What Are Josef Mengele's Experiments

Josef Mengele was a Nazi SS doctor notorious for his gruesome experiments conducted on Jewish and Roma inmates, including those involving twins in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland. Before WW2, Josef Mengele was an assistant to a well-known researcher, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, who studied twins. When the war started, Mengele relocated to Auschwitz where he had access to an unlimited supply of twins and the authority to maim and kill subjects without consequence (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Initially, Josef Mengele was not necessarily feared by children he experimented on. He was often known to appear with pockets full of candy and chocolates, to pat them on the head, to talk with them, and sometimes even to play with the kids(Rosenberg).

Mengele’s experiments, yet only an approximate of 280 individuals survived (Kor). These experiments were conducted not only on twins but also on people with rare genetic disorders such as dwarfism, gigantism, heterochromia (a condition where a person 's eyes are different colors ). Pregnant women were also subject to Mengele’s experimentation (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). All of which resulted in permanent physical and/or mental damage or worse, death. Moshe Offer, a surviving victim told the story of him and his twin: “Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He couldn’t walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore “ This was just one example of hundreds of body maiming experiments Mengele conducted, many of which were used for practice rather than meaningful testing. This specific example clearly showed the fact that Mengele did not consider the children as people at all. Another study commonly conducted was when one twin would be injected with a disease and then monitored so that the progression of the disease could be observed. If the infected twin died from the disease the other would be killed so that Mengele can conduct a comparative autopsy to see the disease’s effect on the body (Schwab, Bacchi). The experiments were cruel if not worse than labor. The twins were not saved by the Angel of Death but led down the path to a different kind of