Nazi Medical Expirements
Presented by Monica Teves
Who is Josef Mengele?
Josef Mengele, german physician and SS captain. In, 1943, he was named SS garrison physician of Auschwitz. In that capacity, he was responsible for the differentiation and selection of those fit to work and those destined for gassing. Mengele carried out human experiments on camp inmates, especially twins.
Who is Josef Mengele?
Josef Mengele
SUBTOPIC 1
Side profile
About Josef Mengele
Born on March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg near Ulm, he was the eldest son of Karl Mengele, a prosperous manufacturer of farming implements. In 1935, Mengele earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Munich.
Medical Service
Mengele was drafted into the army, and thereafter volunteered into the medical service of the Waffen-SS (Armed SS). Although documentation is scant and often contradictory regarding Mengele's activities between this time and early 1943.
What he did
Throughout his stay in Auschwitz, Mengele collected the eyes of his murdered victims, in part to furnish “research material” to colleague Karin Magnussen, a KWI researcher of eye pigmentation.
Utilizing Twins
Mengele had become interested in utilizing twins for medical research through Verschuer, famous for experimenting with identical and fraternal twins in order to trace the genetic origins of various diseases. During the 1930s, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the variant factors of human heredity and environment.
Utilizing Twins
Other Research inerests
He had a wide variety of other research interests, including a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which an individual's two irises differ in coloration. He also conducted several experiments in an attempt to unlock the secret of artificially changing eye colo. He documented in camp inmates the progression of the disease Noma, a type of gangrene which destroys the mucous membrane of the mouth and other tissues.
Jewish and Gypsy
Mengele firmly endorsed the doctrine of National Socialist racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments which aimed to illustrate the lack of resistance among Jews or Roma to various diseases. He also 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.
Dr. Miklos nyiszil
Most scientists at work in the concentration camp environment, Mengele enlisted the aid of trained medical professionals among the prisoner population to perform the more grisly, or mundane, tasks and to carry out autopsies upon his dead victims. We owe much of our early knowledge of Mengele's activities at Auschwitz to Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner physician who assisted Mengele under duress, and then published his experiences, initially in his native Hungarian, in 1946.
Brazil
As his crimes had been well documented before the International Military Tribunal and other postwar courts, West German authorities issued a warrant for Mengele's arrest in 1959, and a request for extradition in 1960. Alarmed by the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in that same year, Mengele moved to Paraguay and then to Brazil, spending the last years of his life near Sao Pãolo. In declining health, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, 1979 and drowned. He was buried in a suburb of Sao Pãolo under the fictive name Wolfgang Gerhard.
1985
In 1985, German police, working on evidence they had recently confiscated from a Mengele family friend in Gunzburg, located Mengele's grave and exhumed his corpse. Brazilian forensic experts thereafter positively identified the remains as Josef Mengele. In 1992, DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion. Mengele had eluded his captors for 34 years.