Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

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Topspeed
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Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#1

Post by Topspeed » 03 Apr 2015, 08:47

I read that dr. Mengele did some testing 1943 onwards with gipsy twins. OTOH the story claimed it is exaggerated by the survivor key eye witness. Any links to dr Mengele actions is the concentration camps to share some light to this ?

I refer to this:

http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/ ... _twins.php

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#2

Post by Brumbar » 07 Apr 2015, 02:55

I would think that using the forum search function here for Mengele threads or visiting other websites than "Incoherent History" will net you better and more accurate information about the good doctor and his twins research, particularly as the article there was both written and translated by two well-known Holocaust Deniers.


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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#3

Post by Topspeed » 07 Apr 2015, 14:17

Ok...if they are holocaust deniers then it is pretty clear. I saw the article and wondered if dr. Mengele is no longer considered a "baddie" !

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#4

Post by uberjude » 19 Apr 2015, 05:12

I think it is fair to say that even leaving his experiments aside,as the guy who made the Selektions, he counts as a baddie. But yes, that source is a holocaust denial site, and again, it's one of those things in which the standard that Holocaust deniers have to (and of course, can't) meet is proving all the survivor testimony is wrong. Meaning that even if some survivors may have exaggerated (note "may"), there is enough survivor testimony to assert that Mengele was a pretty awful figure.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#5

Post by michael mills » 19 Apr 2015, 13:49

There are no data on the experiments on twins by Dr Mengele on behalf of Otmar von Verschuer.

We know that he regularly sent samples back to the Kaiser-Wilhem-Institut in Berlin, where Verschuer headed the anthropological Department. However, they disappeared after the war and have never been found.

All that we have are the memories of the surviving twins, and they are probably distorted, which is not surprising, since they were young children at the time and did not understand what was being done to them. For example, it is probably untrue that Mengele was trying to change the colour of their eyes by injecting substances into them; it is more likely that he was testing the effect of those substances, by using one identical twin as the test subject and the other as a control.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#6

Post by Brumbar » 19 Apr 2015, 19:11

michael mills wrote:There are no data on the experiments on twins by Dr Mengele on behalf of Otmar von Verschuer.

We know that he regularly sent samples back to the Kaiser-Wilhem-Institut in Berlin, where Verschuer headed the anthropological Department. However, they disappeared after the war and have never been found.

All that we have are the memories of the surviving twins, and they are probably distorted, which is not surprising, since they were young children at the time and did not understand what was being done to them. For example, it is probably untrue that Mengele was trying to change the colour of their eyes by injecting substances into them; it is more likely that he was testing the effect of those substances, by using one identical twin as the test subject and the other as a control.

While it may be true that children did not understand what was being done to them, the resulting condition of what had been done to them should certainly have given any post liberation medical personnel who examined them clues as to what had been done and for what purpose. To say that Mengele's submissions to von Verschuer have never been found means no one can understand what he was doing is simplistic and ridiculous.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#7

Post by michael mills » 20 Apr 2015, 04:02

Brumbar, do you have any knowledge of post-war medical examinations of the children on whom experiments were carried out, and of any reports of such examinations? If so, please share them with us.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#8

Post by Ira S. » 25 Jun 2015, 09:22

Topspeed wrote:I read that dr. Mengele did some testing 1943 onwards with gipsy twins. OTOH the story claimed it is exaggerated by the survivor key eye witness. Any links to dr Mengele actions is the concentration camps to share some light to this ?

I refer to this:

http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/ ... _twins.php
I'd highly recommend Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel and Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli. Both were prisoner doctors who knew Mengele fairly well - well enough to witness the experiments - and Nyiszli performed autopsies on the dead bodies of these twins. You can get his account for something like $3 digitally, although it should be taken with a grain of salt, as there is a particular scene in which he seems to project his distress about the camp onto Mengele when the latter comes into the office tired and drenched to the bone, even though his feeling any kind of remorse would be in stark juxtaposition to all of Nyiszli's other descriptions of him and those of the people that knew him.

Mengele also was obsessed with eye color - in Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors there are eyewitness accounts of him collecting eyeballs (of particular interest to him was heterochromia iridis) and confirmation that he did the experiments. Here's the quote:
Mengele had an added project: that of actually changing eye color in an Aryan direction. Dr. Abraham C. wondered why Mengele was devoting so much attention to a few seven-year-old boys who seemed unremarkable and then realized that “those children had one odd characteristic: they were blond and had brown eyes, so Mengele was trying to find a way to color their eyes blue.” Mengele actually injected methylene blue into their eyes, causing severe pain and inflammation, but “their, eyes of course did not change.” Dr. C. had the impression these children were gassed, but he may have been wrong: a former block elder told of thirty-six such children who apparently survived. There is a record, however, of a little girl named Dagmar, born in Auschwitz in 1944, who died after Mengele’s eye injections. 40 Of the children subjected to the eye-color experiment, at least one child became almost blind; the eyes of most of the others, after considerable pain and infection, gradually returned to normal.
If you want to read the whole page (which I recommend you do; it's very interesting), here's the link: http://www.holocaust-history.org/lifton ... T362.shtml

Hope this helped!

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#9

Post by michael mills » 26 Jun 2015, 02:44

The idea that Mengele was trying to change eye colour is most probably a misinterpretation of the purpose of his experiments.

He did indeed collect eyeballs that displayed heterochromia iridis, which is a condition where an individual has eyes of different colours, eg one blue and the other brown. That condition is apparently particularly common among European Gypsies, and it appears that most of the eyeballs that he collected came from Gypsies who had died in the camp. It is possible that Mengele was trying to determine the cause of the condition; or more probably someone back at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut was doing so, and Mengele was collecting specimens for that person, in the same way as he was collecting various specimens for Professor Otmar von Verschuer, for whom he was a research assistant and who had arranged for him to be sent to Auschwitz to carry out experiments on identical twins as an extension of the program that Verschuer had been pursuing since before the war.

The injections that Mengele is reported to have made into the eyes of his twin subjects most probably had a different purpose, namely to test the effect of different substances on human eyes, using one twin as the experimental subject and the other as the control. It is possible that the substances were cosmetics or medical preparations of various kinds, and the purpose of the experiments was to determine whether they were safe to use, ie the same sort of tests that are routinely performed on non-human test subjects such as rabbits at the present time.

The problem with assessing the purpose of Mengele's experiments on behalf of Verschuer is that his notes and the specimens he sent back to Berlin all disappeared after the war, and Verschuer and his other colleagues at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut all denied any knowledge of them. Thus, the lurid stories about his experiments are based largely on accounts given by those of his twin subjects who survived, and they are highly distorted since those subjects were mostly very young and simply did not understand what was being done to them.

The other source is his assistant, Dr Nyiszli, but the accounts by that person cannot be trusted completely, since he was covering up his own role in Mengele's activities, perhaps even in killing test subjects in order to obtain biological specimens.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#10

Post by Ira S. » 27 Jun 2015, 07:45

michael mills wrote:
The injections that Mengele is reported to have made into the eyes of his twin subjects most probably had a different purpose, namely to test the effect of different substances on human eyes, using one twin as the experimental subject and the other as the control. It is possible that the substances were cosmetics or medical preparations of various kinds, and the purpose of the experiments was to determine whether they were safe to use, ie the same sort of tests that are routinely performed on non-human test subjects such as rabbits at the present time.
That's pretty plausible, given that according to Lifton he did want to have it eventually extended to German citizens.
The other source is his assistant, Dr Nyiszli, but the accounts by that person cannot be trusted completely, since he was covering up his own role in Mengele's activities, perhaps even in killing test subjects in order to obtain biological specimens.
If I am remembering correctly, Nyiszli states in his memoir that he assisted with the phenol injections, although I do not know that his was the hand that was on the syringe. While he did not, from the way that he wrote, strike me as a person who would be able to rationalize killing, it is possible that he got caught up in the herd mentality amongst the medical staff (and all of the staff, as a matter of fact).

My main issue with his recountings - other than what you have already mentioned - is that it is impossible by nature for his account to be unbiased, even if we may never know to what degree, because in a perverse manner Nyiszli owed Mengele his life. Granted, he was kept around because he had use to Mengele - from my knowledge of his personality/past actions and general tendencies of people with ASPD, I don't think that he would have much hesitation in killing Nyiszli. (I should note that I'm with those that believe he had the disorder given that numerous descriptions of his actions add up to a profile that meets almost all of today's diagnostic criteria in the US.) Mengele also continued to offer Nyiszli protection, too - at one point in his chapter on the man, Lifton mentions that the other doctors knew not to touch "his" prisoners and generally steered clear of them.

A few times in his memoir, Nyiszli also states that Mengele treated him as "a colleague," and while this was superficial and he also showed himself able to turn on 'his' prisoners in the blink of an eye, I imagine that this would still have created a favorable impression, even if subconsciously, because of the overall hostility toward him almost everywhere else.

This all adds up to what appears to be an attempt at psychologically reconciling these two violently different personalities, which, if that is the case, would easily alter how Nyiszli perceived events. Given that there are things that he still describes as horrific, though, I don't think that the distortion was enough to entirely discredit the work - just enough to necessitate back-checking it with others before taking it all as absolute fact.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#11

Post by michael mills » 27 Jun 2015, 14:39

What is ASPD?

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#12

Post by 4thskorpion » 27 Jun 2015, 17:22

Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisoc ... y_disorder

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#13

Post by Ira S. » 27 Jun 2015, 20:08

I should specify that by DSM-IV-TR criteria (which is what's listed on Wikipedia), Mengele wouldn't be diagnosable (to the extent that any historical figure could be) because of the now-removed requirement of conduct disorder under the age of 18; as far as we know, he didn't do anything terribly abnormal as a child (although it should also be noted that children/adolescents with CD can still be popular with their classmates. He only fits the diagnostic criteria set forth in the DSM-V.

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#14

Post by 4thskorpion » 28 Jun 2015, 09:06

An explanation of the acronym "DSM-IV-TR" for those of us not familiar with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnos ... .282000.29

"...The DSM-IV-TR characterizes a mental disorder as "a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual [which] is associated with present distress… or disability… or with a significant increased risk of suffering." It also notes that "no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of 'mental disorder'… different situations call for different definitions". It states that "there is no assumption that each category of mental disorder is a completely discrete entity with absolute boundaries dividing it from other mental disorders or from no mental disorder" (APA, 1994 and 2000). There are attempts to adjust the wording for the upcoming DSM-V.[dated info][36][37]."

Still none the wiser.... :(

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Re: Is the data about Birkenau tests on twins correct ?

#15

Post by michael mills » 28 Jun 2015, 11:24

Do you think Mengele was anti-social?

He seems to have had quite normal relationships within his own circle.

If he had performed his experiments on chimpanzees rather than on humans, would we consider his behaviour abnormal?

In the social environment in which he lived, certain human groups such as Jews and other perceived enemies of Germany had been downgraded to sub-human status, so within that environment experiments on individuals belonging to those groups were equivalent to experiments on non-human subjects.

Mengele's relationships with his human test subjects might be compared to the relationship of other medical experimenters with their non-human test subjects. Those experimenters look after their subjects and might even feel a certain amount of affection for them, yet are prepared to kill them unflinchingly if required by the experiments they are carrying out.

Of course, animal liberationists see medical personnel who carry out experiments on non-human subjects as cruel monsters, but that is an extreme view, not generally accepted.

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