The name Dr. Josef Mengele stands
out among the dark stories of the men and women who
perpetrated the Holocaust. The Nazi doctor is most
commonly known as the architect of cruel and
unnecessary medical experiments, which he performed
on concentration camp inmates including twin children.
transferred to Auschwitz, where he would earn the
nickname the "Angel of Death." Like all SS doctors there,
Mengele worked shifts on the arrival ramps, where he
would choose those newly arrived prisoners who would
be gassed immediately and those who would be given a
job and be temporarily allowed to live. Even when he
was not working on selection duty, Mengele could be
spotted at the ramp, searching for twins.
Interested in the age-old question of nature versus
nurture, he had performed legitimate research on twins
prior to World War ll. But at Auschwitz, the bounds of
ethics were broken and there were no repercussions
when he maimed or killed a subject of his experiments,
including young Jewish or Roma twins.
Mengele believed Nazi racial theory. Many of his
experiments aimed to illustrate the lack of immune
resistance of subjects considered racially inferior, such
as Jewish prisoners.
Among Menge|e’s research subjects were twins René
and Renate Guttmann from Prague. Renate was
experimented on and René was kept as a control.
Renate was measured and X-rayed. She received
injections and was cut. Once, after she got sick from an
experiment, she was supposed to be killed, but a nurse
hid her and she was spared.
Mengele also selected seven-year-old Hungarian Jewish
twins Lea and Yehudit Csengeri for medical
experimentation upon their arrival in Auschwitz in 1944.
Nazi physicians took the girls’ blood, measured their
bodies, and injected them with different pathogens. Both
survived the Holocaust.
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