Did you see the History of Torture on the History Channel this morning Fletch? Man was that gruesome. The worst had to be Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele and his experiments on children. He would boil the children in hot water vats up to the point where the skin was soft so he could scrape it off for lab work. They were still alive (the water was just short of boiling temps).
Here's some more stuff on this psycho.
When the doors to our cattle car opened, I heard SS soldiers yelling, "Schnell! Schnell!" ("Faster! Faster!"), and ordering everybody out. My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand. She was always trying to protect us because we were the youngest. Everything was moving very fast, and as I looked around, I noticed my father and my two older sisters were gone. As I clutched my mother?s hand, an SS man hurried by shouting, "Twins! Twins!" He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike. "Are they twins?" he asked my mother. "Is that good?" she replied. He nodded yes. "They are twins," she said.
While the twins were spared from outright execution, they were delivered to a decidedly crueler fate. Mengele reserved a special barracks for his twin subjects, as well as for dwarfs, cripples and other "exotic specimens." The barracks was nicknamed the Zoo, Mengele?s holding pen. The twins were his favorite subjects, and they were afforded special treatment, such as being able to keep their own hair and clothing, and receiving extra food rations. The guards were under strict orders not to abuse the children, and were to look after their well being lest one should fall ill and die. Mengele became explosively irate if one of his beloved specimens should happen to die. These twins were referred to as "Mengele?s Children." It was here in the Zoo that the twins were to learn of their parents? true fate in the gas chambers, where Mengele simultaneously became to them a figure of death and of life, the man who had condemned their parents and family members to annihilation, while at the same time sparing their own lives.
Mengele?s children were also spared from beatings, forced labor and random selections in order to maintain their good health. However, Mengele was not motivated by humanitarian urges, but by his desire to keep his specimens healthy for experimentation. Ironically, it was his very experiments that extracted the heaviest physical toll on the children upon whom he lavished such care and affection, and hundreds ended up dying as a result of his gruesome deeds. As with other inmates at Auschwitz, Mengele?s imagination knew no bounds when it came to devising physical torments for his victims. Preliminary examinations of the twins were routine enough. The children filled out a questionnaire, were weighed and measured. However, a more gruesome fate awaited them at Mengele?s hands. He took daily blood samples from his children, and sent these to Professor von Verschuer in Berlin. He injected blood samples from one twin into another twin of a different blood type and recorded the reaction. This was invariably a searingly painful headache and high fever that lasted for several days. In order to determine if eye color could be genetically altered, Mengele had dye injected into the eyes of several twin subjects. This always resulted in painful infections, and sometimes even blindness. If such twins died, Mengele would harvest their eyes and pin them to the wall of his office, much like a biologist pins insect samples to styrofoam. Young children were placed in isolation cages, and subjected to a variety of stimuli to see how they would react. Several twins were castrated or sterilized. Many twins had limbs and organs removed in macabre surgical procedures that Mengele performed without using an anesthetic. Other twins were injected with infectious agents to see how long it would take for them to succumb to various diseases.
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