Josef Mengele "Angle of Death"
Kaitlyn Jenkins
Background
Role
Josef Mengele was an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane-medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz. In January 1937, at the institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he became the assistant of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a leading scientific figure widely known for his research with twins. Mengele had become interested in utilizing twins for medical research through Verschuer, famous for experimenting with identical and fraternal twins in order to trace the genetic origins of various diseases. During the 1930s, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the variant factors of human heredity and environment. Mengele, with his mentor, had performed a number of legitimate research protocols using twins as test subjects throughout the 1930s. Now, at Auschwitz, with full license to maim or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma (“Gypsy”) twins, most of them children.He performed inhumane experiments on inmates. Mengele also sought out pregnant women, on whom he would preform vivisection's before sending them to the gas chambers.
Details
Eva Mozes Kor and her identical twin, Miriam Mozes, survived the deadly genetic experiments conducted by The Angle of Death, Josef Mengele, in the death camp Auschwitz during 1944-1945. All of their parents, grandparents, two older sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were killed in the camps. Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable horror at Auschwitz, specifically on twins. These twins were as young as five and six years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. The Angle of Death injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. He made experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. He made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs. Around three thousand twins passed through Auschwitz during WWII until it's liberation at the end of the war. Only a few of these twins survived the experiments which they were subjected to at the hands of Mengele. Among the few that survived were Eva and Miriam Mozes.