, Abraham, Dora (she was of normal height), about the smallest details of their sex life.

However, at least they remained alive. But another hunchback dwarf who appeared in the camp was much less fortunate. The fanatical doctor decided that the skeletons of the little freaks should be exhibited in the Berlin Museum, and ordered the unfortunate man to be thrown into a cauldron and boiled until the meat was separated from the bones.

And ordinary twins were the fanatic’s favorite “material.” He transfused blood and transplanted their organs into each other, tried to change eye color using chemicals, and infected them with viruses. I wanted to understand how twins are produced and make sure that German women give birth to two or three racially pure children at a time

So the Ovitses were even grateful to their “savior.” And they always tried to appear neat and cheerful before him. The women even flirted with Josef, and he brought their children toys from the kids killed in the camp. The youngest of the family, named Shimshon in honor of his grandfather, even once called Mengele dad. He gently corrected the one-and-a-half-year-old boy: “No, I’m not dad, I’m just Uncle Josef.”

The youngest of the Lilliputians, Perla, who was 23 at the time, seemed to have what would be called “Stockholm syndrome” many years later.

Dr. Mengele looked like a movie star, only more handsome, she said. - Anyone could fall in love with him. But no one who saw him could have imagined that there was a monster hiding behind his handsome face. We knew that he was merciless and capable of the most terrible forms of sadism. That when he was angry, he became hysterical. But, being in a bad mood, he immediately calmed down as soon as he crossed the threshold of our barracks. Seeing him in a good mood, everyone in the camp said, “Probably visited the kids.”

Visual material

One evening the doctor looked into the dwarfs, holding a small package in his hands. He informed his charges that they would have a special trip the next day. Noticing how the Lilliputians turned pale, he reassured them with a smile. And he left a package containing lipstick, blush, nail polish, eye shadow, and a bottle of cologne. The women were delighted.

The next day, at dawn, all the Lilliputians were put into a truck and taken to a building located in the SS residential camp. They even fed us a hearty lunch, served on porcelain plates and silver cutlery.

Then the troupe was brought onto the stage. The hall was full - entirely the management team. The Ovits became poised, but then Mengele barked: “Take off your clothes!” They had no choice but to obey. Trying to cover their private parts, the midgets hunched over. “Straighten up!” - the tormentor shouted to them. And then he began to give a lecture entitled “Examples of work with anthropological and hereditary biology in concentration camps,” the essence of which was that the Jewish people were degenerating, turning into a nation of freaks. Lilliputians were ideally suited as a visual aid. So the SS officers gladly groped the Ovits at the end of the performance.

This was another test for the family, but nevertheless Mengele saved them from death. Another camp doctor, jealous of Josef's position, sent brothers Abraham and Miki to the gas chamber behind his back. But Mengele managed to get them out. Therefore, the Ovitzes were even offended by the doctor who did not take them with him when he was transferred from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen camp. And not in vain. The Lilliputians who were left without the support of the devil were going to be sent to the gas chamber. But they were lucky again. Their execution was scheduled for January 27, 1945, but on that day Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz. A few months later, the miraculously surviving Ovitses returned to their looted and destroyed home. Later they moved to Antwerp, Belgium. And after the formation of Israel they moved to Haifa. They lived a long life: the older sister Rozika died at 98, the younger sister Perla died at 80. She did not feel any malice towards her torturer.

If the judges had asked me whether he should be hanged, I would have answered that he should be released,” she said. - I was saved by the grace of the devil - God will give Mengele his due.

Think about it!

Prisoner of Auschwitz, Czech Dina Gottlibova, on the orders of Dr. Mengele, she made drawings of the heads, ears, noses, mouths, arms and legs of his experimental subjects, including the Ovits. She recalled that Joseph called the dwarfs after the seven dwarfs from the fairy tale. Ironically, Dina married an artist after the war Arthur Babbitt, who drew the characters for Disney's Snow White.

Bear in mind

* Josef MENGELE(1911 - 1979) - SS Hauptsturmführer, awarded the Iron Cross 1st degree for saving two tank crews from a burning tank.

*The topic of his doctoral dissertation was “Racial differences in mandibular structure.”

* At Auschwitz, he dissected live babies, castrated boys and men without anesthesia, subjected women to high-voltage electric shocks to test their endurance, and sterilized a group of Polish nuns using X-rays.

* Received the nickname Angel of Death.

* Until 1949 he was hiding in Bavaria, from there he fled to Argentina. When he was tracked down by agents of the Israeli secret service Mossad, Mengele was the most wanted Nazi criminal after Adolf Eichmann, moved to Paraguay and later to Brazil.

* While swimming in the state of Sao Paulo, the ghoul suffered a stroke and drowned.

Joseph Mengele, a German doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, was born on March 6, 1911. Mengele was personally involved in the selection of prisoners arriving at the camp, and conducted criminal experiments on prisoners, including men, children and women. Tens of thousands of people became its victims.

The terrible experiments of Dr. Mengele - the Nazi "Doctor Death"

"Death Factory" Auschwitz (Auschwitz) gained 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.

Auschwitz was known as a place where human experiments were carried out

Participation in the selection was one of his favorite “entertainment”. He always came to the train, even when it was not required of him. Looking perfect, smiling, happy, he decided who would die now and who would go on experiments. It was difficult to deceive his keen 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 managed to avoid this fate and temporarily delay the date of their death.

Dr. Mengele always accurately saw the age and state of health of people

Joseph Mengele thirsted for power over people's destinies. It is not surprising that Auschwitz became a real paradise for the Angel of Death, 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.

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

“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, nightmarish sight,” say surviving eyewitnesses.

Human life meant nothing to the “Angel of Death.” Mengele was cruel 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.

Joseph Mengele chose who to live and who to die, who to sterilize, who to operate on.

All experiments of the Angel of Death boiled down to two main tasks: to find an effective way that could influence the reduction in the birth rate of races disliked by the Nazis, and by all means to increase the birth rate of the Aryans.

Mengele had his own associates and followers. One of them was Irma Grese, a sadist who worked as a guard in the women's block. She took pleasure in tormenting the prisoners; she could take the lives of prisoners only because she was in a bad mood.

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.

Josef Mengele had followers. For example, Irma Grese, who is capable of taking the lives of prisoners due to a bad attitude

Josef Mengele's first task in reducing the birth rate 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.

To reduce the birth rate of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, Mengele proposed the development of an effective method for sterilizing men and women

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

Eugenics, if you turn to encyclopedias, is the study of human selection, that is, 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.

Joseph Mengele believed that in order to breed a pure race, it is necessary to understand the reasons for the appearance of people with genetic “anomalies”

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 and other people with genetic abnormalities.

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

When it came to experiments, people had their teeth and hair pulled out, extracts of cerebrospinal fluid 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.

Many scientific minds came to Auschwitz to listen to the reports of Josef Mengele

"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. “My guinea pigs” was what the merciless Doctor Death called the twin children.

The interest in twins was not accidental. 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. Arms, legs, fingers, hands, ears and noses were measured centimeter by centimeter.

The Angel of Death meticulously recorded all measurements in tables. Everything is as it should be: 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.

Joseph Menge used 1,500 pairs in his experiments on twins, of which only 200 survived

The twins received blood transfusions, internal organ transplants (often from a pair of other twins), and dye segments 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 Mengele.

The idea is primary, the life of the “little people” is secondary. Dr. Mengele dreamed of revolutionizing the world (in particular the world of genetics) with his discoveries.

So the Angel of Death decided to create Siamese twins by stitching together gypsy twins. The children suffered terrible torment and blood poisoning began.

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.

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.

Now many are wondering whether Joseph Mengele was a simple sadist who, in addition to his scientific work, enjoyed watching people suffer. Those who worked with him said that Mengele, to the surprise of many of his colleagues, sometimes himself administered lethal injections to test subjects, beat them and threw capsules of lethal gas into the cells, watching as the prisoners died.

On the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp there is a large pond where the unclaimed ashes of prisoners burned in the crematorium ovens were dumped. The rest of the ashes were transported by wagon to Germany, where they were used as soil fertilizers. The same carriages carried new prisoners for Auschwitz, who were personally greeted upon arrival by a tall, smiling young man who was barely 32 years old. This was the new Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele, who, after being wounded, was declared unfit for service in the active army. He appeared with his retinue in front of newly arrived prisoners to select “material” for his monstrous experiments. The prisoners were stripped naked and lined up along which Mengele walked, every now and then pointing at suitable people with his constant stack. He decided who would be immediately sent to the gas chamber, and who could still work for the benefit of the Third Reich. Death is to the left, life is to the right. Sickly-looking people, old people, women with infants - Mengele, as a rule, sent them to the left with a careless movement of a stack squeezed in his hand.

Former prisoners, when they first arrived at the station to enter the concentration camp, remembered Mengele as a fit, well-groomed man with a kind smile, in a well-fitted and ironed dark green tunic and a cap, which he wore slightly on one side; black boots polished to perfect shine. One of the Auschwitz prisoners, Krystyna Zywulska, would later write: “He looked like a film actor - a sleek, pleasant face with regular features. Tall, slender...”. For his smile and pleasant, courteous manners, which in no way correlated with his inhuman experiences, the prisoners nicknamed Mengele the “Angel of Death.” He conducted his experiments on people in block no.

10. “No one ever came out of there alive,” says former prisoner Igor Fedorovich Malitsky, who was sent to Auschwitz at the age of 16.

The young doctor began his activities in Auschwitz by stopping an epidemic of typhus, which he discovered in several gypsies. To prevent the disease from spreading to other prisoners, he sent the entire barracks (more than a thousand people) to the gas chamber. Later, typhus was discovered in the women's barracks, and this time the entire barracks - about 600 women - also went to their deaths. Mengele could not figure out how to deal with typhus differently in such conditions.

Before the war, Josef Mengele studied medicine and even defended his dissertation on “Racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw” in 1935, and a little later received his doctorate. Genetics was of particular interest to him, and at Auschwitz he showed the greatest degree of interest in twins. He conducted experiments without resorting to anesthetics and dissected living babies. He tried to stitch twins together, change their eye color using chemicals; he pulled out teeth, implanted them and built up new ones. In parallel with this, the development of a substance capable of causing infertility was carried out; he castrated boys and sterilized women. According to some reports, he managed to sterilize an entire group of nuns using X-rays.

Mengele's interest in twins was not accidental. The Third Reich set scientists the task of increasing the birth rate, as a result of which artificially increasing the birth of twins and triplets became the main task of scientists. However, the offspring of the Aryan race must certainly have blond hair and blue eyes - hence Mengele’s attempts to change the eye color of children through

vom of various chemicals. After the war, he was going to become a professor and was ready to do anything for the sake of science.

The twins were carefully measured by the assistants of the “Angel of Death” in order to record common signs and differences, and then the experiments of the doctor himself came into play. Children had their limbs amputated and various organs were transplanted, they were infected with typhus, and they received blood transfusions. 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.

He launched quite a vigorous activity and therefore many mistakenly considered him the chief doctor of the concentration camp. In fact, Josef Mengele held the position of senior doctor in the women's barracks, to which he was appointed by Eduard Virts, the chief physician of Auschwitz, who later described Mengele as a responsible employee who sacrificed his personal time to devote it to self-education, researching the material that the concentration camp had.

Mengele and his colleagues believed that hungry children had very pure blood, which meant that it could greatly help wounded German soldiers in hospitals. Another former prisoner of Auschwitz, Ivan Vasilyevich Chuprin, recalled this. The newly arrived very young children, the eldest of whom were 5-6 years old, were herded into block number 19, from which screams and crying could be heard for some time, but soon there was silence. The blood was completely pumped out of the young prisoners. And in the evening, prisoners returning from work saw piles of children's bodies, which were later burned in dug holes, the flames from which were escaping several meters upward.

For Mengele, work in

concentration camp was a kind of scientific mission, and the experiments that he performed on prisoners were, from his point of view, carried out for the benefit of science. There are many tales told about Doctor “Death” and one of them is that his office was “decorated” by the eyes of children. In fact, as one of the doctors who worked with Mengele in Auschwitz recalled, he could stand for hours next to a row of test tubes, examining the obtained materials through a microscope, or spend time at the anatomical table, opening up bodies, in an apron stained with blood. He considered himself a real scientist, whose goal was something more than eyes hung throughout his office.

The doctors who worked with Mengele noted that they hated their work, and in order to somehow relieve stress, they got completely drunk after a working day, which could not be said about Doctor “Death” himself. It seemed that the work did not tire him at all.

After the war, Josef Mengele was declared a war criminal, but he managed to escape. He spent the rest of his life in Brazil, and February 7, 1979 was his last day - while swimming he suffered a stroke and drowned. His grave was found only in 1985, and after the exhumation of the remains in 1992, they were finally convinced that it was Joseph Mengele, who had earned himself a reputation as one of the most terrible and dangerous Nazis, who lay in this grave.

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 near Nuremberg in the uniform of a private, but then released because he 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.