Nazi Auschwitz Physician Josef Mengele who Performed Grisly Experiments on Twins went on to Become an Abortionist after the Holocaust

Josef Mengele is a name immediately recognizable to many as the infamous German Nazi doctor and SS captain who assisted the Third Reich in its systemic plan to totally eliminate the Jewish race. After the beginning of World War II, sentiment that previously mostly existed as anti-Jewish propaganda gradually evolved into an anti-Jewish policy, culminating in Adolf Hitler’s plan known as the “Final Solution,” a comprehensive plan to concentrate and annihilate European Jewry. The Holocaust Encyclopedia states that the  “Final Solution” consisted of gassing, shootings, random acts of terror, disease, and starvation that accounted for the deaths of about six million Jews—two-thirds of European Jewry.”

Josef Mengele played an important role in this plan, working in one of the most prominent Nazi concentration camps as a the most prominent of a group of physicians. Mengele used his position at Auschwitz to conduct inhuman experiments on Jews and Gypsies. Many of Mengele’s experiments died from the experiments or were murdered in order to allow for post-mortem experimentation. 

Mengele and other physicians regularly completed “rounds” at the camp where they would make “selections” of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz, determining which prisoners would be allowed to work and which would immediately be sent to certain death in the gas chambers. Mengele was known as the “Angel of Death,” or sometimes as the “White Angel,” for his cold and cruel disposition while making these “selections.” The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes that he is more closely associated with making these “selections” than any other medical officer, although he did not perform the task officially more often than his colleagues, although he did often appear at the selection area while “off-duty” whenever new trainloads of prisoners arrived at Auschwitz.

According to the New York Times, during one-such “selection,” “a mother refused to be separated from her teen-age daughter and scratched the face of the SS trooper who tried to enforce Mengele’s decision. Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and her child. Still raging, he ordered that all the people from that transport whom he had previously selected as workers be sent to the gas chamber.”

Mengele’s favorite medical experiments were twins. One of his experiment’s was named  Renate Guttmann. Just before she turned 6, Renate and her family were sent to Auschwitz were she became #70917. Renate was separated from her brother Rene and mother and taken to a hospital where she was measured and X-rayed; blood was taken from her neck. Once, she was strapped to a table and cut with a knife. She got injections that made her throw up and have diarrhea. While Renate was ill in the hospital after an injection, guards came in to take the sick to be killed. The nurse caring for her hid her under her long skirt and she was quiet until the guards left.

Renate and her brother survived and were reunited in America in 1950. They learned that as one pair of the “Mengele Twins,” they had been used for medical experiments.

At Auschwitz, Mengele performed a broad range of torturous and often lethal experiments with Jewish twins, many of whose were children. On one occasion Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night by injecting their hearts with chloroform.The experiments he performed on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or some other disease, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other.

Mengele also had a fascination with experimenting on eyes. During his tenure at Auschwitz, Mengele collected the eyes of his murdered victims. He was preoccupied with conducting experiments in order to unlock the secret of artificially changing eye color. Mengele also performed experiments to intentionally illustrate the supposed inferiority of Jews. 

After World War II ended, Mengele was in United States custody, however the United States was unaware that Mengele was on a list of wanted war criminals and he was subsequently released. 

Mengele eventually worked his way to South America, where he settled in Argentina. By all accounts, however, Mengele didn’t change at all. His son, Rolf, said his father never expressed any contrition or guilt for his actions during the Holocaust, and Mengele quickly resumed killing, only this time he was working as an abortionist. 

At that time, the government of Argentina actively helped Nazi war criminals escape justice, according to their own declassified records. These records also reveal that Josef Mengele was committing abortions illegally in Argentina. According to Live Action News, “Mengele did not have a license to practice medicine in Argentina, but still reportedly gained “a reputation as a specialist in abortions,” even though they were illegal at the time. He killed at least one woman, and was briefly detained by a judge — but he was released after one of Mengele’s friends arrived in the courtroom carrying a ‘package presumably filled with a large amount of money.’”

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Mengele’s crimes had been well documented before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and other postwar courts. West German authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in 1959, and a request for extradition in 1960. Alarmed by the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in that same year, Mengele moved to Paraguay and then to Brazil. He spent the last years of his life near Sao Pãolo. In declining health, Mengele suffered a stroke and drowned while swimming at a vacation resort near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, 1979. He was buried in a suburb of Sao Pãolo under the fictive name ‘Wolfgang Gerhard.”

His corpse was later exhumed for forensic analysis and DNA evidence confirmed his identity. 

Under the Nazi Reich, Aryan women were forbidden abortions, however non-Aryan women were frequently forced into sterilizations and abortions, usually against their will. It is unsurprising that someone like Mengele who gained such notoriety during the Holocaust for committing murder would go on to continue to commit murder through performing abortions after World War II. 

During the Holocaust an estimated five to six million Jews alone were murdered. However, abortions have ended more than 61,628,584 innocent human lives since the Roe v. Wade decisions was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973.