Essay On Josef Mengele

As dark clouds of smoke suspended above the crematoriums in many of the concentration camps during World War II, Jewish people alongside other minorities facing Nazi oppression questioned their fate in this time of devastating horror; however, those who were not immediately killed oftentimes witnessed an even worse fate under the power of the Nazi physician Dr. Josef Mengele. During the Holocaust, Mengele was one of the most well known doctors in the concentration camps for his brutal, immoral experiments and research trials in which he abused thousands of Holocaust victims. While minority groups such as Jews and Roma Gypsies were cruelly oppressed in numerous ways during the Holocaust, some of the most heinous acts of cruelty were committed

Josef Mengele conducted medical experiments on victims of the Holocaust was in order to gather information that benefited the Axis Powers during World War II. In the concentration camp Dachau, low pressure chambers and high altitude experiments were conducted to benefit the German Experimental Institution for Aviation. By collecting such data, researchers were able to determine the maximum altitude that was safe soldiers to parachute from; however, test subjects of these experiments were forced into such medical procedures and immorally manipulated under the Nazi hand. It is believed that physicians such as Dr. Mengele strongly desired the test results in order to benefit the Axis Powers during the war and learn how to minimize the number of Axis casualties. In other examples, victims were placed in freezing cold ice baths to analyze the effects of hypothermia while additional test subjects were forced to drink different amounts of seawater to determine potability. These experiments were designed to provide Axis organizations with information that could benefit their soldiers such as how much seawater one could consume before acquiring disease. Ironically, in attempting to decrease Axis fatalities, thousands of Jewish people and other oppressed minorities such as homosexuals, gypsies, Slavic groups, and those with mental disabilities suffered through inhumane treatments that resulted in excruciatingly painful death. (USHMM “Nazi”) Although such