Why was mengele obsessed with twins

The children coped with the appalling ordeal of Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments in different ways. Moti Alon, his mother and twin, eventually made their way back home, arriving in Budapest on 5 May He now lives in Israel.

Vera Kriegel emigrated to Israel with her mother after the war, where she lives today. Seventy years later, she still has nightmares. Jona Laks became an activist, the head of a group of Mengele twins. She has been back to Auschwitz many times, and says what she experienced there has never left her mind. Menachem, the boy with no name, eventually returned to his home town in Ukraine. Above all, he recalled his parents, carefree before the war and the Holocaust. I remember her from the back, not the front.

Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Image source, Rex Features. Mengele selected them for experimentation. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jona Laks describes how Mengele kept her alive so he could perform medical experiments on her. Less known was his active participation in ophthalmic research with equal disregard for life and ethical principles. Mengele was not an ophthalmologist, but he worked in close collaboration and complicity with two genetic researchers at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Karin Magnussen and Otmar Von Verschuer.

The objective of the eye color protocol was to demonstrate hereditary differences in iris structure determined by race and ostensibly to "cure" heterochromia. His prosperous family then aided his emigration to South America. He settled in Argentina. West German authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in , and a request for extradition in In declining health, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, Brazilian forensic experts thereafter positively identified the remains as Josef Mengele.

In , DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion. Mengele had eluded his captors for 34 years. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Featured Content. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics.

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Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. And he had a protege: a young physician named Josef Mengele. Like his mentor, Mengele was vehemently racist and a devoted member of the Nazi Party. In , he began working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a medical officer.

At first, Mengele was in charge of the Roma camp there, but in the entire remaining population of the camp was murdered in the gas chambers. Mengele was promoted to chief camp physician of the entire Birkenau camp, and became known for his brutal selections of incoming prisoners for the gas chambers.

Mengele wanted to continue the twin experiments he had begun with von Verschuer, and now he had a captive populace on which to do so. Though his earlier experiments had been legitimate, his work in Auschwitz-Birkenau was not. Abandoning medical ethics and research protocols, Mengele began conducting horrific experiments on up to 1, sets of twins, many of them children.

They were not selected for the gas chambers, lived in separate quarters, and were given additional food and medical care. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. Eugenics itself was rooted in twin research. For Galton and other eugenics researchers, twins held the key to understanding which characteristics were genetic and which ones were environmental.

Using data collected via self-reported questionnaires, Galton studied dozens of pairs of twins to determine how they were similar and different. He concluded that similarities between twins were due to their genetics.