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 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.
On the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp there is a large 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. This was the new Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele, who, after being wounded, was declared unfit for service in the 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 its immutable stack
ohm He decided who to immediately send to gas chamber, and who else can 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 a fit, well-groomed man with kind smile, in a well-fitted and ironed dark green tunic and a cap, which he wore slightly on one side; black boots polished to perfect shine. One of the Auschwitz prisoners, Kristina Zywulska, would later write: “He looked like a film actor - a sleek, pleasant face with regular features. Tall, slender...”
His smile and pleasant, courteous manners, which did not fit in with his inhuman experiences, were nicknamed Mengele by the prisoners as 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. How to deal with typhus differently in such conditions, Mengel
I couldn't think of it.
Before the war, Joseph Mengele studied medicine and even defended his dissertation on the topic “Racial differences in the structure of lower jaw"in 1935, and a little later received doctorate. Special interest genetics represented him, and in Auschwitz greatest degree he showed interest in the twins. He conducted experiments without resorting to anesthetics and dissected living babies. He tried to sew 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 succeeded with the help x-ray radiation sterilize a whole group of monks
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 had to have blond hair and blue eyes - hence Mengele's attempts to change the eye color of children through 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's limbs were amputated and transplanted various organs, infected with typhus and given blood transfusions. Mengele wanted to track
to understand how the identical organisms of twins will react to the same intervention in them. Then the experimental subjects were killed, after which the doctor carried out a thorough analysis of the corpses, examining 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 donated personal time, in order to devote him to self-education, exploring the material that the concentration camp had at its disposal.
Mengele and his colleagues believed that hungry children had very pure blood, which meant that they could
It will be of great help to the wounded German soldiers who are in hospitals. Someone else mentioned this former prisoner 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 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 the concentration camp was a kind of scientific mission, and the experiments he performed on prisoners were, from his point of view, carried out for the benefit of science. There are many tales told about Dr. 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 if Joseph Mengele was a simple sadist, a cat
In addition to his scientific work, he took pleasure in 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 his 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.
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 others 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
manager research laboratory Dr. Joseph 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 did not 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 method, 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 - an 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 in reducing the birth rate of Jews, Slavs and Gypsies was to develop the most effective method of sterilization for men and women. So he operated on boys and men without anesthesia, subjected X-ray exposure women...
The opportunity to conduct experiments on innocent people freed up the Doctor's sadistic frustrations: he seemed to derive pleasure not so much from audio search truth, how much from the inhuman 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.
In fact, 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 important task: in order to breed a pure race, you need 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 Better 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 scary experiments of all [were] gynecological. 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. Josef Mengele was worried main idea: if every German woman, instead of one child, gives birth to two or three healthy ones at once, the Aryan race will finally be able to 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 exists not only in Joseph Mengele, but also in many other scientists, does not tolerate haste, but, on the contrary, requires 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 anal vector: on the shelves, neatly, accurately. 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 conjoined twins, sewing 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.
By doing terrible things and carrying out inhuman experiments over 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 the only way maintaining 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, causing inhuman pain and carrying 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 natural selection will be 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. 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.
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Josef Mengele was born in Bavaria in 1911. He studied philosophy at University of Munich and medicine in Frankfurt. In 1934 he became a member of the SA, a paramilitary unit of the NSDAP (National Socialist German workers' party), in 1938 he joined the ranks of the SS.
Mengele worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. The topic of his dissertation: “Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races.”
A general sadist
During World War II, Mengele served as a military doctor in the SS Viking Division. In 1942 he received " iron Cross"for saving two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." The doctor's range of interests was wide. He began with “increasing the fertility of Aryan women.” It is clear that the material for research was non-Aryan women. Then the Vaterland put it straight the opposite problem: find the cheapest and effective methods birth restrictions for “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.
Having maimed thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception - castration. “Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht proposed to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental technique was very simple: a concentration camp prisoner was covered with ice, and “doctors” in SS uniform constantly measured his body temperature. When a test subject died, a new one was brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after cooling the body to a temperature below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. And the best way to warm up is a hot bath and “the natural warmth of the female body.”
A study was commissioned by the Luftwaffe to study the influence high altitude on the pilot's performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners were taken terrible death: at ultra-low pressure a person simply burst. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. But not a single such aircraft took off in Germany until the end of the war.
Josef Mengele, who became interested in racial theory, conducted experiments with eye color. He decided to prove that Brown eyes Jews can never become blue eyes" true Aryan" He gave hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye, which were extremely painful and often led 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 is the value of research alone on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on human body! And the “study” of three thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out.
Before starting the experiments, " good doctor"Mengele could pat a child on the head, treat him with chocolate...
However, the chief doctor of Auschwitz dealt not only with applied research. He did not shy away from “ pure science" Concentration camp prisoners were infected various diseases to test the effectiveness of new drugs on them. In 1998, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin were accused of using prisoners to test the new sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally “acquired” another 150 prisoners of Auschwitz, no one was able to wake up after the new sleeping pills.
By the way, other representatives of German business also collaborated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustri, made 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 “disintegrated.” Some of the fragments of IG Farbenindustry are well known in the world as drug manufacturers.
And what did Joseph Mengele achieve? Nothing. You can't count scientific result the conclusion is that if a person is not allowed to sleep and not fed, he will first go crazy and then die.
Quiet "retirement"
In 1945, Josef Mengele destroyed all the “data” he had collected and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, he worked quietly in his native Günzburg at his father’s company. Then, using new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through the Red Cross. During those years, this organization issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID was not carefully checked there. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich was at its best.
So Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 1950s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill upon arrest), the Nazi criminal moved to Paraguay, where he disappeared from view.
At the same time, for 40 years after the end of World War II, “fake” Mengeles appeared in the most different places. Thus, in 1968, a former Brazilian policeman claimed that he allegedly managed to discover traces of the Angel of Death (as Mengele was nicknamed by the prisoners) on the border of Paraguay and Argentina.
Shimon Wiesenthal, founder of the Jewish Center for the Collection of Information on Nazi Criminals, announced in 1979 that Mengele was hiding in a secret Nazi colony in the Chilean Andes. In 1981, a message appeared in the American Life magazine: Mengele lives in the Bedford Hills area, located 50 kilometers north of New York. And in 1985, in Lisbon, one suicide left a note admitting that he was a wanted man. Nazi criminal Joseph vom Mengele.
Where was he found?
Only in 1985 did it become known about the true location of Mengele, or rather, his grave. An Austrian couple living in Brazil reported that Mengele was Wolfgang Gerhard, who had been their neighbor for several years. The couple claimed that he drowned six years ago, that he was then 67 years old, and indicated the location of his grave: the town of Embu.
In the same year, the remains of the deceased were exhumed. At every stage of this action, three independent teams of forensic experts were involved, and live television broadcast from the cemetery was received in many countries around the world. The coffin contained only the decayed bones of the deceased, but everyone was eagerly awaiting the results of their identification.
The scientists' chances of identifying the deceased were considered quite high. The fact is that they had at their disposal an extensive archive of data about Mengele: the SS file cabinet from the war contained information about his height, weight, skull geometry, and condition of his teeth. The photographs clearly showed the characteristic gap between the upper front teeth.
The specialists who examined the Embu burial had to be very careful when making their conclusions. The desire to find Joseph Mengele turned out to be so great that there have already been cases of his erroneous identification, including deliberately falsified ones. Many such deceptions are described in the book Witness from the Grave by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover. From the grave).
How was he identified?
The bones discovered in the grave were subjected to a thorough examination, which was carried out by three independent groups of experts: from Germany, the USA and the Shimon Wiesenthal Center, located in Austria. After the exhumation was completed, scientists examined the grave a second time, looking for possibly fallen dental fillings and bone fragments. Then all parts of the skeleton were delivered to Sao Paulo, to the Institute forensic medicine, where further research continued.
The results obtained, compared with data on Mengele’s identity from the SS file, gave experts reason to almost certainly consider the examined remains to belong to a wanted war criminal. However, they needed absolute confidence, an argument was needed to convincingly support such a conclusion. And then Richard Helmer, a West German forensic anthropologist, joined the work of the experts, thanks to whose participation it was possible to brilliantly complete the final stage of the entire operation.
Helmer was able to recreate the appearance of a deceased person from his skull. It was difficult and painstaking work. First of all, it was necessary to mark the points on the skull that served as starting points for restoration appearance faces, and accurately determine the distances between them.
The researcher then created a computer “image” of the skull. Further, based on his professional knowledge of the thickness and distribution of soft tissues, muscles and skin, he received the following computer image, which already clearly reproduced the features of the face being restored. The last - and most critical - moment of the entire procedure came when the face, reconstructed using methods computer graphics, combined with the face in the photograph of Mengele.
Both images matched exactly. Thus it was finally proven that man, long years hiding in Brazil under the names of Helmut Gregor and Wolfgang Gerhard and drowning in 1979 at the age of 67, was really the Angel of Death of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the brutal Nazi executioner, Dr. Josef Mengele.
Vadim ILYIN
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.
On the territory of the Auschwitz concentration camp there is a large 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. This was the new Auschwitz doctor, Josef Mengele, who, after being wounded, was declared unfit for service in the 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 his constant 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 a fit, well-groomed man with a kind smile, in a well-fitted and ironed dark green tunic and a cap, which he wore slightly on one side; 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, Josef 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 had to have blond hair and blue eyes - hence Mengele’s attempts to change the eye color of children 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” in order to record common signs and differences, and then the experiments of the doctor himself 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, the chief physician of Auschwitz, who later described Mengele as a responsible employee who sacrificed his personal time to devote it to self-education, researching 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.
