Josef Mengele Accomplishments

Most people go to the doctor when they are not feeling well, or have injured themselves. Josef Mengele was a doctor of some sort, except he took people to his hospital and instead of helping them feel better he made them sick and tortured them with inhumane experiments. Mengele was a cruel man who experimented on helpless newborns, twins, pregnant women, and more. He truly deserves the name “Angel of Death”.
First, let us start at the beginning of his life, and why he became such a horrible man. Josef was born on March 16th, 1911 to Karl and Walburga Mengele. His younger life was filled with the temperament and criticism of his mother, and his father was not much different, therefore “Josef described his mother as not capable of loving,” (Whitney
Fox 2003 ). Mengele’s father wanted Josef to work in the factory with him but he decided to study medicine at the University of Munich. He had already begun performing small and simple experiments and tests on twins, but at Auschwitz he was given full permission to perform the crueler and more inhumane experiments.
Consequently, his obsession with twins and their similarities continued to grow. “Mengele ran a butcher shop” a survivor of Mengele’s experiments, Alex Dekel, explained, “He was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given, nobody ever questioned him,”(auschwitz.dk 2017). Mengele treated the twins like they were his own children and then tortured and abused them with cruel tests, as if they were rats in his science lab. Just a few examples of his torture are ripping an arm off one Sandoval 2 twin and sewing it onto the other, making one sick to see how long they would live and then killing the other, and injecting chemicals into their eyes to try and change the color.
Every procedure that Mengele composed was done without anesthetics, causing very few of the original 3,000 twins of Auschwitz to survive. By all means, Josef Mengele was a horrible man and his experiments should never be used on anyone again, but they have proven useful in scientific research today. “Modern medical science has gained from his atrocities, but such a fact couldn’t be made public,” (Gilad 2017). For example one experiment would submerge the victims into ice water until they passed out and eventually died, thus giving us information on hypothermia and how to treat it. Mengele’s research was used by the Germans during the war to decrease the amount of soldiers lost in battle and increase their knowledge on illnesses and injuries. In conclusion, Josef Mengele was a cruel man who got away with everything he did. After the war Mengele moved to South America and changed his name to Gerhard. He later died of a stroke while swimming and was declared dead in 1979. Josef Mengele was a scientist with a twisted mind and too much power. He gave us important information, but was it worth all of the lives lost trying to get
it?