Why Nazi experimented on twins

Nazi doctor Mengele's Gruesome Experiments on Twins

From May 1943 until January 1945, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele worked at Auschwitz, conducting pseudo-scientific medical experiments. Many of his cruel experiments were conducted on young twins.

Anxious to make a name for himself, Mengele searched for the secrets of heredity. The Nazi ideal of the future would benefit from the help of genetics, according to Nazi doctrine. If so-called Aryan women could give birth to twins who were sure to be blond and blue-eyed, the future could be saved.

Selection of twins

As the unsuspecting people were herded off the train and ordered into separate lines, SS officers shouted "Zwillinge!" (Twins!) in German. Parents were forced to make a quick decision. Unsure of their situation, already being separated from family members when forced to form lines, seeing barbed wire, smelling an unfamiliar stench — was it good or bad to be a twins?

Some mothers tried to hide their twin, but the SS officers and Josef Mengele searched through the surging ranks of people looking for twins and anyone with unusual traits.

While many twins were either announced or discovered, some sets of twins were successfully hidden and walked with their mothers into the gas chamber.

About 3,000 twins were pulled from the masses on the ramp, most of them children. Only around 200 of these twins survived. When the twins were found, they were taken away from their parents.

Daily life of twins

Each morning, life for the twins began at 6 o'clock. The twins were required to report for roll call in front of their barracks, regardless of weather conditions. After roll call, they ate a small breakfast. Then each morning, Mengele would appear for an inspection.

Mengele's presence did not necessarily cause fear in the children. He was often known to appear with pockets full of candy and chocolates, to pat them on the head, talk with them, and sometimes even play. Many of the children, especially the younger ones, called him "Uncle Mengele."

The twins were given brief instruction in makeshift "classes" and were sometimes even allowed to play soccer. The children were not required to do hard work or labor. Twins were also spared from punishments, as well as from the frequent selections within the camp.

Experiment on twins

The table of contents of a document from the Nuremberg military tribunals prosecution includes titles of the sections that document medical experiments revolving around: food, seawater, epidemic jaundice, sulfanilamide, blood coagulation and phlegmone.

Some of the children, now elderly, have little memory of the experiments, others have memories that may not be 100% accurate.

Jona Laks says Mengele removed organs from people without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered. Vera Kriegel says that he killed people with an injection to the heart, and then dissected them.

She remembers being ushered into his laboratory. "I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor."

The first experiment she was subjected to involved being kept in a small wooden cage with her sister and being given painful injections in her back - she doesn't know why, but thinks it may have been an attempt to change the colour of her eyes.

In another experiment, she says, the pair of them and more than 100 other twins were given injections of bacteria that cause Noma disease - an infection of the mouth or genitals, which causes boils and often turns gangrenous.

Some twins became feverish, and some died, she says. She also remembers Mengele reacting angrily when twins went missing - once when this had happened she stared him out to prove he could not completely dominate her.

Mengele usually used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny.

Twin studies had helped scientists like Mengele’s mentor justify what they saw as necessary discrimination against people with “undesirable” genetic characteristics—Jews, Roma people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and others. But the twin experiments that had helped create the eugenics movement would, ironically, lead to the downfall of eugenics itself. 

For eugenicists like Mengele, identical twins like the Mozes sisters were the perfect research subjects. Since they share a genome, scientists reasoned, any physical or behavioral differences in twins would be due to behavior, not genetics. Eugenicists held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behavior and wipe out undesirable tendencies.

Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor and a Mengele twin, chose to forgive the Nazis

For Eva, life as a Mengele twin meant sitting naked for hours and having her body repeatedly measured and compared to Miriam’s. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. “As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp,” she later recalled. “But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments.

At Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele injected dye into the eyes of children to see if he could permanently change their color. He also famously tried to create conjoined twins by stitching his patients together.