A young girl, Eva, looks up at the doctor.
He’s furious today, stamping his feet and shouting, which makes many of the youngsters
cry.
He’s angry because two of his kids, his prisoners, died before he had a chance to
work on them.
He needs all the guinea pigs he can get.
Eva has seen things she can hardly comprehend.
Soon she will witness something that will sear her mind until she’s an elderly woman.
That is the doctor’s attempt to make conjoined twins.
Her name was Eva Mozes Kor, and she was one of the survivors.
A twin herself, she and her sister were experimented on at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Two of her other sisters, as well as her parents, died in the gas chamber.
The Nazi doctor was Josef Mengele, a man that would become known as the Angel of Death.
We’ll tell you a little about him before we get to the experiments.
As you’ll see throughout this video, he was something of a shapeshifter.
During his student days, he was into music and the arts.
He was studious.
He was bright.
He also developed increasingly nationalistic beliefs as he got older, in line with traditional
values characterized by the Völkisch movement.
In short, he was a racist.
That racism would define his entire life.
The bright young chap went on to study medicine, showing a particular interest in human genetics
and physical anthropology.
In case you didn’t know, the latter is related to the development of humans through evolutionary
history.
You can already see how this man began to embrace the Nazi ideology of a superior race.
In 1937, he joined the Nazi Party and later became part of the SS, a paramilitary organization
which in German was called the Schutzstaffel.
He served in the armed forces for a while after the outbreak of war, later joining the
SS Race and Settlement Main Office.
This division was tasked with “safeguarding the racial 'purity'” of those in the SS.
His responsibilities there were to ensure “genetic health” and also administer “genetic
health tests.”
The Nazi Party did not want its own procreating with people it deemed impure.
Wives and finances of SS members were investigated to ensure this didn’t happen.
Mengele firmly believed in genetic superiority.
He embraced the study of eugenics, which, if you’re not familiar with it, relates
to the attempt to create a healthier future generation by condoning selective interbreeding
with people who have certain genetic characteristics.
The doctor believed he could further his study of genetics by experimenting with humans.
All he needed were test subjects, and those he got when he was made chief physician at
Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943.
When he got there, masses of people had already died in the gas chambers.
Around 75 percent of them were those deemed unfit to work.
They were mainly women, children, and frail, and the elderly.
Part of Mengele’s job was to select which people went to the gas chamber and which people
didn’t.
The vast majority of the 960,000 Jews that were sent there went to the gas chamber.
As did the majority of the Roma, the ethnic Poles, and the Soviet prisoners of war.
Many not immediately slaughtered were forced to work.
They were also experimented on, along with the children.
Part of Mengele’s job was treating sick inmates and Nazi personnel, doing what doctors
generally do.
He was more than just a demented Nazi arch-criminal.
One historian wrote, “Mengele’s outsize reputation as a medical monster is inverse
proportion to what is known and understood about what he actually did.”
There is no question that inmates endured horrendous tortures and often died when they
were experimented on.
They were subjected to deadly air pressure.
They were left out in the freezing cold and dangerously heated up.
Women had their muscles and nerves removed.
Children had limbs removed.
People were deliberately given deadly blood infections.
All manner of indescribable things happened to them.
This was at the hands of many different people, but it’s Mengele’s name that has stood
the test of time.
This is mainly down to his experiments on children and his obsession with twins.
To us he was a beast, but he believed he was riding on the cutting edge of medical science.
The camp gave him the opportunity to do what he thought were great things – albeit within
the parameters of depraved Nazi ideology.
In his owns words, after the war, he said he didn’t invent the camps and just worked
in them.
His son even said, “He couldn’t help anyone.
On the platform for instance.
What was he to do, when the half-dead and infected people arrived?”
But get this.
His son also said, “The twins owe their lives to him.”
He did choose twins for his experiments, which may have saved them from the gas chamber.
It’s now understood that he founded a kindergarten and played violin for the kids there.
That’s one reason he was sometimes called “uncle” by the kids.
They couldn’t have known about medical experimentation at the beginning.
A former inmate doctor later said, “He could be playful, jumping about to please them.
The twin children frequently called him Uncle Pepi.”
This is what another inmate doctor once said about him:
“He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him,
to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we
would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that, ... the crematoria smoke, and these
children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there.”
Mengele didn’t work alone, far from it.
When kids’ hearts were injected with chloroform, or when children were purposefully infected
with disease, or even when young ones had their eyes injected with dye, he was part
of a team, sometimes working under the auspices of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute.
It would be a mistake to blame him for all the atrocities committed in the name of medical
science, but when it comes to experimenting on twins, that was certainly his very own
sphere.
But why twins, you might ask?
No one is exactly sure, but it’s thought that Mengele was interested in learning a
few things.
He believed twins might teach him more about the inheritance of genes.
He was also interested in how twins reacted individually to specific experiments.
It’s thought the overarching reason for the experiments was simply the Nazi’s view
that there was a superior race.
Some people have said Mengele wanted to understand if there was a possibility of giving what
the Nazis thought were “racially superior” couples more chance of having superior twins.
Around 200 pairs of twins survived from as many as 15000 pairs.
Others died when their hearts were injected with phenol so they could subsequently be
dissected.
Survivor Jona Laks said, “Mengele removed organs from people without anesthetic, and
if one twin died the other would be murdered.”
The reason for that was the doctor wanted to know not only how they compared in life,
but what happened to each of their bodies after they died.
At one point, according to the testimony of an inmate assistant, he killed 14 twins in
one night.
That testimony read, “He injected the evipan into her right arm intravenously.
After the child had fallen asleep, he felt for the left ventricle of the heart and injected
10 cc. of chloroform.”
He said the twin twitched and died soon after.
All 14 went the same way that night.
In another case, Mengele took two gypsy twins aged seven and studied them.
They had problems in their joints, which he said was tuberculosis.
The radiologist didn’t agree.
Enraged, Mengele took the twins into another room.
When he returned, he said to the radiologist, “You are right.
There was nothing.”
He’d shot them both and dissected them.
Prior to that, the twins arguably had the best life of any prisoner at Auschwitz - not
that that was saying much.
Those twins had been favorites of Mengele, as one man later said, they were “spoiled
in all respects” and they “fascinated him considerably.”
Some kids were able to play soccer, and most were fed well compared to other prisoners
in the camp.
Some of them got to keep their own clothes as well as the hair on their heads.
One twin survivor later said he felt “completely elevated, segregated from the hurly-burly
of the camp.”
These reports conflict with others, though.
For instance, twins Ephraim and Menashe Reichenberg said they were transported in a packed train,
and when the train stopped, they heard the call, “Zwillinge raus”, “twins out”.
They were told to stay in a certain line, and they would stay alive.
At the camp, they were stripped, shaved, disinfected, and given prisoner uniforms with the numbers
B-10506 and B-10507.
They said there were about 1,000 kids at that time, mostly twins and dwarfs.
The boys had noticeably different voices.
This piqued the interest of Dr. Mengele.
Their necks were injected with an unknown substance in one experiment, which led to
“swelling, high fever, muteness, and a state of exhaustion for several days.”
Menashe died as a result of the experiments in 1946, after he was freed from the camp.
Ephraim later moved to Israel after returning to Budapest to discover all his family was
dead.
He became a bus driver.
Life was ok.
But because of the experiments, he had continual breathing and swallowing problems, which led
to him not being able to talk at all.
In later life, he told his devastating story through an artificial voice amplifier.
All the children were subject cases more than they were humans.
Identical twins were always being measured and analyzed.
For hours at a time, they had to sit through various procedures, including having material
inserted into their spines and spinal taps.
This is what Jona Laks said she saw when it was her first time to be experimented on in
Mengele’s lab: “I was looking at a whole wall of human
eyes.
A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes.
These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down
on the floor.”
Mengele was obsessed with the inheritance of eye color.
Laks said she was given injections in her back, but she never knew why.
She and many other twins were also injected with the gangrenous condition, Noma, which
after making some kids very sick, killed them.
Eva Mozes Kor said she witnessed young boys who’d had their sex organs removed.
She later said she believed it was Mengele’s attempt to change the sex of the boys.
She also said this: “A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from
Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to back.
Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs.
The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.”
No one is going to doubt that twins were horrifically experimented on in those camps, and some of
them died, often in agony.
But, an article published in 2020 by the New York Times asserts that there is as much fact
as there is fiction when it comes to Mengele.
Here is a snippet from that article: “Given his alleged omnipotence, grotesque
and untrue accusations — that Mengele had attempted to create Siamese twins by sewing
together a pair of twins, or that he had attempted to make boys into girls and vice versa — were
circulated.”
The same newspaper back in 1985 told a story that involved Mengele shooting a mother and
a child when the mother refused to be separated from him.
Mengele was reportedly so mad, he had a change of mind and sent all the people he’d previously
chosen to survive to be sent to the gas chamber.
That certainly sounds like someone capable of other horrors.
But, were some of the stories exaggerated?
Here’s another account from Eva Mozes Kor: “One of the twins, who was 19 years old,
told of experiments involving a set of teenage boys and teenage girls.
Cross transfusions were carried out in an attempt to make boys into girls and girls
into boys.
Some of the boys were castrated.
Transfusion reactions were similarly studied in the adolescent twins.”
In 1992, the US Department of Justice released a lengthy report on Mengele, alleging he had
done such terrible things and a lot more we haven’t discussed today.
The report states, “an exchange of blood was repeatedly made between the individual
twins of a pair” adding that some twins died as a result.
We could find no mention of experiments involving sewing twins together.
A survivor and camp warden named Vera Alexander can maybe fill in some gaps.
She once said of the doctor, “Every day Mengele came, and every day he brought some
toys, sweets, chocolates, and new clothes.”
She also said she witnessed how Mengele had impregnated one twin with the sperm of another
twin.
He pampered her, and he was there at the birth.
Alexander said when he saw only one baby and not twins, he threw the baby in the incinerator
and just “walked away.”
Part of Alexanders’s job was taking care of 50 sets of Romani twins.
This is what she said she saw one day about one particular pair of twins:
“Mengele took them away.
When they returned, they were in a terrible state — they had been sewn together, back
to back, like Siamese twins.
Their wounds were infected and oozing pus.
They screamed day and night.
Then their parents — I remember the mother's name was Stella — managed to get some morphine
and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.”
There is also this account from Eva Kor: “A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from
Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to back.
Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs.”
She said they screamed day and night until gangrene killed them.
These are the only two accounts we can find which talk about Mengele trying to make conjoined
twins.
The experiments are perhaps the very nadir of what the doctor did.
Nonetheless, details about them are very scant.
We found more testimony from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a man noted as being a
significant influence behind “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
In the testimony, Vera Alexander is asked about Mengele and what experiments she saw
him conduct.
She tells the judge she saw only one.
He asks her what that was, and she replies, “There was a set of twins, Gypsies, whom
he took away one day from the block where I was - that was the Zigeunerlager - the Gypsy
camp.
Some days later, he returned them, with veins in their arms and their backs sewn together.”
The judge then says he doesn’t quite understand.
Alexander simply says again, “He sewed them.”
The judge asks if they were turned into Siamese twins, to which Alexander says, “He sewed
their arms together - they were already full of pus, and full of wounds.”
She said she didn’t know what happened to them since she was transferred to the women’s
camp after that.
Since the accounts don’t include many details, we’re not sure what really happened to those
twins behind closed doors.
We also can’t be sure what Mengele had intended to discover from the experiments.
What we are sure about is those experiments were never going to result in conjoined twins
that survived any length of time.
Mengele, for all his faults, was a trained professional.
He must have known that.
Mice have been sewn together in modern labs, but even that often lead to the death of the
animals after their immune systems went into hyperdrive.
The process is called, “Parabiosis”, which Mengele would have heard about because it’s
been around since the 1800s.
He also knew the outcome of doing it on humans.
That was likely not of any concern to him.
He had the expendable human resources at hand to experiment.
Mengele managed to escape trial, unlike many other leading Nazis after the war.
Despite being a wanted man, he lived out his life in South America.
His son, Rolf, visited him in São Paulo in 1977, the first time he’d seen his father
in over twenty years.
He told Rolf he was unrepentant, stating that he’d never personally hurt anyone and only
followed orders.
His diary and some of his letters were later found.
In one letter he wrote, “Brazil is a nice country to live in despite the mixing of the
races.
But there are many people who, like me, believe and are sympathetic to the Nazi movement and
racial ideology.”
In another, he wrote, “Weaker humans should not be permitted to reproduce.
This is the only way for humankind to exist and sustain itself.”
In yet more of his writing he claimed if the “inferior morons” are not eradicated from
society, society will destroy itself.
In 1979, he had a stroke in a swimming pool and drowned.
His personal history might have been somewhat embellished over time, but more than a hundred
people he experimented on testified in 1985 about what they had experienced at Auschwitz.
Here’s a snippet from one man’s testimony, which sounds quite different from how Mengele
felt about what he did during the war: “Dr. Mengele pulled me out of a queue as
we were on the way from the c-lager camp to the gas chamber.
I was the only one picked that day personally by Mengele and his assistant.
They took me to his laboratory, where I met other children.
They were screaming from pain…
I was injected with drugs and chemicals.
My body most of the time was connected to tubes which inserted some drugs into my body.”
Even if his monstrousness has been overemphasized at times, there can be little doubt that he
was a sadistic ideologue, foremost a racist, also a narcissist and a murderer, and above
all, human, all too human.
Now you need to watch, “The Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments.”
Or, have a look at, “The WWII Nazi Breeding Plan.”