Mengele's Twin Experiments

Science is a powerful tool in our society, used to answer the most complex of questions. In some cases, though, science is abused and used as a façade for someone’s own personal gain. This was the case for Josef Mengele and the twin experiments he was in charge of at Auschwitz from 1943-1945. The experiments that were performed by Doctor Mengele went beyond what was requested of him by the German government, and were performed to answer his own personal inquiries. Is it important to first understand how Mengele's education contributed to his work at Auschwitz. Mengele earned a Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the University of Munich and acted as an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. Otmar von Verschuer was known for his interest

Vera Alexander, a survivor of Auschwitz, testified in 1985 on this horrific experiment. She stated, “One pair of twins called Guido and Nina was barely older than four. Mengele picked them up and brought them back mutilated in a perverse way. They had been sewn together at the back like Siamese twins.” Mengele sewed the set of twins at the back like Alexander said, and he had even sewn the veins in their hands together. The twins called out day and night in pain. Their mother eventually put an end to their suffering by injecting them with morphine a nurse had given to her. Another one of Mengele’s experiments was to inject chemicals and dyes into twins’ eyes in an attempt to change the color of their eyes. He also attempted to change a boy from a girl and vice versa by transferring blood from a set of boy twins to a set of girl twins, and then transfusing the blood from the girls to the boys. In an even viler approach to this, Mengele cut off parts of twin boys’ genitalia to see if he could turn them into girls. These experiments show the self-serving side of Mengele. He did not have to perform these more horrendous experiments, but he did so to test his own personal