"Camp doctors", especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict terrible suffering upon Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. "Patients" were frozen to death, put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, and exposed to various other traumas.
Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, Mengele surveyed his prey with those dead eyes of his. Death to the right, life to the right. Four hundred thousand souls - babies, small children, mothers, fathers, and grandparents - are said to have been casually waved to the left hand side with a flick of the cane clasped in his gloved hand.
Once Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies. Often Mengele would inject chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. Mengele's special pathology lab was located next to the crematorium. He made experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli, injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, the removal of organs and limbs, incestuous impregnations, and score of other atrocities.
The few survivors tell how as children in Auschwitz they were visited by a smiling "Uncle Mengele" who brought them candy and clothes. Then he'd have them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem, or in his own personal car to undergo experiments. These terrors occurred in Block 10 of Auschwitz I. Josef Mengele was nicknamed the "Angel of Death" for the inhuman experiments he conducted.
Over the years of operation, the camp was expanded and consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz It also had over 40 sub-camps. Beginning in 1942, the camp became the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity, which was committed against the European Jews, as part of Hitler's plan for the liquidation of all European Jews. The majority of the Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after their arrival.
By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial sized scale with some estimates running as high as 3 million people eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting and burning. Nine out of ten people killed at Auschwitz were Jews. Poles, Soviet POWs, Gypsies, Jews were all killed there.
At the end of the war, in an effort to remove any trace of the crimes they had committed, the SS began dismantling and razing the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, as well as burning documents. Prisoners capable of walking were evacuated into the depths of the Reich. Those who remained behind in the camp were liberated by soldiers of the Red Army January 27, 1945. On July 2, 1947, the Polish parliament established the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
