Auschwitz concentration camp: experiments on women. Joseph Mengele. History of Auschwitz. Truth and lies about Dr. Mengele Angel of Death Dr. Mengele

In 1979, a certain Wolfgang Gerhard, a quiet 67-year-old German emigrant who settled here after the Second World War, drowned off the coast of Brazilian Sao Paulo. The old man was buried in a local cemetery and soon forgotten about him. However, 7 years later, Wolfgang’s neighbors accidentally received folders with his archive. Opening the papers, the neighbors gasped - these were descriptions of inhumane experiments on children. Their author was the most wanted Nazi criminal Josef Mengele, a doctor whose medical experiments included thousands of Auschwitz prisoners. Just think: the monster who created a real hell on earth, sending hundreds of people to the next world every day, lived in a real paradise on the Brazilian coast for 35 post-war years. This is the very case when there is no talk of justice.

Josef Mengele was the eldest son in the family. It is a well-known fact that a child is formed in the image and likeness of his parents. Looking at them, he acquires certain traits and qualities that will be fully revealed in adulthood. This is what happened with Joseph. His father paid practically no attention to the children, and his mother was a despotic fury prone to sadism. So the question arises, how should a child grow up when the father pays practically no attention, and the mother does not skimp on beatings at the slightest disobedience or poor grades? The result was a brilliant doctor and a cruel sadist.

Josef was barely 32 years old when he entered service at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The first thing he did was eliminate the typhus epidemic. In a peculiar way, of course: Josef ordered the complete burning of several barracks where the disease was noticed. Effective, to say the least.

But the main thing that Mengele became famous for was his interest in genetics. The Nazi doctor's stumbling block was the twins. Perform experiments without anesthetics? Easily. Dissect still living babies? Exactly what is needed. You can also stitch twins together, change their eye color using chemicals, develop a substance that causes infertility, and so on. The list of inhumane experiments can be continued endlessly.

Another question arises, why was the doctor from hell most interested in the twins? Let's go back to basics. Even in pre-war Germany, the authorities noticed that the birth rate was decreasing and infant mortality was increasing; this pattern was true for representatives of the Aryan nation. Other races and nationalities living in Germany had no problems with fertility at all. Then the German government, frightened by the prospect of the extinction of the “chosen” race, decided to do something. Joseph was one of the scientists tasked with increasing the number of Aryan children and reducing their mortality. Scientists have focused on artificially breeding twins or triplets. 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.

First, the experimental children were carefully selected. The assistants of the ‘Angel of Death’ measured the height of the children and recorded their similarities and differences. The children then met Josef in person. He infected them with typhus, gave them blood transfusions, amputated limbs and transplanted various organs. 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.
Mengele himself believed that he was acting for the benefit of science.

Naturally, many legends have developed around such a colorful character. One of them, for example, says that Dr. Mengele’s office was decorated with the eyes of children. However, these are just fairy tales. Josef could simply spend hours looking at body parts in test tubes or spending time doing anatomical research, dissecting bodies, wearing an apron stained with blood. Colleagues who worked with Josef noted that they hated their jobs, and in order to somehow relax, they got completely drunk, which could not be said about the ‘Angel of Death’. It seemed that his work not only did not tire him, but even gave him great pleasure.

Now many are wondering whether the doctor was an ordinary sadist, covering up his atrocities with scientific activity. According to the recollections of his colleagues, Mengele often took part in executions himself: he beat people, threw them into pits with lethal gas.

When the war ended, a manhunt was announced for Josef, but he managed to escape. He spent the rest of his days in Brazil, eventually taking up medicine again. He made his living mainly by performing abortions, which were officially prohibited by the country's authorities. Retribution overtook him only nearly 35 years after the war.

The most amazing thing is that the story of “Doctor Death” does not end there. A few years ago, Argentine historian Jorge Camaraza wrote a book in which he claimed that Mengele took up fertility experiments again after escaping from justice. As an example, the researcher cited the strange story of the Brazilian town of Candido Godoy, where the birth rate of twins suddenly jumped sharply. Every fifth woman in labor gave birth to twins, and blonde ones at that! Kamarasa was sure that this was Mengele’s machinations. Local residents really remembered the strange veterinarian Rudolf Weiss, who came to the city to treat livestock, but examined not only animals, but also people. Whether Doctor Death has anything to do with this phenomenon is not known for certain.

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 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 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.

Best of the day

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 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 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.

Creature!!!
G_Fox 06.04.2010 07:03:22

It’s a pity that he died easily, he would have been fed alive to the ants!!!

Joseph Mengele
Vovan 10.05.2016 10:23:16

In fact, many doctors look at people like meat. District hospitals are full of doctors sending old people without relatives and money to the morgue, not wanting to overwork helping them, and taking advantage of complete impunity, though without scientific purposes. In the concentration camp, people were still processed for fertilizers, and Mengele, with the rationality of a robot, used them as a material for scientific purposes. The ideology of the superiority of some people over others is a terrible thing

He's a creature!
Ivan 09.06.2017 04:57:22

Yaroslav, you should be given to him for experiments!

The Millennium Hoax.
Leeb 17.08.2017 03:28:22

And the most interesting thing was that they didn’t say that Mendele was a Jew. And Hitler was a little Jew. Goebbels, the main propagandist of the 3rd Reich, was also a Jew and his wife was one of God’s chosen ones. And the result? The most clever scam of the millennium called the Holocaust. The Jews received the state of Israel as a gift, multimillion-dollar payments, and the green light for them everywhere. Bravo.

Mengele created in the name of science and self-education. It's worth acknowledging this. The man simply has an iron will and an unprecedented passion for his profession. Not everyone has been given this.

To be afraid of bones, corpses... what kind of nonsense? We all have bones and we will all be corpses someday. Please note. Disgustingly accurate truth, hehehehe :))

oh, what motherly cynics are gathered here...
Thrgathering 26.06.2018 11:13:57

Especially Mrs Morgenstern.
She tries so hard to highlight the fact that she is fearless and cold-blooded. Unfortunately, you can pretend to be anyone on the Internet. Even an admirer of Dr. Mengele. You, dear, are still too young in mind to understand such things as life and death. When you enter medical school, graduate, get married. You will evaluate your work completely differently and have a completely different attitude towards life and death. It will seem to you that such cynical (empty) statements are nothing more than the stupidity of a cantankerous, narrow-minded girl who has seen enough films about divergents and considers herself special.

My advice to you is to become well acquainted with such things as psychology (in particular, cognitive distortions and the working mechanisms of our psyche) and you yourself will understand that such stupid impulses are nothing more than an empty phrase and a desire for self-realization where it will never exist.

Sylvia and her mother, like most Jews from that region, were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, on the main gate of which only three words promising suffering and death are inscribed in clear letters - Edem Das Seine.. (Abandon hope, all who enter here..).
Despite the severity of her stay in the camp, Sylvia was childishly happy - after all, her own mother was nearby. But they didn't have to be together for long. One day a dapper German officer appeared in the family block. His name was Joseph Mengele, also known by the nickname Angel of Death. Looking carefully at the faces, he walked in front of the lined up prisoners. Sylvia's mother realized that this was the beginning of the end. Her face was distorted by a desperate grimace, filled with suffering and grief. But her face was destined to reflect an even more terrible grimace, not even a grimace, but a mask of Death, when in a few days she would suffer on the operating table of the inquisitive Joseph Mengele. So, a few days later, Sylvia, along with other children, was transferred to children's block 15. So she parted forever with her mother, who soon, as already noted, found death under the knife of the Angel of Death.

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last one working was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates there are millions of tortured prisoners who died from backbreaking work, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from “medical experiments.” >>> Nobody knows for sure how many of these last ones there were. Hundreds of thousands. Why are we writing about this many years after the end of the war? Because inhumane experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also History, the history of medicine. Its darkest, but no less interesting page...

Medical experiments were carried out in almost all of the largest concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Among the doctors who led these experiments there were many completely different people.

Dr. Wirtz was involved in lung cancer research and studied surgical options. Professor Clauberg and Dr. Schumann, as well as Dr. Glauberg, conducted experiments on sterilization of people in the concentration camp of the Konighütte Institute.

Dr. Dohmenom in Sachsenhausen worked on research into infectious jaundice and the search for a vaccine against it. Professor Hagen in Natzweiler studied typhus and also looked for a vaccine. The Germans also researched malaria. Many camps conducted research into the effects of various chemicals on humans.

There were people like Rasher. His experiments in studying methods of warming frostbitten people brought him fame, many awards in Nazi Germany and, as it later turned out, real results. But he fell into the trap of his own theories. In addition to his main medical activities, he carried out orders from the authorities. And by exploring the possibilities of infertility treatment, he deceived the regime. His children, whom he passed off as his own, turned out to be adopted, and his wife was infertile. When the Reich found out about this, the doctor and his wife were sent to a concentration camp, and at the end of the war they were executed.

There were mediocrities, such as Arnold Dohmen, who infected people with hepatitis and tried to treat them by puncturing the liver. This heinous act had no scientific value, which was clear to Reich specialists from the very beginning.

Or people like Hermann Voss, who did not personally participate in the experiments, but studied the materials of other people’s experiments with blood, obtaining information through the Gestapo. Every German medical student knows his anatomy textbook today.

Or such fanatics as Professor August Hirt, who studied the corpses of those who were exterminated at Auschwitz. A doctor who experimented on animals, on people, and on himself.

But our story is not about them. Our story tells of Josef Mengele, remembered in History as the Angel of Death or Doctor Death, a cold-blooded man who killed his victims by injecting chloroform into their hearts so he could personally perform autopsies and observe their internal organs.

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor-criminals, was born in Bavaria in 1911. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at the University of Frankfurt. In 1934 he joined the SA and became a member of the National Socialist Party, and in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Dissertation topic: "Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races."

After the outbreak of World War II, he served as a military doctor in the SS Viking division in France, Poland and Russia. In 1942, he received the Iron Cross for saving two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners soon nicknamed him "the angel of death."

In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply the dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." Unfortunately for the prisoners, the range of Joseph Mengele’s “scientific” interests was unusually wide. He began with work on “increasing the fertility of Aryan women.” It is clear that the material for research was non-Aryan women. Then the Fatherland set a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Having mutilated tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

The “research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners suffered a terrible death: with ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Joseph Mengele, who became interested in racial theory in his youth, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gives hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading 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. Just look at the research on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the “study” of 3 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, the good doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate... the goal was to establish how twins are born. The results of these studies were supposed to help strengthen the Aryan race. Among his experiments were attempts to change eye color by injecting various chemicals into the eyes, amputations of organs, attempts to sew twins together, and other macabre operations. The people who survived these experiments were killed.

From block 15, the girl was taken to hell - hell number 10. In that block, Joseph Mengele conducted medical experiments. Several times she underwent spinal puncture, and then surgical operations during savage experiments on merging dog meat with the human body...

However, the chief doctor of Auschwitz was engaged not only in applied research. He was not averse to “pure science.” Concentration camp prisoners were deliberately infected with various diseases in order to test the effectiveness of new drugs on them. Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, 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 our country. Including as drug manufacturers.

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele 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. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID simply could not be thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing!

The man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived in prosperity and contentment until 1979. The victims did not appear to him in his dreams. His soul, if there was one, remained pure. Justice was not served. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil. And the fact that the valiant agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad helped him drown is just a beautiful legend.

Josef Mengele managed a lot during his life: lived a happy childhood, received an excellent education at the university, made a happy family, raised children, experienced the taste of war and front-line life, engaged in “scientific research”, many of which were important for modern medicine, since Vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already in his old age, Joseph received a peaceful rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already in this well-deserved rest, Mengele was more than once forced to remember his past deeds - he more than once read articles in newspapers about his search, about the fee of 50,000 American dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities against prisoners. Reading these articles, Joseph Mengele could not hide his sarcastic, sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in plain sight, swimming on public beaches, conducting active correspondence, visiting entertainment venues. And he could not understand the accusations of committing atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He saw no difference between the experiments he carried out on beetles at school and those he carried out in Auschwitz. What regret can there be when an ordinary creature dies?!

In January 1945, Soviet soldiers carried Sylvia out of the block in their arms - her legs barely moved after the operations, and she weighed about 19 kilograms. The girl spent six long months in a hospital in Leningrad, where doctors did everything possible and impossible to restore her health. After being discharged from the hospital, she was sent to the Perm region to work on a state farm, and then transferred to the construction of a thermal power plant in Perm. It seemed that the tragic days were in the past. Although the work was not easy, Sylvia did not lose heart: the main thing was that peace came and she remained alive. She was 17 years old then.. /

"Angel of Death" Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor-criminals, was born in 1911 in Bavaria. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at the University of Frankfurt. In 1934 he joined the CA and became a member of the NSDAP, and in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. The topic of the dissertation is “Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races.”

During World War II he served as a military doctor in the SS Viking division. In 1942, he received the Iron Cross for rescuing two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Soon the prisoners nicknamed him “the angel of death.”

Sadistic scientist doctor

Fanatic doctor Josef Mengele

In addition to its main function - the extermination of representatives of “inferior races”, prisoners of war, communists and simply dissatisfied people, concentration camps in Nazi Germany also performed another function. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." Unfortunately, the range of Joseph Mengele’s “scientific” interests was unusually wide. He began with “work” to “increase the fertility of Aryan women.” It is clear that the material for research was non-Aryan women. Then the Fatherland set a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Having mutilated tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to a “strictly scientific” conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold (hypothermia) on the body of soldiers. The “methodology” of the experiments was the most simple: they took a concentration camp prisoner, covered them with ice on all sides, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measured their body temperature... When a test subject died, a new one was brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the topic: “The influence of high altitude on pilot performance.” A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners suffered a terrible death: with ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. But not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.

Joseph Mengele, having become fascinated by racial theory in his youth, on his own initiative conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of a Jew under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gave hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. Conclusion: it is impossible to turn a Jew 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 the 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. There was a lot more going on. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out...

And before starting his experiments, “good Doctor Mengele” could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate...

Concentration camp prisoners were deliberately infected with various diseases in order 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 creators of aspirin were accused of using concentration camp prisoners during the war to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, 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 our country. Including as drug manufacturers.

So what did Joseph Mengele achieve? In medical terms, the Nazi fanatic failed in the same way as in moral, ethical, human... Having unlimited possibilities for experiments at his disposal, he still achieved nothing. The conclusion that if a person is not given sleep and food, he will first go crazy and then die cannot be considered a scientific result.

Quiet "departure from grandfather"

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, he worked quietly in his native Günzburg in his father’s company. Then, with 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 simply not thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents reached unprecedented heights in the Third Reich.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), the Nazi criminal moved to Paraguay, where he disappeared from view. A check of all subsequent reports about his further fate showed that they were untrue.

After the end of the war, many journalists were looking for at least some information that could lead them to the trail of Josef Mengele... The fact is that for forty years after the end of World War II, “fake” Mengeles appeared in a variety of places. Thus, in 1968, a former Brazilian policeman claimed that he allegedly managed to discover traces of the “angel of death” on the border of Paraguay and Argentina. Shimon Wiesenthal 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 fifty kilometers north of New York. And in 1985, in Lisbon, a suicide bomber left a note admitting that he was the wanted Nazi criminal Josef Mengele.

Where was he found?

It was only in 1985, it seems, that Mengele's true whereabouts became known. Or rather, his graves. 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.

Also in 1985, the remains of the deceased were exhumed. Three independent teams of forensic experts participated at every stage of the event, and live television coverage from the cemetery was received in almost every country in the world. The coffin contained only the decayed bones of the deceased. However, everyone was eagerly awaiting the results of their identification. For millions of people wanted to know whether these remains really belonged to the cruel misanthrope and executioner who had been wanted for many years.

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 drawing conclusions. The desire to find Josef Mengele was so great that there have already been cases of his erroneous identification, including falsified ones. Many such deceptions are described in the book Witness From the Grave by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover, which presents readers with a fascinating history of the professional career of Clyde Snow, the main expert who studied the remains of Embu.

How was he identified?

The bones discovered in the grave were subjected to a thorough and comprehensive examination, which was carried out by three independent groups of experts - from Germany, the USA and from 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 taken to Sao Paulo, to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Here 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 certainty; they needed an argument to convincingly support such a conclusion. And then Richard Helmer, a West German forensic anthropologist, joined the experts’ work. Thanks to his 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 were supposed to serve as starting points for restoring the appearance of the face, 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 on the face, he received a new computer image that clearly reproduced the features of the face being restored. The last - and most crucial - moment of the entire procedure came when the face, recreated using computer graphics methods, was combined with the face in Mengele's photograph. Both images matched exactly. Thus, it was finally proven that the man who hid for many years in Brazil under the names of Helmut Gregor and Wolfgang Gerhard and drowned in 1979 at the age of 67 was indeed the “angel of death” of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the cruel Nazi executioner Dr. Josef Mengele (15, 2000, No. 39, pp. 1082–1086; 37, pp. 1170–1177; 38, pp. 365–378; 40, 1999, No. 14, p. 13).