Feb 10, 2006

Realities of our past!

The only book i have read to date which somewhat chronicles life in concentration camps during ww2 is the Auschwitz by primo levi. I have read a lot about ww2 but did not have a clue about the extent of torture that nazis put the jewish people through, hitler,himmler,eichmann, these are familiar names, and i have come across them in books,movies,so on and so forth but one of the most perverse and sick individuals in the nazi regime was a doctor by the name of josef mengele, and i came across his name accidentally when reading about the Paraguayan dictator stroessman, here's more about mengele from wikipedia*
I shudder to think what the world would have been like, had the germans won the war!
Josef Mengele:
"It was during his 21-month stay at Auschwitz that Mengele achieved infamy, and it is for this period that he was later referred to as the "Angel of Death". Mengele was usually part of the medical delegation which met incoming prisoners, determining which would be retained for work and experimentation, and which would be sent immediately to the gas chambers.

Mengele had a morbid fascination with twins; beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks. Most of the children selected for these experiments came from the Roma being held at Auschwitz. Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of dubious scientific value, ignoring the lack of ethics involved, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to create an artificial conjoined twin by sewing the veins in two twins together; this operation was not successful and only caused the hands of the children to become badly infected. Another dubious experiment that he purportedly conducted involved submerging subjects into boiling cauldrons of water so as to see how much heat the human body could take before death. Subjects of Mengele's experiments were almost always murdered afterward for dissection, if they survived the experiment itself. Mengele also had several Jewish medical helpers. They were given the task of dissecting bodies and finding the causes of death.

Mengele also had an interest in dwarfs, founding the Lilliput Troupe, seven of whose ten members were dwarfs. He often called them "his dwarf family" and experimented on them often. He was fascinated by their structure, why they had smaller limbs yet a normal-sized trunk. They seemed vital to his research and he had them treated specially — they were allowed to keep their clothes, scarves and accessories they had from their home. Mengele even gave them make-up to wear on more than one occasion."

No comments: