Dr. Josef Mengele: The Auschwitz Concentration Camps

816 Words4 Pages

Many people went into hiding to stay safe others thought this would be the best for them. People were brainwashed to believe that these camps would actually help them. Most of them died or survived with horrible injuries after they had got there. They were brutally beaten, burned alive in a crematorium, or gassed in a gas chamber. In Auschwitz Dr. Josef Mengele did gruesome experiments on inmates. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime. The Nazis believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews were “lower in status.” Not only were Jews killed, but others such as Gypsies or people with different beliefs. If they didn’t believe what Hitler and his regime thought was …show more content…

Auschwitz was a forced-labor and extermination center run by the German Nazis during WWII. About 1 million people died at Auschwitz from September 1941 to January 1945. The Nazis used gas chambers and other methods to torture and eventually murder the the victims. Most of the victims were Jews. Auschwitz was in Poland, near what is now Oświęcim. It consisted of two concentration camps-Auschwitz I, built in 1940; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, built in 1942. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum article it states, “All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.” It also states, “The first and oldest was the so-called "main camp," later also known as "Auschwitz I" which was established on the grounds and in the buildings of prewar Polish barracks.” People starved, acquired diseases, or worked to death in nearby war factories. The people who had diseases had to go to see Dr. …show more content…

Josef Mengele was the doctor at Auschwitz. A German doctor, personally selected over 400,000 prisoners to die in gas chambers at Auschwitz. Camp inmates called him the “Angel of Death.” He also conducted inhumane experiments on inmates. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum article it states, “Josef Mengele was an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz. In 1937 Mengele joined the Nazi Party. The following year, the same year in which he received his medical degree, he joined the SS.” In the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum article of Josef Mengele it states, “In the first phase of the experiments, pairs of twins and persons with inherited anomalies were put at the disposal of Dr. Mengele and subjected to all imaginable specialist medical examinations. They were also photographed, plaster casts were made of their jaws and teeth, and they were toe-and fingerprinted. As soon as these examinations were finished, they were killed with lethal injections of phenol to the heart so that the next phase of the experimentation could begin: autopsies and the comparative analysis of their internal organs. He worked at Auschwitz from 1943 until 1945. United States captured Mengele but freed him before learning his identity. He then went into hiding. In 1949, Mengele moved to Argentina, Efforts to capture him increased in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In 1959, Mengele fled to Paraguay, then in 1960,

Open Document