Twins held a particular fascination for Nazi racial science, and a particular use within the medical experimental programme at Auschwitz. The standard scientific argument for studying twins is that identical twins share their genetic material, and any difference between them must therefore be the result of environment. Twin studies are a perfectly respectable corner of academic genetics today and were so before the war. What Josef Mengele did at Auschwitz was not twin study in any sense the wider scientific community would have recognised. It was a programme of experimentation that used the twins as paired subjects for whatever Mengele wanted to do, on the basis that he could be sure of having two genetically matched human bodies on which to do it.
Mengele’s selection
Mengele was not the only SS doctor on selection duty at the Auschwitz ramp, but he was the doctor most consistently interested in twins. He stood on the platform during many of the deportation arrivals and had Sonderkommando men call out for twins to come forward. Some twins were spotted by the doctor himself; others were brought to him by Sonderkommando who had been told to look for them. Mothers travelling with twin children were sometimes able to volunteer the children for Mengele’s programme as a means of saving them from the gas chambers, on the understanding that Mengele’s twins were not killed on arrival. Many of the post-war survivor accounts describe this moment of apparent reprieve.
The twins selected by Mengele were taken from their parents on the platform. Almost all of the parents went directly to the gas chambers. The twins were taken to a separate barracks in the Birkenau women’s camp, the Zwillingslager, even when the twins were boys.
The conditions in the twin barracks
The twin barracks held around 200 to 250 children at a time. By the standards of the rest of the camp, the conditions were dramatically better. The children were given more food, were not subject to the daily roll-calls in the same way, and were not put to forced labour. They were allowed to keep their own hair. Some were given clothes that were not the standard prisoner uniform. Mengele was reported by survivors to be friendly and charming with the children, often bringing them sweets, calling them by name, even making sure they had toys. The children called him uncle Mengele.
This is the most disturbing element in the recovered survivor testimony. Mengele’s warmth toward the children he was about to inject with disease, or to take to a laboratory and dissect, was not a deliberate cruelty. It was who he was. He treated the children kindly while doing what he intended to do to them. Several of the surviving twins describe the cognitive difficulty of holding both halves of him in their adult memory.
The experiments
Mengele used the twins for various experimental purposes. Some experiments were physical measurements: the children were measured, photographed and recorded in extensive detail, building a database of identical twin parameters. Some experiments were chemical: dyes were injected into the eyes of children to attempt to change their colour, blood transfusions were exchanged between twins, and various drugs were administered. Some experiments were infectious: one twin was deliberately infected with a disease, and the disease’s development was observed against the uninfected control. Some experiments were surgical: organs were removed, limbs amputated, joints fused.
The most disturbing pattern was that when Mengele wanted to dissect a twin, he killed both. The killing was done by injection of phenol directly into the heart, a standard SS execution method at Auschwitz. The two bodies were then dissected in parallel. The point was to compare the internal anatomy at the same moment of death, controlling for any difference that might be put down to time. Several survivors recall hearing the news that the other half of a friend’s pair had been killed and knowing what was about to happen to the friend.
The numbers
Around 1,500 pairs of twins, around 3,000 children in total, are estimated to have passed through the Mengele programme. Around 200 children survived to liberation, the highest rate of child survival of any category in Auschwitz. The records of the experiments themselves were largely destroyed by Mengele in the last weeks of the camp’s operation, and the post-war reconstruction relies almost entirely on the testimony of the surviving twins.
Mengele’s escape and death
Mengele was the most-wanted of the senior Nazi doctors after the war. He was held briefly by the Americans in 1945, who did not realise who they had, and released. He fled through Italy on the ratlines and reached Buenos Aires in 1949. He lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil over the following thirty years, often using his own name. He was protected by the local German emigre community and by his own family, who continued to send him money from Germany throughout. He drowned, of an apparent stroke while swimming, off the Brazilian coast in February 1979. His body was buried under a false name. He was identified after his family’s archive was searched in 1985 and his remains exhumed and confirmed by DNA testing in 1992. He had never been tried.
The post-war work of the surviving twins
Many of the surviving Mengele twins, as adults, became active in tracking down the records of the experiments and in giving testimony about what had been done to them. Eva Mózes Kor, who survived along with her sister Miriam, founded the organisation CANDLES in Indiana in 1984 to bring surviving twins together. She was prominent in the long campaign to identify Mengele and in the lobbying for his prosecution before his death. The collective testimony of the surviving twins, gathered over decades, is the main reason we know what happened in the Zwillingslager.
See also
Sources
- Lucette Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Flames, Morrow, 1991
- Eva Mózes Kor, Surviving the Angel of Death, Tanglewood, 2009
- Gerald Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, 1986
- USHMM: Josef Mengele