Mengele's experiments - terrible things in Auschwitz. The horrific experiences of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele in a concentration camp

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last one working was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates there are millions of tortured prisoners who died from backbreaking work, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from “medical experiments.” No one knows exactly how many of these last ones there were. Hundreds of thousands. Inhumane experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also history, the history of medicine. Its darkest, but no less interesting page...

Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctor-criminals, was born in Bavaria in 1911. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich and medicine at the University of Frankfurt. In 1934 he joined the SA and became a member of the National Socialist Party, and in 1937 he joined the SS. He worked at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Dissertation topic: "Morphological studies of the structure of the lower jaw of representatives of four races."

After the outbreak of World War II, he served as a military doctor in the SS Viking division in France, Poland and Russia. In 1942, he received the Iron Cross for saving two tank crews from a burning tank. After being wounded, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was declared unfit for combat service and in 1943 was appointed chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners soon nicknamed him "the angel of death."

Dr. Mengele had to answer the question: how to increase the reproductive capacity of the German people so that it meets the needs of the planned large-scale settlement of Germans in the occupied regions of Eastern Europe. His focus was on the problem of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. The experiments were carried out on monozygotic twins, mainly children, dwarfs and persons with congenital disabilities. They were looking for such people among those arriving at the camp.
Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele’s monstrous experiments. Just look at the research on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the “study” of 3 thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the good Doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate...

The twins had blood transfused from one to the other and X-rays were taken of them. The second stage covered a comparative analysis of the internal organs, which was carried out during the autopsy. Such an analysis would be difficult to carry out under normal conditions due to the low likelihood of both twins dying at the same time. In the camp, comparative analysis of twins was carried out hundreds of times. For this purpose, Dr. Mengele killed them with phenol injections. He once led an operation in which two gypsy boys were sewn together to create Siamese twins. The children's hands were severely infected at the sites of resection of blood vessels. Mengele usually, without any anesthesia, cut off part of the liver or other vital organs from Jewish children and killed them with monstrous blows to the head, if there was a need for the newly deceased “guinea pig”. He injected chloroform into the hearts of many children, and he infected his other subjects with typhus. Mengele injected pathogenic bacteria into the ovaries of many women. Some twins with different eye colors had colorants injected into their eye sockets and pupils to change their eye color and explore the possibility of producing Aryan twins with blue eyes. In the end, the children were left with granular clumps instead of eyes.

The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

In 1945, Josef Mengele carefully destroyed all the collected “data” and escaped from Auschwitz. Until 1949, Mengele worked quietly in his native Günzburg at his father’s company. Then, using new documents in the name of Helmut Gregor, he emigrated to Argentina. He received his passport quite legally, through... the Red Cross. In those years, this organization provided charity, issued passports and travel documents to tens of thousands of refugees from Germany. Perhaps Mengele's fake ID simply could not be thoroughly checked. Moreover, the art of forging documents in the Third Reich reached unprecedented heights.
One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing.

The terrible experiments on people by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death of Auschwitz,” did not end after he fled to South America. His dream came true. Argentine historian Jorge Camaraz's new book, Mengele: Angel of Death in South America, argues that Joseph Mengele's experiences did not end when he fled to South America after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. There is evidence that the “Angel of Death of Auschwitz” continued his terrible experiments in Brazil, in a small town that later received the nickname “City of Twins.”

Josef Mengele managed a lot during his life: lived a happy childhood, received an excellent education at the university, made a happy family, raised children, experienced the taste of war and front-line life, engaged in “scientific research”, many of which were important for modern medicine, since Vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already on the run, Joseph received a quiet rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already in this well-deserved rest, Mengele was more than once forced to remember his past deeds - he more than once read articles in newspapers about his search, about the fee of 50,000 American dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities against prisoners. Reading these articles, Joseph Mengele could not hide his sarcastic, sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in plain sight, swimming on public beaches, conducting active correspondence, visiting entertainment venues. And he could not understand the accusations of committing atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He saw no difference between the experiments he carried out on beetles at school and those he carried out in Auschwitz.
He lived in Brazil until February 7, 1979, when he suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea, causing him to drown.

As a prisoner of Auschwitz, she helped thousands of captive women survive. By performing secret abortions, Gisella Pearl saved women and their unborn children from the sadistic experiments of Dr. Mengele, who left no one alive. And after the war, this courageous doctor calmed down only when she delivered births to three thousand women.

In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary. This is exactly how the doctor Gisella Perl lived at that time. She was first moved to a ghetto, and then with her entire family, son, husband, parents, like thousands of other Jews, they were sent to a camp. There, many prisoners were immediately sorted upon arrival and taken to the crematorium, but some, subjected to a humiliating disinfection procedure, were left in the camp and distributed among blocks. Gisella fell into this group.

Hungarian Jews near the train after arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Then she remembered that in one of the blocks there were cages where hundreds of young, healthy women were sitting. They were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Some girls, pale, exhausted, lay on the floor, they could not even talk, but they were not left alone, periodically the remaining blood was taken from their veins. Gisella kept an ampoule of poison and even tried to use it somehow. But nothing worked out for her - either her body turned out to be stronger than the poison, or providence intended to keep her alive.

Women prisoners in a barracks. Auschwitz. January 1945.

Gisella helped women in any way she could, sometimes even simply with her optimism - she told amazing and bright stories that gave hope to desperate women. Having no tools, no medicines, no painkillers, in conditions of complete unsanitary conditions, she managed to perform operations using only a knife, inserting a gag into the women’s mouths so that screams could not be heard.

Gisella was assigned as an assistant at the camp clinic to Dr. Josef Mengele. On his instructions, camp doctors were to report all pregnant women whom he took for his terrible experiments on women and their children. Gisella, in order to prevent this, tried to save women from pregnancy, secretly giving them abortions and causing artificial birth, so that they would not end up with Mengele. The day after the operation, women already had to go to work so as not to arouse suspicion. So that they could rest, Gisella diagnosed them with severe pneumonia. Dr. Gisella Perl performed about three thousand operations in Auschwitz, hoping that the women she operated on would still be able to give birth to children in the future.

Pregnant women in the Auschwitz camp.

At the end of the war, some of the prisoners, including Gisella, were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp. They were released in 1945, but few of the prisoners lived to see this bright day. Upon release, Gisella tried to find her relatives, but learned that they had all died. In 1947 she left for the USA. She was afraid to become a doctor again, the memories of those months of hell in Mengele’s laboratory haunted her, but soon, nevertheless, she decided to return to her profession, especially since she had gained colossal experience.

Autobiographical book by Gisela Perl, published after the war.

But problems arose - she was suspected of having connections with the Nazis. Indeed, in the laboratory she at times had to be an assistant to the sadist Mengele in his sophisticated and inhumane experiments, but at night, in the barracks, she did everything in her power to help women, alleviate suffering, save them. Finally, all suspicions were removed, and she was able to begin work at a New York hospital as a gynecologist. And every time she entered the delivery room, she prayed: “God, you owe me a life, a living child.” Over the next few years, Dr. Giza helped more than three thousand babies be born.

In 1979, Gisella moved to live and work in Israel. She remembered how, in the stuffy carriage that was taking her and her family to the camp, she and her husband and father vowed to meet each other in Jerusalem. In 1988, Dr. Gisella died and was buried in Jerusalem. More than a hundred people came to see Gisella Pearl off on her final journey, and in a report about her death, the Jerusalem Post newspaper called Dr. Giza “the angel of Auschwitz.”

Dr. Josef Mengele is one of the most demonized Nazi criminals. Unfortunately, most of the nightmares attributed to the doctor are absolutely reliable and, remembering the terrible stories of the surviving “patients,” one can believe anything. But was the doctor a madman or a bloodthirsty maniac? Obviously not. Having a sharp mind and brilliant education, the “Angel of Death” was deprived of humanity and a sense of compassion - he simply walked towards his goal, leaving death and grief in his wake.

Josef Mengele was born in 1911 in the Bavarian city of Günzburg. The youth of the future doctor of medicine was typical for most German youth of the late 20s and early 30s of the 20th century. Josef fell under the influence of Nazi propaganda and became a member of the Steel Helmet, a radical Nazi organization.

Members of the Steel Helmet. 1934

But the nightly torchlight processions and burning of Jewish shops did not captivate the intelligent young man, so Mengele broke with the militants a year later, citing health problems. The young man was attracted to science - having received a medical diploma in anthropology, he easily got a job at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, as an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer.

Promising young doctor Josef Mengele

Together with Verschuer, Mengele worked on issues of genetics, with particular emphasis on twins and various developmental anomalies. When Adolf Hitler came to power, the institute abandoned all unpromising tasks and completely switched to studying racial issues. At the height of the war, in 1942, Josef Mengele was offered to work “for the glory of the fatherland” in a concentration camp in Poland, and the young specialist immediately agreed.

Josef Mengele (first on the left) at the Solahütte resort 30 km from

A lot of work was expected, since Jews from all over Europe were brought to Poland to exterminate, and there was more than enough material for scientific research. First, the young specialist was appointed chief physician of the Roma sector in Auschwitz, and a little later he headed the clinic in Birkenau, a satellite concentration camp of a huge death complex.

One of the main tasks of doctors in concentration camps was to receive new batches of prisoners, who were immediately sorted by gender, age and, of course, health status. Elderly, sick, exhausted and too young prisoners were immediately sent to the gas chambers, like hopeless workers.

A new batch of prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz camp station

But any of the doomed could have been saved by Dr. Mengele, he had only to turn to the leadership of the concentration camp with a corresponding request. It is worth noting that the young doctor often made requests for pardon for prisoners and took dozens of them to his clinic on the territory of the camp.

Crematorium oven in Auschwitz

Mengele even asked to wake him up if a train with new prisoners arrived at night. The doctor was especially interested in children and, first of all, twins and those who had growth abnormalities.

Most of the camp doctor’s “patients” were never seen again - they all died a terrible, painful death in the “operating rooms” and laboratories of Auschwitz.

In one of the Auschwitz laboratories

It is difficult to describe the full range of “scientific” works for which Dr. Josef Mengele used living material. They performed operations to change the color of the cornea - the Nazi was looking for a way to turn people with brown and black eyes into blue-eyed Aryans. Creepy experiments in gynecology, amputation of limbs, experiments with lowering body temperature to extreme levels and infection with fatal diseases were also carried out.

Congenital malformations delayed death

Some of the tasks that Mengele set for himself concerned bringing people to the standards of “racial purity,” and some were ordered by the military. The German army needed new ways to escape hypothermia and pressure changes, effective antibiotics and innovative surgical methods.

One of thousands of victims of non-humans in white coats. Pressure variation experiment carried out upon request Luftwaffe

The doctor was not alone - a whole team of killers in white coats worked under his leadership, and in addition, Nazi “luminaries” from other death camps and military hospitals of the Reich regularly came to the camp to “exchange experiences.” “Doctor Death” or “Angel of Death”, which is what the camp prisoners called Mengele, conducted hundreds of experiments, most of which ended in death or crippled the experimental subject.

Doctor Mengele's assistant conducts an experiment with oxygen starvation

Camp prisoners who survived but became incapacitated were sent to gas chambers or killed by an injection of phenol. It is especially creepy to read the memoirs of camp prisoners about Mengele’s attitude towards children. The killer doctor was always kind and courteous, and in the pockets of his immaculate white coat were lollipops and chocolates, which he generously distributed to hungry children.

Czeslaw Kwok. 14-year-old Auschwitz prisoner killed by a phenol injection into the heart in March 1943

Parents, seeing that a polite and nice doctor was taking their children with him, usually calmed down. It could not even occur to them that their children were already sentenced to a terrible death in the clutches of a ruthless monster.

The doctor created the illusion of caring for people around his clinic - there was a kindergarten and a nursery on its territory, as well as an obstetric and gynecological center for pregnant women.

"Kindergarten" by Dr. Mengele. All these children died

Only a few of those whom Dr. Mengele “showed concern” were able to leave the death camp after his liberation - the Nazi knew very well what the risk of disclosing information about crimes would be and carefully covered his tracks. The monster felt the end approaching and 10 days before the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops, he fled from the camp, sending his last experimental subjects to the gas chambers.

In most surviving photographs, “Doctor Death” smiles and looks quite happy

Dr. Mengele took with him an invaluable archive with notes, photographs and observation diaries. Having set out to meet the allies, Mengele surrendered to the Americans, after which his traces were lost for many years.

During the trials of Nazi criminals, the name of Joseph Mengele was mentioned many times, but the American military could not say anything intelligible about his whereabouts.

Wanted Dr. Josef Mengele (Germany)

At this time, “Doctor Death” lived quietly in his native Bavaria under an assumed name and even practiced as a private doctor. Mengele felt so free that he even had the audacity to travel to areas of Germany under the control of the Red Army. One such trip is known for sure - the Nazi needed to pick up some valuable records from a cache.

We are looking for a criminal. Brazil

In 1949, the search for a monster doctor became so narrow that Mengele was forced to flee overseas, to Argentina. After the war, the so-called “rat trail” system operated, ensuring the escape of Nazi criminals from Europe to the relative safety of South America.

Having settled in Buenos Aires, Mengele opened a private medical practice, not disdaining clandestine abortions. In 1958, he was even arrested, but not for crimes in Auschwitz, but for the death of a young patient. However, solid patrons and big money resolved the issue, and the doctor did not stay in prison long.

Dr. Josef Mengele with his son. An old man enjoys life in a Brazilian resort

In the mid-60s, Buenos Aires became a troubled place for the Nazis - the Israeli intelligence service Mossad kidnapped and took to Israel Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler's henchmen. The criminal was tried and hanged to the applause of the whole world. Not wanting a similar fate, the doctor flees to Paraguay under the name Jose Mengele, and then to Brazil.

Mengele felt so confident that he did not even resort to changing his appearance.

For almost 35 years, Mengele led the best specialists in the search for war criminals by the nose. The Mossad and Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, literally stepped on the heels of the Angel of Death many times, but he always managed to evade capture. Unfortunately, the most wanted Nazi monster never received the punishment he deserved.

On February 7, 1979, Mengele, who had recently suffered a stroke, was splashing near the shore of a Sao Paulo beach in the ocean when he suddenly became ill. There was no one nearby, and the killer of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners simply drowned in the shallow water.

International team of experts involved in identifying Mengele's body

Skull of the most wanted Nazi criminal

The search for Mengele continued until 1992, when, using genetic analysis, it was proven that the unnamed remains of a German found in a neglected grave in one of the cemeteries of Sao Paulo belonged to Dr. Joseph himself.

The body of the criminal did not deserve to lie in the ground - it was exhumed, taken apart and used to this day as visual aids at the medical university.

Ralph Mengele

Finally, it is worth saying that Josef Mengele never repented for his crimes. In 1975, the doctor was found by his son Ralph, to whom the Nazi told that he did not regret anything and had brought absolutely no harm to anyone personally.

Sylvia and her mother, like most Jews from that region, were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, on the main gate of which only three words promising suffering and death are inscribed in clear letters - Edem Das Seine.. (Abandon hope, all who enter here..).
Despite the severity of her stay in the camp, Sylvia was childishly happy - after all, her own mother was nearby. But they didn't have to be together for long. One day a dapper German officer appeared in the family block. His name was Joseph Mengele, also known by the nickname Angel of Death. Looking carefully at the faces, he walked in front of the lined up prisoners. Sylvia's mother realized that this was the beginning of the end. Her face was distorted by a desperate grimace, filled with suffering and grief. But her face was destined to reflect an even more terrible grimace, not even a grimace, but a mask of Death, when in a few days she would suffer on the operating table of the inquisitive Joseph Mengele. So, a few days later, Sylvia, along with other children, was transferred to children's block 15. So she parted forever with her mother, who soon, as already noted, found death under the knife of the Angel of Death.

The first concentration camp in Germany was opened in 1933. The last one working was captured by Soviet troops in 1945. Between these two dates there are millions of tortured prisoners who died from backbreaking work, strangled in gas chambers, shot by the SS. And those who died from “medical experiments.” >>> Nobody knows for sure how many of these last ones there were. Hundreds of thousands. Why are we writing about this many years after the end of the war? Because inhumane experiments on people in Nazi concentration camps are also History, the history of medicine. Its darkest, but no less interesting page...

Medical experiments were carried out in almost all of the largest concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Among the doctors who led these experiments there were many completely different people.

Dr. Wirtz was involved in lung cancer research and studied surgical options. Professor Clauberg and Dr. Schumann, as well as Dr. Glauberg, conducted experiments on sterilization of people in the concentration camp of the Konighütte Institute.

Dr. Dohmenom in Sachsenhausen worked on research into contagious jaundice and the search for a vaccine against it. Professor Hagen in Natzweiler studied typhus and also looked for a vaccine. The Germans also researched malaria. Many camps conducted research into the effects of various chemicals on humans.

There were people like Rasher. His experiments in studying methods of warming frostbitten people brought him fame, many awards in Nazi Germany and, as it later turned out, real results. But he fell into the trap of his own theories. In addition to his main medical activities, he carried out orders from the authorities. And by exploring the possibilities of infertility treatment, he deceived the regime. His children, whom he passed off as his own, turned out to be adopted, and his wife was infertile. When the Reich found out about this, the doctor and his wife were sent to a concentration camp, and at the end of the war they were executed.

There were mediocrities, such as Arnold Dohmen, who infected people with hepatitis and tried to treat them by puncturing the liver. This heinous act had no scientific value, which was clear to Reich specialists from the very beginning.

Or people like Hermann Voss, who did not personally participate in the experiments, but studied the materials of other people’s experiments with blood, obtaining information through the Gestapo. Every German medical student knows his anatomy textbook today.

Or such fanatics as Professor August Hirt, who studied the corpses of those who were exterminated at Auschwitz. A doctor who experimented on animals, on people, and on himself.

But our story is not about them. Our story tells of Josef Mengele, remembered in History as the Angel of Death or Doctor Death, a cold-blooded man who killed his victims by injecting chloroform into their hearts so he could personally perform autopsies and observe their internal organs.

In addition to its main function - the destruction of "inferior races", prisoners of war, communists and simply the dissatisfied, concentration camps performed another function in Nazi Germany. With the arrival of Mengele, Auschwitz became a "major scientific research center." Unfortunately for the prisoners, the range of Joseph Mengele’s “scientific” interests was unusually wide. He began with work on “increasing the fertility of Aryan women.” It is clear that the material for research was non-Aryan women. Then the Fatherland set a new, directly opposite task: to find the cheapest and most effective methods of limiting the birth rate of “subhumans” - Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Having mutilated tens of thousands of men and women, Mengele came to the conclusion: the most reliable way to avoid conception is castration.

“Research” went on as usual. The Wehrmacht ordered a topic: to find out everything about the effects of cold on a soldier’s body (hypothermia). The experimental methodology was the most simple: a concentration camp prisoner is taken, covered on all sides with ice, “doctors” in SS uniforms constantly measure body temperature... When a test subject dies, a new one is brought from the barracks. Conclusion: after the body has cooled below 30 degrees, it is most likely impossible to save a person. The best way to warm up is a hot bath and the “natural warmth of the female body.”

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, commissioned research on the effect of high altitude on pilot performance. A pressure chamber was built in Auschwitz. Thousands of prisoners suffered a terrible death: with ultra-low pressure, a person was simply torn apart. Conclusion: it is necessary to build aircraft with a pressurized cabin. By the way, not a single one of these aircraft took off in Germany until the very end of the war.

On his own initiative, Joseph Mengele, who became interested in racial theory in his youth, conducted experiments with eye color. For some reason, he needed to prove in practice that the brown eyes of Jews under no circumstances could become the blue eyes of a “true Aryan.” He gives hundreds of Jews injections of blue dye - extremely painful and often leading to blindness. The conclusion is obvious: a Jew cannot be turned into an Aryan.

Tens of thousands of people became victims of Mengele’s monstrous experiments. Just look at the research on the effects of physical and mental exhaustion on the human body! And the “study” of 3 thousand young twins, of which only 200 survived! The twins received blood transfusions and organ transplants from each other. Sisters were forced to bear children from their brothers. Forced gender reassignment operations were carried out. Before starting the experiments, the good doctor Mengele could pat the child on the head, treat him with chocolate... the goal was to establish how twins are born. The results of these studies were supposed to help strengthen the Aryan race. Among his experiments were attempts to change eye color by injecting various chemicals into the eyes, amputations of organs, attempts to sew twins together, and other macabre operations. The people who survived these experiments were killed.

From block 15, the girl was taken to hell - hell number 10. In that block, Joseph Mengele conducted medical experiments. Several times she underwent spinal puncture, and then surgical operations during savage experiments on merging dog meat with the human body...

However, the chief doctor of Auschwitz was engaged not only in applied research. He was not averse to “pure science.” Concentration camp prisoners were deliberately infected with various diseases in order to test the effectiveness of new drugs on them. Last year, one of the former prisoners of Auschwitz sued the German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The makers of aspirin are accused of using concentration camp prisoners to test their sleeping pill. Judging by the fact that soon after the start of the “approbation” the concern additionally purchased 150 more Auschwitz prisoners, no one was able to wake up after the new sleeping pills. By the way, other representatives of German business also collaborated with the concentration camp system. The largest chemical concern in Germany, IG Farbenindustri, made not only synthetic gasoline for tanks, but also Zyklon-B gas for the gas chambers of the same Auschwitz. After the war, the giant company was “disintegrated.” Some of the fragments of IG Farbenindustry are well known in our country. Including as drug manufacturers.

One way or another, Mengele ended up in South America. In the early 50s, when Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest (with the right to kill him upon arrest), Iyozef moved to Paraguay. However, all this was rather a sham, a game of catching Nazis. Still with the same passport in the name of Gregor, Joseph Mengele repeatedly visited Europe, where his wife and son remained. The Swiss police watched his every move - and did nothing!

The man responsible for tens of thousands of murders lived in prosperity and contentment until 1979. The victims did not appear to him in his dreams. His soul, if there was one, remained pure. Justice was not served. Mengele drowned in the warm ocean while swimming on a beach in Brazil. And the fact that the valiant agents of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad helped him drown is just a beautiful legend.

Josef Mengele managed a lot during his life: lived a happy childhood, received an excellent education at the university, made a happy family, raised children, experienced the taste of war and front-line life, engaged in “scientific research”, many of which were important for modern medicine, since Vaccines against various diseases were developed, and many other useful experiments were carried out that would not have been possible in a democratic state (in fact, the crimes of Mengele, like many of his colleagues, made a huge contribution to medicine), finally, being already in his old age, Joseph received a peaceful rest on the sandy shores of Latin America. Already in this well-deserved rest, Mengele was more than once forced to remember his past deeds - he more than once read articles in newspapers about his search, about the fee of 50,000 American dollars assigned for providing information about his whereabouts, about his atrocities against prisoners. Reading these articles, Joseph Mengele could not hide his sarcastic, sad smile, for which he was remembered by many of his victims - after all, he was in plain sight, swimming on public beaches, conducting active correspondence, visiting entertainment venues. And he could not understand the accusations of committing atrocities - he always looked at his experimental subjects only as material for experiments. He saw no difference between the experiments he carried out on beetles at school and those he carried out in Auschwitz. What regret can there be when an ordinary creature dies?!

In January 1945, Soviet soldiers carried Sylvia out of the block in their arms - her legs barely moved after the operations, and she weighed about 19 kilograms. The girl spent six long months in a hospital in Leningrad, where doctors did everything possible and impossible to restore her health. After being discharged from the hospital, she was sent to the Perm region to work on a state farm, and then transferred to the construction of a thermal power plant in Perm. It seemed that the tragic days were in the past. Although the work was not easy, Sylvia did not lose heart: the main thing was that peace came and she remained alive. She was 17 years old then.. /