'Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death Essay\r'

'After the warfare legion(predicate) national socialist doctors were tried at Nuremberg, for war crimes and crimes against tenderity. Yet the man who became the nigh ill-famed national socialist doctor †although Hitler himself whitethorn never heard of him †fled to South America and escape prosecution. He was never caught and convicted, though he lived for decades thereafter.\r\nMengele, c tout ensembleed ‘Uncle’ by the countless children he subjected to stern experiments and unthinkable torture, and known as the â€Å"saint of Death” in the parsimoniousness camps, was responsible for the torture and deaths of 400,000 people, and the torment of thousands more. The or so measurable thing to note virtually Mengele is that he was not an iso latterlyd example of an repulsiveness maniac gone berserk. He was scarcely part of a system and a much wider net utilization of national socialist doctors. His work may have been different from those o f the other doctors only in quantitative basis not qualitative terms.\r\nToday, the Auschwitz experiments of Josef Mengele remain the close egregious example of the collaboration of unprincipled exploreers with equ exclusivelyy unscrupulous senior scientists and re throwable scientific institutions †which is a phenomenon that could be calamity on a wide ordered series in our own times, e finic all in all(a)y in matters of drug trials of giant pharmaceutical corporations. In 1947, the world learned of what is now the most infamous scandal in aesculapian investigate: checkup experiments filmed by Nazi doctors. Nazi doctors performed a variety of highly disturbing experiments on prisoners in concentration camps.\r\nSome experiments were constructed to further the war effort. For example, to study gun piquancy wounds, Nazi doctors shot inmates and examined their wounds. To study diseases such as typhus, Nazi doctors intentionally infected inmates with disease. To stu dy human capacity to withstand exposure to cold, Nazi doctors stripped inmates and exposed them to icy pissing or blizzards. However, the majority of experiments had less to do with winning the war and more to do with promoting or substantiating Nazi ideology. bushels were interested in sterilizing undesirables, â€Å"curing” homosexuality, and establishing anthropological differences among races.\r\nTo find an effective means of fold sterilization, Nazi doctors injected hundreds of women with a caustic mall in the hope of obstructing their fallopian tubes, and inflicted severe destroy and infections on both male and pistillate prisoners by exposing them to high doses of radiation. To â€Å"cure” homosexuality, Nazi doctors injected hormones into inmates suspected of being homosexual. To catalog strong-arm differences in race, Nazi doctors killed a total of prisoners, stripped the flesh off their bones, and saved their skeletons for an anthropological museum. \r\nDr. Mengele is among the best known SS physicians at Auschwitz, and was responsible along with other SS doctors for â€Å"selections” and checkup examination examination checkup experiments that used prisoners as guinea pigs. Mengele could never have thought of himself as a monstrous psychopath, though, but only as a â€Å"biomedical scientist” participating in a broad words of racial query. During the Holocaust Mengele and many other Nazi physicians used thousands of camp inmates, especially those with disabilities and â€Å"deformities” as subjects for their biomedical racial â€Å"research. â€Å"\r\nBorn in the Swabian section of Bavaria in 1911 into an upper lower-middle-class family, Mengele eventually earned devil doctorates. The frontmost doctorate was in physical anthropology at Munich under(a) Theodor Mollison in 1935 and the moment was in medicine at Frankfurt under Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in 1938. He received his liberty to p ractice medicine in late 1937 but apparently did not prosecute certification in a specialty. Instead, he opted for research. As a student of anthropology, he had studied under the leading exponents of the â€Å" look unworthy of living” theory and it greatly influenced his thinking and behavior.\r\nThe notion that some lives were not worth living was rapidly get academically acceptable. His two dissertation supervisors were eugenicists, and his dissertations in anthropology at Munich and in medicine at Frankfurt both dealt with research in racial hygiene. After finishing his second doctorate, Mengele act his research in Verschuer’s Frankfurt establish for Hereditary biology and Race Hygiene. As principal investigator, Verschuer superintend the research of numerous assistants under a variety of DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft †German Research Foundation) research grants.\r\nVerschuer’s 1938 report to the DFG on this sponsored research, instructio n on the communicable study of tally and families, lists the work and publications of his assistant Mengele. Although Mengele did not articulatio the Nazi party until 1938, he belonged to the brown-shirt ram troopers, the SA, during 1933-34 and in 1938 joined the SS. As an SS member, he was drafted during the war into the Waffen SS instead of the Wehrmacht, advancing by 1943 to the rank of captain (Hauptstrumfuhrer).\r\nHe served as an SS physician to the Eastern front until he was wounded and then posted to the concentration camp death head units in the rear. He functioned during 1943-1944 as one of the SS physicians at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. In his new post, Mengele performed the accustomed duties of a concentration camp SS physician as well as the special Auschwitz assignment of directing selections for the gas chamber. In addition, Auschwitz opened up unlimited opportunities for the manque researcher.\r\nResearch subjects were available in volumed num bers, and the restraints of medical ethics did not apply. Further, Mengele could obligate highly skilled inmate physicians to design and conduct research, perform tests and autopsies, and produce research papers, without the need to share credit with them. It is therefore not surprising that Mengele used Auschwitz as a research laboratory. Otmar von Verschuer, Mengele’s teach who was himself a protege of Eugen Fischer, had left Frankfurt for Berlin in 1942 to succeed Fischer as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology.\r\nMengele had worked at the institute during SS assignments to Berlin and indeed continued to contribute to Verschuer’s research projects (Cefrey 62). When Mengele went to Auschwitz, Vershuer realised the potential of this posting, and as principal investigator, he carried Mengele’s Auschwitz experiments on his DFG grants. Therefore, Mengele’s experiments †that oftentimes necessitated the killing of children, thou sands of them (especially check) †were part of the official program and in pursuing his shockingly mordant â€Å"research” he was only future(a) the broad lines of Nazi research agenda.\r\n drive by the desire to boot out his medical career by scientific publications, Dr Mengele began to conduct all kinds of utterly atrocious medical experiments on living Jews, children, twins, disabled people, and all those who fell into the Nazi category of ‘Untermenschen’ †all of whom he took from the barracks of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, or ‘selected’ right away on their arrival, and brought to his hospital block.\r\nMengele used the pretext of medical treatment to kill thousands upon thousands of prisoners, personally administering the usurious torture procedures, for example as by injecting them with phenol, petrol, chloroform, or by ordering SS medical orderlies to do so. From the moment of his arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele joined the other SS officers and SS doctors, among them Dr Clauberg and Dr Kremer, in the ‘selection’ of Jews reaching the Auschwitz railway junction from all all over Europe.\r\nWith a movement of the slip by or the wave of a stick, he indicated as ‘unfit for work’, and thus destined for immediate death in the gas chambers, all children, old people, sick, halting and weak Jews, and all pregnant women. amongst May 1943 and November 1944 Mengele conducted, also along with Dr. Heinz Thilo, advance of such selections. Mengele was especially on the observation post for twins and other promising research subjects (Lifton 165).\r\nHe also took an equally determinative part in several selections in the camp infirmary, pointing out for death by shooting, injection or gassing those Jews whose dexterity had been sapped by starvation, force labor, untreated affection or ill-treatment by the guards. On May 26, 1943, only two days after he arrived at Aushwitz, Mengele a ttached his first mass murder. There was a typhoid epidemic in the barracks of over a thousand Gypsies who had been brought to the camp two months earlier.\r\nFor Dr Mengele, typhoid was not an illness to be cured, but one to be eliminated; that day, all the Gypsies were dragged out of their barracks and driven to the gas chambers. Against their label in the camp register were put the letters ‘SB’ †‘Sondebehandlung’, Special Treatment. This was vindicatory a sign of much worse things to come. In perpetrating a host of such ghastly â€Å"medical and scientific experiments,” Mengele was of course being an independent member of a larger cohort of wanton butchers.\r\nThese Nazi doctors most brazenly forsook their Hippocratic blighter and armed themselves with scalpels, forceps, and needles in inflicting immeasurable wound and torture on hundreds of thousands of innocent people, a significant portion of them being children. Mengele on a regular basis mailed the results of his research on twins to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. There scientists analyzed the samples of blood obtained earlier death and the organs obtained after dissection.\r\nIt was a systematic, organized and purposeful enterprise. Though some of these doctors collected scientifically valid info and many of the experiments were expressions of pure pathological sadism, the Nazi doctors justified their acts of torture and inhumanity as attempts to improve German medicine and advance science. Mengele himself, through his research on twins, stargaze of being able to genetically mastermind a flawless race.\r\nThe ultimate finishing was to produce an ideal race of Indo-European men and women endowed with only the finest genetic traits, who would rapidly multiply and rule the world. (Lagnado, Dekel 61) Of the more or less 350 doctors who are estimated to have committed medical crimes, only about 20 doctors and 3 assistants were brought to justice in Nuremberg (Spitz 50). Some others were tried, and sentenced to in American military trials at Dachau.\r\n dormant many doctors break loose, including one who would become the most infamous of them all, Dr. Josef Mengele. Human experiment incomplete arose with the Nazis, nor ended with them; however, the history of human experimentation in the West is usually shared into two eras: before the Nazis and after. Mengele is by no means such a marvellous aberration as he may appear to be at first. Nazi doctors perpetrated some of the most horrendous actions during the tierce Reich, but the shadows of Auschwitz and Nuremberg are long.\r\nThough Mengele escaped scot-free, we at least know about his evil deeds; there may be many others of his ilk resilient today and even working in collaboration with reputed organizations whose work we may never even come to know. Works Cited Cefrey, Holly. â€Å"Doctor Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death” pertly York : The Rosen issue Group, 2001 Lagnado , Lucette Matalon; Dekel, Sheila Cohn. â€Å"Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. ” New York : Penguin Books, 1992 Lifton, Robert Jay. â€Å"The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the psychological science of Genocide” New\r\n'