Voices of the Holocaust

Survivors Recall Nazi Medical Experimentation at Auschwitz

Oct 31, 2009

Prisoners sent to Auschwitz knew their reassignment was a death sentence. Often the best chance of survival came from being used as a subject of medical experimentation.

Of all the National Socialist (Nazi) detention camps, the complex at Auschwitz was the most efficiently brutal. More than two thirds of all arriving prisoners were immediately sentenced to death in the gas chambers at Birkenau; the rest faced a slower form of execution, either as slave laborers or as victims of medical experimentation.

The selection process was casually cruel. Even for the survivors, the aftermath was devastating in its precision.

The Camp Doctor at Auschwitz was a 32-year-old physician named Josef Mengele. Mengele had served in the Germany army, been wounded, and then reassigned to medical duty at Birkenau as of May 30, 1943.

By all accounts, Mengele was a study in contrasts. He affected a cool, urbane air when studying prisoners as they arrived at Auschwitz. He could be playful and charming moments before flicking his hand to the 'left,' thereby sentencing the person he was joking with to death.

Children seemed to regard him as a gentle father figure who would be kind to them and bring them chocolate. Sometimes he would invite them for a ride in his car, which then took them directly to the gas chambers.

To women, he could pretend to be attentive. As Lynott (2009) noted, Mengele would act “in a caring, concerned manner when confronted with exhausted women and their children on the ramp" near the 'Gate of Death,' only to order them into the gas chambers after leaving their side. Even female prisoners he tortured and degraded were attracted by his good looks.

And yet his cool demeanor could change to violence in a moment. When the crematoriums could no longer handle all the prisoners sentenced to death, Mengele angrily ordered trenches dug, filled with gasoline, and set ablaze. As Mengele issued orders, children were tossed into the fiery pits: “The children started to scream; some of them managed to crawl out of the burning pit. An officer walked around it with sticks and pushed back those who managed to get out.”

Medical experimentation took place at Block 10 in Auschwitz I. Being chosen for a medical experiment was either a mixed blessing, or a curse. On the one hand, experimentation allowed prisoners to survive a little longer. On the other hand, some experiments were so horrendous that death came immediately. At maximum production, the crematoriums at Auschwitz were said to consume 1,000 bodies throughout any 24-hour period, and there was a steady supply of corpses from the prison population.

Mengele focused his research in genetic engineering. He was fascinated with heredity and the genetic similarities and differences present in twins. As his mentor (Dr. von Verschuer) had written in 1935, research on twins was essential for the “complete and reliable determination of what is hereditary in man.”

Mengele also was curious about prisoners with congenital deformities, such as dwarfs. He wanted to understand the genetic reasons for their deformities, so would kill them upon arrival, dissect their bodies, and send tissue samples back to his mentor in Berlin.

Children arriving at Auschwitz often were killed on the spot. Many were orphans and in such a weak physical condition that they stood little chance of survival on their own. If the children were twins, their only chance at life was being selected for one of Mengele's experiments.

Survivors recalled the variety of experiments performed upon them. For example, Mengele took blood from one twin and injected it into another twin having a different blood type. Headaches and fever would result, which were meticulously recorded. If twins had different eye colors, he would inject their eyes with methylene blue in order to see if the color could be altered. When blindness resulted, the eyeballs would be removed and tagged. Dr. Jancu Veckler recalled arriving at Birkenau and seeing eyeballs lying on a table: “All of them were tagged with numbers and little notes. They were pale yellow, pale blue, green and violet.”

Some twins had limbs removed and transplanted with limbs from another twin. Other twins were castrated without anesthetic, all in the name of 'science.' Yet another twin had her urinary tract connected directly to her colon. Barondess (1996) recalled how Mengele had infected one “twin with typhoid bacilli” and then killed the other “when the infected twin died so that the organs could be compared” after dissection.

Nevertheless, many of the surviving twins refused to condemn the man who brought them candy, or who treated them “like a papa, like a mama” (Lifton, 1985).

Even after all these years, the exact nature of the experiments ordered by Mengele are unknown. Before Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, Mengele sent truckloads of medical records to Dr. von Verschuer in Berlin, who then destroyed them before they could be found. Thus, the primary evidence about experimentation comes from Holocaust survivors.

One Auschwitz survivor recalled being treated like a “human guinea pig . . . where people were used as merely objects . . . to a scientific end.” Even after many years, Mozes-Kor (1992) still remembered the “medical injections, the endless blood taking, the tests, the dead bodies all around us.”

Barondess JA. 1996. Medicine against society. Lessons from the Third Reich. JAMA. 276(20):1657-61.

Lynott DR. 2009. Josef Mengele. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/history/mengele/index_1.html?print=yes

Mozes-Kor E. 1992. The Mengele twins and human experimentation: a personal account. In: GJ Annas and MJ Grodin, eds. The Nazi doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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