Medical Experiments

Several Nazi concentration camps also functioned as places of medical experimentation. Under the guise of researching new treatments or investigating racial eugenics, doctors conducted painful and often fatal experiments on thousands of prisoners without consent.

The man most commonly associated with the pseudo-medical experiments is Dr Josef Mengele, who arrived at Auschwitz in May 1943. Mengele had a particular obsession with twins and conducted experiments on around 1,500 pairs of siblings, many of them children. If one twin died, the other would also be killed so that Mengele could perform a comparative autopsy. Like many Nazi doctors, he regularly drew blood from his ‘patients’ until they fainted and administered previously untested medications to monitor their effects.

The Ovitzes were a Jewish family from Romania, made up of seven brothers and sisters who all had a particular form of dwarfism. On their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944, Mengele personally prevented their immediate gassing, as he was fascinated by anyone with a physical abnormality. However, the tortures to which this family was subjected had, like most of Mengele’s experiments, little or no medical merit. He poured freezing and boiling water in their ears and extracted teeth, eyelashes and hair. Their suffering was acute and they anticipated their eventual murder, but miraculously all seven survived.

Medical experiments also took place at other camps, including Ravensbrück, Mauthausen and Dachau. Sterilization techniques were tested on both male and female prisoners, particularly Jews and Romani, as were the effects of drinking seawater to see if could be made potable. Mauthausen inmates incapacitated as a result of such experiments were gassed at the nearby Hartheim clinic, which had been operational during the euthanasia programme.

When Auschwitz was liberated, several hundred children were found alive in the camp. Like the Ovitz family, their survival was due entirely to the fact that they had been guinea pigs in the twisted experiments of Mengele and the other doctors.

Children survivors of Auschwitz