Doctor death German doctor experiments. The horrific experiences of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele in a concentration camp

German doctor Joseph Mengele is known in world history as the most brutal Nazi criminal, who subjected tens of thousands of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp to inhumane experiments.

For his crimes against humanity, Mengele forever earned the nickname “Doctor Death.”

Origin

Josef Mengele was born in 1911 in Bavaria, in Günzburg. The ancestors of the future fascist executioner were ordinary German farmers. Father Karl founded the agricultural equipment company Karl Mengele and Sons. The mother was raising three children. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, the wealthy Mengele family began to actively support him. Hitler defended the interests of the very farmers on whom the well-being of this family depended.

Joseph did not intend to continue his father’s work and went to study to become a doctor. Studied at the universities of Vienna and Munich. In 1932 he joined the ranks of the Nazi Steel Helmet stormtroopers, but soon left this organization due to health problems. After graduating from university, Mengele received a doctorate. He wrote his dissertation on the topic of racial differences in the structure of the jaw.

Military service and professional activities

In 1938, Mengele joined the ranks of the SS and at the same time the Nazi Party. At the beginning of the war, he joined the reserve forces of the SS Panzer Division, rose to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer and received the Iron Cross for saving 2 soldiers from a burning tank. After being wounded in 1942, he was declared unfit for further service in the active forces and went to “work” in Auschwitz.

In the concentration camp, he decided to realize his long-time dream of becoming an outstanding doctor and research scientist. Mengele calmly justified Hitler's sadistic views with scientific expediency: he believed that if inhuman cruelty is needed for the development of science and the breeding of a “pure race,” then it can be forgiven. This point of view has translated into thousands of crippled lives and more more deaths.

In Auschwitz, Mengele found the most fertile ground for his experiments. The SS not only did not control, but even encouraged the most extreme forms of sadism. In addition, the killing of thousands of Gypsies, Jews and other people of the “wrong” nationality was the primary task of the concentration camp. Thus, Mengele found himself in the hands of a huge amount of “human material” that was supposed to be used up. "Doctor Death" could do whatever he wanted. And he created.

"Doctor Death" experiments

Josef Mengele spent thousands of years during his career monstrous experiments. He amputated body parts and internal organs without anesthesia, sewed twins together, and injected toxic chemicals into children's eyes to see if the color of the iris would change after that. Prisoners were deliberately infected with smallpox, tuberculosis and other diseases. All new and untested medications were tested on them, chemicals, poisons and poisonous gases.

Mengele was most interested in various developmental anomalies. A huge number of experiments were carried out on dwarfs and twins. Of the latter, about 1,500 couples were subjected to his brutal experiments. About 200 people survived.

All operations on fusion of people, removal and transplantation of organs were performed without anesthesia. The Nazis did not consider it advisable to spend expensive medicines on “subhumans.” Even if the patient survived the experience, he was expected to be destroyed. In many cases, the autopsy was performed at a time when the person was still alive and felt everything.

After the war

After Hitler’s defeat, “Doctor Death,” realizing that execution awaited him, tried with all his might to escape persecution. In 1945, he was detained in the uniform of a private near Nuremberg, but then released because they could not establish his identity. After this, Mengele hid for 35 years in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. All this time, the Israeli intelligence service MOSSAD was looking for him and was close to capturing him several times.

It was never possible to arrest the cunning Nazi. His grave was discovered in Brazil in 1985. In 1992, the body was exhumed and proved that it belonged to Josef Mengele. Now the remains of the sadistic doctor are at the Medical University of Sao Paulo.

Now many are wondering whether Josef Mengele was a simple sadist who, in addition to scientific work, it was a pleasure to watch people suffer. Those who worked with him said that Mengele, to the surprise of many colleagues, sometimes himself gave lethal injections to experimental subjects, beat them and threw capsules with deadly gas, watching prisoners die.

On the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp there is big pond, where the unclaimed ashes of prisoners burned in the crematorium ovens were dumped. The rest of the ashes were transported by wagon to Germany, where they were used as soil fertilizers. The same carriages carried new prisoners for Auschwitz, who were personally greeted upon arrival by a tall, smiling young man who was barely 32 years old. It was the new Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele, who was declared unfit for service after being wounded. active army. He appeared with his retinue in front of newly arrived prisoners to select “material” for his monstrous experiments. The prisoners were stripped naked and lined up along which Mengele walked, every now and then pointing at suitable people with its immutable stack. He decided who would be immediately sent to the gas chamber, and who could still work for the benefit of the Third Reich. Death is to the left, life is to the right. Sickly-looking people, old people, women with infants - Mengele, as a rule, sent them to the left with a careless movement of a stack squeezed in his hand.

Former prisoners, when they first arrived at the station to enter the concentration camp, remembered Mengele as smart, well-groomed man with a kind smile, in a well-fitted and ironed dark green tunic and a cap, which he wore slightly askew; black boots polished to perfect shine. One of the Auschwitz prisoners, Krystyna Zywulska, would later write: “He looked like a film actor - a sleek, pleasant face with regular features. Tall, slender...”. For his smile and pleasant, courteous manners, which in no way correlated with his inhuman experiences, the prisoners nicknamed Mengele the “Angel of Death.” He conducted his experiments on people in block no.

10. “No one ever came out of there alive,” says former prisoner Igor Fedorovich Malitsky, who was sent to Auschwitz at the age of 16.

The young doctor began his activities in Auschwitz by stopping a typhus epidemic, 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 discovered in the women's barracks, and this time the entire barracks - about 600 women - also went to their deaths. Mengele could not figure out how to deal with typhus differently in such conditions.

Before the war, Joseph Mengele studied medicine and even defended his dissertation on “Racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw” in 1935, and a little later received his doctorate. Genetics was of particular interest to him, and at Auschwitz he showed the greatest degree of interest in twins. He conducted experiments without resorting to anesthetics and dissected living babies. He tried to stitch twins together, change their eye color using chemicals; he pulled out teeth, implanted them and built up 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 nuns using X-rays.

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 artificially increasing the birth of twins and triplets became the main task of scientists. However, the offspring of the Aryan race must certainly have blonde hair And Blue eyes- hence Mengele’s attempts to change children’s eye color through

vom of various chemicals. After the war, he was going to become a professor and was ready to do anything for the sake of science.

The twins were carefully measured by the assistants of the "Angel of Death" to record general signs and differences, and then the doctor’s own experiments came into play. Children had their limbs amputated and various organs were transplanted, they were infected with typhus, and they received blood transfusions. Mengele wanted to track how the identical organisms of twins would 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 quite a vigorous activity and therefore many mistakenly considered him the chief doctor of the concentration camp. In fact, Josef Mengele held the position of senior doctor in the women's barracks, to which he was appointed by Eduard Virts - chief physician Auschwitz, later described by Mengele as a responsible employee who sacrificed personal time to devote it to self-education, exploring the material that the concentration camp had.

Mengele and his colleagues believed that hungry children had very pure blood, which meant that it could greatly help wounded German soldiers in hospitals. Another former prisoner of Auschwitz, Ivan Vasilyevich Chuprin, recalled this. 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 was completely pumped out of the young prisoners. And in the evening, prisoners returning from work saw piles of children's bodies, which were later burned in dug holes, the flames from which were escaping several meters upward.

For Mengele, work in

concentration camp was a kind of scientific mission, and the experiments that he performed on prisoners were, from his point of view, carried out for the benefit of science. There are many tales told about Doctor “Death” and one of them is 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 next to a row of test tubes, examining the obtained materials through a microscope, or spend time at the anatomical table, opening up bodies, in an apron stained with blood. He considered himself a real scientist, whose goal was something more than eyes hung throughout his office.

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

Now many are wondering whether Joseph Mengele was a simple sadist who, in addition to his scientific work, enjoyed watching people suffer. Those who worked with him said that Mengele, to the surprise of many of his colleagues, sometimes himself administered lethal injections to test subjects, beat them and threw capsules of lethal gas into the cells, watching as the prisoners died.

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 suffered a stroke and drowned. His grave was found only in 1985, and after the exhumation of the remains in 1992, they were finally convinced that it was Joseph Mengele, who had earned himself a reputation as one of the most terrible and dangerous Nazis, who lay in this grave.

German doctor Joseph Mengele is known in world history as the most brutal Nazi criminal, who subjected tens of thousands of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp to inhumane experiments.
For his crimes against humanity, Mengele forever earned the nickname “Doctor Death.”

Origin

Military service and professional activities

In the concentration camp, he decided to realize his long-time dream of becoming an outstanding doctor and research scientist. Mengele calmly justified Hitler's sadistic views with scientific expediency: he believed that if inhuman cruelty is needed for the development of science and the breeding of a “pure race,” then it can be forgiven. This point of view translated into thousands of damaged lives and even more deaths.

"Doctor Death" experiments

Josef Mengele conducted thousands of monstrous experiments over the years of his activity. He amputated body parts and internal organs without anesthesia, sewed twins together, and injected toxic chemicals into children's eyes to see if the color of the iris would change after that. Prisoners were deliberately infected with smallpox, tuberculosis and other diseases. All new and untested medications, chemicals, poisons and poisonous gases were tested on them.

After the war

The “death factory” of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) acquired more and more terrible fame. If in the remaining concentration camps there was at least some hope of survival, then most of the Jews, Gypsies and Slavs staying in Auschwitz were destined to die either in gas chambers, or from backbreaking labor and serious illnesses, or from the experiments of a sinister doctor who was one one of the first persons meeting new arrivals at the train. It was the Auschwitz concentration camp that gained notoriety as a place where experiments were carried out on people.

Mengele was appointed chief physician in Birkenau - in the inner camp of Auschwitz, where he behaved clearly as the chief. His skin ambitions gave him no rest. Only here, in a place where people do not have the slightest hope of salvation, could he feel like the master of fate.

Read more about Josef Mengele’s childhood and personality formation in my article -« Doctor Death – Josef Mengele » . Also read other interesting articles about the Great Patriotic War:

Participation in the selection was one of his favorite “entertainment”. He always came to the train, even when it was not required of him. Constantly looking perfect (as befits the owner of the anal vector), smiling, happy, he decided who would die now and who would go to work.

It was difficult to deceive his keen analytical eye: Mengele always accurately saw the age and state of health of people. Many women, children under 15 and old people were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Only 30 percent of prisoners were lucky enough to avoid this fate and temporarily delay the date of their death.

Chief physician of Birkenau (one of the inner camps of Auschwitz) and
Head of the research laboratory Dr. Josef Mengele.

First days in Auschwitz

Soundman Joseph Mengele thirsted for power over people's destinies. It is not surprising that Auschwitz became a real paradise for the Doctor, who was capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands of defenseless people at a time, which he demonstrated in the very first days of work at the new place, when he ordered the extermination of 200 thousand Gypsies.

“On the night of July 31, 1944, a terrible scene of the destruction of a gypsy camp took place. Kneeling before Mengele and Boger, women and children begged for their life. But it didn't help. They were brutally beaten and forced into trucks. It was a terrible, terrible sight.", say surviving eyewitnesses.

Human life has assigned nothing to the Angel of Death. All of Mengele's actions were drastic and merciless. Is there a typhus epidemic in the barracks? This means we will send the entire barracks to the gas chambers. This the best remedy stop the disease. Do the women have lice in the barracks? Kill all 750 women! Just think: one thousand more unwanted people, one less.

He chose who to live and who to die, who to sterilize, who to operate on... Dr. Mengele not only felt equal to God. He put himself in God's place. A typical crazy idea in a sick sound vector, which, against the backdrop of the sadism of the anal vector, resulted in the idea of wiping unwanted peoples from the face of the earth and creating a new noble Aryan race.

All experiments of the Angel of Death boiled down to two main tasks: to find effective way, which can influence the reduction in the birth rate of unwanted races, and by all means increase the birth rate of Aryan healthy children. Just imagine how much pleasure it brought him to be in that place that other people preferred not to remember at all.

Head of the labor service of the women's block of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Irma Grese
and his commandant SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Joseph Kramer
under British escort in the courtyard of the prison in Celle, Germany.

Mengele had his own associates and followers. One of them was Irma Grese - anal-cutaneous-muscular sound artist, a sadist with a sick sound, working as a guard in the women's block. The girl took pleasure in tormenting the prisoners; she could take the lives of prisoners only because she was in a bad mood.

Josef Mengele's first task to reduce the birth rate of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies was to develop the most effective method sterilization for men and women. So he operated on boys and men without anesthesia, and exposed women to x-rays...

The opportunity to conduct experiments on innocent people freed up the Doctor's sadistic frustrations: he seemed to derive pleasure not so much from the sonic search for truth as from the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Mengele studied the possibilities of human endurance: he subjected the unfortunate to the test of cold, heat, various infections...

However, medicine itself did not seem so interesting to the Angel of Death, in contrast to his favorite eugenics - the science of creating a “pure race”.

Barrack No. 10

1945 Poland. Auschwitz concentration camp. Children, prisoners of the camp, are waiting for their release.

Eugenics, if you look at encyclopedias, is the doctrine of human selection, i.e. a science that seeks to improve the properties of heredity. Scientists making discoveries in eugenics argue that the human gene pool is degenerating and this must be fought.

Essentially the basis of eugenics, as well as the basis of the phenomena of Nazism and fascism, is anal division into “clean” and “dirty”: healthy - sick, good - bad, what is allowed to live, and what can “harm future generations”, therefore, does not have the right to exist and reproduce, from which society must be “cleansed.” This is why there are calls to sterilize “defective” people in order to cleanse the gene pool.

Joseph Mengele, as a representative of eugenics, faced an important task: in order to breed a pure race, it is necessary to understand the reasons for the appearance of people with genetic “anomalies”. That is why the Angel of Death was of great interest in dwarfs, giants, various freaks and other people whose deviations were associated with certain disorders in genes.

Thus, among Joseph Mengele’s “favorites” was the Jewish family of Lilliputian musicians Ovitz from Romania (and later the Shlomowitz family that joined them), for whose support, by order of the Angel of Death, they were created best conditions in the camp.

The Ovitz family was interesting to Mengele, first of all, because, along with the Lilliputians, there were also ordinary people. The Ovits were well fed, allowed to wear their own clothes and not shave their hair. In the evenings, the Ovitzs entertained Dr. Death by playing musical instruments. Joseph Mengele called his “favorites” by the names of the seven dwarfs from Snow White.

Seven brothers and sisters, originally from the Romanian town of Rosvel, lived in a labor camp for almost a year.

One might think that the Angel of Death became attached to the Lilliputians, but this was not the case. When it came to experiments, he already treated his “friends” in a completely unfriendly manner: the poor fellows had their teeth and hair pulled out, cerebrospinal fluid extracts were taken, unbearably hot and unbearably cold substances were poured into their ears, and terrible gynecological experiments were performed.

“The most terrible experiments of all [were] gynecological ones. Only those of us who were married went through them. We were tied to a table and systematic torture began. They inserted some objects into the uterus, pumped out blood from there, picked out the insides, pierced us with something and took pieces of samples. The pain was unbearable."

The results of the experiments were sent to Germany. Many scientific minds came to Auschwitz to listen to Joseph Mengele's reports on eugenics and experiments on Lilliputians. The entire Ovitz family was stripped naked and displayed in front of a large audience like scientific exhibits.

Doctor Mengele's Twins

"Twins!"- this cry resounded over the crowd of prisoners, when the next twins or triplets timidly huddled together were suddenly discovered. They were kept alive and taken to a separate barracks, where the children were well fed and even given toys. A sweet, smiling doctor with a steely gaze often came to see them: he treated them to sweets and gave them rides around the camp in his car.

However, Mengele did all this not out of sympathy or out of love for the children, but only with the cold calculation that they would not be afraid of his appearance when the time came for the next twins to go to the operating table. That’s the whole price of initial “luck”. "My guinea pigs" The terrible and merciless Doctor Death called the twin children.

The interest in twins was not accidental. Joseph Mengele was worried about the main idea: if every German woman, instead of one child, gave birth to two or three healthy ones at once, the Aryan race could finally be reborn. That is why it was very important for the Angel of Death to study in the smallest detail all the structural features of identical twins. He hoped to understand how to artificially increase the birth rate of twins.

The twin experiments involved 1,500 pairs of twins, of which only 200 survived.

The first part of the experiments on twins was harmless enough. The doctor needed to carefully examine each pair of twins and compare all their body parts. Centimeter by centimeter they measured arms, legs, fingers, hands, ears, noses and everything, everything, everything.

Such meticulousness in the research was not accidental. After all, the anal vector, which is present not only in Joseph Mengele, but also in many other scientists, does not tolerate haste, but, on the contrary, requires the most detailed analysis. Every little detail needs to be taken into account.

The Angel of Death meticulously recorded all measurements in tables. Everything is as it should be for an anal vector: on the shelves, neatly, precisely. As soon as the measurements were completed, the experiments on the twins moved into another phase.

It was very important to check the body’s reactions to certain stimuli. For this purpose, one of the twins was taken: he was injected with some dangerous virus, and the doctor observed: what will happen next? All results were again recorded and compared with the results of the other twin. If a child became very ill and was on the verge of death, then he was no longer interesting: he, while still alive, was either opened up or sent to a gas chamber.

The twins were given each other's blood, internal organs were transplanted (often from a pair of other twins), and dye segments were injected into their eyes (to test whether brown Jewish eyes could become blue Aryan eyes). Many experiments were carried out without anesthesia. The children screamed and begged for mercy, but nothing could stop the one who imagined himself to be the Creator.

The idea is primary, the life of the “little people” is secondary. This in a simple way Many unhealthy sound people are guided by this. Dr. Mengele dreamed of revolutionizing the world (in particular the world of genetics) with his discoveries. What does he care about some children!

So the Angel of Death decided to create Siamese twins by stitching together gypsy twins. The children suffered terrible torment and blood poisoning began. The parents could not observe this and suffocated the experimental subjects at night in order to alleviate the suffering.

A little more about Mengele's ideas

Joseph Mengele with a colleague at the Institute of Anthropology and Genetics
human and eugenics named after. Kaiser Wilhelm. Late 1930s.

While doing terrible things and conducting inhuman experiments on people, Joseph Mengele everywhere hides behind science and his idea. At the same time, many of his experiments were not only inhumane, but also meaningless, not bringing any discovery to science. Experiments for the sake of experiments, torture, infliction of pain.

My cruelty and Mengele covered up his actions with the laws of nature. “We know that natural selection controls nature, exterminating inferior individuals. The weaker ones are excluded from the reproduction process. This is the only way to maintain a healthy human population. IN modern conditions we must protect nature: prevent inferior ones from reproducing. Such people should be subjected to forced sterilization.".

People for him are just “human material”, which, like any other material, is divided only into high-quality or low-quality. Poor quality and don't mind throwing it away. It can be burned in furnaces and poisoned in chambers, cause inhuman pain and carry out terrible experiments: i.e. be used in every possible way to create "quality human material", who has not only excellent health and high intelligence, but also generally devoid of any "defects".

How to achieve the creation of a higher caste? “This can only be achieved in one way - by selecting the best human material. Everything will end in disaster if the principle of natural selection is rejected. A few gifted people will not be able to withstand the multi-billion-dollar mass of idiots. Perhaps the gifted will survive, as reptiles once survived, and billions of idiots will disappear, as the dinosaurs once disappeared. We must not allow a massive increase in the number of such idiots.” The egocentrism of the sound vector in these lines reaches its apogee. Looking down on other people, deep contempt and hatred - that’s what motivated the Doctor.

When the sound vector is in a sick state, any ethical standards begin to shift in a person’s head. At the output we get: “From an ethical point of view, the problem is this: it is necessary to determine in which cases a person should be kept alive and in which cases he should be destroyed. Nature has shown us the ideal of truth and the ideal of beauty. What does not correspond to these ideals perishes as a result of selection arranged by nature itself.”

Speaking about the benefits of humanity, the Angel of Death does not at all mean all of humanity as such, for such peoples as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others do not deserve, in his opinion, life at all. He feared that if his research fell into the hands of the Slavs, they would be able to use the discoveries for the benefit of their people.

This is why Joseph Mengele, when Soviet troops were approaching Germany and the defeat of the Germans was inevitable, he hastily collected all his tables, notebooks, notes and left the camp, ordering the destruction of traces of his crimes - the surviving twins and midgets.

When the twins were taken to the gas chambers, Zyklon-B suddenly ran out and the execution was postponed. Fortunately, the Soviet troops were already very close, and the Germans fled.

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

Origin

The biography of Joseph Mengele began in 1911 in the German state of Bavaria. He was born into the family of an ordinary farmer. The father of the future fascist executioner founded the agricultural equipment company Karl Mengele and Sons. The mother was raising children. Josef had two younger brother— Carl Jr. and Alois.

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

Early biography

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

IN student years joined the Steel Helmet organization. Formally, it was not a Nazi movement. The group members were ultra-patriots and held conservative views; there were also monarchists. Soon the poorly organized street units " steel helmet"were absorbed by stormtroopers.

In the ranks of the SA, Joseph Mengele had not yet thought of conducting experiments on people. He didn't stay there 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 physician Othmar von Verschuer, who was considered an authority in the field of genetics. The doctor specialized in twins, genetic abnormalities and hereditary diseases. Under Verschuer's guidance, Joseph Mengele defended his doctoral dissertation. He was then less than thirty years old. Mengele showed great promise.

Military service

The doctor Joseph Mengele had to join the SS and the party for career growth. 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 in the Wehrmacht for long. He transferred to the racial medical battalion of the Waffen-SS.

The doctor did not take direct part in the fighting. He was soon transferred to the SS Main Directorate for Settlement Affairs. Mengele's duties included assessing Poles for suitability for further Germanization according to the racial standards of the Nazi state. After the start of the war with Soviet Union the future Doctor Death was transferred to tank division SS, where he served as a medic. He was awarded the Iron Cross for saving two tank crews from a tank.

In the summer of 1942, the service ended. In the Rostov-on-Don area, Josef Mengele was seriously wounded. After 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 department on settlement issues.

Doctor Death

During this period, Dr. Josef Mengele's life took a sharp turn. His longtime mentor became head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Heredity. The Kaiser had no connection with this institution. The institute was founded long before the start of the war with money from the John Rockefeller Foundation.

The institution dealt with issues of 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 aroused great interest of the then Nazi state. With the coming to power of the fascists, the institute was restructured according to their ideology.

It was Verschuer who suggested that Joseph Menge work in a concentration camp for the benefit of German science. In 1942, a decision was made to move all Jews from the occupied territory to camps in Poland. The Germans had already decided to completely get rid of all Jews, so they saw nothing reprehensible in experimenting on living subjects, who were doomed to die in any case.

Duties at Auschwitz

The scientific director convinced Joseph Mengele that the camps offered enormous opportunities for making scientific breakthroughs. After this, the doctor wrote a statement to the chief physician of Auschwitz about his desire to serve in the concentration camp. The request was granted. Mengele was appointed senior doctor of the gypsy camp on the territory of Auschwitz. He later became the senior doctor of a large camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

His duties included inspecting arriving prisoners. Based on the results of the inspections, the commission decided who was fit to work for the benefit of the camp and would remain alive for some time, and who was too sick, old or weak for backbreaking work. The second group immediately went to the gas chambers. The management did not have much confidence in the workers, so Mengele had to make sure that the workers on duty did not steal valuables that the arrivals had with them.

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

At the very beginning of his work, Joseph Mengele “saved” the camp from the epidemic - he immediately sent a batch of gypsies to the gas chamber, among whom the sick were discovered. Later he got rid of a 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 also knew how long it would last. Often, during the experiments, experimental people became sick or crippled, so Mengele completely lost interest in them. Everything depended on physical condition victims. If the subject did not suffer severe damage, he could be transferred to regular prisoners.

“Rescue” could only happen if the clients of the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele did not need new people. During the war, Verschuer received from his ward a huge number of reports, blood samples, skeletons and internal organs prisoners. Mengele also actively collaborated with Adolf Butenandt. This is one of the world's leading biochemists, laureate Nobel Prize, a distinguished 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 effects of cold and altitude. This required liver preparations, which were supplied to the scientist by Doctor Death.

Josef Mengele did not suffer any punishment for his experiments. The same applies to the scientists with whom he collaborated. Verschuer became one of the most prominent geneticists and avoided denazification, and Butenandt headed the Max Planck Society. It was the most influential and prestigious German organization. Only closer to the 2000s, organizations that were associated with Mengele made official apologies 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 the retreating SS troops, or by the customers. Mengele was responsible not only for the victims of the experiments, but also for 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 crazy. He personally visited his subjects and treated the little ones to chocolates. He asked himself to call his children “Uncle Mengele.” This struck people the most, judging by the recollections of those who managed to survive. Doctor Death was kind to children, courteous, forced little prisoners to go to kindergarten, organized by him, although he well understood that most of the wards would die.

Mengele's subjects of interest were 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, looking for anything unusual. The trains also arrived at night, so he demanded that those on duty immediately wake him up if there was anything “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 the task of raising the birth rate to science. The goal was to increase the likelihood of twins and triplets, of course, if the children were of “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 for his work be created.

Saved by the "devil"

Mengele and the Ovitz family also became interested. Before the war, Romanian Jews were traveling musicians. What saved their lives was that large family both dwarfs and children of normal height were born. This interested Mengele extraordinarily. He immediately transferred the family to his part of the camp and completely freed them from forced labor.

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

Josef Mengele's experiments on people have almost reached a dead end. 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 experimental subjects. He brought toys and sweets to the youngest, and joked with the older ones. The whole family survived. After their release from the concentration camp, they said that they were “saved by the will of the devil.”

Mengele's flight

In January 1945, Mengele left Auschwitz amid the roar of Red Army artillery. All materials were ordered to be destroyed, but the doctor took the most valuable things with him. USSR soldiers entered Auschwitz on January 27. They discovered the bodies of executed prisoners. Mengele 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 advance of the Red Army.

Mengele was captured by the Americans, he was captured near Nuremberg. What saved him was 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. He was soon released. He changed his name to be on the safe side and became Fritz Hollman.

Josef Mengele was included in the list of war criminals compiled by a UN commission. The list was distributed throughout the camps for Wehrmacht soldiers, but not all Allied officers studied it carefully, so the doctor could not be found. Old friends provided the doctor with false documents and sent him to the village, where they were unlikely to look for him. Mengele lived in spartan surroundings. 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 Joseph was forced to hide.

In 1946, a trial began against 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 search for him because they believed that the doctor had died or committed suicide in last days war. His wife also claimed that he was dead.

At this time, Mengele even went to the USSR occupation zone to return some of the records lost during the advance 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 he lived for some time 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 began to have problems with the law in Argentina. A former Nazi doctor was questioned over illegal activities after a girl died due to an abortion. The doctor moved to Paraguay under the name Jose Mengele. Because of his carelessness, he found himself on the radar of those who were hunting the Nazis. In 1959, the process of extradition of a war criminal began in Germany. By this time, the former Nazi doctor had already moved 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 on a farm under the name of his friend Wolfgang Gerhard. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, Mengele successfully lay low. IN recent years The doctor's health has deteriorated. He suffered from hypertension and suffered a stroke a few days before his death. Josef Mengele died while swimming in the ocean in 1979.

Life after death

A Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on people was buried in Brazil under a false name. At the same time, articles appeared in various newspapers every now and then with information that Joseph Mengele was seen in different parts light alive. In the eighties, there was a new interest in the affairs of the Nazis, it again became a topic of interest to everyone, the name Mengele was again often mentioned. In addition to Israel and Germany, the Americans joined the search. Several countries offered rewards for information about the doctor’s whereabouts, public organization and popular newspapers.

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 discovered. At the request of German authorities, Brazilian police interviewed one of the local residents who knew where Mengele was buried. The body was exhumed that same year. The study gave a fairly high probability that it was Joseph Mengele who was buried there.

The identification process, however, took a long time. Only in 1992 was it possible to prove that the remains actually belonged to the criminal. Up until this point, information appeared in the newspapers every now and then that the doctor from Auschwitz faked his death, but in reality continued 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 has done terrible things. At the same time, many documentaries(for example, “Mysteries of the Century. Doctor Death Joseph Mengele” with Sergei Medvedev) recognize 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 Aryan-looking twins. By ethnic type, these people were more like Europeans than the local population.