Some of the most horrific images of Auschwitz are the terrible scenes of the arrival of a train full of Jews to that concentration camp. There in his pressed uniform stood a tall, lean, handsome and friendlier looking man then that of the other SS guards . To one side lay starvation, brutality, and deprivation but a chance for survival. To the other side, instant death in the gas chambers. The frightening yet friendly figure making this decision was, frequently, Josef Mengele, one of the doctors assigned to Auschwitz. He has come to symbolize the manner in which medicine became a tool for genocide.
Mengele was born in Bavaria shortly before World War I to an upper middle class family, which ran a machine, tools business. A promising student, he was sent to Munich in the 1920's where he was attracted to the racial theories of Alfred Rosenberg, the "philosopher" of National Socialism. As Mengele became a believer of National Socialist ideology, he moved to Frankfurt where he received his medical degree studying under Otmar von Verschuer, the director of the Institute for Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt. The main emphasis of his research was the importance of heredity within the context of Nazi race science. By the time his education had…show more content… Verschuer. Seven sets of twins with different colored eyes, for example, were killed with phenol injections and, after dissection, the eyes sent to his mentor. In 1944, Verschuer, then at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology wrote a proposal for new research in which he stated: My asssistant Dr. Mengele has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed and a physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reicher [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for
