Manipulation, exploitation, mistreatment, disease, neglect,corruption, starvation, abuse, and genocide are all words that only begin toexplain the Holocaust. One most likely knows of the Holocaust, or has no lessthan heard of it.
The Holocaust took place in World War Two and was a genocide,a mass killing of a large group of people with a certain ethnicity, of over sixmillion Jews. BBC (2012) found that there were six extermination camps built bythe Nazis that were solely made to kill people. The camps had poison gaschambers that would kill great amounts of people at a time. If you were lucky,you got to be selected to die in a poison gas chamber. Some didn’t get solucky, and got selected for other duties, such as research. The scientistsdoing the research did not care about the safety or the comfortability of theJews that they were experimenting with.
Josef Mengele was one of thesescientists. He was dedicated to his research and did absolutely horrendousthings to select Jews in concentration or extermination camps. Josef Mengelewas a cruel scientist that performed heart-wrenching experiments on innocentJews during World War Two in the Holocaust. The UnitedStates Holocaust Memorial Museum (2017) found that Mengele was born in 1911 onMarch 16th.
He was born in Günzburg, Switzerland where helearned his work ethic from his father, Karl Mengele, who was an extremely successful manufacturer. At theUniversity of Munich, Mengele earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology in theyear 1935. Just two short years later, in 1937, he became the assistantof Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene inFrankfurt, Germany.
That same year, Mengele joined the Nazi Party. Mengele wasdrafted into the army and volunteered in various medical services. In about1943 he was transferred to Auschwitz because he was promoted to the rank of SS.Captain. During his time here, he earned the nickname the “Angel of Death”because of his tremendously cruel conduct. The higher up in rank that Mengelegot, the more power he attained, and the more freedom he had. During hisresearch, assisting, and work in medical services, Josef Mengele had become veryintrigued by quite a few out of the ordinary physical attributes and human abnormalities.
Some of which, he now had the freedom to experiment on. One thing that interested Mengelewere twins. This interest was sparked when he had been assisting Dr. Otmarvon Verschuer who was very wellknown for his research with twins. Josef Mengele assembled together hundreds ofpairs of twins to study the effect heredity has on physical traits.
However,the experiments he performed were cruel and, more often than not, unusual. Mostof the time the experiments were sent off to a pathology lab in Germany forfurther evaluation. Often times he would inject one twin with a secretivesubstance and monitor the illness that would develop. He would produce gangrenein children by applying clamps painfully to their limbs. Sometimes he wouldinject dye into their eyes, while other times he would give the children spinaltaps.
Mengele enjoyed performing autopsies and dissecting the twins forcomparison, so once his test subject had passes away, the other twin would beimmediately killed. He would often stay awake all night long performingautopsies on twins in order to further his research. Another gruesomeexperiment he performed included him trying to create his own conjoined twins.In order to do this, he stitched the twins together at the back. The poorbabies screamed day and night until they passed away after the 3rdday because gangrene had set in (Stockton 2017). Mengele performed terrifying experimentson these twins for research, for his own personal gain. Another thing that interestedMengele were pregnant women. If the women were heavily pregnant, they would usuallybe sent straight to the gas chambers, but if they were in early stages, theywould be taken in for research.
One experiment, Mengele monitored a womanduring her pregnancy and once the child was born, he taped her breasts, andobserved how long it took for the unfed newborn to pass away. One woman wasbelieved to be having twins, so to aid in Mengele’s research, he kept the womenand observed her throughout her pregnancy. When the time came and she gavebirth, their ended up being only one baby.
Because the baby hadn’t been what hehad expected, he threw the newborn into an oven right in front of the motheronly minutes after she had delivered the child. In one point of his research, Mengelebecame interested in abortion. Mengele would preserve women in all stages of pregnancyand would try multiple ways of killing the infant whilst inside the mother’s womb.One way that Kanfer S. and Carlson P. found was a technique that included someonestanding, and putting all of their weight, on top of the woman’s stomach. Meanwhile,Mengele would record how long it would take for the women to miscarry (KanferS. and Carlson P.
1985). Mengele would perform these awful experiments on Jews andput them through excruciatingly painful experiences for his research. He knew theywere going to get killed either way, so why not perform horrifying experiments oninnocent people for science?
