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Sewing Twins - Nazi Camp Experiments
Sewing Twins - Nazi Camp Experiments
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Untertitel (284)
0:00
A young girl, Eva, looks up at the doctor.
0:02
He’s furious today, stamping his feet and shouting, which makes many of the youngsters
0:06
cry.
0:07
He’s angry because two of his kids, his prisoners, died before he had a chance to
0:10
work on them.
0:11
He needs all the guinea pigs he can get.
0:13
Eva has seen things she can hardly comprehend.
0:16
Soon she will witness something that will sear her mind until she’s an elderly woman.
0:20
That is the doctor’s attempt to make conjoined twins.
0:23
Her name was Eva Mozes Kor, and she was one of the survivors.
0:26
A twin herself, she and her sister were experimented on at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
0:30
Two of her other sisters, as well as her parents, died in the gas chamber.
0:34
The Nazi doctor was Josef Mengele, a man that would become known as the Angel of Death.
0:38
We’ll tell you a little about him before we get to the experiments.
0:42
As you’ll see throughout this video, he was something of a shapeshifter.
0:45
During his student days, he was into music and the arts.
0:47
He was studious.
0:48
He was bright.
0:49
He also developed increasingly nationalistic beliefs as he got older, in line with traditional
0:53
values characterized by the Völkisch movement.
0:56
In short, he was a racist.
0:57
That racism would define his entire life.
0:59
The bright young chap went on to study medicine, showing a particular interest in human genetics
1:04
and physical anthropology.
1:05
In case you didn’t know, the latter is related to the development of humans through evolutionary
1:09
history.
1:10
You can already see how this man began to embrace the Nazi ideology of a superior race.
1:15
In 1937, he joined the Nazi Party and later became part of the SS, a paramilitary organization
1:20
which in German was called the Schutzstaffel.
1:22
He served in the armed forces for a while after the outbreak of war, later joining the
1:26
SS Race and Settlement Main Office.
1:29
This division was tasked with “safeguarding the racial 'purity'” of those in the SS.
1:33
His responsibilities there were to ensure “genetic health” and also administer “genetic
1:38
health tests.”
1:39
The Nazi Party did not want its own procreating with people it deemed impure.
1:43
Wives and finances of SS members were investigated to ensure this didn’t happen.
1:47
Mengele firmly believed in genetic superiority.
1:49
He embraced the study of eugenics, which, if you’re not familiar with it, relates
1:53
to the attempt to create a healthier future generation by condoning selective interbreeding
1:58
with people who have certain genetic characteristics.
2:00
The doctor believed he could further his study of genetics by experimenting with humans.
2:05
All he needed were test subjects, and those he got when he was made chief physician at
2:08
Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943.
2:12
When he got there, masses of people had already died in the gas chambers.
2:15
Around 75 percent of them were those deemed unfit to work.
2:18
They were mainly women, children, and frail, and the elderly.
2:21
Part of Mengele’s job was to select which people went to the gas chamber and which people
2:25
didn’t.
2:26
The vast majority of the 960,000 Jews that were sent there went to the gas chamber.
2:30
As did the majority of the Roma, the ethnic Poles, and the Soviet prisoners of war.
2:35
Many not immediately slaughtered were forced to work.
2:37
They were also experimented on, along with the children.
2:40
Part of Mengele’s job was treating sick inmates and Nazi personnel, doing what doctors
2:44
generally do.
2:45
He was more than just a demented Nazi arch-criminal.
2:47
One historian wrote, “Mengele’s outsize reputation as a medical monster is inverse
2:52
proportion to what is known and understood about what he actually did.”
2:55
There is no question that inmates endured horrendous tortures and often died when they
2:59
were experimented on.
3:00
They were subjected to deadly air pressure.
3:02
They were left out in the freezing cold and dangerously heated up.
3:05
Women had their muscles and nerves removed.
3:07
Children had limbs removed.
3:09
People were deliberately given deadly blood infections.
3:11
All manner of indescribable things happened to them.
3:14
This was at the hands of many different people, but it’s Mengele’s name that has stood
3:17
the test of time.
3:19
This is mainly down to his experiments on children and his obsession with twins.
3:22
To us he was a beast, but he believed he was riding on the cutting edge of medical science.
3:26
The camp gave him the opportunity to do what he thought were great things – albeit within
3:30
the parameters of depraved Nazi ideology.
3:33
In his owns words, after the war, he said he didn’t invent the camps and just worked
3:37
in them.
3:38
His son even said, “He couldn’t help anyone.
3:40
On the platform for instance.
3:41
What was he to do, when the half-dead and infected people arrived?”
3:45
But get this.
3:46
His son also said, “The twins owe their lives to him.”
3:48
He did choose twins for his experiments, which may have saved them from the gas chamber.
3:53
It’s now understood that he founded a kindergarten and played violin for the kids there.
3:57
That’s one reason he was sometimes called “uncle” by the kids.
4:00
They couldn’t have known about medical experimentation at the beginning.
4:03
A former inmate doctor later said, “He could be playful, jumping about to please them.
4:07
The twin children frequently called him Uncle Pepi.”
4:09
This is what another inmate doctor once said about him:
4:12
“He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him,
4:16
to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we
4:20
would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that, ... the crematoria smoke, and these
4:24
children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there.”
4:28
Mengele didn’t work alone, far from it.
4:30
When kids’ hearts were injected with chloroform, or when children were purposefully infected
4:34
with disease, or even when young ones had their eyes injected with dye, he was part
4:38
of a team, sometimes working under the auspices of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute.
4:42
It would be a mistake to blame him for all the atrocities committed in the name of medical
4:46
science, but when it comes to experimenting on twins, that was certainly his very own
4:50
sphere.
4:51
But why twins, you might ask?
4:52
No one is exactly sure, but it’s thought that Mengele was interested in learning a
4:56
few things.
4:57
He believed twins might teach him more about the inheritance of genes.
5:00
He was also interested in how twins reacted individually to specific experiments.
5:04
It’s thought the overarching reason for the experiments was simply the Nazi’s view
5:08
that there was a superior race.
5:10
Some people have said Mengele wanted to understand if there was a possibility of giving what
5:14
the Nazis thought were “racially superior” couples more chance of having superior twins.
5:19
Around 200 pairs of twins survived from as many as 15000 pairs.
5:24
Others died when their hearts were injected with phenol so they could subsequently be
5:27
dissected.
5:28
Survivor Jona Laks said, “Mengele removed organs from people without anesthetic, and
5:32
if one twin died the other would be murdered.”
5:35
The reason for that was the doctor wanted to know not only how they compared in life,
5:39
but what happened to each of their bodies after they died.
5:41
At one point, according to the testimony of an inmate assistant, he killed 14 twins in
5:45
one night.
5:46
That testimony read, “He injected the evipan into her right arm intravenously.
5:50
After the child had fallen asleep, he felt for the left ventricle of the heart and injected
5:54
10 cc. of chloroform.”
5:56
He said the twin twitched and died soon after.
5:58
All 14 went the same way that night.
6:00
In another case, Mengele took two gypsy twins aged seven and studied them.
6:04
They had problems in their joints, which he said was tuberculosis.
6:07
The radiologist didn’t agree.
6:09
Enraged, Mengele took the twins into another room.
6:11
When he returned, he said to the radiologist, “You are right.
6:14
There was nothing.”
6:15
He’d shot them both and dissected them.
6:16
Prior to that, the twins arguably had the best life of any prisoner at Auschwitz - not
6:20
that that was saying much.
6:22
Those twins had been favorites of Mengele, as one man later said, they were “spoiled
6:25
in all respects” and they “fascinated him considerably.”
6:28
Some kids were able to play soccer, and most were fed well compared to other prisoners
6:32
in the camp.
6:33
Some of them got to keep their own clothes as well as the hair on their heads.
6:36
One twin survivor later said he felt “completely elevated, segregated from the hurly-burly
6:40
of the camp.”
6:41
These reports conflict with others, though.
6:43
For instance, twins Ephraim and Menashe Reichenberg said they were transported in a packed train,
6:49
and when the train stopped, they heard the call, “Zwillinge raus”, “twins out”.
6:53
They were told to stay in a certain line, and they would stay alive.
6:56
At the camp, they were stripped, shaved, disinfected, and given prisoner uniforms with the numbers
7:00
B-10506 and B-10507.
7:03
They said there were about 1,000 kids at that time, mostly twins and dwarfs.
7:08
The boys had noticeably different voices.
7:10
This piqued the interest of Dr. Mengele.
7:12
Their necks were injected with an unknown substance in one experiment, which led to
7:15
“swelling, high fever, muteness, and a state of exhaustion for several days.”
7:20
Menashe died as a result of the experiments in 1946, after he was freed from the camp.
7:24
Ephraim later moved to Israel after returning to Budapest to discover all his family was
7:28
dead.
7:29
He became a bus driver.
7:30
Life was ok.
7:31
But because of the experiments, he had continual breathing and swallowing problems, which led
7:35
to him not being able to talk at all.
7:36
In later life, he told his devastating story through an artificial voice amplifier.
7:40
All the children were subject cases more than they were humans.
7:43
Identical twins were always being measured and analyzed.
7:46
For hours at a time, they had to sit through various procedures, including having material
7:50
inserted into their spines and spinal taps.
7:53
This is what Jona Laks said she saw when it was her first time to be experimented on in
7:57
Mengele’s lab: “I was looking at a whole wall of human
8:00
eyes.
8:01
A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes.
8:03
These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down
8:06
on the floor.”
8:07
Mengele was obsessed with the inheritance of eye color.
8:09
Laks said she was given injections in her back, but she never knew why.
8:13
She and many other twins were also injected with the gangrenous condition, Noma, which
8:17
after making some kids very sick, killed them.
8:20
Eva Mozes Kor said she witnessed young boys who’d had their sex organs removed.
8:24
She later said she believed it was Mengele’s attempt to change the sex of the boys.
8:27
She also said this: “A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from
8:30
Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to back.
8:32
Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs.
8:36
The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.”
8:41
No one is going to doubt that twins were horrifically experimented on in those camps, and some of
8:45
them died, often in agony.
8:47
But, an article published in 2020 by the New York Times asserts that there is as much fact
8:51
as there is fiction when it comes to Mengele.
8:53
Here is a snippet from that article: “Given his alleged omnipotence, grotesque
8:57
and untrue accusations — that Mengele had attempted to create Siamese twins by sewing
9:01
together a pair of twins, or that he had attempted to make boys into girls and vice versa — were
9:05
circulated.”
9:06
The same newspaper back in 1985 told a story that involved Mengele shooting a mother and
9:11
a child when the mother refused to be separated from him.
9:13
Mengele was reportedly so mad, he had a change of mind and sent all the people he’d previously
9:18
chosen to survive to be sent to the gas chamber.
9:21
That certainly sounds like someone capable of other horrors.
9:23
But, were some of the stories exaggerated?
9:25
Here’s another account from Eva Mozes Kor: “One of the twins, who was 19 years old,
9:30
told of experiments involving a set of teenage boys and teenage girls.
9:33
Cross transfusions were carried out in an attempt to make boys into girls and girls
9:37
into boys.
9:38
Some of the boys were castrated.
9:40
Transfusion reactions were similarly studied in the adolescent twins.”
9:43
In 1992, the US Department of Justice released a lengthy report on Mengele, alleging he had
9:47
done such terrible things and a lot more we haven’t discussed today.
9:51
The report states, “an exchange of blood was repeatedly made between the individual
9:55
twins of a pair” adding that some twins died as a result.
9:58
We could find no mention of experiments involving sewing twins together.
10:01
A survivor and camp warden named Vera Alexander can maybe fill in some gaps.
10:06
She once said of the doctor, “Every day Mengele came, and every day he brought some
10:09
toys, sweets, chocolates, and new clothes.”
10:12
She also said she witnessed how Mengele had impregnated one twin with the sperm of another
10:16
twin.
10:17
He pampered her, and he was there at the birth.
10:18
Alexander said when he saw only one baby and not twins, he threw the baby in the incinerator
10:23
and just “walked away.”
10:24
Part of Alexanders’s job was taking care of 50 sets of Romani twins.
10:28
This is what she said she saw one day about one particular pair of twins:
10:32
“Mengele took them away.
10:33
When they returned, they were in a terrible state — they had been sewn together, back
10:36
to back, like Siamese twins.
10:38
Their wounds were infected and oozing pus.
10:40
They screamed day and night.
10:41
Then their parents — I remember the mother's name was Stella — managed to get some morphine
10:45
and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.”
10:48
There is also this account from Eva Kor: “A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from
10:52
Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to back.
10:54
Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs.”
10:58
She said they screamed day and night until gangrene killed them.
11:01
These are the only two accounts we can find which talk about Mengele trying to make conjoined
11:04
twins.
11:05
The experiments are perhaps the very nadir of what the doctor did.
11:09
Nonetheless, details about them are very scant.
11:11
We found more testimony from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a man noted as being a
11:15
significant influence behind “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
11:19
In the testimony, Vera Alexander is asked about Mengele and what experiments she saw
11:23
him conduct.
11:24
She tells the judge she saw only one.
11:26
He asks her what that was, and she replies, “There was a set of twins, Gypsies, whom
11:30
he took away one day from the block where I was - that was the Zigeunerlager - the Gypsy
11:34
camp.
11:35
Some days later, he returned them, with veins in their arms and their backs sewn together.”
11:39
The judge then says he doesn’t quite understand.
11:41
Alexander simply says again, “He sewed them.”
11:43
The judge asks if they were turned into Siamese twins, to which Alexander says, “He sewed
11:47
their arms together - they were already full of pus, and full of wounds.”
11:50
She said she didn’t know what happened to them since she was transferred to the women’s
11:54
camp after that.
11:55
Since the accounts don’t include many details, we’re not sure what really happened to those
11:58
twins behind closed doors.
11:59
We also can’t be sure what Mengele had intended to discover from the experiments.
12:03
What we are sure about is those experiments were never going to result in conjoined twins
12:07
that survived any length of time.
12:09
Mengele, for all his faults, was a trained professional.
12:12
He must have known that.
12:13
Mice have been sewn together in modern labs, but even that often lead to the death of the
12:17
animals after their immune systems went into hyperdrive.
12:20
The process is called, “Parabiosis”, which Mengele would have heard about because it’s
12:25
been around since the 1800s.
12:26
He also knew the outcome of doing it on humans.
12:28
That was likely not of any concern to him.
12:30
He had the expendable human resources at hand to experiment.
12:33
Mengele managed to escape trial, unlike many other leading Nazis after the war.
12:38
Despite being a wanted man, he lived out his life in South America.
12:40
His son, Rolf, visited him in São Paulo in 1977, the first time he’d seen his father
12:45
in over twenty years.
12:46
He told Rolf he was unrepentant, stating that he’d never personally hurt anyone and only
12:50
followed orders.
12:51
His diary and some of his letters were later found.
12:54
In one letter he wrote, “Brazil is a nice country to live in despite the mixing of the
12:58
races.
12:59
But there are many people who, like me, believe and are sympathetic to the Nazi movement and
13:02
racial ideology.”
13:03
In another, he wrote, “Weaker humans should not be permitted to reproduce.
13:07
This is the only way for humankind to exist and sustain itself.”
13:10
In yet more of his writing he claimed if the “inferior morons” are not eradicated from
13:14
society, society will destroy itself.
13:17
In 1979, he had a stroke in a swimming pool and drowned.
13:20
His personal history might have been somewhat embellished over time, but more than a hundred
13:24
people he experimented on testified in 1985 about what they had experienced at Auschwitz.
13:29
Here’s a snippet from one man’s testimony, which sounds quite different from how Mengele
13:33
felt about what he did during the war: “Dr. Mengele pulled me out of a queue as
13:36
we were on the way from the c-lager camp to the gas chamber.
13:40
I was the only one picked that day personally by Mengele and his assistant.
13:43
They took me to his laboratory, where I met other children.
13:46
They were screaming from pain…
13:47
I was injected with drugs and chemicals.
13:49
My body most of the time was connected to tubes which inserted some drugs into my body.”
13:53
Even if his monstrousness has been overemphasized at times, there can be little doubt that he
13:58
was a sadistic ideologue, foremost a racist, also a narcissist and a murderer, and above
14:04
all, human, all too human.
14:06
Now you need to watch, “The Sea Water Torture - Nazi Camp Experiments.”
14:09
Or, have a look at, “The WWII Nazi Breeding Plan.”
