Today our focus is on the experiments done on the Jews by the Germans it's gravely horrifying
GERMANY
When Allied forces liberated Auchwitz in January of 1945, they found living and deceased human skeletons. Among these skeletons were those of the treasured twins of Dr. Josef Mengele. Although experiments were performed on many types of people at Auschwitz, twins were targeted directly. Mengele performed heinous experiments on identical and fraternal twins of all ages to learn about genetic and environmental traits, and also how to multiply the Aryan race through the birth of twins.
Mengele was obsessed with finding vast numbers of twins. During railhead selections, he would become extremely excited when twins were discovered. He would shout, "Zwillinge, Zwillinge," meaning "twins, twins!" Soon it would become known to the people on the trains that Mengele desired twins. Parents would put children of roughly the same age and appearance together and have them announce, "Wir sind Zwillinge," which meant "We are twins". In this way, many children who were not twins were spared death and instead lived a painful life. Mengele would stop truck convoys headed for extermination because they contained just one set of twins. Hardly any twins escaped Mengele’s selection process
After the twins were selected, they were housed in special barracks. Mothers of young female twins were allowed to stay with their daughters for a short time. On Mengele’s orders they were given almost adequate food, comfortable beds, and hygienic living conditions. It is alleged that at times over 200 pairs of boy twins were housed under Mengele’s care. They were tattooed with a special number sequence that included the letters "ZW" for "twins." An older child or an adult twin was made block chief and called "Zwillingsvater," or "twins’ father". The twins were treated as priceless objects. They were only permitted to have a light job such as a messenger, and harsh penalties followed anyone who was found to have been beating them. Mengele would visit his subjects often. He would bring them gifts of candy and clothing. Many of the children adored Mengele and called him "Uncle Pepi" or Uncle Mengele. This treatment was used to build up their strength and to make them trust Mengele.
The next step the twins encountered involved scrutinization and humiliation. The twins were told to strip and sit next to each other. Mengele would examine every detail of their bodies. He or one of his assistants would spend hours measuring and comparing features of the twins. Mengele would concentrate on one part of the body, such as the eyes, for several hours. The subjects were naked for two to five hours . They were cold, scared, and sometimes cried. Some of his more prized twins were photographed. In one instance, a pair of dwarf twins girls named Elizabeth and Perla were paraded before an audience of 2,000 SS men and one visiting senior bureaucrat. Mengele would ask them questions about their family history including sicknesses and the possibility of more twins.
The next stage, called the "in vivo" stage involved a barrage of experiments on the twins that often left them emotionally and physically scarred for life. The twins would be infected with diseases such as typhus and their wounds were infected deliberately. Chemicals would be applied to the skin to see what color the reaction would cause. Parts of the body were stuck with needles and clamped to see how long the twins could bear the pain. Marc Berkowitz and his twin sister Francesca were two of Mengele’s victims. Marc described what occurred after they were strapped to the marble slabs. "I felt a needle digging into my back. My entire body was burning and the next thing I knew I was fighting from fainting". Forty years later, Marc still suffers from pains due to these injections. Mengele would give one set of twins a blood transfusion from another set of twins to observe the reaction. The twins would suffer from a severe headache and high fever. Mengele drew an estimated 10 cubic centimeters of blood from the twins at every session . Some of the blood was used for examination and even more was used to treat German soldiers on the front. The inadequate diet of the twins in Auchwitz made it difficult for them to reproduce blood, so it became harder to draw each time.
Some twins were studied because they were not exactly identical. In his examination of a pair of boys, Mengele found that one of the twins had an undescended testicle. He studied the other twin to learn more about the condition and of the possible genetic factors. Once, Mengele mistook the two Reichenberg brothers, who were close in age, for twins. One brother had a beautiful singing voice and the other could not carry a tune. Mengele performed crude surgery on their vocal cords to find out why. Ephriham lost all use of his voice and his brother was never to sing so sweetly again . Twin boys named Tito and Nino were taken away by SS officers after it was discovered that one of the boys was hunchback. They were returned three days later. Tito and Nino had been cut and sewn together, back to back, at the hunch and wrists. They were dirty and smelled of gangrene
Mengele tried to change the color of twins’ eyes and hair. The eye experiments began in the summer of 1943. Mengele would inject different colors into the eyes of twins, which resulted in painful infections and sometimes blindness. Once, Mengele murdered three sets of twins in one day due to their eyes. Six of the eight children were heterochromes, meaning they had one blue eye and one brown eye. This was very rare, especially among twins. A Jewish inmate doctor named Vexler Jancu told of his discovery. "In June 1943 I went to a Gypsy camp in Bikenau. I saw a wooden table. On it were samples of eyes. They each had a number and a letter. The eyes were very pale yellow to bright blue, green, and violet". Mengele would also anoint the scalps of his victims with different substances to find information on what determined hair color. This produced severe pain for his victims.
When the twins were deemed useless due to illness or as the results of experiments, they were slaughtered. If one twin died, the other was killed for comparison of their organs and general development. Sometimes twins were killed just to resolve a dispute among doctors about a diagnosis. There were many ways that Mengele had his twins killed including gassing, shooting, and injection. Mengele would offer the twins a ride in his car. He would then either shoot them in the back of the head on the way or bring them to the gas chamber. Mengele would use either concentrated phenol or chloroform injected into the twins to kill them quickly. Mengele poured the solution into a bowl from which the executioner would fill a large syringe with a long needle. The patient’s left arm was positioned so that the chest was thrust forward. The right hand was placed either over the victim’s mouth or eyes. Then the needle was driven into the fifth rib space.
Gisella Perl was quoted as saying, "Our whole being concentrated on Mengele’s hands. Those hands had the power to condemn us to immediate execution or to prolong our miserable life by a few days" . This was the life of the twins who lived in Auchwitz. The gruesome experiments performed on them were endless. One minute, the twins would be enjoying the chocolate and new toy that was given to them by Mengele. The next minute would find them laying on an examining table in excruciating pain. The twins of Auchwitz were truly survivors and their story needs to be told.
Some of the confessions of the survivors were;
Hedvah and Leah Stern:
When they opened the door to our cattle car,our mother became very frightened, "Stay with me, children," she told usrefusing to let go of our hands. But hen some prisoners told her in Yiddish, "Tell them you have twins. There is a Dr. Mengele here who wants twins."
Eva Mozes:
As I clutched my mother's hand, an SS man hurried by shouting, "Twins, twins!" He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike. We were wearing similar clothes. "Are they twins?" he asked my mother. "Is that good?" replied my mother. He nodded yes. "They are twins," she said.
Josef Mengele, aka Auschwitz's "Angel of Death," held a fascination with twins. As Auschwitz's senior "physician" he conducted "genetic experiments" on nearly 1500 sets of twins between 1943 and 1944. For this purpose, it was imperative to the weed out of twin sets from the lines of prisoners coming off the cattle cars. With the blessing and support of his senior and mentor Otmar Von Verscher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Mengele tested various genetic theories with the aim of illuminating Hitler's racial dogmas. Twins were particularly useful because a set of twins share an identical gene pool and their reactions to mutual treatments could be monitered with this in mind. Mengele also picked out individuals with any other physical abnormalities: midgits, dwarfs, hunchbacks. Because 10,000 prisoners might pass through this death camp in a given day, numerous pairs of twins could be found and plucked out as subjects for his "research."
Twins were kept in separate barracks from the other prisoners, and sometimes given preferential treatment. They were better fed than other prisoners, and monitered by gaurds who might be blamed if any of the twins fell ill or died. Unfortunately, this preferential treatment was short-term. Of the 3000 twins who passed through Mengele's labs, only 200 survived the war. Depending on the type of experiment endured by the twins, they were driven to various labs at Auschwitz or neighboring Birkenau camp. Most received routine blood and x-ray tests, often on a daily basis. Mengele's assistants in his experiments were often Jewish inmates with medical backgrounds who had been spared the gas chambers because of their skills.
Twins undergoing his experiments didn't know what the objectives were. It is known that he had a special pathology lab where he performed autopsies on twins who had died from experiements. It was located next to the cremetorium. Mengele's experiments both physical and psychological; experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli, injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs, incestuous impregnations. One twin recalls the death of his brother:
Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why--perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers--and now, my twin.
Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. "One day we were given eye drops, " say Hedvah and Leah Stern, "Afterwards we could not see for several days. We were very frightened of the experiements. They took a lot of blood ... We fainted several times." Unfortunately a strict veil of secrecy over the experiments enabled Mengele to do his work more effectively, and "twins who were subjected to the most grusome procedures took his secrets to their graves." The full extent of his grusome work will never be known because the records he sent to Dr. Von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were shipped out "in two truckloads" and destroyed by the latter. Any remaining notes Mengele carried with him on his escape to South America and those were never found. Some forty years after the war, only a 100 sets of these twins could be found, many living in Israel and the United States. Strangely enough, many of them recall Mengele as a gentle, affable man who befriended them as children and gave them chocolates. Since many had immediately been separated from their families upon entering the camp, Mengele became a sort of father figure. Still a tension existed, that at any time they could be killed if they did not keep a low profile. Older twins "recognized his kindness as a deception--yet another of his perverse experiments to test (our) mental endurance."
Thank God, God is not Man, My prayer for men like Dr Josef Mengele is that his fire in hell would be one of the hottest and his eternal torment the worst
Thanks for reading and see you guys next post.
