Listener discretion is advised, this episode features discussions of murder, human experimentation, torture, medical procedures, infanticide and the Holocaust. That may be upsetting. We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13. There's an implicit trust we tend to place in doctors. They're the ones we rely on to keep us well, to save the day when lives hang in the balance. And that's a heady responsibility, enough to give any normal person an ego boost.

But that kind of power could be intoxicating, especially if it's handed to the wrong person. And in a world where a little power is the difference between life and death, supreme authority can make you, if not a god, at least an angel, an angel of death. This is Medical Murders, a podcast original. Every year, thousands of medical students take the Hippocratic Oath.

It boils down to do no harm. But a closer look reveals a phrase much more interesting.

I must not play at God.

However, some doctors break that oath, choosing to play God with their patients, deciding who lives and who dies each week on medical murders. We'll investigate those who decided to kill. We'll explore the specifics of how they operate not just on their patients, but within their own minds, examining the psychology and neurology behind heartless medical killers. I'm Alastair Madden and I'm joined by Dr. David Kipa, M.D.. Hi, everyone.

I'm very happy to be here to help Alastair with some medical insight and information into the killer's M.O..

I practice internal medicine and have done so for over 30 years, and I'm particularly excited to be diving a little deeper into our story of Josef Mengele, the angel of death.

You can find episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to stream medical murders for free on Spotify, just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. This is our final episode on Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as Auschwitz Birkenau, Angel of Death. Last week we learned about Mandela's quest to become a famous doctor and anthropologist and his zealots like devotion to his mentor, Omar Freya von Virtua.

Today, we're delving into Mandela's horrific tenure as a doctor at Auschwitz Birkenau, the ghastly experiments he carried out and the quest to bring him to justice. All this and more coming up. Stay with us. In early February 1985, a group of Auschwitz survivors reunited in Jerusalem. It had been 40 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and they came together to demand justice. They assembled before a panel, including lawyers, historians and government advisers. And for this audience, they told their stories.

Thirty survivors in all, including twins and little people, shared their harrowing experiences behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz Birkenau. Testimony was delivered in Hebrew, English and French, with some survivors speaking publicly for the first time about their treatment at the hands of Josef Mengele, the angel of death.

At the opening proceedings, a panel member leaned forward to speak, he described Mengele as a self-appointed judge, jury and executioner.

Auschwitz was a place of horrors where emaciated prisoners wandered aimlessly with nothing to do but work as enslaved captives and wait for death. For most, it came in the camp's gas chambers, but there were those who didn't live long enough to be gassed. They fell where they stood and were thrown into growing piles of dead bodies. Some died of disease or exhaustion, others shot or murdered by the prison's guards. It was into this hell scape that 32 year old Josef Mengele stepped in May of 1943.

A trained physician and anthropologist, he may have grown tired of his desk job in Berlin and wanted to use his education to further the Nazi cause. So with likely help from his mentor, Ottmar, I'm sure he'd accepted a posting at Auschwitz. Once there, Mengele slipped into his role as medical doctor. On the surface, it sounds like a position intended to care for the thousands of prisoners who pass through the camp's gates. But Mengele job had very little to do with saving lives.

For years, the Nazis used the concentration camps as their own personal test laboratories, where doctors experimented on prisoners daily.

Ostensibly, the experiments centered around collecting research on common diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis. But doctors also toyed with ways to pull off mass sterilizations. The Nazi doctrine of Aryan superiority had taken root and spread beyond the halls of government into the sciences across Europe. Many German scientists and doctors of the Nazi party seemed happy to ignore the ethics of their profession in order to fuel pseudo scientific research.

Unfortunately, science isn't always immune to political ideology, and this was very evident in Nazi Germany. An example of this was the ideological promotion of social Darwinism, the nonsensical tie between scientific observation in nature and sociopolitical conditions.

The notion, regrettably, helped propel the eugenics resurgence of the early 20th century, eugenics as a concept and practice of improving the genetic makeup of the human race by controlling the expressions of traits deemed desirable or undesirable. With roots in ancient Greece, eugenics was popularized in the early 19th. Hundreds and many countries even implemented eugenic policies to improve the perceived stock of their populations.

In the United States, for example, the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 made it legal and acceptable to sterilize mental health patients across the nation. Eugenics is an extremely myopic way to view human evolution.

For one, genetic selection criteria is subjective, usually dictated by whoever stands to gain from it. Eugenics also leads to a lack of genetic diversity. By selecting out certain genes through eugenics, we are limiting our ability to adapt to an ever changing environment. Much like National Socialism itself, eugenics was a concept doomed to fail. Unfortunately, that didn't stop the Nazis from trying.

Before war broke out, Mangler had worked under Ottmar von Virtua at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity there sure himself a geneticist, was obsessed with the idea that twin studies were key to unlocking the secrets, to creating a so-called master race and willing zealots that he was. Mengele took up his mentor's beliefs. Many Auschwitz doctors and guards claims they had to be convinced to work there. But Mengele never gave this impression. He appeared pleased with his newly gained access to the thousands of people arriving there each day among the Jewish and Roma families, as well as the other singled out minorities.

They were sure to be a number of twins, more than a researcher could hope to come across in their regular work. Ordinarily, medical studies on twins were mostly relegated to observational work, but the twins, viewed as specimens arriving at Auschwitz, would be so much more. Despite his ulterior motive, Mengele wasn't at Auschwitz solely to experiment on twins. Yes, he and Virtua secured funding for research during his tenure there, but he was officially there as an officer of the SS and he took his duties very seriously.

Survivors would later recall seeing Mengele standing on the arriving train platform, handsome and well turned out, he was one of the first memories many had of Auschwitz. He whistled as he directed the prisoners with one hand. Some were sent to the left, others to the right, to the gas chambers for immediate death or to be put to work in the slave camps to squeeze the life from them. Later, Mengele would come to be known as the Angel of Death of Auschwitz, so named for his cold blooded looks and demeanor while sending people to die.

But as he calmly sentenced thousands of people to a swift, painful end, Mengele watched carefully for any twins spilling out of the trains. Families with twins weren't sure what the guard's intentions were, but most sent them to Mengele willingly, though some were taken forcibly from their parents, plucked from the struggling line of people waiting to walk into the gas chambers. Others who weren't twins were also pulled aside to be spared little people, the exceptionally tall and those with a noticeable physical condition all Pete Mengele interest and were allowed to live for now.

As he strode among the arriving prisoners, looking for those he deemed valuable, Mengele took the time to check in with some of them. He asked how the journey was and with all the concern of a doctor, listened as they shared the details of the trip.

He asked for specifics, eager to hear how cramped the train had been or how many people died along the way. Trusting the charming, handsome man, some people told him they felt unwell with a sympathetic smile. He sent them to die. Others he singled out handing them a postcard and pencil. He asked these prisoners to write postcards home and took pleasure in dictating a description of the loveliness of Auschwitz and urging the reader to visit.

Once the postcard was written and addressed, he calmly directed the scribe into the line, snaking towards the gas chambers. With cold indifference, Mengele directed most pregnant women to their deaths, though he decided to spare some on his orders, those he saved was somewhat looked after for Auschwitz standards. But this care only lasted until the woman gave birth, at which point both mother and child were usually sent to the gas chambers, like much of Mengele decisions and work at Auschwitz.

His reasoning was unclear.

However, at least one mother, Ruth Elias, had a separate fate.

She somehow escaped Manala's notice when she arrived three months pregnant at the camp, but when he did find out, he decided to make the most of the situation.

Immediately following the birth of her baby girl, Mengele ordered Ruth's breasts to be tightly bandaged.

He wanted to see how long a newborn can live without food. For a week, Ruth tried desperately to keep her baby alive with moistened bread and soup. But it was no good Mengele came to check on her and the baby every day. One night, Mangler appeared at Ruth's bedside and told her to be ready the next morning, Ruth knew he intended to send them both to the gas chambers and despaired. But that evening, a Jewish prisoner and doctor forced to work while at Auschwitz came to Ruth.

She handed her a syringe filled with morphine and offered an alternative to mangler plan. The doctor urged Ruth to kill her own baby. The doctor explained that she herself had taken the Hippocratic Oath, that she mustn't take a life. But in this case, there was no saving Ruth's daughter if she didn't die of starvation. First, the gas chamber awaited at dawn. Ruth, however, still had a chance. If the baby was dead, she reasoned, Mengele just might lose interest in the mother.

With her little girl barely clinging to life, Ruth injected her with the morphine. It was a macabre show of compassion from the new mother and her fellow prisoner with sorrow.

The women nestled the tiny corpse among the pile of bodies outside their barracks. The gamble paid off when Mengele arrived in the morning, he was frustrated by the baby's death, he wanted the body presumably to perform an autopsy, but couldn't find it among the many dead. Ruth was sent away to another camp.

And if it was one doctor's compassion that led to Ruth's eventual survival, it's also true that has twisted curiosity, played a role in keeping her alive, at least for a time. That same curiosity caused Ruth immeasurable pain and suffering. But she wasn't the only one who survived, albeit severely scarred by Josef Mengele. Scientific curiosity.

Up next, Mengele experiments on the Twins of Auschwitz tirelessness.

I'm so excited to introduce you to the newest Spotify original from podcast called Blind Dating, hosted by YouTube Terror. Michel Blind dating is a fun twist on a classic set up. Strangers are introduced, conversation commences and sparks either fly or fizzle. But here's the catch. Are hopeful singles have to choose their match before ever seeing their face. And once they've picked their potential date, we turn the cameras on and then it's either butterflies or goodbye's blind dating as weekly with new episodes every Wednesday, you can find and follow blind dating, free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now back to the story.

In 1943, 32 year old Dr. Josef Mengele took up his post as an SS officer and doctor at Auschwitz Birkenau there he played a key role in selecting who would die in the gas chambers and who would live to work in the slave labor camps. But while that was his official role at Auschwitz, he was also there to satisfy his own pseudo scientific curiosity and further his research on genetics and eugenics. To do that, he needed twins, hundreds of them, and with thousands of people arriving at the camp each day, he got them.

It's important to note that any official records of Mandela's work at Auschwitz have been lost. It's possible they were destroyed by SS guards as they abandoned the camp or they were seized by the liberating forces or both. Whatever the case with the records went, any documentation of exactly what Mengele did to his subjects or the twisted reasoning behind his experiments? Mangahas, let's see what happens, approach was likely a combination of morbid curiosity and his complete lack of empathy. While his scientific grounding was always dubious, Auschwitz was a place where he could feed his Mackoff curiosities without consequence under the guise of legitimate scientific research and psychology.

This is known as sublimation or the transformation of socially unacceptable desires and behaviors into legitimate actions.

One example of this is the belief that some doctors, especially surgeons, practice in order to satiate their desires to tinker with human bodies.

Medical doctors and surgeons have a different approach to their patients.

Medical doctors look to establish long term and caring relationships over time, whereas surgeons are called in to fix a specific problem and don't have that advantage of developing these relationships.

And for surgeons, that may actually be an advantage, not a disadvantage. Most doctors like myself are not comfortable being in the surgical suite. I think that sublimation for surgeons is just one part of the equation. I think there are many reasons that people go into specific specialties in maglis Auschwitz experiments.

It seems he was doing little else and satisfying his personal fascinations. Given what we do know about Mengel, this research, it's evident he lacked the ethics, morality and smarts to carry out any proper scientific studies.

What he did do was approximate the scientific method while unsuccessfully masquerading as a caring physician.

Despite the lack of records, we still have an idea of what happened in his labs because survivors of Auschwitz were brave enough to share their stories, and they painted a terrifying picture of the smiling angel of death.

Like every new inmates arriving at Auschwitz, twins and those siblings who looked enough alike that they were mistaken for twins were showered and branded. But unlike the rest of the prisoners, their heads were not shaved, nor were they all made to wear prison uniforms. Being one of Mandela's chosen few had other perks, the guards, usually unafraid to beat the prisoners, didn't touch Mandela's twins, nor were the twins punished for small infractions like stealing food, something that likely would have earned anyone else a swift execution.

Already, Mengele had marked his test subjects as more precious special. But though he saved them and allowed his subjects to retain the tiniest measure of dignity, they weren't spared the pain of knowing what happened to their families. And that emotional pain was only the beginning, physical and psychological torture awaited all of Mengele subjects.

But first they filled out a form. The sheet included dozens of questions about the twins background, health history and physical characteristics, including things like hair and eye color.

The form was sent directly to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where Mandela's mentor, Ottmar von Virtua, eagerly awaited these forms so full of detail where perhaps an effort by Mengele to lend an air of scientific purpose to his experiments, he was desperate to achieve notoriety as a doctor and anthropologist.

And it's likely that his careful documentation of his subjects was intended to bring credibility to his work. But though he had a medical degree and studied anthropology at the highest levels, it's a generally accepted fact that Mengele mind was deeply average.

He sought approval from his mentor and acclaim from the wider community, but hadn't the smarts to accomplish either. Once the initial survey was complete, Mengele would personally interview each of the twins, while an assistant measured them from head to toe. According to one survivor, Mengele was especially interested in hair and would examine the roots to observe the way it grew here.

We may be able to see Mengele thinking emerge in an effort to support Nazi beliefs. He wanted to prove that everything about a person, their eye and hair, colors, height, head, shape and even behavioral traits, everything was all dictated by genetic factors.

The Nazis idea that genetic factors dictate everything was largely influenced by the first published scientific study on twins by Sir Francis Galton in 1875. Galton, who was actually a half cousin to Charles Darwin, believed that nature prevails almost entirely over nurture. Twins have actually been studied in medicine since the days of hypocritic dating back to the fifth century B.C.. From a scientific perspective, the study of twins is useful because it allows us to examine the relationship between environment and genetics, which we've learned from our last episode.

In the field of epigenetics. The study of twins relative to epigenetics has the advantage of looking at someone's environment over their genetics. Assuming they're twins, especially identical twins have similar genetics. One example is discovery of the LSP one gene, a marker for mammographic density and breast cancer risk. Scientists found that identical twins had similar mammographic density, while non-identical twins expressed only half this similarity.

These findings suggest that some breast cancers are determined largely by genetics, including those caused by the bracket genes.

The megaliths methods proved to have little scientific basis. His interest in twins clearly wasn't novel in the scientific world.

These initial charts and measurements perhaps served as a basis for Mandela's ongoing research, helping him to decide which twins were best suited for different areas of attention. But they were also a chance for him to get to know the prisoners, some of the younger children he would sit and chat with for stretches of time. To many, he was cheerful, smiling and laughing with them. He brought sweets and liked it when children in the camp, not just his twins, called him Uncle Mengele.

For some survivors, this side of Mengele is the one they remembered best. When the full extent of his scientific experiments were later revealed, many of his subjects experienced a jarring cognitive dissonance. The man who'd spared them from the gas chambers, who'd brought them candy and taken an interest in them, couldn't possibly be a monster. But kind Uncle Mangler was just a tiny facet of the criminal doctor's personality, he kept his subjects happy or at least more comfortable than some of their fellow inmates because he could and because he enjoyed wielding that power.

But he also did so to earn their trust, calming them down during traumatic procedures was easier if they liked him.

Once subjects arrived to the camp, they were initiated into an almost daily barrage of tests and observations. Six days a week, Mandela's children were taken the one and a half miles to a facility at Birkenau there in a dedicated building. The tests began Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were for measurements. They were stripped naked and waited up to eight hours, while Mandela's assistants, usually Jewish prisoners who were medical and anthropological professionals, measured every inch of them on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Things were even worse for hours. The twins would be forced to give blood samples, often while they were injected with unknown chemicals into their other arm. Children who are too small to provide blood samples via their arms had it taken from the neck a much more painful procedure. And unfortunately, that was only the beginning. Due to a lack of records, reports of many more probing experiments are anecdotal but horrifying on a near daily basis, the prisoners tasked with supervising the twins were instructed to prepare several of them for the day's experiments.

The chosen prisoners were bathed and taken to one of a number of facilities around Auschwitz Birkenau. Sometimes the experiments were little more than X-rays or blood tests, but not always like a good Nazi.

Mengele was obsessed with producing the perfect Aryan specimen. As mentioned earlier, it's believed by some that he hoped to find the secret to altering a person's hair and eye color and share that valuable knowledge with Virtua and his colleagues. To this end, he performed experiments on the eyes of his twins.

A pair of twins who survived recalled one day we were given eye drops afterward we could not see for several days. We thought the Nazis had made us blind. Drops were the least invasive of the eye procedures, some had chemicals injected directly into their eyeballs simply so Mangler could observe the results, waiting for a color change that would never come.

Other experiments occurred with little explainable reasoning.

One survivor, Alex Dekle, who was 12 when he arrived at Auschwitz, recalled seeing Mengele perform an operation to remove pieces from a prisoner's stomach decal, stated that the procedure was performed without the use of anesthesia.

He also witnessed Mengele removing a person's heart again sans anesthesia.

And here's where things need to be taken with a grain of salt, because in the decades following World War Two, Josef Mengele passed into the realm of myth. In his book, Mengele Unmasking the Angel of Death, biographer David Marwell asserts without discounting his guilt and the atrocities conducted at Auschwitz Birkenau, that Mengele reputation for outsized his impact at the camp, sometimes leading to stories of horrific experiments in service of perverse racial curiosity.

Still, if accounts like these are true, it paints an even more diabolical picture of Mengele than we've yet seen without anesthesia. The operations Mengele was reportedly performing would have been tantamount to torture.

An excruciating, painful and traumatic event like this would cause a patient's cortisol levels the stress hormone to jump off the charts. This could lead to a number of dangerous physiological outcomes like heart attack, stroke and death.

If true, these stories are horrific. If embellished, they speak only to the perceived evil brought about by Mengele actions.

You'll occasionally hear tales of Mengele attempting to manufacture conjoined twins by sewing identical twins together or have surgeries to remove or replace the sexual organs of boys and girls. Biographer David Marwell suggests that some stories like this might be more in line with trope than truth, but it would be a mistake to dispute every survivor's account of their time under Mengele so-called care. One man, Moshe offer remember the results of experiments performed on his twin brother, TB, saying Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in TB?

I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he was the older twin. He performs several operations on TB. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation. I did not see TB anymore. Whether or not all of his experiments were as gruesome as the stories suggest is a subject many have debated for decades. What is clear is that Mengele killed many of his twins for the express purpose of examining their corpses.

Dr. Miklós Knisely, a Jewish prisoner, performed autopsies for Mengele in a specially constructed dissection room in July of 1945. Dr. Knisley offered his deposition about one particular disturbing evening at Auschwitz. 14 Roma twins waited outside the dissection room, crying one by one. Mengele had each child brought into the room and laid upon the dissection table. There, he injected them with EpiPen to first knock them out, then chloroform directly into their heart to kill them. According to Dr.

Knisely, each of the waiting twins met the same fate that night. Like much of Mandela's actions at Auschwitz, this incident largely remains a mystery. We can only guess his motives. The reason Mengele combined Eva Peron with the chloroform is that ever pan was something that would augment or be synergistic with the chloroform to make its effect even stronger when used by itself. It does not have the same killing power as it does when combined with chloroform. Maybe the combination of EpiPen and chloroform and mangle his mind was a more humane method of killing than the gas chambers.

This certainly would have been a less painful, less frightening death.

Summarily killing them in his own way may have also been something that made Mengele feel powerful. One last measure of personal control over his victims. He may have even simply felt they were no longer of use to him. Whatever his reason for executing these twins, they joined the number of Mengele subjects who didn't survive Auschwitz.

And though many twins survived Auschwitz because they were mangler subjects, some died for the same reason. Author Robert Jay Lifton theorized that part of the twins value to Mengele was in the curious trick of their genetic sameness. They could be studied under identical conditions, go through the same or similar experiments, and then, if needed, be thoroughly examined once they were dead. Another Auschwitz prisoner, Dr. Radiologist's Abraham C, recalled a pair of Roma twins who were particular favorites of Mengele and the prison.

The doctors, the boys were around six or seven and both exhibited symptoms of suspected tuberculosis. They were studied as the Nazis were interested in hearing the disease. But careful examination led most doctors at the camp to declare them free of the disease. But Mengele was unconvinced, stubborn and furious at being contradicted. He insisted that he alone knew the truth. After arguing with Abraham, Mengele stormed from the room and returned. An hour later, he calmly admitted that the boys were not tubercular and that he shot each boy in the neck, then dissected.

They're still warm bodies to search for signs of the disease. Mengele likely told himself the boys deaths were just a final step in his scientific process, that it was an unavoidable consequence of medical advancements. But in reality, he murdered them in a misguided effort to prove a point. Having confidence in your convictions can be a useful trait in a doctor, but it can just as easily have disastrous consequences. It's not uncommon for doctors to disagree about a patient's diagnosis from a patient's perspective.

It can be really upsetting and potentially life threatening to receive conflicting or worse misinformation. This is why multiple opinions are very important when it comes to major health issues. Good medical practice would never discourage a doctor from getting a second opinion or allowing their patients to do the same. This can only bring in more information and give a patient choices that they may not have otherwise had with only one opinion. Unfortunately, there are unreasonable practitioners who view themselves as infallible.

These types would wrongly take offense to any differing opinion, doing it as a challenge to their expertise and egos. This seems to be exactly the kind of doctor Mengele was. At Auschwitz, there were few who could challenge Mengele. He essentially had free reign to do as he pleased, sentencing thousands to death with a flick of his wrist, then playing a doctor with his twins. The science was dubious, the medicine minimal and his actions criminal. But it was the kind of research Mengele believed he needed to do to achieve fame and respect.

But despite his grand ambitions, he didn't have forever.

And infamous as his reign at Auschwitz was, it was all coming to an end.

Up next, Josef Mengele final days at Auschwitz Birkenau. Now back to the story. Some accounts of Dr. Josef Mengele, his time at Auschwitz make particular mention of his kindness to small children, most make much of the terror he struck into the hearts of adults who knew his power. All agree that he was a monster.

And in the decades after World War Two, his infamy grew as reports emerged of his horrific scientific experiments. His reputation came to resemble an evil scientist toiling in a dingy laboratory. But the historical record largely rests on the stories told by his victims. It's from such accounts that we know one of his most prominent duties at the camp between 1943 and 1945 was selecting prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. Those who escaped that fate upon their arrival still lived in fear of Mengele as a physician at Auschwitz, he strolled through the camp and various barracks, choosing those who looked weak, sick or imperfect.

By this point in time, it wouldn't have been hard to find prisoners who look close to death. Nazi death camps for places ravaged with disease and prior to arrival, prisoners lived in ghettos that were hotbeds for illness. The crowded and unsanitary conditions of these places led to epidemics like typhus and dysentery, which were exacerbated by the long and packed train rides to the camps.

In this regard, it was unlikely that one would arrive at Auschwitz in good health. Even if they did, there was no guarantee their life would be spared. By the summer of 1944, Mengele had been at Auschwitz for about a year and the war was going poorly for the Nazis, with defeat seeming imminent. They redoubled their evil efforts to eradicate the Jewish people from Europe. Aside from the twins pulled from the masses, most arriving prisoners were now pointed in one direction to the gas chambers, despite the almost certain defeat his country now faced.

Reports say that Mengele continued to take perverse pleasure in his role. He even found the time to entertain himself at the grotesque expense of his doomed captives. In July of that year, a group of Hungarian rabbis arrived at the camp wearing their traditional black coats, woolen pants and fur hats. When Mengele spotted the men, he ordered them to step out of line to sing and dance for him. The rabbis began chanting the kohl nidre, a hymn of atonement as they danced and displayed their spiritual devotion, Mengele was unmoved by their prayer, wouldn't save them from his judgment.

When they were done, they rejoined the line moving into the gas chambers. It wouldn't be the last time Mengele wielded his power with unnecessary cruelty by now, this was his domain and he had carte blanche. Within Bengalese fiefdom, his tests on twins weren't the only twisted medical research and separate from his own experimentations, mangler sense of cruelty knew no bounds.

He sometimes liked to keep his own subjects happy, to make his own life easier. But those prisoners he didn't need were another story entirely.

One account tells a 15 year old Ebbie Hillman, whose striking beauty shown even with a roughly shorn head and clad in the shapeless outfits uniform.

By the time she arrived at the camp, most selections for the gas chambers took place inside the gates of Auschwitz, ostensibly to help him make a better informed decision. Mengele ordered many of the women to strip naked for him when EBR Hilman removed her clothes, onlookers reported Mengel as marked fascination with her. She transfixed him and that was unacceptable.

He resolved that she should be punished and ordered has sent to Block Ten.

That infamous building was where Mengele and colleagues conducted cruel gynecological experiments.

Hardly any of the subjects survived.

Weeks later, EBR was seen wandering the camp grounds, her stomach bloated from untold surgeries and her limbs swollen.

She looked aged and withered, no longer an enchanting beauty and no longer of any concern to Mengele. He had other things on his mind.

As 1944 drew to a close, even fanatics like Mengele could read the writing on the wall, some SS officers and guards began making preparations for retreat just in case. Still, when the Roma camp with an Auschwitz was closed and all its prisoners slaughtered, Mengele was careful to have his twin's bodies retrieved from the gas chambers to properly examine them. It's interesting to note that Mengel is twins were likely some of the very few victims of the Holocaust who received an autopsy, it's impossible to say what his intentions were in performing these autopsies.

Maybe he felt he missed some important detail after reviewing his work. It's also possible that his interest in twins escalated to some bizarre obsession, the sort of behavioral addiction driven by his brains, dopamine imbalance.

Whether this action was driven by a need for thoroughness or something more pathological mangle, the scientific records would ultimately be lost to time.

But to the end, he remained committed to completing his work, whatever it was, and he began to worry about what would happen to his data in the coming months to one of the prisoner doctors, he lamented, Isn't it a pity that all this work will fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks with the Russians?

Just weeks from reaching Auschwitz, many Nazi doctors destroyed their records, but not Mengele.

In a desperate effort to preserve his research, he packed slides and notes into boxes, then supposedly had them shipped to his hometown of Ginzberg. But where those boxes ended up is anyone's guess. It seems that no one has ever uncovered written records of Mengele work at Auschwitz, and the doctor himself didn't stick around to answer any questions.

In January of 1945, he disappeared from the camp under cover of darkness. In the following days, whatever was left of Mandela's records were destroyed, they were blown up by the remaining SS guards, along with the massive crematoriums that for years had polluted the sky above Auschwitz with black smoke, though, it's clear that Josef Mengele was never the great scientific mind he imagined himself.

It's hard to not be somewhat curious about his lost medical records. In all likelihood, however, his research was probably not all that useful, despite the importance he attributed to it. It's even possible that Mengele tried to hide these records not for their research value, but to avoid embarrassment over his incompetence, brutality and lack of results. Many with firsthand knowledge of Mangels experiments at Auschwitz denounced him as a scientific wannabe, which makes it even harder to imagine that his loss records would be a great contribution to medicine.

And yet the doctors work at Auschwitz was deemed too valuable or too incriminating to fall into the hands of the enemy. So it was destroyed with all the rest. It was a desperate attempt by the Nazis to cover their tracks to hide the millions of murders that took place at the concentration camps. Thankfully, it didn't work and the world was made aware of the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, many of the worst offenders from the Nazi leadership evaded those seeking to bring them to justice, including the angel of death of Auschwitz.

Following his escape, mangler largely remained a free man in the immediate aftermath of the war. Only the survivors of Auschwitz really knew what he had done there. Unfortunately, he was not a prominent name on many wanted lists. He slipped through the cracks and eventually made his way to South America. Even after the war, he seemed unable to stay away from medicine, risking still more lives in the process. In Argentina, he practiced medicine without a license until a teenage patient died during an abortion, afraid that any attention would expose his identity as a war criminal.

He moved on. He was just in the nick of time to Nazi hunters, had tracked down his Argentina address and ordered his extradition. But by the time everything was in place for his arrest, Mengele was already gone, fled to Paraguay.

Unfortunately, this wasn't his only escape from justice during his years as a fugitive, for decades, so many of mangler surviving twins stayed silent, too traumatized to speak up, too fearful to share their horrifying ordeal until February of 1985, when a group of surviving twins reunited in Jerusalem to finally reveal the truth.

It was a trial of sorts. Forty years had passed since he slipped away from Auschwitz and Mengele had never faced justice. His victims were done waiting for their day in court. Three days of testimony made headlines around the world has the truth about Josef Mengele. Twisted experiments came to light for the first time at the close of the trial. The assembled tribunal demanded that efforts resume to apprehend the 73 year old doctor and bring him to justice. An international manhunt began with forces from the U.S., Israel and Germany searching for any sign of the elusive Mengele.

They wouldn't have to look for long. That same year, German police exhumed remains from a grave in Brazil and confirmed they were, in fact, Josef Mengele.

The renewed effort to find Mengele had come too late in 1979 at the age of 67. He suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned. He was buried under the name Wolfgang Gearheart, hiding his true identity even to the grave.

In his youth, Mengele was desperate for fame and admiration for his work. But beyond his Auschwitz infamy, he didn't contribute anything to the medical field. A lot was made of the temperament required to be a doctor. But seldom do we talk about the personality of scientists. Josef Mengele was fit to be neither.

To the end, Josef Mengele remained an unrepentant Nazi who failed to take responsibility for the monstrous role he played in the Holocaust, shielded by his family's wealth and helped by sympathizers, he deprived his victims of the chance to confront him, to ask him why, if Mengele had a great mind, if he were truly concerned with a scientific import of his research, he might have felt compelled to defend or explain his crimes at Auschwitz Birkenau. Then again, it's easy to see that Mengele mind was neither great nor particularly scientific.

He was mediocre to the last degree, except perhaps in his capacity for evil.

Thanks for listening to medical murders and thanks again to Dr. Kipa for joining me today. And thank you, Alastair, very much.

For more information on Josef Mengele, among the many sources we used, we found the book Children of the Flames. Dr. Josef Mengele and The Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalan Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekle and the Nazi Doctors Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton. Extremely helpful to our research.

You can find all episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify, not only to Spotify, already have all of your favorite music, but now Spotify is making it easy for you to enjoy all of your favorite podcast originals, like medical murders for free from your phone, desktop or smart speaker to stream medical murders on Spotify. Just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. We'll see you next time. Medical murders was created by Max Cutler and as a podcast studio's original, it is executive produced by Max Cutler Sound designed by Trent Williamson with production assistance by Carly Madden, Kristen Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Rateliff and Erin Larson.

This episode of Medical Murders was written by Joel Cullen with writing assistants by Maggie Admire and stars David Kepa and Alistair Murden.

Hey, listeners, don't forget to follow blind dating for a fun twist on a classic set up YouTube and host Tara Michelle can't wait to help hopefuls singles meet their match, search blind dating and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.