Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Ap essays on josef mengele
Ap essays on josef mengele
Josef Mengele Thesis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Ap essays on josef mengele
Hungry, beaten, naked, abused, and dehumanized: these are just a few words to describe the prisoners in death camps all around Germany during World War II. Another word that describes these people is, experiments. Prisoners were human test tubes, available in seemingly unlimited amounts. With no rights and no chance of liberation, these people were treated like lab rats. During World War II, there were multiple evil and horrible events; one of the most wicked happenings was Josef Mengele’s medical experiments in the Nazi death camps.
Even though Mengele will go down in history as the Angel of Death, before his adulthood Mengele’s life was completely different. His father, Karl Mengele, was an extremely successful businessman. He owned the family factory and worked there so much that Mengele had few memories of his father. With his father nowhere to be seen, Mengele’s mother had to do everything. His mother, Walburga, was a crazy, murderous women, who literally drove Mengele crazy. There is evidence that some of the acts Mengele did were caused by how his mother treated him. Mengele once wrote about how cold-hearted his parents were, and how he felt like he needed the power of authority. Mengele was the eldest of three sons. At school, Mengele had the nickname of “Beppo”. This word is an affectionate name for a proactive young child. He was a well-behaved student, and received compliments from otherwise strict and mean teachers. In his village, he was always the best dressed, well-mannered, and all of the ladies wanted him.
At this time Mengele’s life was normal. He went on to college and avoided his parents. Going against his father’s wishes, Mengele decided not to go into business but in to the medical field. Mengele studied gene...
... middle of paper ...
...ushing Mengele over the edge. Mengele had been seeking control his entire life until Auschwitz provided him with it. With all the sense of power and control, it went to his head. He started performing operations that could not have been able to done by anyone else, anywhere else. After Mengele lost his power, he realized all of the evil that he had created and lived in the shadows for the rest of his life.
Work Cited
“Angel of Death” Louis Bülow 2012-14. Web. 27 March 2014
“Josef Mengele” American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise Elie Berman 2014. Web. 27 March 2014
“Josef Mengele” History Learning Site Chris Trueman 2000-2013. Web. 27 March 2014
“Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death” Crime Library Douglas B. Lynott. Web. 4 April 2014
“Josef Mengele.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 10 July 2013. Web. 27 March 2014.
Thousands upon thousands of innocent Jews, men, women, and children tortured; over one million people brutally murdered; families ripped apart from the seams, all within Auschwitz, a 40 square kilometer sized concentration camp run by Nazi Germany. Auschwitz is one of the most notorious concentration camps during WWII, where Jews were tortured and killed. Auschwitz was the most extreme concentration camp during World War Two because innumerable amounts of inhumane acts were performed there, over one million people were inexorably massacred, and it was the largest concentration camp of over two thousand across Europe.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
Dr. Nyiszli was a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp survivor which was located in Poland. Reading his story provided me and the rest of the world with a description of the horrors that took place in the concentration camp in 1944. Being separated from his wife and daughter, Dr. Nyiszli volunteered to work under the supervision of the head doctor at the concentration camp which was Josef Mengele. Being a Jew and a medical doctor, he was spared death to do worst then a death, to perform scientific research on his fellow inmates with the infamous “Angel of Death”- Dr. Josef Mengele. Dr. Nyiszli was named Mengele’s personal research pathologist. In that capacity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months. There were several thoughts that ran my mind after reading Dr.
“Nazi Hunting: Simon Wiesenthal.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 06 Feb. 2014
Between 1939 and 1945, more than seventy medical research projects and medical experiments were conducted at Auschwitz and Dachau. (Auschwitz Medical Experimentation). Over two hundred doctors participated in such research projects and experiments, sentencing between 70,000 and 100,000 people, held against their will, to death through experimentation. These were mostly Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals and other minorities. They were thought to be inferior to the human race. Such practices became widely accepted and embraced by the Germans, due to the Nazis propaganda. The experiments conducted were diverse, but could be categorized in three classes.
As the human species develops, medicine follows suit. Researchers look down medicinal avenues which promise a better life-- a longer life. However, red and blue paint cannot engender purple paint without proper mixing. Thus, health sciences cannot expand without thorough experimentation. The Nazis exemplified this concept of “thorough experimentation” with their cruel and inhumane medical experiments. The trials varied in nature and reason. Some of the “experiments had legitimate scientific purposes, though the methods that were used violated the canons of medical ethics. Others were racial in nature, designed to advance Nazi racial theories. [However,] Most were simply bad science.” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). The medical experiments performed by the Nazis were vast and highly divergent, but they can generally be divided into three categories: racial experimentation, war-injury experimentation, and pharmaceutical testing.
The book begins with Beppo Mengele as a child in Günzburg, Germany, with quotes from his later “children” of the death camps. These added quotes relate to what is happening in Mengele’s own life and enhance the story. It was said “there is nothing in Josef Mengele’s early life that would have prepared him for the notoriety that was destined to engulf him” (Lagnato 31). A majority of the book is placed at Auschwitz, but the setting later moves to South America as Dr. Mengele flees Europe and his war crimes. Explained in the book, Josef Mengele had gotten swept up in the Nazi move...
“Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body. “A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards.
In 1930, young, teenage Mengele completed high school and left his home to study medicine at Munich University in Germany. Adolf Hitler was stirring up the Bavarian people at this time with his “anti-Jewish” ideas. He attracted large crowds, who gather...
At the camp, the Jews were not treated like human. They were force to do thing that was unhuman and that dehumanized
In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli tells the story of his time in Auschwitz. Dr. Nyiszli is a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp located in Poland. His story provides the world with a description of horrors that had taken place in camp in 1944. Separated from his wife and daughter, Dr. Nyiszli volunteered to work under the supervision of the head doctor in the concentration camp, Josef Mengele. It was under Dr. Mengele’s supervision that Dr. Nyiszli was exposed to the extermination of innocent people and other atrocities committed by the SS. Struggling for his own survival, Dr. Nyiszli did anything possible to survive, including serving as a doctor’s assistant to a war criminal so that he could tell the world what happened at the Auschwitz concentration camp.This hope for survival and some luck allowed Dr. Nyiszli to write about his horrific time at Auschwitz.His experiences in Auschwitz will remain apart of history because of the insight he is able to provide.
Edward Bond, a playwright who lived through WW2, says that, “Humanity has become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz” (BrainyQuote 1). This means that when humanity becomes a privilege to some and not a natural right to all, then things like Auschwitz and in turn the Holocaust happen. The Holocaust death camps were considered both mentally and physically inhumane; the total effect of them shows the true level of inhumanity they installed. The death camps were mentally inhumane to the prisoners especially during the first few days because most inmates had some to all of their family taken away and killed. The camps tore families apart and people watched as their loved ones were left to be killed.
During World War II, Hitler rounded up people who were not part of the Aryan Race and sent them to concentration camps; in those camps, some of those people served as test subjects for medical experimentation. These experiments separate into three categories. The first type were “experiments aimed at facilitating the survival of Axis military personnel,” (Museum). Next, the “experimentation aimed at developing and testing pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses which German military and occupation personnel encountered in the field” (Museum). Finally, the “[experimentations] sought to advance the racial and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview” (Museum). In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Dr. Mengele conducted at least two of the selections that Elie had to watch and go through, but it is different because in Night, Elie Wiesel was not aware of the experiments and only saw Dr. Mengele during the selections. Dr. Mengele and other SS doctors received the power to test various medical experiments on Jews, Gypsies, war prisoners, the unwanted, and others that Hitler sent to concentration camps. Some were done for science and others were just to satisfy the doctor's interests.