W*rse Than Any E*ecution: The Most Br*tal N*zi Human Experiments

Near the Polish town of Oświęcim, the Nazis created one of the largest concentration camp complexes of the Third Reich, Auschwitz. More than 1.3 million people were deported there. Auschwitz was a combination of forced labor, mass extermination, and medical experiments conducted on the captives. As far as SS was concerned, Auschwitz prisoners were not people.

They were treated as expendable material with no limitations as to what could be done to them. SS leadership granted camp doctors almost complete freedom. Prisoners were used to test drugs, study the effects of poisons and infections, and undergo surgeries with no medical purpose. Many of these studies had nothing to do with science and were simply a form of legalized violence.

Auschwitz turned out to be the perfect breeding ground for these crimes. Hundreds of thousands of people went through the camp system, which provided the Nazis with a constant supply of victims for labor, execution, and experimentation. One of the most notorious doctors there was Josef Mengele.

No one could have imagined that a small boy called Josef would grow into a true monster, devoid of compassion and seeing people only as test subjects. Mengele decided to devote his life to medicine from a young age. After finishing school, he enrolled immediately in medical university. And by the age of 24, he had earned a doctorate in biological anthropology.

During his studies, he developed a strong interest in testing the human body and psyche, particularly through racial theory. He came to believe that Germans were biologically superior to all other races and therefore should hold the highest status and rule over others. Thanks to his contributions to the Nazi Party, in May 1943, Mengele was assigned to serve in Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz II complex, which consisted of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps.

Most prisoners were Jewish, Polish, and Romani, many of whom met their demise in the camps. Mengele had no objections to this state of play and took part in the execution of Roma prisoners in 1944. He personally selected 2,893 people who were sent to the gas chambers. Due to his lack of principles and constant interest in studying the possibilities and limitations of the human body, he was soon promoted to chief physician and assigned to the SS hospital in Birkenau.

His duties included monitoring prisoners’ physical and mental condition and carrying out selections. By that, we mean sorting prisoners based on their ability to work. Those who were relatively healthy and were able to perform physical labor were sent to the barracks and received work assignments. Those who were weak, ill, or elderly were sent to gas chambers or given lethal injections.

These selections were routinely performed, earning Mengele the nickname Angel of Death. Nothing frightened prisoners more than medical inspections, especially when the Angel of Death was involved. Gisella Perl, a Jewish gynecologist in Birkenau, recalled:

“We feared these visits more than anything else, because we never knew whether we would be permitted to live. He was free to do whatever he pleased with us.”

Mengele was one of the few tormentors who genuinely enjoyed his work. Former prisoners testified that other doctors often arrived drunk or in a foul mood, but not Mengele. He was always sober with a slight smile on his face, which made him look even more menacing and evoked more fear among the prisoners.

One of the simpler experiments involved transfusing large volumes of blood from one twin to another. The aim of this procedure was to test compatibility, in particular, the compatibility of immune systems. During these procedures, the doctors were not overly concerned with safety, which is why patients would fall seriously ill or die shortly after.

Our body is a closed system that struggles to adapt to major changes, unable to handle large volumes of blood even if it matches the blood type. Hygiene also wasn’t a priority, and equipment was often reused without proper sterilization, leading to infections and sepsis, which also resulted in death. Even by Auschwitz standards, these blood transfusions were considered relatively non-invasive and safe.

Other procedures had a far higher ratio of fatalities relative to the number of survivors. One example would be the organ transplant surgeries. Nazi medics would perform an organ exchange between twins in order to observe how their bodies responded to the transplant. Most of these operations were fatal, since the surgeries took little to no care to make the procedure as seamless as possible for the patient.

The surgical work was crude, with little effort to minimize damage or unpleasant symptoms. Incisions and stitches were performed carelessly, as if working on a cadaver rather than a living person. In fact, they had no reason to exhibit care and preserve the lives of these patients. After the procedure, subjects were typically killed with phenol injections, so their organs could be thoroughly examined.

All experiments were rooted in the belief that prisoners belonged to were inferior race, and therefore, did not deserve to be treated humanely. However, some Nazi experiments embarked to bring them closer to the status of a real human. One such experiment was an attempt to change the subject’s eye color. Doctors injected chemicals and dyes into patients’ eyes to try to make them blue.

Unfortunately, these injections were painful, leading to infections, or worst case, complete loss of sight. Mengele was especially interested in people with heterochromia, a genetic mutation where the eyes are different colors. Prisoners with heterochromia were killed. Their eyes were extracted and sent for further research to one of the institutes belonging to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

The interest of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society were not limited to eugenics and anomalies of the human body. They also researched various viruses and other illnesses, which granted the Auschwitz doctors permission to test biological weapons on captives. Prisoners were infected through injections, often administered directly into the spine without anesthesia.

The goal was to provoke rapid immune responses, since all of the white blood cells are produced in the bone marrow. By design, only one of the twins was infected. Meanwhile, doctors made no effort to treat the illness. They simply observed and waited for the subject to die. At that point, the other twin was killed, and both bodies were dissected for comparison, noting the differences in skin, organs, and the skeletal system to study the effects of the virus on the body.

Sadly, not everyone was lucky enough to die before the autopsy. Some victims were dissected alive, once again, without anesthesia. Even in cases when the intervention was minimal and the person survived surgery, they often died later from infection or gangrene. Josef Mengele expressed particular interest in gangrene.

More precisely, he was keen to study noma, a bacterial disease causing severe decay of facial tissue, often linked to malnutrition and corresponding maladies. Noma piqued Mengele’s interest since it was common among Roma prisoners and relatively unknown in Europe. It is likely that Mengele wanted to pioneer the research into this uncharted disease.

People suffering from this disease were put to sleep, followed by an autopsy and decapitation. Their heads and organs were submerged in formalin in large jars for preservation, and then sent off to Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for further study. No effort was made to save patients’ lives or find treatment.

People were killed in the name of pioneering research that would prove that Roma people were inferior to Germans. One survivor, Moshe Offer, described his and his brother’s time in Auschwitz and the horrors he lived through. Mengele visited us as a good uncle, bringing us chocolate. Before applying the scalpel or syringe, he would say:

“Don’t be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

He injected chemical substances, performed surgery on Tibi’s spine. After the experiments, he would bring us gifts. In the course of later experiments, he had pins inserted into our heads. The puncture scars are still visible. One day, he took Tibi away. My brother was gone for several days. When he was brought back, his head was all dressed in bandages. He died in my arms.

Upholding his reputation as a cruel, soulless person devoid of compassion, Mengele had no lower age limit when it came to his patients. At a certain point, he went so far as to begin experimenting on the unborn fetuses.

The angel of death infected pregnant women with typhus, a severe and often fatal disease that caused intense headaches, near total digestive dysfunction, weakness, and nausea. No attempts were made to treat the illness or ease the symptoms. The purpose of these experiments was to determine how the mother’s body isolates the fetus from viruses and bacteria, and whether the disease could be transmitted in utero.

The natural outcome was almost always fatal. What may appear extremely brutal to us was considered routine by Auschwitz medical staff. Their cruelty extended even further, as some dissections were performed on people who were still alive. It is impossible to imagine the suffering of someone lying bound on an operating table.

It wasn’t that long ago, in mid-20th century, when these events took place. Some experiments required active participation from both twins. According to witness Vera Alexander, Mengele attempted to merge two people into a single living organism. He wanted to study the limits of biological adaptation, the connection between twins’ bodies, and changes that would occur after uniting them.

He cut open their backs, stitching together the soft tissues and blood vessels of two subjects in an attempt to create conjoined twins. Sadly, both died from gangrene shortly after the operation. Such losses did not concern the staff at concentration camps. Their attitude could be reduced to fewer untermensch, fewer problems.

This is why they also conducted separate experiments aimed at reducing the population of groups they considered undesirable without directly killing them. These involved castrations. The Nazis used various methods including chemical castration, radiation, vasectomy with complete removal of the vas deferens, and partial or complete surgical removal of reproductive organs to enact this torture.

These procedures were often performed without anesthesia with the subject simply tied to a surgical table. This was their way of collecting data on how the male reproductive system affects hormone levels and tracking changes resulting from its removal. Though this was only a secondary goal.

Unfortunately, male victims of these experimental procedures not only lost reproductive function, but also ended up with various forms of disability due to gangrene or infection, which often resulted in death. Each experiment in Nazi concentration camps had an apparent objective to study biological weapons, understand how viruses spread in the human body, develop organ transplantation techniques, or determine the limits of human survival.

In reality all of these acts were driven by a single underlying purpose to identify and prove the supposed flaws of Untermensch. The Nazi leadership sought clear scientific justification to back up their claim that Germans were a superior race. For doctors like Mengele, this goal removed all constraints and allowed them to act on their cruelty without reservation, feeding their inner monsters.

Even so, this story of inhuman torture and thousands of innocent people maimed and killed eventually came to an end. On the night of January 17th, 1945, the Soviet army approached Poland from the east. All medical and academic personnel at Auschwitz were ordered to evacuate. Josef Mengele knew full well that if he were to answer for his crimes, he would face capital punishment.

He would be lucky if the method of execution was a firing squad. In a hurry, he gathered only the essential belongings and destroyed all samples and records of his experiments. He headed west toward Germany. Along the way, he joined a unit of retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and exchanged his SS uniform for a military dress of a Wehrmacht officer.

The situation was deeply ironic. In Auschwitz, Mengele had been the one who inspired primal fear, deciding people’s fates at will with no one to oppose him. Now, he had become a weak and powerless trembling figure with his only option to flee in fear. His escape was largely pointless. Although, neither he nor the Wehrmacht soldiers knew at that point that those they had considered subhuman had already taken over much of Germany and were waiting for the retreating Nazis in their homeland.

Soon after Mengele’s group crossed the Polish border, they were detained by American forces in the town of Weiden. An amusing detail, given that Weiden is located not far from Nuremberg, where Mengele’s colleagues would later stand trial for the war crimes they committed.

However, the Angel of Death was lucky. He was only held captive for 2 months and then released because his identity as the Josef Mengele of Auschwitz could not be confirmed. This was largely due to the fact that he had refused to get the blood group tattoo that was typically applied to SS personnel. His devil’s luck did not end there. With the help of his family’s wealth and connections, he managed to escape Germany and emigrate to South America.

Mengele died in February 1979, a relatively peaceful and painless death, especially considering the deaths of his victims. The former monster of the Nazi concentration camps died after suffering a stroke and drowning while out for a swim. Living under the name Wolfgang Gerhard in Brazil, he was buried in Embu, near São Paulo.

Six years later, in 1985, Wolfgang Gerhard’s body was exhumed based on suspicions among American investigators in regards to his involvement in Nazi crimes in Europe. The post-mortem examination of the remains was challenging due to the time spent in the grave.

Six years was enough for the body to lose almost all soft tissues needed for direct identification. As a result, specialists had to mainly rely on the skeletal remains, especially the skull. Numerous researchers worked to determine his true identity. They carefully examined every bone, cavity, fracture, growth, and tool, reconstructing aspects of his life and comparing the skull with photographs of Mengele.

In the end, American forensic expert Lowell Levine stated with certainty:

“There is absolutely no doubt at all that this is Josef Mengele.”

All the victims who were subjected to these inhuman experiments ultimately suffered in pain. Mengele and his staff had no intention of contributing to science or medicine.

Their goal was purely ideological, to prove that we were superior to them. For decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, and even after the Angel of Death was long gone, former prisoners of Auschwitz continued to share their horrific accounts. The last known Mengele twin, Jiri Feizer, died on October 13, 2023.

He spent his life trying to cope with the psychological trauma inflicted on him, but never fully overcame it. Thanks to these people, we have the knowledge of the atrocities of the past, and can work to prevent them in the future. The very least we can do is not let their suffering be forgotten.