Nazi 'Angel of Death' doctor Josef Mengele was obsessed with dwarfism and twins but his choice 'specimen' was a 12-year-old boy's head he planned to dissect, new book on his monstrosities reveal
By Caroline Howe
Daily Mail
February 18, 2020
Josef Mengele was the embodiment of evil, prowling the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the 1940s for his helpless victims, with the Nazi being obsessed with anomalies and carried out the most sadistic experiments on those prisoners, a new book reveals.
Known as the Angel of Death and the most notorious war criminal of all time, Mengele was a medical monster and intent on destroying the perceived enemies of the Aryan race – the Jews – and creating the ideal German community.
Captivated by oddities, victims of Mengele's medical experiments were chosen based on different eye colors, growth anomalies such as a clubfoot or a hunchback, giantism or dwarfism, twins and gypsies.
A choice 'specimen' he sent to his lab for study was the head of a 12-year-old boy he was going to dissect.
This detail was discovered in a document by author David Marwell, former chief of investigative research at the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, hired to do a global search to find Mengele in the 1980s.
'This only reinforced my notion of him as a wildly sadistic, grotesque monster,' writes Marwell in his new book Mengele, Unmasking The 'Angel of Death'.
'Mengele stalked the nightmares and haunted the daydreams of legions and emerged as the embodiment not only of the Holocaust itself but also of the failure of justice in the wake of the war that allowed so many Nazi murderers and accomplices to escape justice,' Marwell adds.
Mengele focused on identical twins, physical twins and gypsies.
With 732 pairs of twins to experiment on, Mengele once impregnated one twin with the sperm from a different twin to see if she would produce twins.
When there was only one baby, one survivor claimed he tore the baby out of the mother's uterus and threw the child into an oven and walked away.
Mengele put pairs of twins in small wooden cages and painfully injected them daily in the back with bacteria that caused an infection of the mouth or genitals, leading to gangrenous boils.
He applied painful clamps to children's limbs to induce gangrene, injected dye into their eyes, gave them injections in the spine and spinal taps with no anesthesia.
He did blood tests and transfusions from one twin to the other.
Typhus and tuberculosis were given to one twin but not the other. If one died, the other would be killed with an injection of chloroform to the heart to study and compare the effects of the disease.
Mengele operated without anesthetics for procedures removing organs, performing castration or amputation. He injected prisoners in the heart with chloroform or phenol that instantly caused blood coagulation.
Victims were purposely killed for just after-death measurements and examination Organs, eyes, blood samples and tissues were sent to a lab for further study and to be dissected.
All victims suffered unbearable pain and an agonizing death.
Mengele also injected eyes of people who had different color pupils to see if he could change the eye color.
He pinned hundreds of human eyes to the wall like a butterfly collection.
Mengele took his turn on the ramp where the starved and exhausted prisoners arrived at the camp in trains or cattle cars, packed so tightly that the dead ones were still standing.
Each SS officer on duty on the ramp decided with the flick of a wrist to the left or the right who among the 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the Auschwitz II concentration camp in 1943 were going to live and work, and who were going to be sent to the gas chambers.
Mengele decided who was going to be a victim of his medical experiments.
Mengele was always there sober, unlike the other officers, culling inmates, determining fates and searching through new arrivals to find twins or anyone with unusual traits.
Reportedly some 3,000 twins were pulled from the masses, mostly children, but only 200 survived.
'The vast majority of people who encountered Mengele on the ramp shortly after arriving in Auschwitz did not survive', the author notes.
The camp became the perfect lab for Mengele to pursue his own perverted scientific interests that he viewed as a cutting edge endeavor.
Prisoners from Auschwitz – including children selected by Mengele – were sent to other concentration camps to serve as subjects for tuberculosis experimentation and were infected with the disease.
'The children were hanged from the heating pipes in a school in Hamburg to hide evidence of these experiments', Marwell reports.
Prisoners suffering from schizophrenia and depression were subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
The goal was to treat incapacitated prisoners so that they could return to the work force.
Most of the experiments were unsuccessful and led to the death of the prisoners.
Mengele had earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich before joining the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene and working with a German geneticist.
Most of Mengele's twisted experiments were almost exclusively done in pursuit of his own pseudo-scientific specialization, instead of being conducted for practical scientific reasons.
Arriving at Auschwitz allowed Mengele to pursue his work unchecked 'to protect and 'improve' the German race', all part of the Nazis rhetoric to create a new racial order and safeguard German blood.
With thousands upon thousands of helpless victims, Auschwitz was the ideal lab for Mengele - and his deeds proved to be the darkest nightmare of modern history.
The author finds it difficult to accept testimony about some of the experiments attributed to Mengele – creating a Siamese twin by 'sewing together' two twins, or making boys into girls or girls into boys or even connecting the urinary tract of a 7-year old girl to her own colon – as reported by other authors.
'Given Mengele's ambition, it is clear that he pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards', writes Marwell.
The science he was pursuing at Auschwitz was consistent with what was being carried out in the scientific establishment.
But his 'research was criminal – and monstrous – and pushed scientific research across ethical boundaries', writes the author.
By the beginning of 1945, the Soviets were advancing on Auschwitz and the SS evacuated inmates by embarking on death marches in the bitter winter to other camps and then blowing up the crematorium complexes.
Mengele believed to the end that Hitler's weapons would rescue the Germans from defeat. He was wrong and the Third Reich collapsed.
Mengele was soon on the run.
He was able to join up with a German military field hospital and dressed himself as a German Army officer, ditching the SS uniform.
He developed a cogent cover story, eliminated his service in the SS and tried on different names.
Mengele had cleverly avoided getting a tattoo when he was in the SS, the very blood-type tattoo he had implemented.
An old school friend he visited gave him a discharge certificate he had in the name of another physician and now the Angel of Death was Fritz Holmann.
He disappeared working on a farm 12-14 hours a day earning some money.
The young woman he had married and bore him a son publicly declared her husband dead.
But living in the forest, Mengele stayed in touch with his family. He needed their financial help to leave Germany.
The preferred route was through an Italian port, so Mengele crossed into Italy by way of Austria and secured false documents.
With a new ID issued in the name of Helmut Gregor by a Nazi-oriented group in South Tyrol, and money that arrived from his father which would pay for a guide, Mengele was set to travel to Argentina.
The trip was confirmed with the issuance of a Red Cross passport.
'A Red Cross passport was an essential element in the escape of so many Nazis for departing Italy and gaining entry to South America'.
Mengele almost didn't make it when the official who was expected to issue a visa for him wasn't there.
He was interrogated, accused of committing horrific crimes against Italian prisoners of war – but continued to say he was from South Tyrol.
His contact finally showed up and Mengele was on his way on the North Queen to Argentina – traveling as Helmut Gregor to a new continent in 1949.
He went to the theater, concerts and attended lectures with sophisticated people for nearly a decade before he was forced to change his name and disappear.
By the time the German justice officials produced an extradition request to the lethargic bureaucracy of Argentina, Mengele had been gone for months and settled in Paraguay in 1960.
With his contacts, he was one step ahead.
In 1985, Germany, Israel and the United States formed a cooperative effort to find Mengele although they had all searched for him on their own.
There were leads that he was living in Ethiopia, Argentina, Egypt, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Ecuador.
Family members were surveilled to learn anything.
The Angel of Death was finally located in June 1985 – dead. He had died in a swimming accident in 1979 and his body buried in São Paulo.
The author was there when they exhumed the body and held his bones in his hands.
'Among the last written words of his life, Mengele was unrepentant to the end and expressed no remorse'.
January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.
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