CHAPTER I

MENGELE'S BACKGROUND AND AUSCHWITZ YEARS

Without question, the Third Reich's unique export of genocide is the most influential characteristic of the twentieth century.

In total, upwards of twenty-one million souls were murdered during the Nazi reign either in concentration camps or by mobilized killing squads such as the Einsatzgruppen.

A primary component to the Holocaust was the research conducted by Nazi physicians on uninformed and unsuspecting prisoners.

Educated and trained to aid and ensure quality of life, the physicians collaborated with the Third Reich to create unfathomable feats of torture and murder in the name of science.

Adolf Hitler's shining beacon of the Final Solution, the Auschwitz concentration camp, was called home by possibly the most infamous Nazi physician.

Josef Mengele worked tirelessly in Auschwitz to unlock the programmability of human genetics by experimenting on young children.

This paper will detail Mengele's research and deconstruct the changing medical and deontological ethical landscape which promulgated the environment of government supported human torture.

I will attempt to understand how Mengele justified his research and if it has any redeeming qualities.

Josef Mengele's upbringing in the small Bavarian hamlet of Gunzburg, Germany was aristocratic, albeit nothing spectacular.

His family prospered financially due to the machinery factory founded by his father, Karl, and operated by the stern matriarch.

Josef, unlike his brothers, was wholly disinterested in learning the family trade.

Instead, he dreamed of distinction in scientific academia.

At a young age, Josef struggled with his marks in grade school, earning only average grades, certainly nothing inspiring that foretold his future academic achievements.

Mengele instead spent his formative years parading around town with his brothers in the most fashionable outfits, cavorting with the young local girls at cafes and theatres.

He often effused to his schoolmates that the Mengele name would be heard on the radio and all would be proud to know him.

Josef Mengele was only partially correct in his prediction, for his enthusiastic drive for achievement ultimately led him to commit the most heinous of atrocities on the most innocent of victims.

Early in his education Mengele chose courses in anatomy and science, hoping to further his career in a broad medical research field rather than confining himself to a specific discipline.

"He opted instead for medicine with an emphasis on anthropology and human genetics, so [he] could study the whole range of medicine"

Zealous industriousness enabled Mengele to earn doctorates in Anthropology from Munich University and in Medicine from Frankfurt University.

During this period Mengele did not advertise virulent anti-Semitism, though he was already a rising member of the Nazi Party.

While his original doctoral thesis focused on the jaw structure and the construction of four separate racial groups, there is nothing present which articulates racial motivations.

Mengele's two theses, accepted by each university, were panned as rather dry and uninspiring.

Simultaneously, more important political storms were brewing in Germany.

Years before, in Gunzburg, Mengele had joined the Nazi Party but only seemed moderately interested in their politics.

As he advanced professionally in Munich, the racial hygienic aspect of the Nazi platform became increasingly attractive.

It is difficult to pinpoint a definitive date at which Mengele became fully engrossed in Nazi racial propaganda.

However, it is possible that his immersion is a result of "--- the political climate and that his real interest in genetics and evolution happened to coincide with the develoing concept that some human beings afflicted by disorders were unfit to reproduce, even to live"

Josef Mengele's scientific aspirations soon became influenced by specific ideologies and professional mentors which would shape the research of Cell Block 10 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The most influential figure in Mengele's early career was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, considered the most respected racial hygienist in Germany.

It was von Verschuer who pushed Mengele into the study of twin genetics.

"Under his [von Verschuer's] aegis, Mengele learned that it was acceptable, even desirable, to experiment on human beings if it advanced a scientific cause"

Moreover, von Verschuer imparted to Mengele the necessity of using innumerable experimental subjects.

Josef's dedication and tutelage would ideally result in tenure with the highest German universities, a notoriety which Mengele seriously craved.

A primary legislative influence on the young doctor was the enactment of the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health.

This extreme governmental measure detailed the sterilization qualifications for several groups categorized as subhuman.

Chief among those groups were schizophrenics, manic depressives, alcoholics, the blind, any individual suffering physical deformities, and homosexuals, among others.

This legislation gave Mengele the political impetus to operate free from prosecution.

He was now fully engrossed with the Nazi cause of racial hygienics.

"He was convinced he served a great cause, an attempt by Hitler to prevent mankind from self-destructing --- He became the incarnation of Nazism in its extreme"

Several mitigating factors, from the centuries old European seedling of anti-Semitism to the experimental freedom Nazism provided, from the influence of von Verschuer to the changing political landscape, resulted in a potent recipe for mass murder.

Mengele's reputation grew quickly through the upper echelon of the Nazi government, and he was soon charged by Heinrich Himmler to craft a directive for the occupied territories of the lebensraum.

Mengele succeeded in working with Himmler on an extensive four point plan:

(1) The annexed territories were to be thoroughly cleansed of non-Germans;

(2) persons claiming any German blood would be classified according to documentary evidence first, and lacking that, by racial examination; those in doubtful categories as well as "renegade" {anti-Nazi or "Polish minded"}

(3) Germans would be segregated and subjected to special conditions to ensure "re-education and good behavior persons" exhibiting Germanic features would also undergo racial examinations to determine if their ancestors had been "Polanized"; positive cases would be removed from Poland for better re-Germanization in the Reich proper;

(4) similar procedures would be carried out upon orphans from Polish orphanages as well as children coming under public care.

It is the section under racial examinations that Mengele contributed the most expertise.

Through his work with Himmler, Mengele procured the legality of extensively studying each minute anatomical characteristic with the understanding that doctors could decipher any undesirable ancestral blood by simple physical examination.

That diagnosis would forever change the life of the patient as imprisonment, exile, or death was oftentimes the result.

Furthermore, in 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Progeny With Hereditary Disease was ratified.

This piece of legislation further skewed reality with regard to legalizing unethical behavior.

It is from this frame of reference that the concept of "special treatment" must be approached ---
These efforts on behalf of "national health" and the "integrity of the German people" can thus be classified under three main headings:

1. The euthanasia program for the "incurably sick"

2. The direct extermination, by means of "special treatment", of racial groups and patients considered undesirable.

3. Preliminary experimental work in mass sterilization.

This proclamation, combined with the overall provisions established in the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health, provided Mengele with the opportunity to accumulate disposable experimental subjects.

For the next decade, Mengele grew more emboldened and became more willing to take science past the levels of acceptability.

World War II soon erupted, and Mengele accepted appointment to the elite medical division of the Waffen SS.

Early in his deployment with the SS, he was awarded two medals: the Black Badge for the Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the German People.

Under heavy fire, Mengele had administered aid to two fellow soldiers and was instrumental in saving their lives.

These medals were proudly displayed by Mengele in the following years, even while administering selection at the Auschwitz death camp.

Josef Mengele would emerge as the medical symbol of the Nazi concentration camps.

His stoic nature and high military fashion became the enduring illustration of the macabre selections at Auschwitz.

"Josef Mengele had become --- the incarnation of its monstrosity cool, detached, and always immaculately prepared for the long-drawn-out rituals of death ---"

With the simple wave of his gloved hand, Mengele appropriated hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children immediately to the gas chambers.

Those poor souls, unfortunately, were lucky.

For it was the children, and most especially twins, which caught Mengele's eye.

Nazi medicinal dogma mandated that the Aryan race could be categorically bread to perfection.

By doing so, the German state could reproduce at an astounding rate, thereby populating their rightful lands and defeating the treachery of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other undesirables.

In order to achieve this utopia, Mengele would have to unlock the programmability of human reproduction.

For many years he was lacking what he envisioned as the ideal situation, namely unlimited human experimentation.

However, through the cavalcade of political evolutions and societal acceptability, Mengele would soon enjoy the freedom of experimentation and responsibility that only the Auschwitz concentration camp could offer.

By standing guard at the selection ramps, Mengele was able to personally select his human test subjects each day.

He often proclaimed his astonishment at both the number of available subjects and the remarkable power he held over the prisoners.

Mengele's primary aim in research was to prove that certain traits were inherited and thusly could be bred out of existence.

Included in these traits were eye color, obesity, and certain nasal features.

"The ultimate goal was to produce an ideal race of Aryan men and women endowed with only the finest genetic traits, who would rapidly multiply and rule the world"

This potential medical breakthrough and the manipulation of traits through careful breeding practices would make Mengele universally famous.

Mengele understood he could only achieve professional success through industrious determination, for he knew he was not as gifted as his contemporaries.

He held that "if he only worked hard enough, performed enough experimental studies, tested a sufficient number of twins, then he would be recognized as the great scientist he thought he was"

It may even be that Mengele's monstrous experiments were the physical manifestation of subconscious feelings of ineptitude.

Primary among these being that von Verschuer was the racial hygienist mastermind.

It was von Verschuer who was admitted to the American Eugenics Society, not Mengele.

It was von Verschuer who stayed out of the desolate concentration camps and worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (later renamed the Max Planck Institute) while Mengele was forced to be away from his wife and newborn son.

But despite his dedication and fanaticism, the mediocre student of Gunzburg never possessed any real brilliance.

The tests, questionnaires, and many of the experiments themselves appear to have been the brainchild of Verschuer.

Mengele's reality did not match his delusions.

He was only the lackey of von Verschuer, not the medical genius he had hoped. Undaunted, Mengele strove to out-research his more respected contemporaries.

Auschwitz experiments were seen by Mengele as being crucial in achieving his personal goal of an academic career.

They were to be used as part of his "habilitation", which was required for university appointment.

He began to push the ethical boundaries of his profession, and experienced no professional backlash.

The outcome was so called legalized human experimentation and unchecked torture conducted solely for personal gain.

The litany of crimes committed by Mengele at Auschwitz is astonishing.

It is humanly incomprehensible that the institutionalized torture and murder of children occurred in plain view at Cell Block 10.

Mengele was transfixed by the uniqueness of the twins in Auschwitz, and he finally supervised his own laboratory, free from the direct supervision of von Verschuer.

Even though Dr. Eduard Wirths was stationed as the Chief SS doctor at Auschwitz, Mengele's power was never monitored or questioned.

Mengele began to experiment with children immediately after placement in the small Polish town of Oswiecim.

Children, strapped to slabs of marble, had their spines, eyes, and inner organs probed, injected, and cut, often with unknown chemicals and without anesthetic.

However, Mengele's experiments were incomplete.

While Auschwitz provided Mengele with identical twins and the opportunity to use one as the control in his experiments, he was not presented a detailed medical history of each patient, thereby rendering his experiments baseless.

Each individual brought to the Auschwitz gate was not required to bring their medical history; therefore Mengele could not discern which characteristic was genetic and which was environmental.

This incomplete knowledge would have been understood by a professional such as Mengele, unfortunately it did not seem to sufficiently matter.

Furthermore, Nazi political pressure pushed Mengele to increase his number of experiments.

"This was especially interesting to the Nazi regime, in particular with regard to a desired increase in the birth rate through medically manipulated increase in the number of births of twins."

One trait Mengele researched is the occurrence of twins having different colored eye pigmentation.

Subsequently, Mengele began to experiment with the eye pigmentation in an attempt to discover the cause for the difference or, conversely, to determine if he could alter the pigmentation.

Thirty-six children from one barrack in Birkenau were used for the eye tests, which resulted in painful infections and sometimes blindness.

After the tests the children served no further use, and so they were gassed.

After gassing the eyes were removed and shipped back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, presumably to von Verschuer.

In Auschwitz, this pattern of experimentation then gassing became typical under Mengele.

Once a child was judged as unnecessary or the experiments were complete, that child was murdered.

Following selection, a child would be brought to a special camp section which solely housed Mengele's specimens.

These young prisoners were given better shelter, healthcare, and food than the other Auschwitz residents for the purpose that Mengele needed the children in enhanced health for his experiments.

It must have been surreal to watch Mengele interact with the children.

Moments after motioning the rest of a child's family to the gas chambers, he would dote on the young orphan and ensure that any needs were accommodated.

"Uncle Mengele, as they called him, delighted them with candy, joked with them, hugged and kissed them"

There exist camp survivor stories of present day adults fondly remembering this aspect of imprisonment.

While the torture and medical practices were barbaric, Mengele routinely treated the children better than most SS officers.

Moreover, Mengele was violently protective of his children and presided over upwards of six hundred prisoners at one time.

The camp had a special wing, B2F, from which Mengele conducted his in vivo experiments; that is, experiments conducted while the children were alive, oftentimes without anesthetics.

In many cases, typhus and tuberculosis were injected into one healthy twin to see how each reacted to the disease.

Once again, the moment the study was completed, the children were murdered.

Several times Mengele rushed to save his subjects from premature death at the hands of the gas chambers.

"At one point towards the end of the war, I was scheduled to go to the chambers --- that's when I saw Mengele. We were taken off the truck. He stopped the whole procession because they were going to kill his twins"

In the same People Magazine article Rene's sister, Irene, recalls the selection ramp with Mengele, impeccably dressed, repeatedly bellowing out for twins.

Dr. Martina Puzyna, a prisoner doctor, recollects on the time she witnessed Mengele running alongside a cattle car of Hungarian Jews screaming for twins to emerge.

Dr. Puzyna remembers Mengele "--- shrieking in a loud voice --- " and acting quite maniacally.

He exhibited unimaginable fury at the prospect of missing out on more research subjects.

Once chosen by Mengele, the children were taken to the hospital, cleaned, deloused, and intensely examined.

One of Mengele's captive doctors, Martina Puzyna, was responsible for these examinations.

Each measurement was painstakingly noted, and Puzyna often worked to delay the processing, for once the measurements were complete the children were available to Mengele.

A witness, Vera Alexander, described one of Mengele's experiments:

One day Mengele brought chocolate and special clothes.
The next day, SS men came and took two children away.
They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino.
One of them was a hunchback.
Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state.
They had been cut.
The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too.
There was a terrible smell of gangrene.
The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.

Alexander went on to describe blood transfusions between twins so that Mengele could observe each child's reaction.

Oftentimes the children endured high fevers and terrible headaches and if the child cried too often as a result of the pain, he or she was gassed.

Mengele worked tirelessly to ensure his test subjects died at precisely the same time.

This would ensure the internal reaction to any stimulus could be accurately documented.

Following Germany's defeat 1945, a West German Indictment listed Mengele amongst its criminals.

The indictment alleges as follows:

--- Mengele had 100 children shot in the back of the head for his autopsies.
He is also said to have lured some of the more unwilling children to the crematorium from the experimental block by offering them sweets and then shooting them on the way.
One of his most common methods of ensuring simultaneous deaths was to inject chloroform into their hearts, coagulating the blood and causing heart failure.

Mengele soon ordered the construction of an updated research and pathology division to better conduct autopsies.

Mengele acted in explicitly destructive ways to newborns and their mothers.

"He is said to have stood on pregnant women's stomachs until the fetuses were expelled; he is even said to have dissected a one-year-old while the child was still alive"

Mengele ordered mothers to cover their breasts with tape and they were prohibited from nourishing the child.

In several cases, sympathetic nurses smuggled morphine from the hospital so the mothers could mercy-kill the child.

Furthermore, Mengele is " --- said to have thrown a newborn baby onto a stove, angered at the mother's pregnancy which the selection doctors had failed to spot and which would have normally qualified her for the gas chamber --- "

Due to the lack of decent medical facilities available to the prisoners, Josef Mengele ordered all pregnant women to be immediately gassed.

Many times, children Mengele deemed unworthy for his most important experimentation received immediate and terrible deaths.

A survivor, Annani Silovich Petko, gave a sworn statement to the following:

After a while a large group [of SS officers] arrived on motorcycles, Mengele among them.
They drove into the yard and got off their motorcycles.
Upon arriving they circled the flames; it burned horizontally.
We watched to see what would follow.
After a while trucks arrived, dump trucks, with children inside.
There were about ten of these trucks.
After they had entered the yard an officer gave an order and the trucks backed up to the fire and they started throwing those children right into the fire, into the pit.
The children started to scream; some of them managed to crawl out of the burning pit; an officer walked around it with sticks and pushed back those who managed to get out.
Hoess and Mengele were present and were giving order ---
They were all under five years old.

Mengele's insatiable need to experiment continued to escalate.

It is estimated that only a hundred or so set of twins survived Auschwitz out of the nearly three thousand that entered.

"So obsessed was he with finding vast numbers of twins that he attended railhead selections even when it was not his turn; he could be seen bargaining with the SS physicians on duty to set the twins aside for him"

While many of the other SS doctors turned to alcohol to cope with their regular duties of railhead selection, Mengele bartered for more opportunities.

He often dressed in his Waffen-SS best and stood sentry for hours.

An important voice to the medical horrors of Auschwitz comes from Miklos Nyiszli.

The Jewish Hungarian doctor was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter in 1944 and soon became employed as Mengele's personal pathologist.

Immediately following the war, Nyiszli published a detailed account of what he witnessed as part of the Jewish sonderkommando.

He begins by explaining the benefits of experimenting in a concentration camp:

The confines of the KZ [Auschwitz Concentration Camp] offered vast possibilities for research, first in the field of forensic medicine, because of the high suicide rate, and also in the field of pathology, because of the relatively high percentage of dwarfs, giants and other abnormal types of human beings.
The abundance, unequaled elsewhere in the world, of corpses, and the fact that one could dispose of them freely for purposes of research, opened wider horizons.

Nyiszli reaffirms the fact that, with regard to scientific experimentation, the need for fresh corpses to autopsy was paramount.

The uniqueness of having so many twins living in a centralized location was especially appealing to the Nazis, for it presented a capacity for research unavailable throughout human history.

Unfortunately, in order to detail precisely how one twin reacted to an injection or stimulus, both specimens had to die at precisely the same time.

Nyiszli details his horror at discovering this practice:

I began the dissection of one set of twins and recorded each phase of my work --- In the exterior coat of the left ventricle was a small red spot caused by a hypodermic injects --- There could be no mistake --- Normally the blood contained in the left ventricle is taken out and weighed.
This method could not be employed in the present case, because the blood was coagulated into a compact mass.
I extracted the coagulum with the forceps and brought it to my nose.
I was struck by the characteristic odor of chloroform.
The victim had received an injection of chloroform to the heart --- and cause instantaneous death by heart failure --- Not only did they [Third Reich] kill with gas, but also with injections of chloroform into the heart.

Nyiszli further notes that Mengele had spoken with the pathologist following his gruesome discovery.

As you can see, Mengele remarked, these children suffered from syphilis and would have suffered a slow and gruesome death.

The Third Reich did not have the medical capacity to prevent their suffering, and therefore, Mengele was quietly saving the children from further pain.

The absurdity with which Mengele performed his experiments is infinite.

He would order twin sisters to have pre-pubescent sex with other twin boys to determine if this would provide a higher rate of twin babies.

"When we objected that such an experiment was impermissible he told us that we were prisoners and that we had no say in the matter"

Mengele soon began a routine of shooting or ordering the gassing of any patient who dissented.

The appearance of Mengele's personality "doubling" was often on full display.

It manifested itself in how he treated the children first and foremost, but most especially how he treated pregnant women.

Mengele was seen treating a pregnant inmate through the labor process; especially taking " --- all correct medical precautions during childbirth, rigorously observing all aseptic principles, cutting the umbilical cord with the greatest care, etc"

No more than thirty minutes later, Mengele dispatched the mother and newborn to be gassed.

In this case the two sides of Mengele, the beneficent doctor and the murderer, were both present.

Mengele's physician side eased the labor suffering of the mother, and when that task was complete, the Auschwitz Mengele reemerged, immediately marking the woman and newborn for death.

Moreover, Mengele was instrumental in resolving unique problems with the extermination process.

Mengele once witnessed a bottleneck at the crematorium, which was rendering the gassing process inefficient.

The Nazi doctor resolved the issue by ordering trenches to be dug and filled with gasoline.

"Both the dead and the living, adults as well as children and infants, were thrown bodily into these pits to be destroyed under Mengele's supervision"

This resolved the immediate issue of the bottleneck, and the gassing soon resumed acceptable levels of efficiency.

Marc Berkowitz and his sister Francesca were brought to Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia with their parents in early 1944.

Marc and Francesca were quickly selected by Mengele for experimentation.

"They put us in freezing baths, smeared chemicals on our skin, but it was the needles we were most afraid of. After the first 150 injections I stopped counting --- "

Berkowitz even witnessed his mother marching toward the gas chamber, after which Mengele mocked the child by asking if he still believed in God.

Moshe Offer is a survivor of Mengele's experiments.

He witnessed the slow murder of his brother, Tibi, while in Auschwitz.

"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"

Auschwitz had taken Offer's mother, father, and two older brothers at the selection ramp, and now Moshe witnessed the slow murder of his only remaining relative at the hands of Josef Mengele.

Mengele's experiments lacked any sense of professionalism, and his dissections were oftentimes stodgy and ill-prepared.

An Aryan-looking Jew from Poland, Joe Rosenblum, came to Auschwitz and worked his way as a slave employee into Mengele's care.

Unbeknownst to his guards, Rosenblum understood German.

As a result, Rosenblum was able to document many conversations Mengele had with his staff in the hospital.

First and foremost, Rosenblum tells of the sloppiness with which the experiments were conducted.

"It [autopsy] indeed was a mess. All the corpses had been cut into bloody pieces. There were piles of body parts on the wooden tables, which were about twelve feet long and four feet wide, peppered with numerous bloodstained nicks"

However, there was a side to Mengele, the other side of his "doubling", which saved Rosenblum from certain death.

For several months Rosenblum had worked tirelessly to clean Mengele's office, the offices of his subordinate physicians, and even polished Mengele's boots once a day.

This was done strictly out of self-preservation, and it ultimately proved helpful.

Rosenblum developed an infection behind his Mastoid bone, which nearly killed the young Pole.

Joe was operated on by Mengele, and even given anesthetics.

The surgery was arranged by a fellow inmate called only "Father," and done because Mengele wished to reward Joe for his diligence in cleaning the office.

Following the surgery, Rosenblum was permitted to recuperate in the hospital, an honor never before bestowed upon a Jewish prisoner.

Joe was provided warm farina, buttered bread, and milk for the several days of his recovery.

Once or twice a day, Mengele would stop by Rosenblum's bed and inquire as to how his incision was healing.

After a week or two, Rosenblum was simply allowed to pack up his new clothes, given to him by the hospital staff, and walk out of the front door back into the main camp.

Rosenblum directly attributes his camp survival to the operation and care Mengele provided.

Meanwhile, Mengele would return to the selection platform, the location where he spent a vast majority of his free time.

"Mengele would dress himself in his military best, no matter the weather, and separate the incoming prisoners for hours on end"

As the German war effort devolved and more German men and boys were being recruited into the fighting forces, the need for slave labor increased.

During the earlier selections, Mengele routinely gassed mothers with their children.

Now, however, Mengele began sending the mothers to the work camps.

Rosenblum notes that, following this separation, the children were still executed.

The change in behavior was not a noble gesture; Mengele was still ordering the murder of innocent children.

Only now, the mothers were kept alive, knowing full well the fate of their offspring.

On one unique day, Rosenblum overheard Mengele discussing the war with several of his subordinates.

While cleaning the office, Rosenblum took notes when the discussion turned to the justifications behind the genocide.

Unlike most Nazis, Mengele seemed to function without any overriding sense of anti-Semitism.

Rather, he authorized the gassing of Jewish prisoners on a more philosophical level.

"Actually, we never had anything against the Jewish people --- Hitler wanted to be smarter than the rest of the world, so we had to eliminate the Jews --- they never did anything to us"

Mengele went on to exclaim that the Jews were highly successful in business, science, and the arts.

The Aryan race desired supremacy among all human endeavors and therefore the Jewish population could not continue.

The world could not support the coexistence of two master races.

Summarily, the Aryan leadership had decided to eradicate the Jews from civilization.

To see such a startling acknowledgement from Mengele is chilling, as it adds another layer to his rationalization for the Auschwitz experiments.

Mengele was, by most accounts, actively murdering innocent children in an effort to advance his career in post-war Germany.

After Auschwitz was liberated, Mengele escaped prosecution with the help of Nazi sympathizers and settled in South America.

A reasonable query is if Mengele was, indeed, remorseful for his behavior.

His son, Rolf, who had only briefly met Mengele when he was very young, traveled to South America to confront his father and ask that very pointed question.

Mengele remarked as follows:

--- his job was to clarify only "able to work" and "unable to work".
He graded people as "able to work" as often as possible.
He thinks he saved the lives of several thousand people that way.
He didn't order the extermination and he was not responsible.
He said the twins owe their lives to him.
He said he never harmed anybody personally, and he got very excited at this point.

Rolf departed the bungalow with a vibrant disgust for his father and what he had committed.

Josef Mengele, the butcher of children at Auschwitz, had somehow turned himself into a victim.

The town of Candido Godoi, Brazil is often cited as the prime example of Mengele continuing his experimentation into twin reproduction.

There are reports of a higher concentration of twin births in this town, and it is fact that Mengele visited there several times while in hiding.

However, to associate Mengele as being instrumental in Candido Godoi's high twin birth rate is misleading.

There are two main points of contention:

1. It turns out that Candido Godoi experienced no notable change in the twin birth rate in the 1960's.
According to the town's baptismal records, twins had been unusually common in the town since at least the 1920's, decades before Mengele's arrival.
Twin births are still common in the town today, decades after Mengele's death.
Even if Mengele had developed some ovulation induction drug, it would have affected only that generation; he had no knowledge or ability to modify genetic code, which would have been necessary to pass the trait to future generations.

2. Candido Godoi's twin rate is very high, but not extraordinarily high compared to similar towns in the region.
It turns out that many such communities, not only in South America but worldwide, consisting of small, isolated populations, often expatriates, have high twin rates.
In particular, isolated villages in Nigeria and Romania have similar histories and similar twin rates.

While Mengele did spend time in Candido Godoi, there is no evidence to prove that he conducted any experimentation in the town.

While in South America, Mengele posed as a farm worker, a veterinarian, and worked many menial jobs.

However, he never practiced medicine on humans again, aside from allegedly treating Martin Bormann's stomach cancer and performing the occasional illegal abortion.

Josef Mengele conducted experiments on an untold number of children at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

His research caused the mutilation and murder of a high percentage of its young prisoners, and Mengele successfully evaded prosecution for his crimes, ultimately drowning in a Brazilian lake in 1979.

What remains behind is a catalogue of scientific data for future generations to assess.

The quest then becomes to determine which factors changed in Germany that allowed for Mengele's experiments.

While documenting the horrific tales of children in the Auschwitz concentration camp, it is important to note that Josef Mengele committed no crime due to the specific nature of German law.

The morphing political, professional, and deontological ethics within Germany created an environment which allowed for the acceptability of Mengele's torture of children.