You may have heard about the man we are going to talk about today in our other shows, but today we will give you the full rundown of
who he is. Have you ever heard about the Nazi T4 Euthanasia program, which more or less gave what it called “mercy death” to people not fit to work,
such as mentally ill people in asylums? Or what about the Rape of Nanking where as many as 200,000 to 300,000 unarmed Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese soldiers. It’s even reported that two Japanese officers had a killing contest, to see who could kill the most people in one day, but only using
a sword. It’s thought 20,000 women were raped, including children and the aged. These are some of the tragic moments in history perpetrated by monsters, but today we’ll focus on one brute alone, in this episode
of the infographics Show, Josef Mengele - The Nazi Psycho Doctor. Dr. Mengele, aka, “The Angel of Death”,
was born on March 16, 1911 in Günzburg, Bavaria, Germany. His dad had a company called “Firma Karl
Mengele & Söhne”. Josef had two younger brothers, Karl and Alois, but of his actual childhood, little is known. As he grew older he studied two disciplines at university. He took a degree in philosophy at the university of Munich, where it’s said he was heavily influenced by Alfred Rosenberg. It’s written that this mentor was one of
the main influences behind Nazi ideology, including theories of race superiority. Mengele also earned a degree in medicine at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Five years later he would finish his PhD in
physical anthropology. If you don’t know what that is, it’s mostly
concerned with how our bodies evolve, how we are physically different and what that
means, as well as understanding the biological base of human behavior. You’ll soon see how this relates to what
he did later in life when he became a somewhat devilish, experimental doctor. In 1937, he studied under Germany’s leading expert on twins, joining the ‘Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene.” He then joined the Nazi party and the SS,
and was drafted into the army and worked as a medical expert. He wasn’t always in the background, and
did see a lot of action on the Eastern Front. He was seriously wounded and so was sent to work at the “‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics.” Prior to that though, he received the Iron
Cross First Class for rescuing two German soldiers from a burning tank. That same year he was sent to work at Auschwitz, and this is where he made his name as the angel of death. Part of his job at Auschwitz was to look at
those that were sent there and make the decision if they were fit to work or not. If they weren’t deemed good for work, they were sent for execution in the gas chamber. Those selected for the gas chamber were by
no means all disabled, they could be healthy children, the old, or even pregnant women. It’s said that many of those that worked
with him on these selection committees were highly disturbed and distressed by this horrific
job, but some reports say Mengele took great pleasure in looking up and down his new cast
of visitors. Some reports state that he would whistle songs
while making the decision. What he really was interested in, though,
was twins. And with all those people being led to the
camps he found quite a few of them. So, what exactly did his job entail besides
selecting people for the gas chamber. Well, he was also responsible for testing
the gas that killed people, which was a cyanide-based pesticide called Zyklon B. He would also work
on trying to find a cure for a gangrenous bacterial disease called Noma, which had hit
one of the camps. How did he do that? Well, not in the way you’d expect. He rounded up mostly affected kids and had
them killed, then he sent their body parts back to university labs for more research
to be conducted. He was also trying to find some way of helping
German soldiers not freeze to death on the battlefield. The elements were a killer for many men on
different sides, especially in Russia. So, Mengele froze prisoners at the camp just
to see what most bodies could take, and so working out what soldiers would be able to
stand. If they did die, he would use certain techniques
to try and bring the frozen prisoners back to life. These are his lesser known experiments, though. He is more infamous for his fascination with
eye color and other experiments based on genetics which according to reports were to “refine
the master race". One of the things he did was to inject dye
into children’s eyes to change the eye color. It seems this was very painful and sometimes
made the children blind. They would often get killed anyway and Mengele
would collect their eyes. It seems the experiments were related to seeing
how generations passed on eye color, and as you know, the Germans favored blue eyes. He was very interested in the aberration when
twins have two different eye colors. According to one writer that later wrote about
this, “In June 1943 I went to the Gypsy camp in Birkenau. 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.” There are numerous theories as to why he concentrated
so much on twins, but many experts believed it was related to improving the German race
by trying to create a way for German people to have more twins, preferably racially superior
twins. What’s so strange about this man is that
so many people in the camps seemed to like him, saying he was always smiling and very
charming. One survivor recounted, “Mengele was an
attractive man. A perennial little smile showed the gap between
his front teeth…. Whenever he spoke to me, he was very polite,
giving the impression that he was interested in me. It was hard to believe that his little smile
and courteous behavior were just a facade behind which he devised the most horrific
murderous schemes.” Sounds like he fits the description of a psychopath. Its said he made life much easier for his
young victims, giving kids a kind of kindergarten and feeding them well. They played more and even referred to this
monster as “Uncle Mengele”, only often later ending up being viciously experimented
on. For this he has since been labelled a very
cunning, unremorseful sadist. He’d often give his kids candy, but little
did they know what was in store for them. He’d also experiment on dwarfs and pregnant
women, performing surgeries without any kind of pain relief. They too were then sent to the gas chamber. Other accounts say he would remove limbs of
people without anesthesia, pull out teeth, transfuse blood from one twin one to another,
perform ad hoc sex change operations and see how well people dealt with total isolation
– measuring their madness. But his macabre piece de resistance was when
he tried to sew two twins together, thereby making them conjoined, a kind of Siamese twin
Frankenstein’s monster. We must remember that all these accounts come
from witnesses in the German army and survivors, at least according to The Guardian. It said there are no manuscripts of what he
did. As for that worst experiment, Eva Mozes Kor,
a twin herself, later recounted some horrors after she was rescued from the camp. She said the Gypsy twins had their blood vessels
and organs connected. They screamed in agony all night she said,
and then they died three days later from gangrene. Another survivor interviewed on TV many years
later said, “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 the terrible smell of gangrene.” This seems to be the lowest point of all the
ordeals. After the war Mengele went on the run, even
working for a time as a farmhand. He ended up getting a visa under an alias
and escaping to Argentina. His wife didn’t want to go, so she left
him. He worked as a carpenter, but the Argentine
government has since said he also worked illegally as a doctor – especially performing abortions. He was talked about many times during the
Nuremberg trials, but most thought he must be dead. Nonetheless, this was one very wanted man,
and he became part of what became known as the Nazi hunt. Mossad spent years trying to track him down,
but did not succeed. He died in a swimming pool in Brazil in 1976
from a stroke. One thing we do know is that life got hard
for him, with The Guardian saying he lived in poverty most of the time. They know this because 86 letters were released
from a Sao Paulo police archive. He seems he never repented and remained a
racist, though did say that so many Jewish people were successful because they didn’t
interbreed much. In the letters he also says he feels no regret
about taking away “unworthy lives.” Mengele’s son, Ralph, always said he didn’t
agree with anything his father did, but did say he just couldn’t abandon him. He visited his dad in the 70s in Sao Paolo,
saying he was "a frightened, hounded creature, full of fear, depressed and thinking often
of suicide.” Now there’s some dark karma for you. So, what do you think about Mengele’s experiments? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
Worst Prison Experiments. Thanks for watching, and as always, please
don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time!
