Mengele had a son, Rolf, who visited his father in Brazil in 1977 he had not seen his father since the ski holiday in 1956; He found an unrepentant Nazi who claimed he had never personally harmed anyone and only carried out his duties as an officer.

Rolf Mengele later claimed that his father had shown no remorse for his wartime activities.

He was known as the “Angel of Death” and used his position in Auchwitz to conduct experiments on childred especially twins (as that gave him a “control subject”) and pregnant women,

One of the twins would be subjected to live experimentation which included

• Uneccessary amputation of limbs and deliberate typhus contamination
• Injections of various chemicals in the eye to change it colour
• Experimentation into the effects of various chemicals
• Disection of live “patients” without anesthesia
• Frorced removal of kidneys without anedsthesia

In the case of twins when one died, the other would be killed for a comparative disection

He attempted to create a pair of Siamese Twins, by sewing two (normal) twins together inclusing conjoining thier blood system (they died of gangerene)

One one occassion he was witnessed personally killing 14 childred with lethal injections of Chloroform to the heart

So the description “bad guy” cannot be used, “sadistic monster” is far more appropriate

←———————————-

My answers seems to have dragged many holocaust deniers / those that wish to make it look like far less that it was - I am sorry but there is mountains of evidence to confirm what happened and the scale of it

If you want to minimise the holocaust - have the courage to open a thread and argue your case - do NOT contanimate my thread with your lies

My husband was in the slave labor camps 5 years. He was 13 when the NAZIs entered the Jewish quarter of Bedzin, Poland, broke into Aunt’s house and grabbed him. He was at his aunts to see his new baby cousin. The baby was grabbed too, stuffed into a gunney sack with some other screaming infants, who had been grabbed from other homes. On the way to a slave labor labor camp called ‘Bismarckhutte’ the NAZIs stopped the transport truck and threw the gunney sack full of babies into the Vistula River. At the camp there was no barracks for the prisoners. The prisoners were only allowed to build their barracks on the Sabbath. So they stood all night on the frozen ground, in a circle trying to keep warm, as it was below zero at night. The men shoved my husband into the middle of the circle because his grandfather had been a deeply revered intellectual. In the morning the circle’s outer ring of men were dead, frozen to death. The prisoners started their workday before dawn with a lineup. Men were often murdered in the lineup. My husband’s nose was bashed in with a rifle butt as the Kapos were hunting for a boy who had traded something for a shoelace. When the boy revealed himself, they hanged him in front of the lineup. That sort of murder and worse, went on every day the five years he was a slave laborer in those camps. The camps were designed to work a man beyond his capacity and without enough food until he died. They were death camps. Men in desperation threw themselves on the electric fence surrounding the camp when they could bear no more. One NAZI architect attached to their building project somehow saw my husband for what he was, a little boy, so passed him every day and dropped some food on the ground near him, for three years.

Here is a photo of his last concentration camp jacket. I have kept it all these years. …to go on: He would not have survived without that food. If they had been caught, both would have been shot. That NAZI was a man, when the rest of the NAZIS and their Polish helpers were not. The Nazi architect and my husband never spoke so I don’t know this righteous man’s name…. The men and boys were worked from dawn to dusk, whipped, kicked, beaten, shot, struck, they lived in constant terror. They all had lice and diarrhea. They were fed a starvation diet of watery soup, all the time physically sick, thinking dead people might have been put in the soup by the NAZIS. Indeed, corpses sometimes were nibbled upon during the night by some of the starving. My husband lived in this agony five years and at the end, when the Russians were coming, was forced on the death marches by the fleeing NAZIs. They marched right along with civilians fleeing also toward the West. These prisoners were often seen by the civilians, who did nothing. If a man fell or sat down he was shot. My husband weighed 78 lbs at the end of the death march. By the end of the death march he was in Germany when the allies broke through. When the Americans came to his barracks one of the officers ordered an enlisted man to pick up my dying husband and take him to the military hospital where they transfused his blood. He was so near death the man ran. Others weren’t so lucky. They walked out of the camps, stuffed themselves on food and died as their bodies could not adapt so fast. …My husband became a scientist and a physician in the USA. But that is another story.

Addendum: Many people have asked me how Michael survived in Bismarkhutte slave labor camp on the starvation rations when he was 13 years old and still growing. He did not. I referred to a Nazi who helped him survive, so here is a detailed account, of that story:

Shortly after Michael was enslaved in the Bismarkhutte concentration camp he began, like all the other slave laborers, to slowly starve to death. The prisoners worked from morning to night at hard labor, exposed to the raw elements and were fed, it is estimated, 900 or less calories a day.

For some unknown reason, a Nazi officer who was one of the architects in charge of construction, looked at Michael and only saw a starving child, not the ridiculous Nazi stereotype of a Jew.

One day the Nazi officer walked by Michael. As he passed nearby he dropped something on the ground and kept walking on without looking back. Michael quickly bent over and picked up what turned out to be meat wrapped in bread. Michael immediately gobbled it down. This Nazi, whenever he was working, managed to drop meat and bread near Michael for three years! If he and Michael had been caught by other NAZIs doing this, both would have immediately been shot. Michael and this righteous man never spoke, never knew each other’s names. This is my way of honoring that heroic man here, by sharing his tale of heroism with Quora readers.

Finally, Michael had to live the rest of his life the size of a 13 year old boy as his body could not grow on the little food it had those five years.

I found this photo of boys in Bedzin Poland before my husband was rounded up and enslaved in Bismarkhutte. He is the boy standing out a bit from the others, the fifth one in line not counting the shoulder of one boy out of the frame. Note the Star of David on the boy’s right arms.

Creepy as hell. From what I understand, he displayed no outward aggression or hostility most of the time. In fact, he purposely and carefully crafted friendships with the children of the camp - even getting them to refer to him as "Uncle Josef". He would appear as a father figure in this way, comforting children and lulling them into a false sense of security. He would often give the younger ones candy, be very friendly and outwardly appear to run a “normal” medical facility.

Until he was ready for his experiments, that is, and sliced them open alive with a rusty blade and no anesthetic. Or else force-feeding them poison, human waste, etc. slowly enough for him to observe all possible disease as it occurred. He would leave them to die after torture, without anesthetic, suffering to their last breath. He would stick needles in the eyes of the children and inject experimental chemicals, trying to see if he could change eye color. He also sewed identical twins together with no sterilization procedures, painkillers or anything else to ease the extreme pain and suffering. They would suffer with severe infections and die a slow painful death. Some of his experiments are too gruesome to go over, even here. I think I would be sick if I had to go into detail.

I'm sorry for being so graphic, but as this IS the question and my response is quite shockingly the truth without sugar-coating it, it's unfortunately necessary. I can tell you one thing - if the Devil does exist, he was undoubtedly Josef Mengele.

My grandmother was a prisoner at Aushwitz. Her sister was pregnant and they were separated. For some reason my grandmother claims that she "knew" that something bad was going to happen and that if she didn't act now she would never see her sister again. My grandmother has had a lot of stories about her life that have elements that are supernatural, unexplainable. How she sometimes just knows things that there's no possible way she could know. So at this point I'm just guessing somehow god gave her that feeling and made her know these various things. Anyways she knew she needed to act. She saw this well dressed, good looking officer surrounded by soldiers reporting to him so she figured that was the guy in charge. She walked over to him, unfortunately the soldiers around him didn't want her to talk to him and started beating her but somehow she pushed through them, all bruised and bloodied, crawling she kissed this officer's boot and begged him to let her sister come with her and not to separate them. He was apparently impressed by her ability to endure the beatings of his soldiers and probably figured something along the lines of "They're gonna die anyways. Why not let them die together?" and granted my grandmother's request. They were led to the barracks that would be their homes for the next few years. Later found out that her sister was in the line to be gassed. My grandmother had been 16 at the time while her sister was 20. After the war while reading reports about the concentration camps, she came across writings about a doctor, named Mengele, who had performed inhuman experiments on Jewish and Roma prisoners. It had a picture of Dr. Mengele, and she realized that he was the officer that had let her sister live all those years ago. I asked her what she thought of Mengele, if she hated him and such once. She told me that she had forgiven him because he had saved her sister.

I talked to a Holocaust survivor once, a little old woman. We exchanged pleasantries. But then I got right to the point. I told her that, if I put myself in France or Belgium during that time period, I would like to believe I would be brave and hide Jews so they couldn’t be taken away to concentration camps, but if the Germans threatened my wife, my children, I’m ashamed to admit I would turn the Jews in to save my family. I told her how ashamed I was to admit to myself that I would not be brave or righteous; I would be a coward and conform.

She got teary eyed and gripped me by the arm with her bony hand and said, “Thank you for telling the truth. I am so goddamn tired of everybody who’s had an easy life thinking they would be brave. God bless you for telling the truth. Now I will tell you something. Sometimes, to stay alive, we would do anything, ANYTHING, to live, even if it meant violating everything, even if it meant someone else died. Sometimes I was brave. Sometimes I was not. It is survivors remorse. I carry it all the days of my life to my grave. Then she excused herself to be alone.

PANIC. Nothing but panic.

Have you ever drowned? Have you ever been in the gas chamber in army training? Have you ever panicked because your body NEEDED oxygen? That's what it was.

Prisoners were shoved into a room with fake shower heads, and lights on. When everyone was inside, the door behind them was shut, sealed, and locked from the outside.

The lights were then shut off. When fear began to arise, someone from the roof would open a small hatch which would release outside light into the chamber. People would hope. But Zyklon B pellets were poured, then sealed.

People couldn't see the gas, it was dark. There was no light. Just people panicking.

Next, people didn't know what was happening. But everyone tried inhaling oxygen as normal, but a sharp burning pain was being inhaled. People choked. People screamed and panicked. People literally clawed at the walls. Some people tried climbing on top of others to get the oxygen which was rising to the ceiling. But within minutes, nothing could be done. People were trapped inside a dark crowded room, choking on a toxic agent.

This didn't happen quickly either. This went on for minutes. Some people passed out, some were coughing and feeling their lungs burn, trying to breathe to get at least some oxygen. But after several minutes, death was inevitable. The bodies were dragged out and thrown into crematoriums.

I once read a story when the Nazis ran an experiment with an unknown gas agent. They threw 3 men into a sealed room. Upon releasing the gas, the first man died instantly. The second one felt sick and died later in the day. The third one survived until the next day. But was coughing up blood and pieces of his lungs.

The gas chambers weren't what you think. It's in our instinct to want to see, to have situational awareness. All of that is taken away in the gas chambers. The next thing taken away, is your oxygen supply. Then, your life. Rest In Peace to those who lost their lives to the Nazi Regime.

This is a section of the barbed wire fence surrounding the primary concentration camp of Dachau, just north from München, south Germany.

It is electrical, so touching it would likely electrocute you.

Heres a (cleaned up) section of beds from one of the barracks:

They are not long enough to stretch out in, and prisoners would share beds like this, several persons per bed. One thin bedsheet per bed, changed every two months.

Walls are thin, with no insulation or heating. The roof is not waterproof.

Food in 1934 was 500g of bread per day, two cups of tea called “coffee”, and one portion of vegetable / potato soup at lunch. Later, portions became smaller.

Every day is used for hard manual labour, typically 9 hours per day with no breaks except a short lunch break.

Prisoners are sectioned, and depending on work, conditions may be harder. The lowest don’t get aforementioned bedsheet, and are most often subjected to random - and violent - beatings by drunken guards.

Just west of the main camp was this building.

You could easily see the smoke from the chimney in the camp. This is the crematorium. Here are some of the ovens:

There are several reports of prisoners still moaning just before being pushed into the ovens

You are not on Earth anymore. You are in a place where every description of Hell sounds like a beautiful dream long gone. Everyone around you look as you; skin, bones and a broken spirit.

You cannot imagine the suffering.

Remember the barbed wire fence at the top? Conditions were so indescribably cruel that prisoners regularly would walk towards the fence, and if they were not shot, they would die from electrocution on the fence.

Look at it again.

What place would make people so desperate that some dreamt of leaning at the barbed wire, but didn’t have the stamina to get there?

The atmosphere changes:

(Picture I took)

Once you enter through the gate, any happy thoughts seem to fade and you’re met with an overwhelming sensation of death.

You just KNOW that the majority of the people that walked through that gate died in that very same place.

The birds barely chirp. All you hear is the the scraping of footsteps. People barely talk. Even if they talk, they keep their voices down. You don’t hear laughter AT ALL. You don’t see anyone smile AT ALL.

You see, outside of Auschwitz, there are little shops spread out. Book shops and a lot of food places. There is some chatter. But the minute you enter the camp, there is no chatter.

When entering the gas chamber, it is so quiet there (unless some teens are giggling).

They weren’t useless.

Sure, their results were pretty much useless. But he performed these experiments for a reason.

Josef Mengele did these experiments for the sake of the Aryan Race and to study hereditary subjects for his research.

He injected blue dyes into people’s eyes in hopes of changing the eye color to blue, studying if physical Aryan traits can be produced artificially.

He would kill people that had 2 different eye colors so he can remove them and study them.

He experimented on twins to study hereditary traits. If one twin died from the experiment, the next one would be killed. He would then dissect them and study “what went wrong.”

Those experiments were useless as they did not prove anything or bring satisfying results. But they weren’t useless to him. He did it for his own research. That’s why he did them.

Eva Mozes Kor and her identical twin, Miriam Mozes is one of the pair of twins who survived the sick experimentation of Dr. Mengele.
In 1950 Eva and Miriam received visas for Israel and went there. In 1952, they both joined the Israeli Army. Eva studied drafting and Miriam became a nurse. In 1960, Eva married an American tourist, Michael Kor, also a concentration camp survivor.
Eva Mozes Kor is the author of books on her experience and she has spoken to over 400 schools, universities, conferences, synagogues, and civic groups.
As adults, Eva and Miriam suffered serious health problems. Eva suffered from miscarriages and tuberculosis. Her son had cancer. Miriam's kidneys never fully developed and she died in 1993 of a rare form of cancer, probably brought on by the unknown medical experiments and injections which she was subjected to at the hands of Josef Mengele.

Full statistics for the tragic fate of the children who died in the Holocaust will never be known. Some estimates range as high as 1.5 million murdered children. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped children - plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, they lived and died during the dark years of WW2 and were victims of the Nazi regime.

Dr. Josef Mengele, a physician and SS officer, is notorious for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates, particularly twins, at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.

These experiments were part of the broader Nazi effort to advance their racist and pseudoscientific theories and to further their goals of Aryan supremacy and eugenics.

Mengele's experiments were conducted without regard for the well-being or humanity of the victims and resulted in immense suffering and death.

Some of the infamous twin experiments conducted by Josef Mengele include:

Genetic Studies:

Mengele conducted various genetic experiments on twins to study hereditary traits and attempt to prove Nazi racial theories.

He often subjected twins to physical examinations, measurements, and comparisons.

Twin-to-Twin Transfusions:

Mengele performed blood transfusions between twins to study the effects and compatibility of different blood types.

These experiments were carried out without anesthesia and often resulted in severe complications and even death.

Sewing Twins Together:

In one particularly gruesome experiment, Mengele attempted to create conjoined twins by sewing twins together in various ways, such as attaching their blood vessels or organs.

These experiments were incredibly painful and almost always led to infections and death.

Experiments on Eye Color:

Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of twins to change their eye color, attempting to prove that eye color could be altered through artificial means.

Sterilization and Castration:

Mengele conducted experiments involving sterilization and castration, often without anesthesia, to study the effects on reproduction and to further Nazi eugenic goals.

Experiments on Infectious Diseases:

Twins were intentionally infected with diseases like typhus and other pathogens to study their progression and treatment.

Many of these experiments resulted in severe illness and death.

These experiments were carried out with a complete disregard for the well-being and dignity of the victims.

Many of the twins subjected to these experiments suffered greatly, both physically and emotionally, and a significant number died as a direct result of Mengele's actions.

Dr. Josef Mengele, or perhaps more fittingly, "The Butcher," was stripped of his medical license after his heinous crimes were exposed.

Yet, even in exile, he continued to practice medicine illegally.

Known as the "Angel of Death," Mengele exhibited severe psychopathic traits and became infamous for performing gruesome surgical procedures on his victims, such as amputating healthy limbs without anesthesia, sewing twins together to create conjoined twins, and injecting chemicals into their eyes to change their color.

According to the memoirs of Dr. Gisella Perl, a German Jewish physician forced to work alongside Mengele, she witnessed his chilling indifference to human suffering.

She recalled how he would muffle the agonizing screams of his victims with classical music.

One harrowing account details Mengele cutting a baby from the womb of a Roma woman while she was fully conscious and without anesthesia.

Her screams did nothing to faze him; he remained focused and composed, even as the woman bled out on the operating table.

Mengele's cruelty extended to random acts of violence.

He beat a 14-year-old Jewish girl with his fists for no apparent reason.

Described as generally calm, elegant, and soft-spoken, yet prone to sudden bursts of rage, he would often shoot or beat inmates to death.

Mengele's justification, according to his son Rolf, was that he was "saving" these people.

He claimed that by using them as "lab rats," he spared them from the gas chambers and believed he should be thanked for offering them a chance at survival.

In his warped mind, the Jews he experimented on were "dead anyway" and thus had no real chance of survival outside of his cruel experiments.

The vast majority of Mengele’s victims did, in fact, die in excruciating agony.

The excruciating pain of amputations without anesthesia, or being injected with deadly poisons to observe their effects, is unimaginable.

Mengele’s obsession with children, particularly Jewish twins, is a dark chapter in his brutal legacy.

These children were treated as expendable lab rats, a reflection of Mengele’s complete disregard for humanity—a chilling hallmark of his psychopathic nature.

They were too horrifying to be disturbing.

The man on the image is Joseph Mengele, or Dr. Mengele. He would spark his career as a medical researcher in the 30’s, but before he did, he joined the SS. After he was injured, he looked for a position in concentration camps as a medical researcher. So, he was assigned to be in Auschwitz to conduct experiments.

He conducted many types of experiments. On the healthy, the young, other races, etc. However, the experiment on twins is what is he mostly known for. It was not for what he found, but how people portrayed his works. Some painted his experiments as very disturbing, cruel, ruthless, and perhaps heartless. This almost seemed as if he was willing to find the answers, no matter the cost. The results of his experiments were almost always dead patients, patients sent to gas chambers, and twins surviving (very few cases). Through his works on thousands of people, he was referred to as the ¨Angel of Death¨.

His goal on these experiments is to find the secrets of heredity or find the answer as to why people are physically different. He always had interest on the research and less on the health of the patients. He would do anything to uncover the solution, even as to poke a needle into a child’s eyeball to see if it changed colors. If he were to discover the answer, he would have accomplished one of the things Hitler wanted within his regime: a population of only blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.

At the end of the war, allied nations chased fleeing Nazis as if they were rats. However, some got away along with their crimes, and Mengele was one of those. The allies did have a chance to catch him, but instead let him go. Reason is that he was among other prisoners of war before the war ended, but since his name was not on the ¨Most Wanted¨ list, they let him go. He fled to South America where he lived the rest of his days without never getting caught.

I felt a very strange and unsettling feeling. I can’t describe it very well. I had read many books on Auschwitz and watched the Soviets documentary on the liberation of the camp. I thought I knew what my reaction would be. But as I stood at the entrance it hit me that 1.1 million people had been killed there. When it came to going through the gas chamber I had to tell my traveling companion there was no way I would go through it. I tried but there was no way. But the hardest was the ramp. It was where the people were told to go either right or left. And to think I was standing in that very spot.

So it's a good question.

In answer, I can offer no personal experience, of course. I have no better recommendation to give than to read what Shlomo Venezia, a Jew from Thessaloniki, who was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, had to say on the matter.

He survived the initial selection due to his youth and good health. His mother and two sisters perished. He himself ended up working in the Sonderkommando in Birkenau.

The responsibility of the Sonderkommando was to deal with those who were destined for the gas chambers - preparing them to go in, helping them to undress, shepherding them in, and then, after the SS workers had gassed the victims to death, carrying the corpses out, shaving their heads and loading the bodies into the ovens of the crematoria, or burning them in open air pits.

Finally, they had to clean out all of the vomit, blood, piss and shit, so that the gas chambers would appear neat, clean and safe for the next group.

The whole Sonderkommando was itself selected and consigned to the gas chambers, by the SS, on a regular basis. So very few of these workers survived. To my knowledge Venezia's account is the only existing complete report from a witness who survived the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. There are interviews of other Sonderkommando survivors too, but they are much more fragmentary than Venezia's story.

After the war Sonderkommando survivors were regarded as being akin to collaborators by many writers on the events of the Shoah, and for this and other reasons, they tended to be very unwilling to talk about their experiences. They had better conditions than the majority of inmates, better food and better sleeping arrangements. But their life expectancy was very short, and they knew that - if there were any lull in the arriving stream of transport trains - they could all be put to death.

So to make a long story short, their situation was not at all pleasant. As Venezia said:

"During the first three weeks I was constantly stunned by the enormity of the crime, but then you stop thinking."

His testimony can be found in:

Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz

Shlomo Venezia (2011)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0745643841?cache=7d0389433ed50afb61269de7440395a5#ref=mp_s_a_1_1&qid=1392877395&sr=1-1

Actually, Mengele was working under the direction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (which has formally apologized for its role in the medical experiments), and the results of those experiments were sent by Mengele to the institute. Other doctors who worked in Auchwitz have said Mengele never told them anything about his work - it was kept secret. Unfortunately, the files have never been found, or at least they have never been made public.

While Mengele has been occasionally portrayed as a "pseudo scientist," the truth - that he was an intelligent, well educated doctor who was working under a respected institute - is more frightening. You can learn more by looking at posts from Eva Kor (a surviving Mengele twin) or Kiel Majewski, executive director of the Candles Holocaust Museum, an organization dedicated to the memory of the Mengele twins and other victims of the Nazi medical experiments.

I met an elderly German lady who came to my emergency department with abdominal pain. The Xray showed a bullet in her back, lodged by her spine.

I said to her “you have a bullet in your back!”

She smiled and said “That’s where the guard shot me when I escaped from Auschwitz”.

She had been one of the rare successful escapes. Most of those who went with her died before they were out of sight of the camp. She made it to a forested area and was cared for by ‘people’ (she didn’t say more about them) and then later made it overland to Holland and emigrated after the war.

She didn’t want to talk much about it and I didn’t press her. I got the impression it was terrifying, painful, cold and desperate.

No.

Mengele was a biological crank, like his boss Himmler. Mengele and Himmler were not respected scientifically because they were crazy. They were great believers in ‘Aryan Race Theory’ that was not quantitative and therefore not scientific.

However, German biologists made progress in Nazi Germany despite the crazies in the concentration camps. For instance, the electron microscope was invented in Nazi Germany. The German biologists also figured out many things in the way cells worked.

Discoveries weren’t made by those psychos in the camps, but real life biologists who had the misfortune of living at an interesting time of German history.

The Nazi regime greatly slowed down German biological research. The biology department heads were chosen by their ability to appease the Nazi officials.

‘Race theory’ was not endorsed by most German biologists. Most of the professionals endorsing ‘race theory’ were anthropologists and psychologists. These ‘science professionals’ often objected to the materialism of actual biological research. Real biologists often have to use physics and chemistry to analyze their systems.

Instead of Mengele or Himmler, let me discuss a German biologist who undoubtedly did make a valid contribution to biological science.

The best Nazi biologist was probably Konrad Lorenz. He won the Nobel prize after WWII for ethology, the study of animal behavior. The only ‘human experimentation’ that he did was administrating aptitude tests to a number of people, Polish and German. Much of his research on animal behavior is still considered valid. However, it is his experiments with human beings that are controversial because of the way the Nazis used it.

However, his conclusions were incorporated into Nazi propaganda. He made comments while not explicitly racist did suggest some sort of negative eugenics. He, of course, denied to the end of his days that he actually intended his conclusions to be used in a homicidal way. There are many skeptics who doubt he was as unaware as he claimed as to how his research was being used.

However, he did try to frame his conclusions in terms of race theory. He said that ‘antisocial people should be cut out of human society like a cancer.’ He never said the Jews or the Poles should be killed.

He also ‘proved’ that Poles were more enthusiastic but less organized than Germans. Again, the bare statement isn’t so offensive today. In Europe today, it would almost be funny, like a light hearted joke. However, the Nazi propagandists read this as, ‘Poles are subhuman.’

Foreign biologists would not share with the biologists in Nazi Germany because they couldn’t respect the racial theory.

Lots of Jewish biologists were kicked out of their biology departments. This didn’t do German research most goo. However, I should mention a Gentile biologist who was very good scientifically and was still kicked out of a German University. Let me discuss another ethologist, De Vries.

Von Frisch discovered the waggle dance of the bee. Con Frisch was persecuted by the SS for being a Jew, which is not very likely. Con Frisch did good work on insect behavior. However, his students informed on him because he didn’t try to teach race theory. He taught a course in genetics, probably including Mendels laws. Only a Jew would teach Mendel’s Laws over race theory, or so the students claimed.

The SS got him kicked out of the university for being a Jew, an accusation which most certainly wasn’t true. He did get back to the university, you may be glad to know.

<I corrected a mistake that I had made earlier. Somehow, I had conflated con Frisch with de Viers. It was con Frisch who discovered the waggle dance. It was von Frisch who was persecuted by his ‘politically aware Aryan students’. I edited the previous paragraph to say ‘von Frisch’ instead of ‘’de Viers.’>

The problem wasn’t the German biologists. The problem was the deans and managers that were put in charge of the biologists. The people that managed the biologists were chosen from hard core Nazis. Fortunately, they mostly left their Gentile biologists alone with regards to research. However, they couldn’t work very well with people outside Germany with these Nazi managers on their backs.

My information comes from a very good book on the subject. I carefully read:

‘Biologists Under Adolf Hitler’ by Ute Deichmann (circa 1975).

If you are interested in the subject, I strongly recommend this book.

This is a very difficult question to answer for a wide variety of reasons. One primary reason is because almost everyone reacts differently.

Also, I'm not sure “feel” is the right word because it can mean so many things. Feel is a very imprecise word.

One approach would be to examine things a visitor can and cannot control. For example, the visitor can do many things to prepare for the visit. I wrote a long detailed answer to a question about exactly that. If I recall, I listed 12 different activities so that your visit is a good one.

Interestingly, for me personally the impact was nuanced and not as emotional as I expected. Since I've studied Auschwitz so intensely nothing really surprised me per se. Yes, this building is in the right place, this fence is as seen in pictures, etc. There was no surprise element for me. I knew Auschwitz II Birkenau is huge, so I was not shocked as I'm sure most visitors are.

On a practical level the visitor’s feelings might be impacted by the quality of the guide, the weather, how crowded (2 million visitors in 2016) the camp is the day you visit, and which tour you pick. 90% of visitors pick the shortest tour, 3 1/2 hours. That is not nearly enough time to see two separate camps, plus you only see roughly 25% of Birkenau, the main killing center. Pick the five hour tour. Best advice I can give you. Also, if you can afford it, reserve a private guide for your group vs. being in a chaotic scrum of 30 trying to keep up with a guide who most definitely is keepin a tight schedule.

Carefully consider what you're viewing and what took place there between 1940 and 1945. Honor and remember the victims. That should be your only objective. It is about the victims and their memory. It's not really about you. Also, consider the depravity of man.

Do not pressure yourself and feel cheated if you don’t get a “"feeling.”

Side note - I've been to Auschwitz twice, the second time for nine days. I've also visited Treblinka twice.

There is a huge difference between the two camps. Auschwitz at times appears to be more tourist attraction than the largest graveyard in the world and the site of the greatest crime in human history. Treblinka is minimalist and uses a stark simplicity to convey a message of profound sorrow. My wife and I stood above the ashes of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

Remember, it's about the victims, not the visitor.

To put it simply, life in a concentration camp would be absolutely horrendous.

You would arrive in a small, hot and cramped train carriage full of other people - scared people. Many would die before they even arrived at the camp, because if these conditions. This alone could be described as hell.

Once you arrived at the camp, it wouldn't be uncommon for you to be organised into a line, where an officer would point left or right. One way would take you to the gas chamber. The other would send you to work. If you were strong, you worked to death. If you were weak, you were killed. Either way, you died horribly.

If you were sent to work, you would be underfed and overworked. You would die fairly quickly under such conditions. You did, if course, get to eat and rest - but you got very little food and time to sleep. These conditions can not sustain a human being, thus you would die quite painfully.

If you were sent to work, you would either die from being overworked or get sent to a gas chamber when you couldn't work anymore. If you were sent to a gas chamber, you would die straight away (after having all your possessions and hair removed).

This picture shows where you would sleep, and it is clear that this space can't accommodate the number of people inhabiting it. It is also clear that everyone present has been starved, and is suffering from severe malnourishment.

Like the first picture, this shows starved and malnourished people. It looks like it may have been taken during or after a liberation. Judging by the fact that they are all adult men, and are still alive, they were most likely workers.

So, to sum it up, conditions were horrendous.

I would ordinarily write an answer, but honestly just reading about it makes me want to vomit. I can't write anything deep and introspective, or helpful. I will offer these three pieces:

• This is a factual account of atrocities, including a discussion of his "favorite" twins who survived, Eva and Miriam Mozes (little girls at the time):

http://www.auschwitz.dk/eva.htm

• This is a fascinating interview from a pair of older twins who watched family members die in the Holocaust, went through the horrors of testing, had a horrific job, and nearly died in the winter evacuation march - but still speak of Mengele as though they had a crush in him ("he was the handsomest man"):

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/28/dr-mengeles-twins.html

• And a series of interviews with experiment survivors:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-02-07/news/8501080137_1_josef-mengele-israel-and-west-germany-auschwitz

Painful stuff, but you'll certainly learn quite a bit about this horrible time in human events.

Paint your kids' faces in kisses tonight, and extra hugs because you're lucky enough to be able to.

Kind regards,
Alexandra

It strikes me as extremely unlikely.

The impressions I get from Mengele are:

1. He was a sadistic monster, and
2. He was as mad as a box of frogs!!

Not only were many of his experiments appalling, but it's hard to see what useful conclusions you could draw from them.

Take the attempt to change people's eye colour by injecting them with dye.

The eye colour they're born with is obviously inherited by some means, just like every other characteristic. Well, perhaps you could change the colour later, by injecting dye to overlay the original colour, but so what? The occasional really wild tattoo artist might be interested in that, but I can't think of any other applications for that knowledge.

Sewing identical twins together to make them conjoined. This is major surgery that would probably fail simply because it was performed in primitive conditions on terrified, relatively undernourished and ill-prepared children by a single surgeon without much expertise. Is anybody out there actually surprised that the children died? There could be a number of reasons for their deaths - sepsis, tissue rejection, surgical shock, incompetence … we don't know which of these was responsible, so how can we learn?

The more I read about Nazi ideology, the more I think that, besides being evil, these people were raving mad! How could you trust anything you learned from nutters like that, even if you think it would be ethical to do so?

In the camps, doctors used to film some of the inmates doing everyday tasks (riding a bike, jumping, running on a treadmill, etc.) using x-ray cameras. Basically they would just leave the cameras running until the inmates died from radiation poisoning from the x rays.

Despite their horrific origins, the films provided a unique view (at the time) of how the human body actually worked, and they were used as a training aid for anatomy students up until around the mid sixties. Dr. Oliver Sachs (the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) was one of the students who campaigned against the use of the films in education on ethical grounds, but the insights they imparted had already been learned.

Some Nazi anatomists (such as Eduard Pernkopf) dissected prisoners and made extremely detailed anatomy drawings that are very ethically debated to this day, but paved the way for future doctors at the time.

I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. The tour starts with Auschwitz and terminates at Birkenau. Here are my feelings:

Camp Auschwitz

• This was the start. There was a little bit of apprehension and some excitement mixed in.
• As one starts looking at the barracks and buildings of Auschwitz, dread, anger, pity and shame sets in (even though I am Indian, I felt all these).
• When I saw the luggage bags, boots, hair, utensils, I felt nauseated.
• As more horror stories brought forth, it turned from surreal to real.
• When we were taken to Block 11, the Standing Cells, the Starvation Room, Yard of Block 11 and the wall of death, the feeling was just overwhelming; I mean I cannot describe them.
• All the while, our guide was narrating stories in a rather monotonous tone, no rhetoric, no emotion, no judgement, etc. She was trained to be that way because she is not allowed to describe the true horrors.
• At this point some ladies in our group were in tears and shock. I mean they expected something bad but not the true extent.

Camp Birkenau

• Unlike Camp Auschwitz where things are preserved like a museum, Birkenau or Auschwitz-II is an open vast grounds just with barracks.
• Birkenau was never a completed site; it was always work in progress
• As one passed thru the dreaded gate of Birkenau, we could somewhat visualise what the Jews must have felt

• We saw the typical wagon which carried Jews for days without food, water, latrine, weather protection (freaking hot or icy cold), etc.

• The camp had barracks that described the living conditions:

• And finally, we saw the dreaded gas chambers (remains) which were destroyed by retreating SS:

• It was just too much.

It is a visit that I will recommend for everyone. The pictures and words do not tell the complete story. The proof is overwhelming.

I hate the people who say that holocaust is a myth and deny it. I detest people who admire Hitler and Nazi ideology.

Here's how Rudolph Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler did it (from Rudolf Vrba):

On 7 April 1944, with the help of two other prisoners, they hid in a pile of wood between the inner and outer perimeter fences, sprinkling the area with tobacco soaked in gasoline to fool the guards' dogs.[22] According to Kárný, at 20:33 that evening, SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein, the Birkenau commander, was informed by teleprinter that two Jews had escaped.[23]
The men knew from previous escape attempts by others that, once their absence was noted during the evening appell (roll call), the guards would continue the search for three days. They therefore remained in hiding, in silence, for three nights and throughout the fourth day. Wetzler wrote in his memoir that they tied strips of flannel across their mouths and tightened them whenever they felt a tickle in their throats.[24] At 9 pm on 10 April, they crawled out of their hiding place and headed south toward Slovakia 80 miles (130 km) away, walking parallel to the Soła river

They made it to Slovakia where, sheltered by sympathetic Slovakians, they wrote the "Vrba/Wetzler report", detailing the death camps. Pressure from the publication of this report led to the Hungarian government, on 7 July 1944, suspending its deportations to Auschwitz: "By then 437,000 Jews had been deported, constituting almost the entire Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside, but another 200,000 living in Budapest were saved".

Again from Wikipedia:

Bratislava, c. June 1944. Vrba on the right, and on the left, Arnost Rosin, who escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May 1944. The man in the middle is Josef Weiss of the Bratislava Ministry of Health, who secretly made copies of the Vrba–Wetzler report, which the escapees hid behind a picture of the Virgin Mary in their rented apartment

The “Angel of Death” was personally in charge of the “Selection Process”

That is how my grandmother met Mengele. She looked perfectly healthy. BUT the women in her family have big breasts. So this monster wanted to be sure she wasn’t pregnant, or had just given birth. He grabbed each breast and CRUSHED them in his hands to see if any milk came out. None did. She survived 3 years of slave labor. The rest of her immediate family (20 people) did not.

For many years she would wake of screaming, because she could still feel these hands! Not a very monstrous story. Unless you consider that for years, this was his DAILY routine. “Perfectly normal”.

Footnotes

The comic “Maus” describes the life of one person who survived.

Essentially, people were driven out of the cattle cars to a point where children and people deemed to old or weak to work were moved to the left (in most reports), stripped naked and gassed. Those driven to the right were stripped, issued uniforms (probably taken off a dead prisoner), their hair was cut off, their possessions were taken and they were tattooed.

The barracks were horrible overcrowded, with five people to a bed. The latrine was inadequate to the task. Dysentery and typhus spread like wildfire in the barracks.

Awakened before dawn, they might have received “coffee” (a nasty tea made of who-knows-what) and forced to undergo a roll call. Those who died overnight had to be brought out to be counted — and woe to the barracks that did not make count! Then they marched to work, driven with whips, until they got there. Work began. Maybe they got a liter of “soup” midday, that is, hot water with a few vegetables in it. After a long day of work (usually dangerous or backbreaking) they were marched back, underwent roll call (which could go on for hours), and received their dinner: a small hunk of black bread adulterated with sawdust, maybe some oleo or marmalade, maybe a little sausage. “It was enough to make you die slower”, as Maus’ protagonist reported.

The above was a “good” day, without morning beatings, endless rollcalls, no cauldrons of watery soup dumped out at lunchtime for the lulz, no “calisthenics”, no SS men shooting randomly at prisoners or beating them without provocation and, above all, no “Selections”.

During “Selections”, inmates would be ordered to strip and run in front of a “doctor” who would single out the weak, to be marched to a gas chamber within days.

Perhaps on good day the victims had an hour or two to themselves, then it was lights out. A few hours later, the next day began.

Most prisoners died within a year, if not within two or three months. If the concentration camp did not kill them, there is a good chance that the death march toward Germany to get away from the Russians did.