Research Paper
LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
Submitted to Dr. Boggs,
in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the completion of
HIEU390 B01
By
Lindsey Slade
March 4, 2024
1
World War II was a brutal time in our history. The rise of Nazi Germany, millions upon
millions of young men losing their lives for the cost of freedom and liberty from fascism. None
of that though could compare to the horror, suffering, and brutality that was done at a
concentration camp called Auschwitz. However, along with the rise of Hitler, and him trying to
perfect the Aryan Race, and trying to exterminate anyone who was not like him as far as race,
religion, etc. They propagated a certain doctor to perform experiments with medicine and the
limitations of the human body to the prisoners at Auschwitz. Dr. Josef Mengele experimented
with different medicines and people to expand the Nazi War Machine in efforts to see what
limitations were on the human body, how to perfect a perfect race for Nazi Germany, and to
achieve academic success.
Mengele had a pretty normal childhood growing up, his father had a successful company,
and he was an engineer. Barbier states, “He owned his own business-eventually called Frima
Karl Mengele & Sohne-by the time his oldest son was born. Known as a “shirt-sleeve boss”, the
elder Mengele had thirty employees working in his farm-machinery factory by the time World
War I erupted. Raised Catholic, the Mengele boys grew up quite comfortable- that is wealthy-
circumstances.”1 Josef Mengele had a nice life before the outbreak of the war living comfortably
with the wealth of his family. After World War I breaks out, Josef’s mother takes control of the
business and landed government contracts due to her success in growing the company.
Mengele would not go down the path of keeping the family business, so he moved to
Munich in 1930 to study at University. Barbier states, “His initial field of study, philosophy,
introduced him to Alfred Rosenberg’s racist theories that emphasized the “innate intellectual and
moral superiority of Aryans.” As events would later prove, Mengele bought into those theories
1 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 70.
2
hook, line, and sinker, and he would continue to demonstrate how committed he was to them for
decades after World War II.”2 Moving forward during his study at University and sitting under
learning about racist theories, proved that Mengele was starting on a path of racism and bigotry
towards people not like him. He became a part of a nationalist extreme right-wing group called
the Stahlhelm, or Steel Helmets, which led him to forming an identity that would promote him to
getting his PhD, and then eventually becoming the “chief doctor” at Auschwitz.
"Mengele joined the Nazi Party and, after passing the required background check to
verify that he had no Jewish or other non- Aryan ancestors, received acceptance into the Waffen
Schutzstaffel (SS) as an officer in 1938. Assignment to the SS as a medical officer did not end
Mengele’s desire to advance his career academically. He pursued his coveted goal— a
professorship in medicine— by continuing his research and by publishing when
possible. In fact, prior to his 1943 assignment to Auschwitz, he published three pieces: the
dissertation that he wrote in the University of Munich’s Anthropological Institute; “Genealogical
Studies in the Cases of Cleft Lip- Jaw- Palate,” his 1938 published medical dissertation; and
“Hereditary Transmission of Fistulae Auris,” which was based on research conducted by von
Verschuer and others."3 By gaining favor and joining the Nazi Party it put Mengele’s career
trajectory skyrocketing to where he did not have to be in the military anymore as an officer, but
could advanced his medical career to help Nazi Germany. Once promoted to his position at
Auschwitz he would have to immediately decide which of the new inmates would live or die.
Once prisoners were imported into Auschwitz, he would decide which prisoners would go to
torturous labor or to immediate extermination.4 An eyewitness to the atrocities at Auschwitz,
2 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 71.
3 Ibid. 72.
4 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 74.
3
Denis Avey describes the camp as this, “Once through the gates I began to take in the layout of
the camp, with its spawl of shoddy barracks buildings. With the wind in the quarter it was then,
the sweet, ghastly smell of the distant crematoria swept across the site, catching in my nose and
throat. It was a sickly, stench that joined all the other smells around me produced by filth and
decaying people. Further into the camp a shaven-headed body was hanging motionless from a
gibbet. His neck was broken and twisted, forcing his head to one side. If his hands were tied I
couldn’t tell. If there was a sign around the neck saying what he had done to end up there, I
didn’t take it in.”5 In an eyewitness testimony, Goldie Szachter gives an account of Mengele
saying, “As Dr. Mengele stalked through the hospital corridors, looking about in all directions,
he noticed that Rivtche was lying down covered by a blanket. He stopped and began to shout in a
growing rage, “Who is this girl? Why is she not standing up for the selection? Who is
responsible for her failure to obey the orders of the selection process?” In the middle of his
tirade, he grabbed the record card at the foot of Rivtche’s bed in order to determine how ill
Rivtche was, for whenever he saw a thick pack of cards, signifying a lengthy illness, or
concluded from a record card that a patient was seriously ill, the person would automatically be
doomed for the gas chambers.”6
Dr. Mengele was famous for the experimentation that he called “groundbreaking” on live
Jewish prisoners. Part of these experiments was to not only torture Jews, but to experiment on
what the human body could handle and try to perfect the Aryan race. Some of the examples of
these experiments were injecting thousands of inmates with everything from petrol to chloroform
to study the chemical effects on the body.7 Trying to experiment and perfect the Aryan race,
Mengele would also exterminate anyone prisoner who had a physical deformity as soon as they
5 Avey, Denis. The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. 141.
6 Szachter Kalib, Goldie. “Through the Valley of the Shadow and Death.” Essay. 234.
7 Ibid, 74.
4
entered the camp, and then perform tests on the cadavers of those prisoners. “When he arrived at
the camp, Mengele was tasked with addressing a problem in the women’s facility—a typhus
epidemic. He ruthlessly attacked the problem head on. He quickly ordered the solution that he
deemed most appropriate. He issued a directive that resulted in the movement of 498 women to
the gas chambers.”8 Eva Moses Kor was a survivor of the experiments of Mengele and she is
quoted saying this, “Mengele came in every day after roll call– he wanted to see how many
guinea pigs he had. Three times a week both of my arms would be tied to restrict the blood flow,
and they took a lot of blood from my left arm, on occasion enough blood until we fainted. At the
same time they were taking blood, they would give me a minimum of five injections into my
right arm. After one of these injections I became extremely ill and Dr. Mengele came in next
morning with four other doctors. He looked at my fever chart and he said, laughing sarcastically,
“Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live.”9 Eva had to tell herself to survive
these sadistic experiments because if she would have died then her twin sister would have been
rushed to Mengele’s lab and killed with an injection in the heart and would have comparative
autopsies on both.10 These children just 10 years of age had to fight for their lives to escape death
from Dr. Josef Mengele, and they were just some of the survivors. Bryan Vansuch says,
“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
8 Ibid, 74.
9 Rees, Laurence. “Corruption.” Essay. 181.
10 Ibid. 182.
5
success through industrious determination, for he knew he was not as gifted as his
contemporaries.”11 Mengele used this determination for success to bring about the monstrosities
of his experimentation all in the hopes of achieving a perfect Aryan race. The camp and
survivors had made a clear distinction that when they saw Dr. Josef Mengele, they gave him the
name, the Angel of Death.12
In Nazi Germany medicine became corrupt with the rise of Hitler coming to power.
Euthanizing was happening to try and eliminate diseased children, and they used the war to
distract the public from what was happening.13 Medicine that was supposed to heal and help the
sick, quickly became known as deadly medicine, and Mengele would use these deadly medicines
in experimentation on the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc. Schaefer says, “The most horrific
experiments were performed in the concentration camps by Josef Mengele and his minions. At
Auschwitz, Mengele and others used human subjects to learn about pain thresholds; they froze
prisoners to study the effects of hypothermia; they put prisoners in pressure chambers to test
human tolerance for high altitudes. Mengele had a special fascination with twins, which
he subjected to perverse (and often deadly) experiments.”14 These experiments that Mengele put
these people through were to go in and find “groundbreaking breakthrough” using these
experiments to find a perfect race and develop a scientific breakthrough with medicine.
“Mengele’s main objective was to use this research program in Auschwitz as a basis for his
second postdoctoral thesis, necessary to obtain a chair at a German university. According to SS
doctor Hans Munch, who had worked alongside Mengele, he was “a combination of scientific
11 Vansuch, Bryan J.=Mengele’s ethics: An analytical approach to understanding Josef Mengele’s
motives.7.
12 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 73.
13 Schaefer, Naomi. “The Legacy of Nazi Medicine.”=The New Atlantis. 57.
14 Ibid. 58.
6
knowledge, opportunism, and ambition”. Rudolf Vitek described Mengele as a “cynical, cold,
devious, sly, and keen-witted person”. Intellectually, Mengele was convinced of the merits of
establishing racial hygiene measures.”15 Halioua is an MD and presents the cases for the reason
why Mengele was using these experiments in such a way as just to get on a chair at a university,
damaging people to gain academic success. In an interview with a survivor of Auschwitz, Eddy
Wind says, “The youngsters have been raised in the spirit of blood and soil. They don’t know
any better. But those older ones, like the Lagerarzt (Josef Mengele), show through those minor
acts that they still harbor a remnant of their upbringing. They didn’t learn this inhumanity from
an early age and had no need to embrace it. That’s why they’re guiltier than the young Nazi
sheep, who have never known better.”16 Survivors would have to do everything to survive
Mengele’s experiments and even asked Mengele to save his wife’s life. Even in the face of
absolute horror and brutality, these survivors tried everything they could just to stay alive so they
could possibly see their loved ones one day.
Another experiment that Mengele did provided by an eyewitness account was from the
Ovitz family who had dwarfism. Mengele gave this family special treatment in hopes of
preserving them for his research and experimentation. Perla Ovitz states, ““The amount of blood
they took was enormous and, being feeble from hunger, we often fainted. That didn’t stop
Mengele: he had us lie down and when we came to our senses they resumed siphoning
our blood. They punctured us carelessly and blood spurted. We often felt nauseous and vomited
a lot. When we returned to the barrack, we’d slump on the wooden bunks—but before we had
time to recover, we’d be summoned for a new cycle.”17 Mengele was obsessed with doing
15 Halioua, Bruno and Michael F. Marmor. 2020. The Eyes of the Angel of Death: Ophthalmic Experiments
of Josef Mengele.=745.
16 de Wind, Eddy. Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp. 201.
17 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 79.
7
experiments on people who had special conditions like dwarfism or twins, in the hopes of
discovering something in their blood, or in their genetics in hopes of figuring out how to perfect
the perfect race. Mengele was creating his own research “niche” that was going to be separate
from the experiments of his mentor in hopes of the notoriety that he would bring to himself
through these experiments. “Mengele was aiming not only to discover the biological and
pathological causes of the birth of dwarves, but to demonstrate the racial theory that in the course
of its long history, the Jewish race had degenerated into a people of dwarves and cripples.” He
would, as a result, be able to provide an even more definitive reason for the extermination of the
Jewish race. To accomplish his goal, Mengele had his assistants repeatedly draw blood from the
Ovitz family members. If one of them fainted during the process, he or she was “revived” for the
withdrawal of blood to continue.”18 Mengele was not only out to achieve a perfect race, but was
focusing on achieving academic greatness, to be the highest in academia based on these cruel
experiments that he did on the prisoners at Auschwitz. Vansuch says, “It is important to note that
Josef Mengele believed his actions to be ethical and, under German law, he committed no actual
crimes in Auschwitz. Nazi dogma viewed the changing landscape and the coming victory in the
Second World War as the advent of a new civilization, and this revolution would forever change
the medical profession. ―Away with all that is unfit to live, for the restoration of a sound and
healthy people. Away with all the biologically inferior, forward to a new biological superiority.
The elimination of those unworthy of life would help create a new Aryan world order in which
physician approved legislation would determine who is fit to live.”19 This dogma created an
entire identity and lifestyle based in bigotry and evil towards fellow humans, viewing them as
inferior and not worthy of life. All of this just to achieve some sort of fame and to be published
18 Ibid, 80.
19 Vansuch, Bryan J.=Mengele’s ethics: An analytical approach to understanding Josef Mengele’s motives.
27.
8
and recognized by academia at the time. Barbier says, “At the end of the day, what did Mengele
learn from these experiments? That remains unknown. He did not publish the results of his
research on dwarfs. Ultimately, Mengele hoped to achieve academic greatness. He believed that
his “research” at Auschwitz would help—particularly if he succeeded in publishing “his
Habilitation, a second, post-doctoral, dissertation required for admission to a university faculty
as a professor in German-speaking lands.” In this he did not succeed—much to his everlasting
disappointment, as was demonstrated in his repeated efforts later in life to convince his son to
pursue a doctorate, but to no avail.”20
Josef Mengele tried his very best from his rise to academics under the mentorship of
teachers who taught racist theories, to being in the army, then going to be the “chief doctor” at
Auschwitz caused insurmountable pain and suffering to his victims giving him the name The
Angel of Death. He used the experiments on victims to further his career in medicine to be
published and become famous in all academia by using these torturous experiments to gain
academic achievement and success.
20 BARBIER, MARY KATHRYN, and DENNIS SHOWALTER. “Josef Mengele— ‘Angel
of Death.’” 80-81.
9
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“or
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https://www.proquest.com/openview/cf3c3c549caa32e00af1bd837e90d1dc/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750.
