Human experimentation

Block 10 - Medical experimentation block in Auschwitz

Josef Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using
inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins; they would
be selected and placed in special barracks. He also recruited Berthold Epstein, a Jewish
pediatrician. As a doctor, Epstein proposed to Mengele a study into treatments of the disease
called Noma that was noted for particularly affecting children from the camp.[12]

While the exact cause of Noma remains uncertain, it is now known that it has a higher
occurrence in children suffering from malnutrition and a lower immune system response. Many
develop the disease shortly after contracting another illness such as measles or tuberculosis.[13]

Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the
concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably the Ovitz family - the children of a
Romanian artist, of whom seven of the ten members were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation, they
toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. Mengele often called them "my dwarf family";
to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of "the abnorm".[citation needed]

Mengele's experiments also included attempts to take one twin's eyeballs and attach them to the
back of the other twin's head, changing eye colour by injecting chemicals into children's eyes,
various amputations of limbs, and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen's account of her time in
Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943.
Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments.
Most of the victims died, because of either the experiments or later infections.

"Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed
them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform
into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting
each piece of the twins' bodies."[10]

At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies. After the experiment was over, these twins
were usually murdered and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two
Romani children were sewn together to create conjoined twins; the hands of the children became
badly infected where the veins had been resected, this also caused gangrene.[10]

The subjects of Mengele's research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were,
for the time being, safe from the gas chambers.[14] When visiting his child subjects, he introduced
himself as "Uncle Mengele" and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his
grim acts, he was also called "Mengele the protector".[15]

The book Children of the Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Shiela Cohn Dekel,
chronicles Mengele's medical experimental activities on approximately 3,000 twins who passed
through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until its liberation at the end of the war.
Only 100 pairs of twins survived;[16] 60 years later, they came forward about the special
privileges they were given in Auschwitz owing to Mengele's interest in twins, and how as a
result they have suffered, as the children who survived his medical experiments and injections.[10]

Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: "I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself
believed he was doing serious work — not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only
exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop — major surgeries were performed without
anaesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the
stomach, but without any anaesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again
without anaesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the
power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one
perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it
was a madness on his part."[17]