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Research Question: What was Nazi medicine and the outcome in Auschwitz concentration camp
performed by Dr. Josef Mengele?
Rees, Laurence. “Corruption.” Essay. In Auschwitz A New History, 180–288. New York, NY:
PublicAffairs, 2005.
In this book, Laurence Rees is able to show a deeper side about Auschwitz. He interviews
over 100 Auschwitz survivors as well as the Nazi soldiers that were there. Many of these
people are speaking their story for the first time. Some of these stories tell of the abuse by
Dr. Josef Mengele. There are a few interviewees that saw Mengele be outright harsh and
then others experienced compassion from him. The book goes on to explain how Dr.
Mengele selected his human experiments to live or die. By having all of these first hand
accounts, the reader can really tell of the harshness experienced by the imprisoned in
Auschwitz.
de Wind, Eddy. Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp. New York,
NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2020.
Eddy de Wind tells of his first hand account of how he was originally trying to save his
mother from Westerbork, which was a camp for Jews. He ends up falling in love with a
nurse and they are transported to Auschwitz. Friedel, Eddy’s wife, ends up being one of
Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments at the camp. Eddy goes on to write about how his wife
was no longer the same and how much it affected her. Throughout the book there are
signs that she is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from her time with
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Mengele. This memoir was recently translated from Dutch to English in 2020 and shows
the strength of two survivors of Auschwitz.
Avey, Denis. The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. Philadelphia, PA: DaCapo Press, 2011.
The book is a true story about a British soldier who was held at a prisoner of war camp,
but he snuck into Auschwitz. The author, Avey, was able to switch places with a Jew
being held at the concentration camp and saw that some workers had been punished by
death through working. This story shows the brutality that the prisoners faced at
Auschwitz. While Avey’s time at the camp was brief he still saw and experienced the
inhumanity that the Nazi’s put the prisoners through. He goes on to tell of how difficult it
was to tell this story, but it is imperative that people know exactly what happened from
his brief time there.
Szachter Kalib, Goldie. “Through the Valley of the Shadow and Death.” Essay. In The Last
Selection: A Child’s Journey Through the Holocaust, 224–242. Amherst, MA: The
University of Massachusetts Press, n.d.
This book written by Goldie Szachter Kalib tells of her childhood journey through the
Holocaust. Originally, like many Jews, Goldie and her family were sent to the labor
camps before ultimately the death camps. She tells of what her life was before the Nazis
started sending Jews to the concentration camps, then what her life was like in
Auschwitz. Goldie also recounts when her and her mother were part of Mengele’s
selection, to live or die. She recalls vividly of what life was like in the concentration
camp. Goldie’s story shows the cruelty that Jews faced during the Holocaust.
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Schaefer, Naomi. “The Legacy of Nazi Medicine.” The New Atlantis, no. 5 (2004): 54–60.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43152101.
This article talks about how horrific Nazi medicine could be in the concentration camps.
Schaefer explains how Mengele used the prisoners to learn more about the limits of the
human body. For instance, they would freeze prisoners to see the effects of hypothermia.
This shows how Josef Mengele didn’t really care about the people, but instead wanted to
use them for his own scientific learning. Mengele was well-known for his infatuation
with twins and if he found some at the camp, it would often lead to death for the twins.
BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele—‘Angel of
Death.’” In Spies, Lies, and Citizenship: The Hunt for Nazi Criminals, 69–100.
University of Nebraska Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1tqx72k.10.
This chapter excerpt goes into detail about Josef Mengele about his early life all the way
up to his escape from prosecution. It would seem that he had a pretty normal childhood growing
up, until he moved to Munich. This is when he started studying racist theories and advancing his
studies in medicine becoming a doctor to practice medicine. Barbier goes on to tell of his
military service with Germany and how became the “chief doctor” at Auschwitz. This is where
he told the prisoner whether they would live or die. She also goes into detail about one of the
twin experiments that Mengele performed there.
Vansuch, Bryan J. Mengele’s ethics: An analytical approach to understanding Josef Mengele’s
motives (April 11, 2011). Accessed February 28, 2024.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/cf3c3c549caa32e00af1bd837e90d1dc/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750.
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This thesis paper tells about Mengele’s motives behind the human experiments that he
was performing at Auschwitz. Mengele was interested in genetics and didn’t care about the
ethics he had as a doctor. He wanted more than anything to advance his career, and didn’t care
about who he harmed in the process. Vansuch’s work shows a plethora of works cited proving
his thesis about Mengele. He shows how Mengele thought it was perfectly okay to go about
experimenting on humans. A major key factor was that the Law for the Prevention of Progeny
With Hereditary Disease was ratified making unethical behavior legal.
Halioua, Bruno and Michael F. Marmor. 2020. The eyes of the angel of death: Ophthalmic
experiments of josef mengele. Survey of Ophthalmology 65, no. 6: 744-748,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039625720300734.
This article by Halioua and Marmor tells of the ophthalmologic experiments that
Mengele performed, which weren’t as well-known as his others. It tells of how Mengele
and two genetic researchers were seeing if they were able to change eye colors. They
would do this by taking the eyes of the deceased at the camp and injecting them with
various concoctions. It shows the unethical behavior and principles by Josef Mengele.
The authors describe how it was the doctors’ jobs at the concentration camps to have
selections for prisoners to live or die, but they also sought out those they could perform
experiments on.
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