Josef Mengele Angel of Death. "Doctor Death"

During the war, the name of Josef Mengele (photo in the article) was little known, so he managed to escape punishment and quietly leave Germany after the war. Much later, he turned into a symbol of a killer doctor who performed crazy experiments on prisoners. Later it became clear that Mengele was not alone - he fulfilled the requests of other doctors and scientists, including world famous ones.

Origin

The biography of Josef Mengele began in 1911 in the German state of Bavaria. He was born into a family of an ordinary farmer. The father of the future Nazi executioner founded the company for the production of agricultural equipment "Karl Mengele and Sons". The mother took care of the children. Josef had two younger brothers, Carl Jr. and Alois.

The wealthy Mengele family began to support Hitler immediately after he came to power, because the Fuhrer protected the interests of those peasants on whom the family's well-being depended. Josef's father quickly joined the party, and when Hitler arrived in the city, he spoke at the Karl Mengele factory. When the Nazis came to power, the company received a good order.

Early biography

As a child, Josef was a rather curious, ambitious and talented child. One day he told his parents that someday they would see his name in an encyclopedia. He studied well at school, was interested in art and sports. After leaving school, the young man refused to follow in his father's footsteps and decided to get a medical education. At first he wanted to become a dentist, but then he found it too boring. He studied at the Munich and Military Universities.

In his student years, he joined the Steel Helmet organization. Formally, it was not a Nazi movement. The members of the group were ultra-patriots and adhered to conservative views, there were also monarchists. Soon, the little organized street detachments of the Steel Helmet were absorbed by the stormtroopers.

In the ranks of the SA, Josef Mengele did not even think of conducting experiments on people. There he did not remain long. Street fights did not inspire the intelligent young doctor, so he soon left the organization, citing poor health. After receiving his diploma (the young man studied anthropology at the university), Mengele began working at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.

There he became an assistant to the physician Otmar von Verschuer, who was considered an authority on genetics. The doctor specialized in twins, genetic abnormalities and hereditary diseases. Under Verschuer's guidance, Josef Mengele completed his doctoral dissertation. He was then less than thirty years old. Mengele showed great promise.

Military service

Physician Josef Mengele had to join the SS and the party for career advancement. This often happens in totalitarian states. At the end of the thirties, Mengele first joined the NSDAP, and then the SS. In 1940, when the war was already in full swing, he was drafted into the army. Mengele did not stay long in the Wehrmacht. He transferred to the racial medical battalion of the Waffen-SS.

The doctor did not take a direct part in the hostilities. Soon he was transferred to the SS Headquarters for Settlement. Mengele's duties included evaluating Poles for suitability for further Germanization according to the racial standards of the Nazi state. After the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, the future Doctor Death was transferred to the SS Panzer Division, where he served as a medic. He was awarded the Iron Cross for rescuing two tankmen from a tank.

In the summer of 1942, the service ended. In the Rostov-on-Don area, Josef Mengele was seriously wounded. After his recovery, he was declared unfit for service. With the rank of captain, the doctor returned to Germany, where he continued to work in the SS administration for settlement issues.

Doctor Death

During this period, a sharp turn took place in the life of Dr. Josef Mengele. His longtime mentor became head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Heredity. The Kaiser had nothing to do with this institution. The Institute was founded long before the start of the war with the money of the John Rockefeller Foundation.

The institution dealt with eugenics, which was extremely popular throughout the world after the First World War. Eugenics is the science of selection, ways to improve hereditary qualities. This was of great interest to the then Nazi state. With the advent of the fascists to power, the institute was rebuilt on their ideology.

It was Verschuer who suggested that Josef Mengel work in a concentration camp for the benefit of German science. In 1942, a decision was made to transfer all Jews from the occupied territory to camps in Poland. The Germans had already decided to completely get rid of all the Jews, so they did not see anything reprehensible in experimenting on living subjects, who in any case were doomed to death.

Duties in Auschwitz

The scientific director convinced Josef Mengele that the camps offer great opportunities for scientific breakthroughs. After that, the doctor wrote a statement to the head physician of Auschwitz about his desire to serve in a concentration camp. The request was granted. Mengele was appointed chief doctor of the gypsy camp on the grounds of Auschwitz. He later became chief physician of a large camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

His duty was to inspect the arriving prisoners. Based on the results of the inspections, the commission decided who was fit for work for the benefit of the camp and would remain alive for a while, and who was too sick, old or weak for overwork. The second group was immediately sent to the gas chambers. The management did not have much confidence in the workers, so Mengele had to make sure that the attendants did not appropriate valuable items that the arrivals had with them.

He had permission to research, that is, he could leave any prisoners for experiments. The experiments of the doctor Josef Mengele were horrifying. The doctor's test subjects had some privileges, for example, they received improved nutrition and were exempted from hard work. The people selected for the experiments could not be sent to the gas chambers.

At the very beginning of work, Josef Mengele "saved" the camp from the epidemic - he immediately sent a batch of gypsies to the gas chamber, among whom the sick were found. Later he got rid of the party of women in the same way. If Mengele knew how to stop the epidemic, he would have conducted experiments on these people.

Mengele's experiments

It was impossible to predict the consequences of Josef Mengele's experiments. No one knew also how long it would last. Often, in the process of experiments, the experimental people became sick or crippled, so that Mengele completely lost interest in them. Everything depended on the physical condition of the victim. If the subject did not suffer severe damage, he could be transferred to ordinary prisoners.

"Salvation" could only happen if the customers of the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele did not need new people. During the war, Verschuer received from the ward a huge number of reports, blood samples, skeletons and internal organs of prisoners. Mengele actively collaborated with Adolf Butenandt. This is one of the world's largest biochemists, Nobel Prize winner, an outstanding researcher of sex hormones. Butenandt developed a substance that was supposed to improve the quality of the blood of the military, their resistance to the influence of cold and altitude. This required liver preparations, which the scientist was supplied by Doctor Death.

Josef Mengele did not suffer any punishment for his experiments. The same applies to scientists with whom he collaborated. Verschuer became one of the largest geneticists and escaped denazification, and Butenandt headed the Max Planck Society. It was the most influential and prestigious German organization. It was not until the 2000s that organizations associated with Mengele made a formal apology to the victims of the experiments.

The exact number of victims of Dr. Josef Mengele is difficult to calculate. Almost all documents were destroyed either by the doctor himself, or by retreating SS troops, or by customers. On the conscience of Mengel were not only the victims of the experiments, but also the murdered disabled prisoners.

Experiments on twins

The doctor was not at all a psychopath, as one might assume, although Josef Mengele's experiments were insane. He personally visited his experimental subjects, treated the smallest to chocolates. He asked the children to call himself "Uncle Mengele." This most amazed people, judging by the recollections of those who managed to survive. Doctor Death was kind to the children, courteous, forced the little prisoners to go to a kindergarten organized by him, although he knew well that most of the wards would die.

Mengele was interested in people with genetic abnormalities and twins. The most exciting moment for him is the arrival of a new batch of prisoners. He personally examined the newcomers in search of something unusual. Trains arrived at night too, so he demanded that the attendants immediately wake him up if there was something “interesting”.

A laboratory was built for the doctor near one of the crematoria. The laboratory was equipped with the most modern equipment. Then the party set before science the task of raising the birth rate. The goal was to increase the likelihood of twins and triplets, of course, if the children were "pure blood". Josef Mengele's experiments were terrible. He found out how twins react to the same intervention. At the same time, he had about two hundred pairs at his disposal. Only in Auschwitz could such unique conditions be created for his work.

Saved by the Devil

Interested in Mengele and the Ovitz family. Before the war, Romanian Jews were itinerant musicians. They were saved by the fact that in a large family both dwarfs and children of normal growth were born. This unusually interested Mengele. He immediately transferred the family to his part of the camp and completely delivered them from forced labor.

Over time, the family became the favorites of Josf Mengele. He visited the prisoners and was always in a good mood. Over time, this was noticed by the camp staff and prisoners. A close relationship developed between the doctor and the subjects. He called them after the seven dwarfs from the Snow White cartoon.

Josef Mengele's experiments on people have almost come to a standstill. The doctor simply did not know what to do with this family. He took all kinds of tests from them: blood, hair and teeth. The doctor became attached to the subjects. He brought toys and sweets to the youngest, joked with the older ones. The whole family survived. After being released from the concentration camp, they said they were "saved by the will of the devil."

Flight of Mengele

In January 1945, Mengele left Auschwitz under the roar of the artillery of the Red Army. All materials were ordered to be destroyed, but the doctor took the most valuable with him. Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz on January 27. They found the bodies of the executed prisoners. Mengele, on the other hand, was sent to a camp in Silesia, where experiments were carried out in the preparation of bacteriological warfare. But it was no longer possible to stop the offensive of the Red Army.

Mengele was captured by the Americans, he was captured near Nuremberg. He was saved by the fact that he did not have the typical Nazi blood type tattoo under his arm. At one time, he managed to convince his superiors that there was no point in this, because a professional doctor would in any case do an analysis before starting a transfusion. They released him soon after. He changed his name to play it safe and became Fritz Holmann.

Josef Mengele was included in the list of war criminals compiled by the UN commission. The list was distributed among the camps for Wehrmacht soldiers, but not all Allied officers carefully studied it, so the doctor could not be found. Old friends supplied the doctor with false documents and sent him to the village, where he would hardly be looked for. Mengele lived in a Spartan setting. The owners remembered him as a man who ate everything on the table and drank a liter of milk. They even sympathized with him, because Josef was forced to hide.

In 1946, a trial began of doctors who conducted experiments on people in concentration camps. But Josef Mengele was not in the dock, although his name was repeatedly mentioned in the case file. They did not actively look for him, because it was believed that the doctor died or committed suicide in the last days of the war. His wife also claimed that he was dead.

At this time, Mengele even went to the zone of occupation of the USSR to return some of the records lost during the offensive of the Red Army. Three years later, the Nazi doctor decided to flee their country. He used the cover of the Red Cross to emigrate to Argentina. Then the doctor took the name of a certain Helmut Gregor. At the same time, in Argentina, for some time he lived under his real name and surname. From time to time, Mengele even visited European countries to meet his wife and son, who refused to leave Germany.

In the fifties he got into trouble with the law in Argentina. A former Nazi doctor was interrogated about illegal activities after a girl died due to an abortion. The doctor moved to Paraguay under the name José Mengele. Due to his carelessness, he was in the field of view of those who hunted for the Nazis. In 1959, the process of extradition of a war criminal began in Germany. By this time, the former Nazi doctor had already managed to move to Paraguay.

A few months later, with the help of friends who sympathized with the Nazis, he moved to Brazil. There he got a job working on a farm under the name of his friend Wolfgang Gerhard. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, Mengele successfully lay down on the bottom. In recent years, the doctor's health has deteriorated. He suffered from hypertension, and a few days before his death, he had a stroke. Josef Mengele died while swimming in the ocean in 1979.

Life after death

The Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on people was buried in Brazil under a false name. At the same time, articles appeared in various newspapers with information that Josef Mengele was seen alive in different parts of the world. In the eighties, a new interest in the affairs of the Nazis arose, it again became an interesting topic for everyone, Mengele's name began to be often mentioned again. In addition to Israel and Germany, the Americans joined the search. Several countries, public organizations and popular newspapers promised rewards for information about the doctor's whereabouts.

In 1985, a search was carried out in the house of one of the doctor's old friends. Correspondence with the fugitive and information about his death were found. At the request of the German authorities, the Brazilian police interviewed one of the locals who knew where Mengele was buried. In the same year, the body was exhumed. The study gave a rather high probability that Josef Mengele was buried there.

The identification process, however, dragged on. Only in 1992 was it possible to prove that the remains really belonged to the criminal. Up to this point, the newspapers now and then appeared information that the doctor from Auschwitz faked his death, but in reality continues to hide in one of the Latin American countries.

The story of Josef Mengele has become the basis of many documentaries and discussions. This is a war criminal who did terrible things. At the same time, many documentaries (for example, "Mysteries of the Century. Dr. Death Josef Mengele" with Sergei Medvedev) admit that he achieved truly phenomenal results as a doctor. For example, in a small town in southern Brazil, where Mengele continued his experiments on twins, 10% of the population are twins of Aryan appearance. By ethnotype, these people were more like Europeans than the local population.

Josef Mengele

In world history, many facts are known about bloody dictators, rulers and tyrants, distinguished by particular cruelty and violence, who killed millions of innocent people. But a special place among them is occupied by a person with a seemingly peaceful and most humane profession, namely the doctor Josef Mengele, who, in his cruelty and sadism, surpassed many famous killers and maniacs.

Curriculum vitae

Josef was born on March 16, 1911 in the German city of Günzburg in the family of an agricultural machinery manufacturer. He was the eldest child in the family. The father was constantly busy with affairs at the factory, and the mother was distinguished by a rather strict and despotic character, both to the factory staff and to her own children.

At school, little Mengele studied well, as befits a child of a strict Catholic upbringing. Continuing his studies at the universities of Vienna, Bonn and Munich, he studied medicine and at the age of 27 he received a medical degree. Two years later, Mengele joined the ranks of the SS troops, where he was appointed to the post of doctor in the sapper unit and rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. In 1943, he was commissioned for injury and appointed as a doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

welcome to Hell

To most of the surviving victims of the "Death Factory", as Auschwitz was called, Mengele, at their first meeting, seemed to be a fairly humane young man: tall, with a sincere smile on his face. He always smelled of expensive cologne, and his uniform was perfectly ironed, his boots were always polished. But these were only illusions about humanity.

As soon as new batches of prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, the doctor lined them up, stripped them naked and slowly walked among the prisoners, looking for suitable victims for his monstrous experiments. Those who were sick, the elderly and many women with babies in their arms, the doctor determined in the gas chambers. Only those prisoners who were able to work, Mengele left alive. Thus began hell for hundreds of thousands of people.

The "Angel of Death", as the prisoners called Mengele, began his bloody activities with the destruction of all the gypsies and several barracks with women and children. The reason for such bloodthirstiness was the typhus epidemic, with which the doctor decided to fight extremely radically. Imagining himself the arbiter of human destinies, he himself chose who to take life, who to operate on, and who to leave alive. But Josef was especially interested in inhuman experiments on prisoners.

Experiments on prisoners of Auschwitz

Hauptsturmführer Mengele was very interested in genetic changes in the body. In his opinion, torture was carried out for the benefit of the Third Reich and the science of genetics. So he looked for ways to increase the birth rate of the superior race and ways to reduce the birth rate of other races.

To study the effects of cold on German soldiers in the field, the "Angel of Death" surrounded the prisoners of the concentration camp with large pieces of ice and periodically measured body temperature.
To determine the maximum critical pressure that a person can withstand, a pressure chamber was created. In it, the prisoners were torn to pieces.
Also, prisoners of war were given lethal injections to determine endurance.
Inspired by the idea of destroying non-Aryan nationalities, the doctor performed operations to sterilize women by injecting various chemicals into the ovaries and exposing them to X-rays.

People for Mengele were just biomaterial for work. He easily pulled out teeth, broke out bones, pumped out blood from prisoners for the needs of the Wehrmacht, or performed sex change operations. Especially for the "Angel of Death" people with genetic diseases or deviations were of interest, for example, such as midgets

Dr. Mengele's experiments on children

Children in the activities of the Hauptsturmführer occupied a special position. Since, according to the ideas of the Third Reich, little Aryans were supposed to have only light skin, eyes and hair, the doctor injected special dyes into the eyes of Auschwitz children. In addition, he conducted experiments, introducing various injections into the heart, forcibly infected children with venereal or infectious diseases, cut out organs, amputated limbs, pulled out teeth and inserted others.

The twins were subjected to the most cruel experiments. When the twins were brought to the concentration camp, they were immediately isolated from other prisoners. Each pair was carefully examined, weighed, measured for height, length of arms, legs and fingers, as well as other physical parameters. At that time, the top leadership of Nazi Germany set the task - so that every healthy Aryan could give birth to two, three or more future Wehrmacht soldiers. "Doctor death" transplanted organs to the twins, pumped blood to each other, while he entered all the data and results of bloody operations into tables and notebooks. Enlightened by the idea of creating a Siamese pair of twins, Mengele performed an operation to sew together two little gypsies, who soon died.

All operations were performed without anesthesia. Children endured unbearable hellish pain. Most of the little prisoners did not live to see the end of the operation, and those who fell ill or were in very bad condition after the operation were placed in the gas chambers or an anatomical autopsy was performed.

All the results of the experiments carried out were periodically sent to the table of the highest ranks of Germany. Josef Mengele himself often held consultations and conferences at which he read out reports on his work.

The further fate of the executioner

When Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in April 1945, Hauptsturmführer Mengele quickly left the "death factory", taking with him his notebooks, notes and tables. Being declared a war criminal, he was able to escape to the West, disguised as an ordinary soldier's uniform. Since no one identified him, and the identity was not established, the doctor avoided arrest, wandering first in Bavaria, and then moved to Argentina. Before the court, the bloody doctor never appeared, fleeing from justice in Paraguay and Brazil. In South America, "Dr. Death" was involved in medical activities, usually illegal.

Suffering from paranoia, the "Angel of Death" died, according to some sources, on February 7, 1979. The cause of death was a stroke while swimming in the ocean. Only 13 years later, the location of his grave was officially confirmed.

Video about the terrible experiments of the Nazis on prisoners of concentration camps

Now many are wondering if Josef Mengele was not a simple sadist who, in addition to scientific work, enjoyed watching the suffering of people. Those who worked with him said that Mengele, to the surprise of many colleagues, sometimes lethally injected his subjects himself, beat them and threw capsules with lethal gas into the cells while watching the prisoners die.

On the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp there is a large pond where the unclaimed ashes of the prisoners burned in the crematorium ovens were dumped. The rest of the ash was transported by wagons to Germany, where it was used as fertilizer for the soil. The same carriages carried the new prisoners for Auschwitz, who were personally greeted on arrival by a tall, smiling young man who was barely 32 years old. It was the new doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, after being wounded, declared unfit for service in the army. He appeared with his retinue in front of the newly arrived prisoners to select "material" for his monstrous experiments. The prisoners were stripped naked and lined up in a row along which Mengele walked, now and then pointing to suitable people with his unchanging stack.

ohm. He also decided who to immediately send to the gas chamber, and who else could work for the good of the Third Reich. Death is to the left, life is to the right. Sickly-looking people, old people, women with babies - Mengele, as a rule, sent them to the left with a careless movement of a stack squeezed in his hand.

Former prisoners, when they just arrived at the station to enter the concentration camp, Mengele was remembered as a smart, well-groomed man with a kind smile, in a well-fitted and ironed dark green tunic and in a cap, which he wore slightly to one side; black boots polished to a perfect shine. One of the prisoners of Auschwitz Christina Zhivulskaya will write later: "He looked like a film actor - a well-groomed, pleasant face with regular features. Tall, slender..."

his smile and pleasant, courteous manner, which did not fit in with his inhuman experiences, the prisoners nicknamed Mengele the "Angel of Death". He conducted his experiments on people in block number 10. "No one ever got out of there alive," says former prisoner Igor Fedorovich Malitsky, who ended up in Auschwitz at the age of 16.

The young doctor began his work in Auschwitz by stopping the epidemic of typhus, which he discovered in several gypsies. To prevent the disease from spreading to other prisoners, he sent the entire barracks (more than a thousand people) to the gas chamber. Later, typhus was found in the women's barracks, and this time the entire barracks - about 600 women - also went to their deaths. How to deal with typhus differently in such conditions, Mengel

could not think of.

Before the war, Josef Mengele studied medicine and even defended his thesis on "Racial Differences in the Structure of the Lower Jaw" in 1935, and later received his doctorate. Genetics was of particular interest to him, and in Auschwitz he showed the greatest degree of interest in twins. He performed experiments without resorting to anesthetics and dissected live babies. He tried to stitch twins together, change their eye color with chemicals; he pulled out teeth, implanted them and built new ones. In parallel with this, the development of a substance capable of causing infertility was carried out; he castrated boys and sterilized women. According to some reports, he managed to sterilize an entire group of monks using X-ray radiation.

Mengele's interest in twins was not accidental. The Third Reich set scientists the task of increasing the birth rate, as a result of which the artificial increase in the birth of twins and triplets became the main task of scientists. However, the offspring of the Aryan race had to have blond hair and blue eyes - hence Mengele's attempts to change the color of the eyes of children through various chemicals. After the war, he was going to become a professor and for the sake of science he was ready for anything.

The twins were carefully measured by the assistants of the "Angel of Death" in order to fix common signs and differences, and then the experiments of the doctor himself came into play. Children were amputated limbs and transplanted various organs, infected with typhus and transfused with blood. Mengele wanted to trace

how identical organisms of twins will react to the same intervention in them. Then the experimental subjects were killed, after which the doctor conducted a thorough analysis of the corpses, examining the internal organs.

He launched a rather violent activity, and therefore many mistakenly considered him the chief doctor of the concentration camp. In fact, Josef Mengele held the position of senior doctor of the women's barracks, to which he was appointed by Eduard Wirths, the head doctor of Auschwitz, who later described Mengele as a responsible employee who sacrificed his personal time to devote his self-education, exploring the material that the concentration camp had.

Mengele and his colleagues believed that hungry children have very pure blood, which means that it can

There is a lot to help the wounded German soldiers in hospitals. This was recalled by another former prisoner of Auschwitz, Ivan Vasilievich Chuprin. The newly arrived very young children, the eldest of whom were 5-6 years old, were herded into block number 19, from which screams and crying could be heard for some time, but soon there was silence. The blood from the young prisoners was pumped out completely. And in the evening, prisoners returning from work saw piles of children's bodies, which were later burned in dug pits, the flames from which burst up several meters.

For Mengele, work in a concentration camp was a kind of scientific mission, and the experiments that he performed on prisoners were, from his point of view, for the benefit of science. Many tales are told about Doctor "Death"

and one of them - that his office was "decorated" by the eyes of children. In fact, as one of the doctors who worked with Mengele in Auschwitz recalled, he could stand for hours near a row of test tubes, examining the materials obtained under a microscope, or spend time at the anatomical table, opening the bodies, in an apron stained with blood. He considered himself a real scientist, whose goal was something more than eyes hanging all over the office.

The doctors who worked with Mengele noted that they hated their work, and in order to somehow relieve tension, they got completely drunk after a working day, which could not be said about Dr. Death himself. It seemed that his work did not tire him at all.

Now many are wondering if Josef Mengele was not a simple sadist who

To whom, in addition to scientific work, it was a pleasure to observe the suffering of people. Those who worked with him said that Mengele, to the surprise of many colleagues, sometimes lethally injected his subjects himself, beat them and threw capsules with lethal gas into the cells while watching the prisoners die.

After the war, Josef Mengele was declared a war criminal, but he managed to escape. He spent the rest of his life in Brazil, and February 7, 1979 was his last day - while swimming, he had a stroke and drowned. His grave was found only in 1985, and after the exhumation of the remains in 1992, they finally became convinced that it was Josef Mengele who had earned himself a reputation as one of the most terrible and dangerous Nazis in this grave.

I continue to publish materials that I commemorate the 65th anniversary of the victory over fascist Germany. This time the hero of my story is the famous "angel of death from Auschwitz" Dr. Mengele.

Josef Mengele (German Josef Mengele; March 16, 1911, Günzburg, Bavaria - February 7, 1979, Bertioga, São Paulo, Brazil) was a German doctor who conducted experiments on the prisoners of the Auschwitz camp during World War II. Dr. Mengele was personally involved in the selection of prisoners arriving at the camp, and during his work sent more than 40,000 people to the gas chambers of the death camp.

After the war, he moved from Germany to Latin America, fearing persecution. Attempts to find Mengele in order to bring him to justice were unsuccessful, although, according to Rafi Eitan and another of the Mossad veterans, Alex Meller, they tracked Mengele to Buenos Aires during the operation to kidnap Adolf Eichmann, but captured him at the same time with Eichmann or immediately after the capture of the latter was too risky. He died in 1979 in Brazil. In the circle of acquaintances, Josef Mengele was called Beppo (Italian Beppo, the Italian diminutive of Giuseppe - Josef), but he became known to the world as the "Angel of Death from Auschwitz" (the prisoners called him the Angel of Death).

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last of those who worked was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates - millions of tortured prisoners who died from overwork, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from "medical experiments". How many of these, the last, no one knows for sure. Hundreds of thousands. Why are we writing about this many years after the end of the war? Because inhuman experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also history, the history of medicine. Its blackest, but no less interesting page...

Medical experiments were carried out in almost all of the largest concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Among the doctors who led these experiments were many completely different people. Dr. Wirtz was involved in lung cancer research and explored the possibilities of surgery. Professor Klauberg and Dr. Schumann, as well as Dr. Glauberg, conducted experiments on the sterilization of people in the concentration camp of the Könighütte Institute.

Dr. Domenom in Sachsenhausen worked on the study of contagious jaundice and the search for a vaccine against it. Professor Hagen was studying typhus at Natzweiler and was also looking for a vaccine. The Germans were also engaged in malaria research. In many camps, they were engaged in research on the effects of various chemicals on humans.

There were people like Rusher. His experiments in studying methods of warming frostbitten brought him fame, many awards in Nazi Germany and, as it turned out later, real results. But he fell into the trap of his own theories. In addition to his main medical activities, he carried out orders from the authorities. And by exploring fertility treatments, he was cheating on the regime. His children, whom he passed off as his own, turned out to be adopted, and his wife was barren. When they found out about this in the Reich, the doctor and his wife ended up in a concentration camp, and at the end of the war they were executed.

There were mediocrities, such as Arnold Domain, who infected people with hepatitis and tried to cure them by piercing the liver. This heinous act had no scientific value, which was clear to the specialists of the Reich from the very beginning. Or people like Hermann Voss, who did not personally participate in the experiments, but studied the materials of other people's experiments with blood, obtaining information through the Gestapo. Every German medical student knows his anatomy textbook today.

Or such fanatics as Professor August Hirt, who studied the corpses of those who were destroyed in Auschwitz. A doctor who experimented on animals, on people and on himself.

But our story is not about them. Our story tells about Josef Mengele, who remained in History as the Angel of Death or Doctor Death, a cold-blooded man who killed his victims by injecting chloroform into their hearts in order to personally perform an autopsy and observe their internal organs.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi criminal doctors, was born in Bavaria in 1911. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at Frankfurt. In 1934 he joined the SA and became a member of the National Socialist Party, in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Dissertation topic: "Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races."

After the outbreak of World War II, he served as a military doctor in the SS division "Viking" in France, Poland and Russia. In 1942 he received the Iron Cross for rescuing two tankers from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for military service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners soon nicknamed him "the angel of death".

In addition to their main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the advent of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major research center". Unfortunately for the prisoners, the circle of "scientific" interests of Josef Mengele was unusually wide. He began with work on "increasing the fertility of Aryan women." It is clear that non-Aryan women served as material for research. Then the fatherland set a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of "subhumans" - Jews, gypsies and Slavs. Having crippled tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

"Research" went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on the body of a soldier (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most straightforward: a prisoner from a concentration camp is taken, covered with ice on all sides, "doctors" in SS uniform constantly measure body temperature ... When an experimental person dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after cooling the body below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the "natural warmth of the female body."

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners took a terrible death: at ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, none of these aircraft in Germany took off until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Josef Mengele, who in his youth was carried away by racial theory, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a "true Aryan." He injects hundreds of Jews with blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.

Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele's monstrous experiments. What are some studies of the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the "study" of 3,000 infant twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and transplanted organs from each other. Sisters were forced to have children from brothers. Sex reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the kind doctor Mengele could stroke the child on the head, treat him with chocolate ...

However, the chief doctor of Auschwitz was engaged not only in applied research. He did not shy away from "pure science". The concentration camp prisoners were deliberately infected with various diseases in order to test the effectiveness of new drugs on them. Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The creators of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pills. Judging by the fact that shortly after the start of the "testing" the concern additionally acquired another 150 prisoners of Auschwitz, no one could wake up after a new sleeping pill. By the way, other representatives of German business also cooperated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustry, produced not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz. After the war, the giant company was "unbundled". Some of the fragments of IG Farbenindustry are well known in our country. Including as drug manufacturers.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Josef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was, rather, a sham, a game of catching the Nazis. All with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Josef Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing!

In abundance and contentment, the man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived until 1979. The victims did not appear to him in a dream. Justice did not prevail. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil. And the fact that valiant agents of the Israeli special service Mossad helped him drown is just a beautiful legend.

Josef Mengele managed a lot in his life: to live a happy childhood, get an excellent education at the university, make a happy family, raise children, get to know the taste of war and front-line life, engage in "scientific research", many of which were important for modern medicine, since vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already in years, Josef received a quiet rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already on this well-deserved rest, Mengele was repeatedly forced to recall his past affairs - he repeatedly read articles in newspapers about his search, about a fee of 50,000 US dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities with prisoners. Reading these articles, Josef Mengele could not hide his sarcastic sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in sight, swam on public beaches, conducted active correspondence, visited entertainment establishments. And he could not understand the accusations of committed atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He did not see the difference between the experiments he did at school on beetles and those he did at Auschwitz.

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last of those who worked was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates - millions of tortured prisoners who died from overwork, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from "medical experiments". How many of these, the last, no one knows for sure. Hundreds of thousands. Inhuman experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also history, the history of medicine. Its blackest, but no less interesting page...

Dr. Mengele had to answer the question: how to increase the reproductive capacity of the German people so that it satisfies the needs of the planned large-scale settlement by Germans of the occupied regions of Eastern Europe. His focus was on the problem of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. Monozygotic twins were subjected to experiments, mainly children, dwarfs and persons with congenital disabilities. They were searched for among those arriving at the camp.
Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele's monstrous experiments. What are some studies of the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the "study" of 3,000 infant twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and transplanted organs from each other. Sisters were forced to have children from brothers. Sex reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the kind doctor Mengele could stroke the child on the head, treat him with chocolate ...

The twins were given blood transfusions from one to the other and x-rayed. The second stage covered a comparative analysis of the internal organs, which was performed during the autopsy. Such an analysis would be difficult to carry out under normal conditions due to the low probability of the simultaneous death of both twins. At the camp, twin comparisons were made hundreds of times. For this purpose, Dr. Mengele killed them with phenol injections. He once led an operation in which two gypsy boys were sewn together to create Siamese twins. The children's hands turned out to be heavily infected at the sites of resection of blood vessels. Mengele usually, without any anesthesia, cut off part of the liver or other vital organs from Jewish children and killed them with monstrous blows to the head if there was a need for a just-dead "guinea pig". He injected chloroform into the hearts of many children, he infected other of his experimental subjects with typhus. Mengele injected many women with pathogenic bacteria into the ovaries. Some twins with different eye colors had colorants injected into their eye sockets and pupils to change eye color and explore the possibility of producing blue-eyed Aryan twins. In the end, the children were left with granular clots instead of eyes.

The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on the body of a soldier (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most straightforward: a prisoner from a concentration camp is taken, covered with ice on all sides, "doctors" in SS uniform constantly measure body temperature ... When an experimental person dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after cooling the body below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the "natural warmth of the female body."

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected "data" and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Gunzburg at his father's firm. Then, according to new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. It is possible that Mengele's fake ID was simply not thoroughly verified. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.
One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was, rather, a sham, a game of catching the Nazis. All with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Josef Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing.

The terrible experiments on people by Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death of Auschwitz", did not end after his flight to South America. His dream came true. A new book by Argentinean historian Jorge Camaraza, Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America, has just been published, which claims that Josef Mengele's experiments did not end after his flight to South America after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. There is evidence that the "Angel of Death of Auschwitz" continued his terrible experiments in Brazil, in a small town that later received the nickname "Twin City".

Josef Mengele managed a lot in his life: to live a happy childhood, get an excellent education at the university, make a happy family, raise children, get to know the taste of war and front-line life, engage in "scientific research", many of which were important for modern medicine, since vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already on the run, Josef received a quiet rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already on this well-deserved rest, Mengele was repeatedly forced to recall his past affairs - he repeatedly read articles in newspapers about his search, about a fee of 50,000 US dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities with prisoners. Reading these articles, Josef Mengele could not hide his sarcastic sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in sight, swam on public beaches, conducted active correspondence, visited entertainment establishments. And he could not understand the accusations of committed atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He did not see the difference between the experiments he did at school on beetles and those he did at Auschwitz.
In Brazil, he lived until February 7, 1979, when he suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea, as a result of which he drowned.

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