What was dr. mengeles role at auschwitz

During the s, twin research was seen as an ideal tool in weighing the factors of human heredity and environment. Mengele and his mentor had performed a number of legitimate research protocols using twins as test subjects throughout the s. 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 had a wide variety of other research interests. Among these was a fascination with heterochromia, a condition in which the irises of an individual's eyes differ in coloration.

He himself also conducted several experiments in an attempt to unlock the secret of artificially changing eye color. He also zealously documented in camp inmates the progression of the disease Noma , a type of gangrene which destroys the mucous membrane of the mouth and other tissues.

Mengele firmly endorsed Nazi racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments which aimed to illustrate the lack of resistance among Jews or Roma to various diseases. M uch of our early knowledge of Mengele's activities at Auschwitz comes from Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner-physician who assisted Mengele under duress.

Nyiszli published his experiences, initially in his native Hungarian, in He spent the next few weeks at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, until its evacuation. He then made his way west to evade capture by Soviet forces. In the immediate postwar period, Mengele was in US custody.

Unaware that Mengele's name already stood on a list of wanted war criminals, US officials quickly released him. From the summer of until spring , using false papers, Mengele worked as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria.

His prosperous family then aided his emigration to South America. He settled in Argentina. West German authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in , and a request for extradition in In declining health, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, Brazilian forensic experts thereafter positively identified the remains as Josef Mengele.

In , DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion. The children coped with the appalling ordeal of Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments in different ways. Moti Alon, his mother and twin, eventually made their way back home, arriving in Budapest on 5 May He now lives in Israel. Vera Kriegel emigrated to Israel with her mother after the war, where she lives today. Seventy years later, she still has nightmares. Jona Laks became an activist, the head of a group of Mengele twins.

She has been back to Auschwitz many times, and says what she experienced there has never left her mind. Menachem, the boy with no name, eventually returned to his home town in Ukraine. Above all, he recalled his parents, carefree before the war and the Holocaust.

I remember her from the back, not the front. Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Image source, Rex Features. Mengele selected them for experimentation. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jona Laks describes how Mengele kept her alive so he could perform medical experiments on her.

Image source, Getty Images. Child prisoners at Auschwitz, photographed on the orders of Josef Mengele. Vera Kriegel explains how she set out to show Mengele he was not master of her mind. Motti Alon explains how he saw one of Josef Mengele's cruel medical experiments. Menachem Bodner: I did not know my name on leaving Auschwitz. Children at Auschwitz show the identification numbers printed on their arms.

He tested vaccines on the girl. After countless injections, she was more dead than alive. One day Lidia's mother sneaked into the children's barracks to bring her daughter food and found her lying unconscious with a high fever. Zofka believes that the doctor was motivated by a "boundless cynicism" that allowed him to see his victims not as human beings, but as "material that is already dead.

Read more: Holocaust survivor celebrates th birthday with descendants. After the war, business was even better. Karl Mengele was elected city councilor and mayor, and, in , with his son on the run to escape charges of committing atrocities on behalf of the Nazis, Karl Mengele was made a gold-medal citizen of the city. A street was named after him. After his death in , his son Alois, one of Josef's younger brothers, took over the business.

It has since gone broke. In , Alois Mengele's son, Dieter, created the Familie Dieter Mengele Sozialstiftung, a foundation that reports having donated over a quarter of a million euros to charitable causes. The modern Mengele family does not want to have anything to do with the past — not even with projects that commemorate his uncle's victims.

Asked if she would be willing to speak for an interview, she responded: "We are not interested in contacts with the media. Read more: Seventy-five years ago, the Nazis carried out the mass murder of Sinti and Roma people at Auschwitz. The US government ordered a fresh investigation into Mengele's disappearance. But Mengele was already dead. He escaped the international manhunt and fled to South America with his family's financial support in Born in , Mengele drowned off the coast of Brazil in , just shy of 68 years old — a fact that his family kept secret.

It wasn't until that his death became known. He opposes renaming the street that honors Mengele's father, arguing that that would hold all members of the family responsible for doctor's crimes — he considers that guilt by association.

Another performance by the group a commemorated the Jewish Polish pediatrician Janusz Korczak, who wrote children's books and ran an orphanage before he was killed by the Nazis at the Treblinka extermination camp in Residents also installed a plaque to honor Mengele's victims in the courtyard of the historic Dossenbergerhaus, which today is an elementary school.

The plaque was designed by the students, and the inscription quotes the Austrian philosopher Jean Amery, who fought in Belgium with the resistance and was interned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen: "No one can escape from the history of his people.