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Josef Mengele: What Were the Human Experiments?

Josef Mengele was an anthropologist and SS physician, who is infamous for his inhuman medical experiments on the prisoners in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. He used to be an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a scientist who did a lot of research on twins, and did his own thesis on the genetic factors that can cause a cleft chin or cleft palate, for which he earned a cum laude doctorate. All of this may have been his inspiration for the “research” he did on the Jewish and Gypsy twins at Auschwitz.

Josef Mengele – Type of Experiments

Josef Mengele was not the head physician at Auschwitz , but he was part of a team of doctors that had to select which people were suitable for work and which had to be gassed right away. With so many subjects to experiment on, he grabbed the opportunity to continue his previous research on genetics. He was particularly interested in twins as twin research was seen at the time to be the ideal way to determine how the environment or human heredity influence the human body. Most of his subjects were children, and he would reportedly do blood transfusions from the one twin to the other, do amputations and try to sew it onto the other twin, stitch two twins together to form Siamese twins, infect one twin with typhus or another disease and many other experiments. More often than not, the twins died during the procedures or he would have them killed afterwards so he can do an autopsy. If one twin died from a disease, Josef Mengele would often kill the other as well to mark the differences between the sick and healthy subjects.

Mengele was also very interested in heterochromia, where people have irisis of different colors and he would collect eyes and bodyparts of his victims and send it through for research. He would also inject chemicals in victims’ eyes to attempt to change their eye color. Other subjects of interests included dwarfs, people with deformities and he also documented a disease that broke out in camp, Noma. He also experimented on pregnant women before sending them off to the gas chambers (they were not fit for work, after all) and caused incestuous pregnancies, which he researched. He tried sex change operations, removing organs and operating on victims without anaesthesia. He also tried to prove that Jewish and Gypsy people were genetically inferior through several experiments. The Mengele experiments were all done in secrecy but most of the information we have today are because of the accounts of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner-physician who was forced to assist Josef Mengele.

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The Macabre Story Of Josef Mengele, The Nazi ‘Angel Of Death’

A notorious ss officer and physician, josef mengele sent over 400,000 people to their deaths at auschwitz during world war ii — and never faced justice..

One of the most notorious Nazi doctors of World War II, Josef Mengele performed gruesome medical experiments on thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Guided by an unwavering belief in the unscientific Nazi racial theory, Mengele justified countless inhumane tests and procedures on Jewish and Romani people.

From 1943 to 1945, Mengele built up a reputation as the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz. Like other Nazi doctors on-site, Mengele was tasked with choosing which prisoners would be murdered immediately and which ones would be kept alive for grueling labor — or for human experiments. But many prisoners remembered Mengele as being particularly cruel.

Not only was Mengele known for his cold demeanor on the arrival platform of Auschwitz — where he sent about 400,000 people to their deaths in the gas chambers — but he was also infamous for his brutality during his human experiments. He saw his victims as mere “test subjects,” and gleefully embarked on some of the most monstrous “research” of the war.

But as World War II came to a close and it became clearer that Nazi Germany was losing, Mengele fled the camp, was briefly captured by American soldiers, attempted to take up work as a farmhand in Bavaria, and eventually escaped to South America — never facing justice for his crimes.

On June 6, 1985, Brazilian police in São Paulo dug up the grave of a man named “Wolfgang Gerhard.” Forensic and later genetic evidence conclusively proved that the remains actually belonged to Josef Mengele, who had apparently died in a swimming accident in Brazil a few years prior.

This is the horrific true story of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who terrorized thousands of Holocaust victims — and got away with everything.

Inside Josef Mengele’s Privileged Youth

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele came from a wealthy family and appeared to have been destined for success at an early age.

Josef Mengele lacks a terrible backstory to which one can point a finger when attempting to explain his vile acts. Born on March 16, 1911, in Günzburg, Germany, Mengele was a popular and rich child whose father ran a successful business at a time when the national economy was cratering.

Everybody at school seemed to like Mengele and he earned excellent grades. Upon graduating, it seemed natural that he would go on to university and that he would succeed at anything he put his mind to.

Mengele earned his first doctorate in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. According to the New York Times , he did his post-doctoral work at the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene under Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was a Nazi eugenicist.

The ideology of National Socialism had always held that individuals were the product of their heredity, and von Verschuer was one of the Nazi-aligned scientists whose work attempted to legitimize that assertion.

Von Verschuer’s work revolved around hereditary influences on congenital defects such as cleft palates. Mengele was an enthusiastic assistant to von Verschuer, and he left the lab in 1938 with both a glowing recommendation and a second doctorate in medicine. For his dissertation topic, Mengele wrote about racial influences on the formation of the lower jaw.

But before long, Josef Mengele would be doing far more than simply writing about topics like eugenics and Nazi racial theory.

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Josef Mengele’s Early Work With The Nazi Party

Wikimedia Commons Before he worked on horrific experiments at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele thrived as an SS medical officer.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Josef Mengele had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, at the age of 26, while working under his mentor in Frankfurt. In 1938, he joined the SS and a reserve unit of the Wehrmacht. His unit was called up in 1940, and he seems to have served willingly, even volunteering for the Waffen-SS medical service.

Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, Mengele practiced eugenics in Poland by evaluating Polish nationals for potential “Germanization,” or race-based citizenship in the Third Reich.

In 1941, his unit was deployed to Ukraine in a combat role. There, Josef Mengele quickly distinguished himself on the Eastern Front. He was decorated several times, once for dragging wounded men out of a burning tank, and was repeatedly commended for his dedication to service.

But then, in January 1943, a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. And that summer, another German army was eviscerated at Kursk. Between the two battles, during the meatgrinder offensive at Rostov, Mengele was severely wounded and rendered unfit for further action in a combat role.

Mengele was shipped back home to Germany, where he connected with his old mentor von Verschuer and received a wound badge, a promotion to captain, and the assignment that would make him infamous: In May 1943, Mengele reported for duty to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The “Angel Of Death” At Auschwitz

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Yad Vashem Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp of World War II. Over 1 million people died there.

Mengele got to Auschwitz during a transitional period. The camp had long been the site of forced labor and POW internment, but the winter of 1942-1943 had seen the camp ramp up its killing machine , centered on the Birkenau sub-camp, where Mengele was assigned as a medical officer.

With the uprisings and shutdowns in the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, and with the increased tempo of the killing program across the East, Auschwitz was about to get very busy, and Mengele was going to be in the thick of it.

Accounts given later by both survivors and guards describe Josef Mengele as an enthusiastic member of the staff who volunteered for extra duties, managed operations that were technically above his pay grade, and seemed to be almost everywhere at the camp at once. There’s no question that Mengele was in his element in Auschwitz. His uniform was always pressed and neat, and he always seemed to have a faint smile on his face.

Every doctor in his part of the camp was required to take a turn as the selection officer — dividing incoming shipments of prisoners between those who were to work and those who were to be immediately gassed — and many found the work depressing. But Josef Mengele adored this task, and he was always willing to take other doctors’ shifts on the arrival ramp.

Other than determining who would be gassed, Mengele also managed an infirmary where the sick were executed, assisted other German doctors with their tasks, supervised inmate medical staff, and conducted his own research among the thousands of inmates whom he had personally selected for the human experiment program that he also started and managed.

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele often targeted twins for his brutal medical experiments at Auschwitz.

The experiments Josef Mengele devised were ghoulish beyond belief. Motivated and energized by the seemingly bottomless pool of condemned human beings placed at his disposal, Mengele continued the work he had started at Frankfurt by studying the influence of heredity on various physical traits. According to the History Channel , he used thousands of prisoners — many of whom were still children — as fodder for his human experiments.

He favored identical twin children for his genetics research because they, of course, had identical genes. Any differences between them, therefore, must have been the result of environmental factors. In Mengele’s eyes, this made sets of twins the perfect “test subjects” for isolating genetic factors by comparing and contrasting their bodies and their behavior.

Mengele assembled hundreds of pairs of twins and sometimes spent hours measuring various parts of their bodies and taking careful notes on them. He often injected one twin with mysterious substances and monitored the illness that ensued. Mengele also applied painful clamps to children’s limbs to induce gangrene, injected dye into their eyes — which were then shipped back to a pathology lab in Germany — and gave them spinal taps.

Whenever a test subject died, the child’s twin would be immediately killed with an injection of chloroform to the heart and both would be dissected for comparison. On one occasion, Josef Mengele killed 14 pairs of twins this way and spent a sleepless night performing autopsies on his victims.

Josef Mengele’s Volatile Temperament

Wikimedia Commons Josef Mengele (center) with fellow SS officers Richard Baer and Rudolf Höss outside of Auschwitz in 1944.

For all of his methodical work habits, Mengele could be impulsive. During one selection — between work and death — on the arrival platform, a middle-aged woman who had been selected for work refused to be separated from her 14-year-old daughter, who had been assigned death.

A guard who tried to pry them apart got a nasty scratch on the face and had to fall back. Mengele stepped in to resolve the matter by shooting both the girl and her mother right on the spot. After murdering them, he then cut short the selection process and sent everybody to the gas chamber.

On another occasion, the Birkenau doctors argued over whether a boy they had all grown fond of had tuberculosis. Mengele left the room and came back an hour or two later, apologizing for the argument and admitting that he had been wrong. During his absence, he had shot the boy and then dissected him for signs of the disease, which he hadn’t found.

In 1944, Mengele’s zest and enthusiasm for his gruesome work earned him a management position at the camp. In this capacity, he was responsible for public health measures at the camp in addition to his own personal research at Birkenau. Again, his impulsive streak surfaced when he made decisions for the tens of thousands of vulnerable inmates.

When typhus broke out among the women’s barracks, for example, Mengele solved the problem in his characteristic way: He ordered one block of 600 women gassed and their barracks fumigated, then he moved the next block of women over and fumigated their barracks. This was repeated for each women’s block until the last one was clean and ready for a new shipment of workers. He did it again a few months later during a scarlet fever outbreak.

Yad Vashem/Twitter Josef Mengele, pictured while conducting one of many horrific human experiments.

And through it all, Josef Mengele’s experiments continued, becoming more and more barbaric as time went on. Mengele stitched pairs of twins together at the back, gouged out the eyes of people with different-colored irises, and vivisected children who once knew him as the kindly old “Uncle Papi.”

When a form of gangrene called noma broke out in a Romani camp, Mengele’s absurd focus on race led him to investigate the genetic causes he was sure were behind the epidemic. To study this, he sawed off the heads of infected prisoners and sent the preserved samples to Germany for study.

After most of the Hungarian prisoners were killed off during the summer of 1944, the transports of new prisoners to Auschwitz slowed down during the autumn and the winter and eventually stopped altogether.

By January 1945, the camp complex at Auschwitz had been mostly dismantled and the starving prisoners force-marched to — of all places — Dresden (which was about to be bombed by the Allies). Josef Mengele packed up his research notes and specimens, dropped them off with a trusted friend, and headed west to avoid capture by the Soviets.

A Shocking Escape And An Evasion Of Justice

Wikimedia Commons A photo taken from Josef Mengele’s Argentine identification documents. Circa 1956.

Josef Mengele managed to avoid the victorious Allies until June — when he was picked up by an American patrol. He was traveling under his own name at the time, but the wanted criminal list hadn’t been efficiently distributed and so the Americans let him go. Mengele spent some time working as a farmhand in Bavaria before deciding to escape Germany in 1949.

Using a variety of aliases, and sometimes his own name again, Mengele managed to avoid capture for decades. It helps that almost nobody was looking for him and that the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay were all highly sympathetic to the escaping Nazis who sought refuge there.

Even in exile, and with the world to lose if he got caught, Mengele just couldn’t lay low. In the 1950s, he opened an unlicensed medical practice in Buenos Aires, where he specialized in performing illegal abortions.

This actually got him arrested when one of his patients died, but according to one witness, a friend of his showed up in court with a bulging envelope full of cash for the judge, who subsequently dismissed the case.

Bettmann/Getty Josef Mengele (center, at edge of table), pictured with friends in the 1970s.

Israeli efforts to capture him were diverted, first by the chance to capture SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann , then by the looming threat of war with Egypt, which drew the Mossad’s attention away from fugitive Nazis.

Finally, on February 7, 1979, the 67-year-old Josef Mengele went out for a swim in the Atlantic Ocean, near São Paulo, Brazil. He suffered a sudden stroke in the water and drowned. After Mengele’s death, his friends and family members gradually admitted that they had known all along where he had been hiding and that they had sheltered him from facing justice.

In March 2016, a Brazilian court awarded control over Mengele’s exhumed remains to the University of São Paulo. It was then decided that his remains would be used by student doctors for medical research.

After learning about Josef Mengele and his terrifying human experiments, read about Ilse Koch , the notorious “Bitch of Buchenwald.” Then, meet the men who helped Adolf Hitler rise to power .

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Medical experiments

Thousands of people were victims to pseudo-medical studies carried out in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where prominent doctors pertaining to the Nazi apparatus ignored all ethical concerns and took advantage of the chance to experiment with thousands of prisoners against their will.

The SS Josef Mengele was the cruellest of all the doctors that operated in Auschwitz. He often selected their victims personally on the platform at their arrival to the camp and had a predilection for twins.

Medical instrument used by Dr Mengele’s team in his racial studies. © Paweł Sawicki.

The pseudo-medical experiments he, Dr Horst Schumann or Dr Carl Clauberg, among others, carried out included, for example, tests on sterilization using iodine, X-rays or silver nitrate , castration of the ‘subhumans’ or artificial insemination to spread the Aryan race.

There were other common practises, such as euthanasia, genetic manipulation , racial investigation and procedures as cruel as the injection of chemicals in the eyes to change their colour or even the creation of artificial ‘Siamese twins’.

Victims of the Nazi pseudo-scientific experiments. Courtesy of the USHMM.

These experiments were made with live patients whose organs were often removed with no anaesthetic.

Many of the prisoners used in these tests died during the procedures. Many others were murdered after completion to check the effect they had had in their interiors. The few survivors were mutilated or otherwise incapacitated and marked for life thanks to the SS doctors’ cruelty.

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Josef Mengele

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• The History Learning Site - Biography of Joseph Mengele
• The Holocaust - Josef Mengele
• BBC News - The twins of Auschwitz
• Jewish Virtual Library - Biography of Josef Mengele
• William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History - Mengele's Medical Experiments
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - The professional origins of Dr. Joseph Mengele
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - Biography of Josef Mengele
• Josef Mengele - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Josef Mengele (born March 16, 1911, Günzburg, Germany—died February 7, 1979, Enseada da Bertioga, near São Paulo , Brazil) was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45) who selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies.

Mengele’s father was founder of a company that produced farm machinery , Firma Karl Mengele & Söhne, in the village of Günzburg in Bavaria . Mengele studied philosophy in Munich in the 1920s, coming under the influence of the racial ideology of Alfred Rosenberg , and then took a medical degree at the University of Frankfurt am Main . He enlisted in the Sturmabteilung ( SA ; “Assault Division”) in 1933. An ardent Nazi, he joined the research staff of a newly founded Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in 1934. During World War II he served as a medical officer with the Waffen- SS (the “armed” component of the Nazi paramilitary corps) in France and Russia. In 1943 he was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labour or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”). His chief interest, however, was research on twins. Mengele’s experiments often resulted in the death of the subject.

After the war, Mengele escaped internment and went underground, serving for four years as a farm stableman near Rosenheim in Bavaria. Then he reportedly escaped, via Genoa , Italy, to South America in 1949. He married (for a second time) under his own name in Uruguay in 1958 and, as “José Mengele,” received citizenship in Paraguay in 1959. In 1961 he apparently moved to Brazil , reportedly becoming friends with an old-time Nazi, Wolfgang Gerhard, and living in a succession of houses owned by a Hungarian couple. In 1985 a team of Brazilian, West German, and American forensic experts determined that Mengele had taken Gerhard’s identity, died in 1979 of a stroke while swimming, and was buried under Gerhard’s name. Dental records later confirmed the forensic conclusion.

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Science and Suffering: Victims and Perpetrators of Nazi Human Experimentation

Exhibition Type: Online Exhibition

Introduction

Under the Nazis, medical research supported a new vision for a ‘racially pure’ Europe. Science and Nazi ideology worked together to shape this new world. Nazi policy eroded the legal basis for the protection of individual rights, including control over one’s own body, to promote the body politic  Volkskörper .

Scientists seized the opportunity to advance medical research. They performed cruel and often fatal experiments on thousands of Jews and other ‘undesirables’.

Medical research relied on experimentation. Animals were soon replaced by human beings.

This exhibition examines coerced experimentation in Nazi-dominated Europe. Portraits of victims and perpetrators show how widespread and destructive the experiments were. The exhibition explores the legacy of medical research under Nazism and its  impact on bioethics and research today .  

The exhibition launched on 17 May 2017, and is based on the extensive research of  Professor Paul Weindling , Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. We are grateful to the Wellcome Trust and Wiener Library donors for their support of this exhibition and related programming.

With special thanks to University of Bristol & University of Southampton PhD Candidate Chad MacDonald for adapting this online exhibition.

From Eugenics to Experiments

Guidelines for New Therapy and Human Experimentation, 28 February 1931 [excerpt]

• Experimentation shall be prohibited in all cases where consent has not been given;
• Experimentation involving human subjects shall be avoided if it can be replaced by animal studies…
• Experimentation involving children or young persons under 18 years of age shall be prohibited in if it any way endangers the child…
• Experimentation involving dying subjects is compatible with the principles of medical ethics and shall therefore be prohibited…

The international eugenics movement became popular in the early twentieth century. It intended to promote physical and mental health. Eugenics advanced the idea that some people were ‘genetically superior’. Volunteer blogger Kirsty Dear recently published a post on the international eugenics movement on the Wiener Library blog, entitled Hitler’s Debt to America: The International Eugenics Movement.

Eugenics policies sought to prevent ‘inferior’ individuals from having children, often by forced sterilisation (removal or destruction of reproductive organs). ‘Superior’ individuals and groups were encouraged to have more children to create a more law-abiding, ‘fitter’ population. Eugenics became linked to theories about race. The Nazis absorbed eugenic ideas into their racist platform.

Experimental medicine was on the rise in Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s. Often, researchers experimented on the poor, the mentally and terminally ill, and other vulnerable groups. Nazi Germany invested extensive skilled personnel, equipment and facilities into such experiments.

The German Minister of the Interior’s guidelines on human experimentation were not enforceable by law. Once psychiatric patients and racial ‘inferiors’ lost their status as ‘human subjects’, life and limb were at risk.

Image credit (below centre): American Eugenics Society Records, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, USA. Image credit (below right): Vogel, Alfred. Erblehre, Abstammungs, und Rassenkunde in bildlicher Darstellung. Stuttgart, 1938.

Nazifying Medical Research

Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked – those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different…We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, 1938

The medical field proved vital to the Nazis as they consolidated power and reorganised the German state and society from 1933. The medical profession was ‘co-ordinated’ and Jewish practitioners were purged. Nazi priorities shaped medical ethics, and medicine offered a means of control.

Racial hygiene fixated on ‘cleansing’ the German hereditary stream. In July 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases . This law imposed sterilisation on people deemed to have hereditary illnesses or disabilities. Physicians sterilised those with schizophrenia, Huntington’s chorea and epilepsy, as well as so-called ‘mental defectives,’ chronic alcoholics and the blind and deaf.

The law marked a break with democratic structures of public health provision. The Nazis also targeted for sterilisation groups of ‘mixed race’, Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’), and those showing ‘antisocial behaviour’.

The Nazis pushed for a radicalised research agenda. Ambitious researchers saw new opportunities for coerced experiments. German medical education was oriented toward research and experimentation. German doctors demanded powers to screen, segregate and operate on victims in the name of science.

Image credit (below left): Volk und Rasse, VII, 1936. Image credit (below right): Rechenbuch für Volksschulen:Gaue Westfalen-Nord und -Süd: Ausgabe B für wenig gegliederte Schulen: Heft 5: siebentes und achtes Schuljahr . Edited by Adolf Schiffner. Leipzig: F. Hirt & Sohn Crüwell, 1941.

‘Life Unworthy of Life’ and Brain Research

The Nazis justified the murder of ‘undesirables’ they viewed as a drain on national resources. They targeted infants and children with birth defects as the first victims of their plans for ‘mercy killing’. From 1939 to 1945, medical staff murdered about 10,000 children in special wards created at hospitals and clinics.

After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler ordered the ‘euthanasia’ (or ‘T4’) programme for the ‘incurably ill’. Medical staff selected adult victims, whom they transferred to designated killing centres. There they were gassed.

The launch of the so-called euthanasia programme brought new opportunities for research on patients before they were killed. After medical staff killed the victims, physicians investigated their brains and neural tissue. They wanted to prove links between brain abnormalities and clinical forms of illness.

One was really on one’s own, and totally alone with one’s fears. For any child, this is horrible. And the term “unworthy [of] life” is still ringing in my ears. There is still a sign above my life that says: strictly speaking, you have no right to live. Leopoldine Maier, survivor of the Spiegelgrund clinic.

War, Genocide and ‘Research Opportunity’

As war and the genocide against the Jews and others unfolded, medical research intensified. Medical and racial experts preyed on the blood and bodies of people who came under Nazi rule.

German scientists set out to conquer new frontiers. Professional ambition drove forward ruthless agendas to advance careers. In most cases, medical researchers or industrial interests initiated experiments.

Medical professionals planned experiments, and administrators and funding agencies authorised them. The Reich Research Council and the German Research Fund approved and financed medical research and experiments.

War and occupation provided opportunities to study infectious diseases, immunity and race. Industry, the military and public health agencies supported the experiments in an effort to prevent infections and promote productive labour.

This inhuman Nazi [Claus Schilling] shut me inside a glass cage for two hours daily, and I had to bear thousands of anopheles mosquitoes on my body. When I could bear the pain no longer I [tried] to drive the blood poisoned mosquitoes off…but the doctor…had in a mirror seen my efforts. For that I was put under strict arrest for seven days. Before I was taken away to serve the seven days I received 25 strokes with a bloodstained bull-pizzle covered with leather. Heinz Reimer, survivor of Schilling’s malaria experiments in Dachau.

Industry and Science

Shoe Testing

The longest-running coerced experiments were carried out from June 1940 to February 1945 on a shoe-testing track in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The victims were political prisoners, British prisoners of war, and one Irish prisoner of war.

Inmates had to run up to 40 kilometres per day on the track. They often carried heavy rucksacks. Physicians tested performance-enhancing drugs and stimulants, such as cocaine, on the victims.

The research aimed to benefit civilian and military needs. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research, the German Leather Institute and the Department of Rubber Research tested artificial shoe soles. Shoe factories, such as Salamander, Freudenberg and Fagus, commissioned the tests. Temmler-Werke, a pharmaceutical company, tested the amphetamine Pervitin on the inmates.

Wartime Expansion: Rascher’s Experiments

Sigmund Rascher, an ambitious rising star in medical research, joined the SS in 1939. In 1941, as captain of the Luftwaffe Medical Service, Rascher sought permission to conduct high altitude and low pressure experiments on human beings.

More than 540 Dachau inmates, including Soviet prisoners-of-war and Polish prisoners, were used in the experiments. Luftwaffe medical services, civilian aviation medical researchers, university academics and the SS Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Study of the ‘Aryan’ Race , cooperated in the research.

Rascher conducted another set of deadly experiments on low temperature and freezing, during which he studied the process of death. The freezing experiments tried to recreate conditions for German airmen whose planes had come down at sea.

Rascher killed at least eighty inmates during the experiments. While the Luftwaffe became drawn into experimental research at Dachau, the extent to which it used Rascher’s results remains controversial.

Two warders pushed me to a bathroom. Three doctors and about ten students were already gathered there. After a heart examination I was injected with some red stuff and put into a bath-tub with a thermometer. They switched on a ventilator. I was covered in water all but head and hands. Two of the physicians took my wrists, controlling my pulse and making notes. I was able to describe the agony I felt being completely helpless in the hands of the so unscrupulous tormentors to whom the life of a concentration camp inmate meant less than nothing. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was that a slight ice-covering began to appear on the surface of the water. Iwan Ageew, survivor of freezing experiment in Dachau.

The Ravensbrück ‘Rabbits’

Experiments and resistance.

The ‘Rabbits’ were 74 female inmates of Ravensbrück concentration camp . The women, all Polish political prisoners, endured severe wound experiments between 1942 and 1943. The women were called ‘Rabbits’, the German language equivalent of a test ‘guinea pig’.

Ordered by Heinrich Himmler, the experiments formed part of SS surgeon Dr Karl Gebhardt’s research on treating infected war wounds. Gebhardt and other researchers wanted to test the effectiveness of sulphonamide drugs on war wounds versus traditional surgery.

There were two sets of experiments on treatment war wounds, particularly gangrene, in Ravensbrück and Dachau. Homeopathic treatment was used in Dachau and sulphonamide drugs were tested in Ravensbrück. The physicians used surgery to inflict injuries, rather than as a treatment.

The women protested against their treatment and encouraged other inmates to do the same. They smuggled letters – written in urine – outside the camp. The letters reached the Polish underground and the Polish government-in-exile in London , which published information about the experiments.

We, the undersigned, Polish political prisoners, ask Herr Commander whether he knew that since the year 1942 in the camp hospital experimental operations have taken place…We ask whether we were operated on as a result of sentences passed on us because, as far as we know, international law forbids the performance of operations even on political prisoners. Protest by the ‘Rabbits’ to Ravensbrück commandant Suhren, March 1943

Auschwitz Block 10

‘reproductive’ research.

On the brink of their annihilation, Jews were targeted for experimentation. The arrival of Jews at Birkenau for selections for slave labour or gassing meant that large groups of men, women and children were subjected to experiments.

Professor of Gynaecology Dr Carl Clauberg approached SS chief Heinrich Himmler for research opportunities in Auschwitz. He wanted to devise a surgery-free method to sterilise en masse women deemed ‘unworthy’ of children.

Using more than 500 Jewish women as subjects, Clauberg injected toxic chemicals to seal the Fallopian tubes. He used X-ray machines, developed by Siemens, to sterilise with high X–ray doses. In the process of testing, researchers burned many of the women with radiation. The experiments caused severe pain and sometimes death.

Doctors also carried out racial research in Block 10. They selected some of the women for death so their skeletons could be used for anthropological and ‘racial’ study.

In the final days of the war, Clauberg also conducted experiments on women in Ravensbrück concentration camp. He transferred there as Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and other camps.

Dr Clauberg performed sterilisation experiments on my person without my consent…Clauberg performed his first experiment on me. The sterilisation was done by injection and it was a very large size syringe that was injected subcutaneously into my vagina and a white substance was then injected into me. Most likely this substance was injected into my uterus. The syringe was about 30 cm long. The procedure occurred rather rapidly… Such injections were done to me three times with breaks of 3 to 4 months. After such an injection I had a terrible burning session in my abdomen. Rosalinde de Leon, Witness Testimony for Clauberg’s Trial, 1956.

Mengele and Twin Research

Scientists were eager to examine hereditary pathology, research the German Research Fund supported. SS physician Josef Mengele saw an opportunity to advance his research when he became the doctor in charge of the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring 1943.

At first Mengele focused on therapies for ‘Noma’, a gangrene infection of the mouth. ‘Gypsy’ twins were sought. Mengele collaborated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in the research and killing of eight members of the Sinto family Mechau, because they had different coloured eyes. He selected research subjects for death so that their bodies and organs could be further experimented on.

Mengele improvised a research facility at Auschwitz. He obtained blocks to house twins and dwarves arriving from Hungary in Auschwitz from May 1944. He established a pathological laboratory next to the crematoria in June 1944, and recruited prisoner doctors, anthologists and artists to work with him.

When over 430,000 Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring and summer 1944, his research intensified. He made selections from the streams of people deported to the camp as material of scientific interest.

Most of the Hungarian twin experiment victims were children aged between one-and-a-half and thirteen years. Between 650 and 732 Jewish twins were experimented on.

Mengele and his assistants X-rayed, photographed and drew pictures of them. They conducted hearing and eye tests. They extracted blood and brain fluid. The tests were painful and humiliating. Mengele selected certain twins for murder and some did not survive.

One day at midnight SS officers woke us and led us to the dissecting room, where Dr Mengele was already waiting for us…There were 14 Gypsy twins under SS guard, sobbing bitterly. Without saying a word, Dr. Mengele prepared a…syringe. From a box he took out Evipan, from another he placed chloroform in…vials on a table. Then the first twin was brought in, a young girl of around fourteen. Dr. Mengele ordered me to undress her and place her on the autopsy table. Then he administered an intravenous injection of Evipan in the right arm. After the child lost consciousness, he touched for the left heart ventricle and injected 10 cm3 of chloroform. The child was dead after a single convulsion and Dr. Mengele had her taken to the morgue. The murder of all fourteen twins happened in the same way that night. Dr. Mengele asked us if we could perform…autopsies. Deposition of prisoner Dr Miklós Nyiszli, July 1945.

Image credit (below left): USHMM, courtesy of Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme. Image credit (below centre): USHMM archive, courtesy of Yehudit Csengeri Barnea. Image credit (below right): USHMM archive, courtesy of Belarusian State.

Legacies of Nazi Medical Research

German scientists viewed coerced experiments as a benefit to the war effort, to science, and ‘racial purity’. More than 15,000 people, but possibly up to about 27,000, were experimented on during the Nazi period. This includes between 3,166 and 3,991 Jews. Research on identifying victims and their fates is still ongoing. The legacy of the experiments persists.

An American military tribunal held proceedings against 23 German physicians and administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Medical Trial opened on 9 December 1946. It was part of the subsequent Nuremberg trials.

The verdict was announced on 29 August 1947: 16 doctors were found guilty, with 7 sentenced to death. The Medical Case was the only Nuremberg Trial to end with a set of judicial guidelines: the  Nuremberg Code . The Code outlined conditions for ‘permissible medical experiments’ involving voluntary consent of research subjects.

Some medical staff of the ‘euthanasia’ centres were also tried after the war. Out of 265 known perpetrators, 9 died or were killed during the Second World War. 72 were tried after the war (25 were executed, 4 served life imprisonment, 31 were convicted to varying prison terms and 12 were acquitted). 125 evaded justice, 20 committed suicide, while the post-war fate of 39 is not known.

Surviving Victims and Compensation

Coerced experiments caused permanent disabilities, infertility, incapacity and death. Those who survived were forever marked by their experiences. While some survivors recovered, many lives never returned to normality.

In July 1951, the German government offered compensation to victims of medical experiments under National Socialism.  Most victims received 3,000 marks or less as a single payment . Rather than compensate pain and suffering, the Federal Finance Ministry calculated loss of earning capacity. This meant that X-ray sterilisation victims, including many women who did not work outside the home, received only minimal compensation, or none at all.

Officials refused to compensate twins experimented on by Mengele until after Mengele’s death, arguing that a ‘twin experiment’ was not a medical experiment. Eventually, meagre sums were disbursed. Matters improved when Poland and Hungary requested adjudication by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Sums between 30,000 and 50,000 marks were awarded to victims in Eastern Europe.

The United Kingdom’s Foreign Office did not support claimants or negotiate for additional compensation for experiment victims who resided in the UK. Many victims were thus never monetarily compensated, even minimally, for their suffering.

Research uses and human remains

The scientific usefulness of research results gained from Nazi human experimentation remains meagre. Yet the extended use of victims’ remains has not been fully clarified.

For instance, Dr Heinrich Gross, who conducted research on and selected children for ‘euthanasia’ in the  Spiegelgrund clinic  in Vienna, carried on with his research after the war. He became a celebrated forensic psychiatrist until he was stripped of the Austrian Medal for Science in 2003.  

Slides of brain tissue prepared by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society’s Julius Hallervorden were uncovered at the  Max Planck Society  (the successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) in the 1980s. In 2015, concern arose over brain tissues, some from ‘euthanasia’ victims, stored in the Max Planck Society archives. In 2016, the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry recognised that it has brain specimens from ‘euthanasia’ victims in its collections. The victims will be commemorated by name and their body parts given dignified burial.

The medical and scientific elite rarely confronted the destruction caused by their field during the Nazi period.

In 2012, the  German Medical Assembly  apologised for the role of German medical practitioners in coerced sterilisation, ‘euthanasia’ and experiments under Nazism. In 2017, the Max Planck Society opened its archival collections for research on its history of unethical, coerced research.

Today bioethics, research, and some medical practices remain controversial and contested. Debates surround abortion, stem cell research, assisted suicide, end of life care, the role of pharmaceutical companies, and genetically engineered births.

How can the past frame our understanding of these debates – and the consequences of our choices – today?

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• Mengele's Experiments

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Mengele's medical experiments.

Before the war, Josef Mengele had received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service and assigned to Auschwitz in May 1943; there he saw the opportunity to conduct medical research on human subjects. His experiments focused primarily on twins, with little or no regard for the health or safety of the victims.

Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele frequently assumed an enthusiastic posture on the railroad platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as trainloads of captives arrived from across German-occupied Europe. Pointing in one direction, the SS-physician sent the healthiest prisoners to factory work as slave laborers; pointing in the opposite direction, he sent countless women, children, the frail and the elderly to die in gas chambers and be cremated.

The entrance to Auschwitz, taken in 2014.

A third group, primarily twin children, who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments, were delivered to well-supplied barracks where Mengele conducted grisly and often fatal surgical experiments in a pseudoscientific quest to uncover the secrets of genetics. Mengele’s mocking smile and soft but deadly touch earned him the title “The Angel of Death”. Dr. Olga Lengyel, a prisoner at the concentration camp, revealed that Mengele supervised the birth of a child with meticulous care. Within an hour, mother and child were sent to the gas chamber. Dr. Gisela Perl, a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist, described the aftermath of one brutal killing by Mengele. “He took a piece of perfumed soap out of his bag and, whistling gaily with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face, he began to wash his hands”. One witness described how Josef Mengele ripped an infant from its mother`s womb, then hurled it into an oven because it wasn`t a twin as he had hoped. A third witness recounted how Mengele kept hundreds of human eyes pinned to his lab wall ''like a collection of butterflies”.

Mengele was fascinated with twins. He was interested in differences between identical and fraternal twins as well as how genetic diseases originated and affected them. His experiments also distinguished between genetic traits and those developed by the environment of the child. He operated on children to find genetic weaknesses in the makeup of Jewish or Gypsy people, thereby providing scientific evidence for the ideas of the Nazi party. Mengele hypothesized that his subjects were particularly vulnerable to certain diseases because of their race, and that they had degenerative blood and tissue.

Young prisoners held at a Nazi concentration camp.

Mengele or one of his assistants subjected twins to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes. He performed experiments such as unnecessary amputation of limbs. He intentionally infected a twin with typhus or another disease and transfused the blood of the infected twin into the other. Many of his subjects died while undergoing these procedures. After an experiment was complete, the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner doctor at Auschwitz, recalled one occasion where Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night through a chloroform injection to the heart. If one twin died of disease, Mengele killed the other so that comparative reports could be prepared after death.

He was known for experimenting with eyes. One of his studies regarded heterochromia iridum , a condition in which people's eyes are differently colored. After he killed heterochromatics, Mengele removed their eyes and sent them for study to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Genetics in Berlin under the helm of Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler. Mengele also attempted to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects.

His experiments on dwarfs and people with physical abnormalities included taking physical measurements, drawing blood, extracting healthy teeth, and treatment with unnecessary drugs and X-rays. Many of the victims were sent to the gas chambers after about two weeks, and their skeletons were sent to Berlin for further study.

Mengele firmly endorsed Nazi racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments aiming to illustrate the susceptibility among Jews or Gypsies to various diseases. He 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. Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two Gypsy twins together back-to-back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. The children died of gangrene after several days of suffering.

Mengele was also interested in the etiology and treatment of noma (a form of gangrene affecting the face, usually caused by a bacterial infection and typically occurring in young children suffering from malnutrition or other disease). This latter disease, widespread in Mengele’s “Gypsy Family Camp”, had been previously almost unknown in Europe. Mengele’s first experimental subjects were Gypsy children.

On Mengele's orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria.

In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs of twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toe prints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy.

Although gynecology was not his specialty, Mengele conducted experiments on pregnant women. He had them infected with typhoid in order to determine whether their children would be born with the infection too.

Ruth Elias was pregnant when she was transferred from Theresienstadt (Nazi ghetto located in Czechoslovakia) to Auschwitz. She said, “I delivered a beautiful big blonde girl, but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound so that, as he said, “We can see how long a newborn baby can survive without food”. After watching her baby suffer for several days, a female Czech doctor gave Elias a syringe with an overdose of morphine to end the child’s agony.

Forced sterilization experiments by means of X-ray, surgery and various drugs were also conducted at Auschwitz. The targets for sterilization included Jewish and Gypsy prisoners. The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization, which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort.

On the night of January 17, 1945, as the Soviet army approached Poland from the east, Mengele left Auschwitz, salvaging what records he could from his experiments on twins, cripples and dwarfs. From that night, he never stopped running. He fled westward, where he joined a retreating unit of Wehrmacht soldiers, exchanging his SS uniform for a Wehrmacht officer’s. American soldiers arrested him in Weiden, Germany, more than 400 miles west of Auschwitz, and held him for two months in two prisoner camps. But the Americans released Mengele when they failed to identify him as the same Josef Mengele listed on “wanted for mass murder and other crimes” circulars compiled by the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Allied High Commission in Paris. For that, he had his vanity to thank. It was Mengele’s decision not to have his blood group tattooed on his chest or arm when he joined the SS in 1938 that clinched his freedom.

Josef Mengele's skull, used to identify his body.

With luck, assistance from his prosperous family and a network of friends, he evaded recapture and fled to South America (Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil). In February 1979, aged 67, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming near Bertioga, Brazil. He was buried in Embu on the outskirts of São Paulo under the fictive name of Wolfgang Gerhard . His body was exhumed in 1985. An American scientist, Lowell Levine, a forensic scientologist brought to Brazil to work on the skull – one of dozens of experts assembled for the task – declared, “There is absolutely no doubt at all that this is Josef Mengele.”

Josef Mengele was dead. Four decades after World War II ended, there was still a clear message in 1985: The horrors inflicted by the Nazis SS Hauptsturmführer doctor had not been forgotten nor dismissed as acceptable wartime behavior.

Erwin W. Rugendorff, MD, PhD

Olga Lengyel: Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz. Chicago Review Press, Incorporated,2005 John Martin: In Evil Footsteps. World War II, October 2019, PP 26 – 37 David G. Marvel: Mengele – Unmasking the “Angel of Death”. W.W. Norton & Company, 2020 Eva Moses Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri: Surviving the Angel of Death. Tanglewood. Terre Haute. IN, 2009 Miklós Nyiszli: I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. Translated from Polish by Witold Zbirohowski-Koṥcia, 2010 Gerald L. Posner and John Ware: Mengele: The Complete Story. Cooer Square Press, 2000 Wikipedia: Josef Mengele

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Why the Nazis Were Obsessed With Twins

By: Erin Blakemore

Published: July 8, 2019

“Twins! Twins!” Ten-year-old Eva Mozes clung to her mother amidst the chaos of the selection platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau . Before arriving at the death camp, she had been stuffed into a train car on a seemingly endless journey from Hungary. Now, she and her twin sister Miriam pressed close as Nazi guards shouted orders in German.

Suddenly, an SS guard stopped in front of the identical girls. “Are they twins?” he asked their mother.

“Is that good?” she replied.

He nodded, and Eva Mozes’s life changed forever. The SS guard grabbed her and Miriam, whisking them away from their mother as they screamed and called her name. They never saw her again.

Eva and Miriam had just become subjects of a massive, inhumane medical experimentation program at Auschwitz-Birkenau—a program aimed solely at thousands of twins, many of them children.

Led by physician Josef Mengele, the program turned twins like Eva and Miriam into unwilling medical subjects in experiments that exposed about 3,000 children at Auschwitz-Birkenau to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical “research” into illness, human endurance and more.

Twins were separated from the other prisoners during the massive “selections” that took place at the camp’s massive train platform, and whisked off to a laboratory to be examined. Mengele usually used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination , injections with diseases, amputations , and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny.

Auschwitz Photos Taken After Its Liberation Reveal Devastating Atrocities

'After Auschwitz, the human condition is no longer the same. After Auschwitz, nothing will ever be the same.' —Elie Wiesel.

Auschwitz Survivors Recall Harrowing and Heroic Moments From the Death Camps

Estimates suggest that Nazis murdered 85 percent of the people at Auschwitz. Here are the stories of three who survived.

Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp

How many were killed, how many children were sent to the site and the numbers of people who attempted to escape are among the facts that reveal the scale of crimes committed at Auschwitz.

Twin studies had helped scientists like Mengele’s mentor justify what they saw as necessary discrimination against people with “undesirable” genetic characteristics—Jews, Roma people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and others. But the twin experiments that had helped create the eugenics movement would, ironically, lead to the downfall of eugenics itself. 

For eugenicists like Mengele, identical twins like the Mozes sisters were the perfect research subjects. Since they share a genome, scientists reasoned, any physical or behavioral differences in twins would be due to behavior, not genetics. Eugenicists held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behavior and wipe out undesirable tendencies.

By the time twin research began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the 1940s, the use of twins in scientific experimentation was decades old. Though prior twin experiments had produced growing evidence that environment was as important as genetics, eugenics researchers clung to the idea that they could unlock new insights into nature and nurture through studying them. 

One of them, Otmar von Verschuer , had significant power and influence in Nazi Germany. He authored texts that influenced Nazi policies toward Jews, Roma people and others, arguing that race had a biological basis and that “inferior” people could taint the Aryan race. An advocate for forced sterilization and selective breeding, von Verschuer collected genetic information on large numbers of twins, studying the statistics in an attempt to determine whether everything from disease to criminal behavior could be inherited. And he had a protege: a young physician named Josef Mengele.

Like his mentor, Mengele was vehemently racist and a devoted member of the Nazi Party. In 1943, he began working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a medical officer. At first, Mengele was in charge of the Roma camp there, but in 1944 the entire remaining population of the camp was murdered in the gas chambers. Mengele was promoted to chief camp physician of the entire Birkenau camp, and became known for his brutal selections of incoming prisoners for the gas chambers.

Mengele wanted to continue the twin experiments he had begun with von Verschuer, and now he had a captive populace on which to do so. Though his earlier experiments had been legitimate, his work in Auschwitz-Birkenau was not. Abandoning medical ethics and research protocols, Mengele began conducting horrific experiments on up to 1,500 sets of twins, many of them children. 

The “Mengele Twins” received nominal protection from some of the ravages of life at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were not selected for the gas chambers, lived in separate quarters, and were given additional food and medical care. In exchange, though, they became the unwilling subjects of inhumane experiments at the hands of Mengele, who gained a reputation as the “Angel of Death” for his power, his mercurial temper and his cruelty.

For Eva, life as a Mengele twin meant sitting naked for hours and having her body repeatedly measured and compared to Miriam’s. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. “As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp,” she later recalled . “But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments.”

Eugenics itself was rooted in twin research. Frances Galton, a British scientist who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, had used twin studies in his earliest eugenic research. Deeply influenced by his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, Galton became intrigued by how and whether humans passed along traits like intelligence, and preoccupied with the potential of breeding “desirable” genetic traits into humans.

For Galton and other eugenics researchers, twins held the key to understanding which characteristics were genetic and which ones were environmental. Using data collected via self-reported questionnaires, Galton studied dozens of pairs of twins to determine how they were similar and different. He concluded that similarities between twins were due to their genetics. “The one element that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency,” he wrote. “It inevitably asserts itself.”

Though Galton’s twin research was biased and seriously flawed by modern standards, it helped lay the foundation for the eugenics movement. It also convinced other eugenicists that twins were the ideal way to study nature and nurture. But though eugenicists hypothesized that twins could help them create more perfect humans, the results of twin experiments kept confounding scientists. In the 1930s, for example, a group of American researchers who compared twins found a large variance in IQ in twins who had been raised apart but nonetheless shared similar personalities and behavioral traits.

Though twins were “the most favorable weapons” for the study of the “much-debated nature-nurture problem,” they wrote, their conclusions suggested that the very qualities eugenicists thought they could encourage by monitoring marriage and eliminating individuals with “undesirable” traits from the gene pool didn’t have to do with genetics at all.

The Nazis’ defeat ended Mengele’s experimentation on twins at Auschwitz. At the end of the war, the “Angel of Death" managed to escape prosecution. Shielded by Nazi sympathizers, he lived in South America until his death in Brazil in 1979.

In the aftermath of the war, scientists grappled with the aftermath of Nazi experimentation and the Holocaust’s use of eugenic principles in the name of genocide. In 1946, a group of German physicians who had carried out euthanasia and conducted medical experimentation in Nazi death camps were tried at Nuremberg during a 140-day-long trial. The trial resulted in seven death sentences and the Nuremberg Code , a set of research ethics that has influenced modern concepts of informed consent and medical experimentation.

Only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived. Among them were Eva and Miriam. In the 1970s, Eva Mozes Kor began lecturing about her experiences and seeking out other survivors. Eventually, she and Miriam formed a nonprofit called Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors (CANDLES) and tracked down more than 100 other twin survivors, documenting their experiences and the health ramifications of the often unknown experiments they had been subjected to at Auschwitz.

Most records of experimentation at Auschwitz were destroyed, but the lives of people like Eva Mozes Kor, who died in July 2019 at age 85, bear witness to the twin experiments’ brutality. Ironically, the very type of experimentation Nazi physicians thought would uphold the pseudoscience they used to justify genocide ended up undermining the field of eugenics. In the face of unconvincing data revealed by twin studies and worldwide condemnation of Nazi medical experiments, scientists abandoned eugenics en masse and the field died out. 

Today, the concept of twin studies has been challenged by research that demonstrates genetic variations even among identical twins. But  twin studies are still used to learn more about age-related disease, eating disorders, sexual orientation and more, while a groundbreaking study of twin NASA astronauts is shedding new light on how microgravity affects the human body. But though twins remain invaluable to researchers today, twin studies are still a subject of debate among scientists eager to sidestep their hideous history. 

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Josef Mengele

(1911-1979)

An ardent Nazi, In 1943 Josef Mengele was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labor or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”).

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Josef Mengele
• Birth Year: 1911
• Birth date: March 16, 1911
• Birth City: Günzburg
• Birth Country: Germany
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp who selected prisoners for execution in gas chambers and led medical experiments on inmates.
• Science and Medicine
• Astrological Sign: Pisces
• University of Frankfurt am Main
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1979
• Death date: February 7, 1979
• Death City: Enseada da Bertioga
• Death Country: Brazil

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Josef Mengele Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scientists/josef-mengele
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 16, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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• Published: 01 August 2001

Genetics of susceptibility to tuberculosis: Mengele's experiments in Auschwitz

• Benno Müller-Hill 1  

Nature Reviews Genetics volume  2 ,  pages 631–634 ( 2001 ) Cite this article

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Great experiments will always be remembered. I highlight an experiment that was conducted during the Nazi regime in Germany. Not only did the experiment fail, it was also linked to fraud and crimes against humanity. This failed experiment will never be forgotten.

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I thank the Präsidentenkommission of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG) for giving me access to the letters of Butenandt and the Archive of the MPG for their excellent help.

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A History of Mengele's Gruesome Experiments on Twins

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From May 1943 until January 1945, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele worked at Auschwitz, conducting pseudo-scientific medical experiments. Many of his cruel experiments were conducted on young twins. Simple the words "Mengele twins" are chilling.

Notorious Doctor of Auschwitz

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Mengele, the notorious doctor of Auschwitz, has become an enigma of the 20th century. Mengele's handsome physical appearance, fastidious dress, and calm demeanor contradicted his attraction to murder and gruesome experiments.

Mengele's seeming omnipresence at the railroad unloading platform called the ramp, as well as his fascination with twins, incited images of a mad, evil monster. His ability to elude authorities after World War II—he was never captured—increased his notoriety and gave him a mystical and devious persona. Make no mistake: he was a war criminal.

In May 1943, Mengele entered Auschwitz as an educated, experienced, medical researcher. With funding for his experiments, he worked alongside some of the top medical researchers of the time. Anxious to make a name for himself, Mengele searched for the secrets of heredity. The Nazi ideal of the future would benefit from the help of genetics, according to Nazi doctrine. If so-called Aryan women could give birth to twins who were sure to be blond and blue-eyed, the future could be saved.

Mengele, who worked for professor Otmar Freiherr von Vershuer, a biologist who pioneered twin methodology in the study of genetics, believed that twins held these secrets. Auschwitz seemed the best location for such research because of the large number of available twins to use as specimens.

Mengele took his turn as the selector on the ramp, but unlike most of the other selectors, he arrived sober. With a small flick of his finger or riding crop, a person would either be sent to the left or the right, to the gas chamber or to hard labor.

Mengele would get very excited when he found twins. The other SS officers who helped unload the transports had been given special instructions to find twins, dwarfs, giants, or anyone else with a unique hereditary trait like clubfoot or heterochromia (each eye a different color). Mengele was on the ramp not only during his selection duty but also when it was not his turn as a selector, to ensure twins would not be missed.

As the unsuspecting people were herded off the train and ordered into separate lines, SS officers shouted "Zwillinge!" (Twins!) in German. Parents were forced to make a quick decision. Unsure of their situation, already being separated from family members when forced to form lines, seeing barbed wire, smelling an unfamiliar stench—was it good or bad to be a twin?

Sometimes, parents announced they had twins, and in other cases, relatives, friends, or neighbors made the statement. Some mothers tried to hide their twins, but the SS officers and Mengele searched through the surging ranks of people looking for twins and anyone with unusual traits. While many twins were either announced or discovered, some sets of twins were successfully hidden and walked with their mothers into the gas chamber.

About 3,000 twins were pulled from the masses on the ramp, most of them children. Only around 200 of these twins survived. When the twins were found, they were taken away from their parents. As the twins were led away to be processed, their parents and family stayed on the ramp and went through selection. Occasionally, if the twins were very young, Mengele would allow the mother to join her children to ensure their health.

After the twins had been taken from their parents, they were taken to the showers. Since they were "Mengele's children," they were treated differently than other prisoners . Though they suffered through medical experiments, the twins were often allowed to keep their hair and their own clothes.

The twins were then tattooed and given a number from a special sequence. They were then taken to the twins' barracks where they were required to fill out a form. The form asked for a brief history and basic measurements, such as age and height. Many of the twins were too young to complete the form by themselves, so the "Zwillingsvater" (twin father) helped them. This person was actually an inmate assigned to the job of taking care of the male twins. Once the form was filled out, the twins were taken to Mengele. He asked them more questions and looked for any unusual traits .

Life for the Twins

Daily life for the twins began at 6 a.m. They were required to report for roll call in front of their barracks, regardless of weather conditions. After roll call, they ate a small breakfast. Then each morning, Mengele would appear for an inspection.

Mengele's presence did not necessarily cause fear in the children. He was often known to appear with pockets full of candy and chocolates, to pat them on the head, talk with them, and sometimes even play. Many of the children, especially the younger ones, called him "Uncle Mengele."

The twins were given brief instruction in makeshift "classes" and were sometimes even allowed to play soccer. The children were not required to do hard work or labor. They were also spared from punishments, as well as from the frequent selections within the camp . The twins had some of the best conditions of anyone at Auschwitz until the trucks came to take them to the experiments.

Mengele's Twin Experiments

Generally, every twin had to have blood drawn every day. They also underwent various medical experiments. Mengele kept his exact reasoning for his experiments a secret. Many of the twins that he experimented on did not know the purpose of the experiments, or what exactly was being injected into or otherwise done to them. The experiments included:

Measurements:  The twins were forced to undress and lie next to each other. Every detail of their anatomy was carefully examined, studied, and measured. Features that were the same between the two were deemed to be hereditary, and those that were different were deemed environmental. These tests would last for several hours.

Blood:  The frequent blood tests and experiments included mass transfusions of blood from one twin to another.

Eyes:  In attempts to fabricate blue eye color, drops, or injections of chemicals would be put in their eyes. This often caused severe pain, infections, and temporary or permanent blindness.

Shots and diseases:  Mysterious injections caused severe pain. Injections into the spine and spinal taps were given with no anesthesia. Diseases, including typhus and tuberculosis, would be purposely given to one twin and not the other. When one died, the other was often killed to examine and compare the effects of the disease.

Surgeries:  Various surgeries were performed without anesthesia, including organ removal, castration, and amputation.

Death:  Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was Mengele's prisoner pathologist. The autopsies became the final experiment. Nyiszli performed autopsies on twins who had died from the experiments or who had been purposely killed just for after-death measurements and examination. Some of the twins had been stabbed with a needle that pierced their hearts, which were injected with chloroform or phenol, causing near-immediate blood coagulation and death. Some of the organs, eyes, blood samples, and tissues would be sent to Verschuer, Mengele's former professor, for further study.

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Nazi physician Carl Clauberg (at left), who performed medical experiments on prisoners in Block 10 of the Auschwitz camp. Poland, between 1941 and 1944.

Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical experiments

A Romani (Gypsy) victim of Nazi medical experiments to make seawater safe to drink. Dachau concentration camp, Germany, 1944.

Nazi doctor Victor Brack on trial

Victor Brack, one of the Nazi doctors on trial for having conducted medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Nuremberg, Germany, August 1947.

Sentencing of Herta Oberheuser

Herta Oberheuser was a physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. This photograph shows her being sentenced at the Doctors Trial in Nuremberg. Oberheuser was found guilty of performing medical experiments on camp inmates and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Nuremberg, Germany, August 20, 1947.

Waldemar Hoven, head SS doctor at Buchenwald

Waldemar Hoven, head SS doctor at the Buchenwald concentration camp, testifies in his own defense at the Doctors Trial . Hoven conducted medical experiments on prisoners. Nuremberg, Germany, June 23, 1947.

Jadwiga Dzido testifies at the Doctors Trial

Concentration camp survivor Jadwiga Dzido shows her scarred leg to the Nuremberg court, while an expert medical witness explains the nature of the procedures inflicted on her in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on November 22, 1942. The experiments , including injections of highly potent bacteria, were performed by defendants Herta Oberheuser and Fritz Ernst Fischer. December 20, 1946.

Wladislava Karolewska testifies at the Doctors Trial

Wladislava Karolewska, a victim of medical experiments at the Ravensbrück camp, was one of four Polish women who appeared as prosecution witnesses at the Doctors Trial . Nuremberg, Germany, December 22, 1946.

Arriving in Nuremberg to testify

Four Polish women arrive at the Nuremberg train station to serve as prosecution witnesses at the Doctors Trial . From left to right are Jadwiga Dzido , Maria Broel-Plater, Maria Kusmierczuk, and Wladislawa Karolewska . December 15, 1946.

A witness testifies about the murder of Catholic priests at Dachau

Friedrich Hoffman, holding a stack of death records, testifies about the murder of 324 Catholic priests who were exposed to malaria during Nazi medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, November 22, 1945.

Nazi physician Carl Clauberg

Nazi physician Carl Clauberg, who performed medical experiments on prisoners in Block 10 of the Auschwitz camp. Place and date uncertain.

Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele , German physician and SS captain.  He was the most prominent of a group of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments that often caused great harm or death to the prisoners.  In November 1943 Mengele became "Chief Camp Physician" of Auschwitz II (Birkenau).  Many of those subjected to Mengele's experiments died as a result or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination. 

11-year-old girl who was a victim of medical experiments at Auschwitz

United Nations personnel vaccinate an 11-year-old concentration camp survivor who was a victim of medical experiments at the Auschwitz camp. Photograph taken in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp , Germany, May 1946.

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Soviet soldiers inspect a box containing poison used in medical experiments . Auschwitz , Poland, after January 27, 1945.

Survivor Helena Hegier's disfigured leg

A war crimes investigation photo of the disfigured leg of a survivor from Ravensbrück, Polish political prisoner Helena Hegier (Rafalska), who was subjected to medical experiments in 1942. This photograph was entered as evidence for the prosecution at the Medical Trial in Nuremberg. The disfiguring scars resulted from incisions made by medical personnel that were purposely infected with bacteria, dirt, and slivers of glass.

Victim of medical experiments at Neuengamme

A Soviet prisoner of war, victim of a tuberculosis medical experiment at Neuengamme concentration camp. Germany, late 1944.

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A victim of a Nazi medical experiment is immersed in icy water at the Dachau concentration camp. SS doctor Sigmund Rascher oversees the experiment. Germany, 1942.

Eduard, Elisabeth, and Alexander Hornemann

Eduard, Elisabeth, and Alexander Hornemann. The boys, victims of tuberculosis medical experiments at Neuengamme concentration camp, were murdered shortly before liberation. Elisabeth died of typhus in Auschwitz . The Netherlands, prewar.

Seven-year-old Jacqueline Morgenstern

Photograph of seven-year-old Jacqueline Morgenstern in Paris, France, 1940. Jacqueline was later a victim of tuberculosis medical experiments at the  Neuengamme concentration camp. The SS took 20 of the children who had been victims of medical experiments at Neuengamme to a school building in Hamburg. Situated on Bullenhuser Damm, this location was a subcamp of Neuengamme. Jacqueline and the other children in the group (10 boys and 10 girls, all Jewish) were killed there.

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