Terrific Experiments Free Essay Example

Josef Rudolf Mengele was a very significant officer in Auschwitz, one of the many WWII concentration camps. He was born on March 16, 1911 and was in service as a German SS officer and physician from 1938-1945. He started out as a supervising physician for the selection of arriving prisoners and eventually worked his way up to becoming Chief Medical Officer at the main infirmary in Birkenau, the sister camp to Auschwitz. As Mengele had a Ph.D in anthropology and a doctorate in medicine from Frankfurt University, he used his power in Auschwitz to start his research on heredity.

He used prisoners for human experimentation.

These experiments often included; freezing, burning, injection of chemicals and dissection of inmates. Most of Mengele’s experiments were conducted on children; he also performed vivisections on pregnant women before sending them to the gas chambers. Human vivisections are considered a form of torture and are illegal although Mengele did them frequently, often without anesthetic. Above all others, Mengele’s favourite projects included twins.

Twin subjects were typically given tattoos as an easy identifier. After the experiments were over the twins were killed and dissected. One of Mengele’s more known experiments was one that he conducted on a set of Roma twins.

The children were sewn together to create conjoined twins. These children’s hands became severely infected because of the vein resection and as a result caused gangrene. Despite all of the cruel, twisted experiments that Mengele oversaw, he was often known as “Mengele the Protector” to some prisoners.

He was given this name because while prisoners were being kept for research, they were fed and housed better than other inmates and were safe from the gas chambers for the time being. This was historically significant because Dr.Mengele was not a life saver, instead he was more of a psychopath, and he did terrifying experiments to children, twins, as well as pregnant women. This is something to remember because this shows how humanity is horrifying.

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