Differences And Similarities Between The Holocaust And Dr Mengele

During the Holocaust, the atrocities committed by the Nazis were not limited to mass murder, but also included human experiments conducted on twins. The experiments done were initiated by Dr. Josef Mengele, a German Nazi doctor. Dr. Mengele was also known as the Angel of Death. Dr. Mengele was an SS soldier and an active member of the Nazi party. Dr. Mengele’s experiments were done to twins because he wanted to compare one twin to the other or compare the outcomes of the experiments to two people with the same genetic makeup. Life for the twins in Auschwitz was different than all the other inmates in the camp. They were kept alive and did not have to go through what other prisoners went through until Dr. Mengele picked them up in trucks to

bring them to the “hospital” to experiment on them. Auschwitz was his opportunity to start / continue his research with identical and fraternal twins. These experiments had no regard for the mental, physical or safety of the people that they were experimenting on. All these experiments were done based on genetics and to make a pure Aryan Germany.

Dr. Mengele conducted some of his experiments because Germany thought that they could make a better human race through selective breeding. By these experiments they could promote the positive goals of their science which could eliminate alcoholism and mental illnesses. They would try and make blue eyes by using drops, injections and chemicals that would be put into the eyes, which often would cause severe pain, infections and sometimes make the person permanently blind. The Nazi’s ideal vision of the future of Germany would benefit from genetics, in a letter that Mengele himself wrote. In the note to himself he writes about how if a pure Aryan woman could give birth to twins that both had blonde hair and blue eyes the future of Germany could be saved. The next step after making genetically engineering the eyes to be blue is to completely take out the “inferior people” strands from the human population. The experiments were done to refine the master race and to determine the causes of defects in children.

Dr.

Mengele conducted twin experiments in which one of the twin was the “control group” and the other twin was the “experimental group,” or an experiment was done on both twins to see if the same result occurred. This is because twins have the same genetic makeup. Diseases that included 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. This is because they thought that they have the same genetic makeup. They would purposely give it to one but not to the other to see how the first twin would react and note it down. Then he died and they would inject the other twin and see what the differences and the similarities were in how the body would react to the injection. Various surgeries were performed without anesthesia including organ removal, castration, and amputation, nerve regeneration, bone transplantation from one person to the other and conjoining twins together happened to the people being experimented on. A few sections of muscle,bone, and nerves were take out of the person without any anesthesia. After the operations the people suffered from intense pain, mutilation and sometimes permanent disability. A survivor from those experiments were done to both her legs. She then suffered from a fever after the surgery was done on her and she was not taken care of when she had a fever. Some other experiments that Dr. Mengele conducted on twins were high

altitude experiments. High altitude experiments would be done in a low pressure room which had a high altitude and the Nazis’s would raise them the highest they could go and see for how long they could stay up there for. Most of the people that he experimented on died or were injured because of the high atmospheric altitude. Sea Water experiments happened to the twins as well. Sea water experiments is when the person being experimented on is unable to eat any food and is only given chemically processed sea water. These experiments would cause extreme pain, this would result in extreme dehydration and or organ failure. Another experiment that they did on people were injecting Malaria into the body. This was done because Germany wanted to investigate immunization and or a treatment for Malaria. The “healthy” inmates at the concentration camps were either already bit by mosquitos or were injected with the disease. After having got the injection the people were “treated” by various injections to test what would happen. At least 1,000 people were forced into this experiment. A large amount of people died from having suffered severe pain and possibly permanent disability. After all of these experiments were done on them the people who died would all be either dissected to study to see how the experiment effected that person or cremated.

The twins life was not the best but also was not the worst. When they first arrived in Auschwitz they were selected by Nazi soldiers to be brought to Dr. Mengele to be looked over. After In fact people say it was worst than the people who were not getting experimented on. The kids that were getting experimented on were manipulated to think that Dr.Mengele was the good guy and not the bad guy. The twin’s day started at six o’clock in the morning. They had to go outside of their barracks and wait until Dr. Mengele came to select the kids that he was experimenting on that day and deciding what the experiment was going to be depending on if the kids could go through it. When Dr. Mengele showed up in the morning he would bring the kids candies, chocolates, food and sometimes play with them. Measurements were done to the twins this was by telling them to lie down next to each other naked so they could measure every single part of their body and compare it to the twin. The measurements lasted for several hours. Blood tests that included blood being transfused from one twin to the other. They would inject mysterious things in the spine and the spinal taps which were given with no anesthesia. These injections were done to one twin and then was given to the other twin a few weeks later depending on how the initial twin felt. Typhus and Tuberculosis were purposely given to one twin but not the other. If one died the other one would also be killed to see the similarities and differences of the effects of the disease.

After the Holocaust Dr.

Mengele apparently escaped and went underground for four year being a farm stableman near Bavaria, after that he reportedly left Bavaria and went to Genoa then South America in 1949. After he moved to Uruguay and married someone from there and changed his name to José Mengele, when he got married he got citizenship in Paraguay in 1959. In 1961 he supposedly moved to Brazil and becoming friends with an-old Nazi soldier named Wolfgang Gerhard. He then supposedly lived very wealthy thanks to a Hungarian couple. A team of Brazilian, West Germans and American forensic experts determined that Dr. Mengele stole Gerhard’s identity after his death. When Dr. Mengele arrived in Brazil he apparently started out as a vet and offered medical treatment to the woman in the town of Candido Godoi. Scientist fail to discover why so many as one in five pregnancies in Candido Godoi are twin pregnancies and most of those twins are blonde hair and blue eyed. We also know that Dr. Mengele made multiple visits in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the 1960s. This shows that Dr. Mengele was still trying to achieve his dream of a Nazi master race. Candido Godoi is now known of the land of twins and is also where the a museum called “The house of Twins” is located. The first blue eyed and blonde haired twins that were born was in 1963, which is when people say that Dr. Mengele was in Brazil. These experiments show that the Holocaust was worse than people thought it was because

people thought that the only event during the Holocaust was the Nazi’s killing Jews but they were experimenting on twins, dwarfs, giants and just Jews in general. Dr. Mengele was a sick man. He thought he was not torturing the kids and he was saving them from the horror that was happening to the people in the other barracks. The twins were his favourite subjects and had special treatment, which was being able to keep their hair, their clothes and getting extra food than all the other people. He thought that experimenting on the twins was for the good of the nation. In Auschwitz over one thousand twins were selected for the experiments but only 200 survived when the camp was liberated. The survivors suffered from long term effects from the experiments that the Nazi’s were doing to them.

Citations:
Rosenberg, Jennifer. "A History of Mengele's Gruesome Experiments on Twins." ThoughtCo, Apr. 4, 2018,thoughtco.com/mengeles-children-twins-of-auschwitz-1779486.
BBC News, “The twins of Auschwitz” , Published January 28, 2015, April 12, 2018
BuzzFeedVideo. YouTube, YouTube, 15 Sept. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgPAetNY5U&t=249s.
“Josef Mengele.” en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia., n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2018. (-- removed HTML --) .
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The Telegraph, January 21, 2009, April 19, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/4307262/Nazi-angel-of-death-Josef-Mengele-created-twin-town-in-Brazil.html
Malaria Experiments, Nazi Medical Experiments,April 19, 2018, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/malaria-experiments