Mengele's Twin Studies

German Nazi-science on the whole is disturbing to the majority of those reading about it today. What is the most disturbing piece of information out of all of it is that the Nazis were actual people committing these crimes, not aliens or some foreign beings who might have no connection to humanity. The idea that baffles many is the fact that humans can ruin other humans' lives and brainwash them so easily.

Josef Mengele played quite a large role in this. A physician in the Nazi camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mengele had the job of deciding who could die and who could be used for labor. Mengele was head of a "Gypsy" camp whose inhabitants later all got gassed, which led Mengele to achieve a higher position of power (Chief Medical Officer); this seems an odd way to gain power to any sane human being.

Mengele is most famous for his interest in twins, who furthered his studies in heredity. He used them to test diseases such as Noma, a disease primarily caused by malnutrition and weak immune systems (obviously prevalent in concentration camps). Often, Mengele would use one twin as a control and inject the other twin with something he thought caused such an infection. He would also try various amputations and to change the twins' eye colors by injecting them with foreign substances. Usually this was performed on children, which makes the matter seem even worse.

Was it good or bad that twins were sent to the concentration camps instead of the gas chambers? It seems like a Catch-22. Some mothers hid their twins, unsuspecting of what was to come next, and they would all end up in the gas chamber; other mothers would offer their twins at hearing the request (other requests were made as well for dwarves, giants, and other abnormal qualities). It seems that going to the concentration camp to be tested and tortured is not much better than getting gassed.

Mengele's experiments are a prime example of two simple questions that have plagued many people since the time of these concentration camps; how could anyone do such things to another human being, and how could anyone sit back and let it happen?