Josef Mengele: The Infamous Nazi SS Officer
Josef Mengele was a German doctor and Nazi SS officer who was convicted of crimes against humanity after his death. He was born on March 16, 1911, in the Bavarian town of Gunzburg, the first son of Karl Mengele, a farm machinery factory owner who subsequently became a munitions manufacturer during World War II.
Education and Military Service
He graduated from the University of Frankfurt in 1934 and served in the Waffen SS as a medical officer in France and Russia. After the war, he moved to Germany and worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin under his mentor Max von Verschuer.
Twins Research and Inhumane Experiments
His research on twins earned him fame and a reputation as the world's most evil doctor. He performed a variety of experiments on twins, including unnecessary amputation of limbs or intentionally infecting one with typhus or another disease and then transfusing the blood of that twin into the other so that he could examine the resulting disease.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he also conducted experiments on Jews and Romani people to show them their "degeneracy." He aimed at showing that a person's genes were affected by their social environment and that Jews and Romani people were more prone to disease than other people.
While he was at Auschwitz, he sent his colleagues in Germany samples of blood, body parts, organs, skeletons, and fetuses from the prisoners he treated. The researchers used these samples to help them identify the racial origin of different diseases.
Working with Twins in the Lab
In 1943, he became an assistant in the lab of a well-known genetics researcher who had a special interest in twins and their relationship to heredity. He supervised a team of doctors and assisted them in their research, which focused on the characteristics of twins.
He was so fascinated by twins that he even had a room in the experimentation block for them, where he played the piano and sang romantic songs in German to them. This room was known as the music room.
The Impact on Victims
Several of the women who arrived at Auschwitz were twins, including Vera and Jona Laks, who were taken straight from the Lodz ghetto. Their mother was a Jewish girl with a blue-eyed appearance, while their sister was a Romani girl.
Their mother was taken to the gas chamber as soon as she was recognized, while their sister was kept for further study at the laboratory where Josef Mengele had a particular interest in twins. She says he was interested in their "perfect Aryan features" and their brown eyes.
She recalls a visit by the chief physician of the camp, who ordered her and her mother to the lab, where they were subjected to weekly examinations. They were then measured and examined in terms of their physical attributes, such as the length of their arms, legs, and ribs.
They were then often subjected to painful procedures, such as chloroform injections. These procedures resulted in loss of consciousness, deafness, and - among the smaller children - death.
