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Josef Mengele

MENGELE, JOSEF (1911- ?). Camp doctor at Auschwitz extermination camp. ..appointed chief doctor in 1943 by Himmler ... joined other doctors (Koenig, Thilon, Klein) in the task of choosing employable Jews to operated the industrial machines and sending others to the gas chambers. The selection was haphazard. The inmates were paraded before Mengele, who called either "Right!" (work squads) or "Left!" (gas chambers). ...[he] promoted medical experimentation on inmates, especially twins ... supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create Siamese twins ... hands of the two children became badly infected where the veins had been resected.

Witnesses at the Frankfurt Trial told of [his] standing before his victims with his thumb in his pistol belt and choosing candidates for the gas chambers. When it was reported that one block was infected with lice, [he] solved the problem by gassing all the 750 women assigned to it.

Work Cited

Snyder, Dr. Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989. ISBN 1-55778-144-3

See also:

Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1991, for work relating to the experimentation Mengele carried out on twins, and his life after escaping to South America.

Posner, Gerald L, and John Ware, "Mengele: The Complete Story", New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1986. (Biography)