Never Forget Your Name by Alwin Meyer

Author:Alwin Meyer [Meyer, Alwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-01-11T06:00:00+00:00

‘Twins! Where Are the Twins?’

The twins Jiří and Zdeněk Steiner from Prague were taken by SS doctor Mengele when they were 14. Ferenc and Otto Klein from the Hungarian town of Hajdúböszörmény were 11, and Olga and Vera Grossmann from Turiany in eastern Slovakia were just 6 years old when they were preyed upon for Mengele’s experiments.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele was particularly interested in twins. When they arrived on the ramp, he requisitioned them for his pseudo-medical experiments. Most were aged between 1 and 16 years.

Mengele had long been interested in ‘race research’. In his first doctoral work in 1935, he claimed, on the basis of 123 lower jaws examined by him in the Munich State Anthropological Collection, that the race of a subject could be determined from their skeleton. ‘His study, which was graded summa cum laude, would be regarded today as madness rather than science’,1 says medical historian Udo Benzenhöfer.

Mengele arrived at Auschwitz at the end of May 1943. He was head camp doctor in the ‘Gypsy’ Camp, later in the men’s hospital, and doctor in the SS field hospital. He also served in other hospital blocks, including the one in the Women’s Camp. He effectively had power over all of the children, women and men in the different sections of Auschwitz-Birkenau and those on the transports that arrived almost every day.2

‘For many inmates, Mengele embodied the selections process.’3 It is true that he sent masses of children, women and men to the gas chambers, supervised executions, accepted the fact that inmates died as a result of his experiments, and killed subjects when they were no longer of use to him.4

But it is also true that all SS doctors in Auschwitz selected, supervised gassings and sought out twins for Mengele’s experiments. Pharmacists, medical orderlies and dentists also made selections. They all served the extermination of inmates.5

Mengele felt omnipotent in Auschwitz, tried out all kinds of things in his human experiments, studied noma (cancrum oris), tested procedures for sterilizing men and women, conducted bone marrow transplants, did experiments to change eye colour, and carried out research on twins.6

With a doctorate in philosophy and medicine, he was interested in both Jewish and Sinti and Roma twins. They were selected, measured, X-rayed, infected with viruses, their eyes cauterized, and finally killed and their bodies dissected.

The nurse Elźbieta Piekut-Warszawska, who was arrested in Kielce and deported in late May 1943 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, arrived in the twins’ block in the Women’s Camp in July 1944. In her memoirs, she writes:

After the selections on the ramp, around 350 pairs of twins aged from one to sixteen years were housed in this block. Some were of the same sex, others of different sexes. The parents of these children were gassed. The twins were Jewish children from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary and Germany. They still looked healthy and pretty, but were scared and tearful.…

After just a few weeks the children showed the first symptoms of avitaminosis [which can cause scurvy], throat and eye infections, oedema of the extremities, and pneumonia.

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