Not unlike adults, child and minor inmates were subjected to criminal medical experiments. Most is known about the experiments conducted at KL Auschwitz, including on children, by the aforementioned SS physician and anthropologist, Dr Josef Mengele. A “frequent guest” in both family camps, he originally exploited the inmates as live human material for his criminal experiments. From May 1944 he selected, sometimes in person, victims from Jewish transports designated to be killed during selection on the ramp. Mengele devoted most attention to studies of multiple pregnancies as he was especially interested in twins, particularly monozygotic (uniovular, identical). Moreover, he was also interested in the physiology and pathology of dwarfism and conducted research on children and adults with various congenital deformities, e.g., severe kyphosis, disabilities or limps, but also with different colour irises (heterochromia iridum), and with sections of their iris with different colours (heterochromia iridis). When a disease known as noma, or orofacial gangrene, began to spread among children and adolescents in the Romani camp, without affecting other parts of the camp, he also launched a study on its causes and methods of treatment. During his experiments, some children were killed on Mengele’s order. Their bodies were transported to the SS Hygiene Institute in Rajsko where specialist studies were conducted, and individual organs were preserved as specimens. In some cases, entire heads were even conserved in jars. The specimens were later dispatched to the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem and to the SS Medical Academy in Graz in Austria that Mengele cooperated with. [For more on the criminal activity of Dr J. Mengele at KL Auschwitz, see: Helena Kubica, Dr Mengele und seine Verbrechen im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau [in:] Hefte von Auschwitz 1997, No. 20, pp. 369–436; Miklós Nyiszli, Byłem asystentem doktora Mengele. Wspomnienia lekarza z Oświęcimia, Warszawa 1996, pp. 46–47.]

Josef Mengele organised a laboratory workshop for himself in the Romani camp, in the barrack of the Bath (Sauna) situated behind Barrack 32, where he conducted morphological and anthropometric tests and studies. The final stage of examination of some twin pairs and individuals was the autopsy, during which individual body organs were analysed. For that reason, victims were killed on the order of Doctor Mengele, or personally by him, in most cases with shots of phenol to the heart, and the bodies were delivered to the mortuary. The mortuary was initially situated in the Romani camp (Sector BIIe), later it was set up in the outhouse of Barrack 12 of the men’s hospital (sector BIIf) in Birkenau, and then from July 1944 on the premises of Crematorium No. II. It was a specialist research dissecting room, with modern instrumentation, equipped by Dr Mengele himself. He employed an inmate to work there, a Hungarian Jew, Miklós Nyiszli, an anatomical pathologist, who conducted autopsies, made comparative studies of certain internal organs, and drafted scientific conclusions from the autopsy results.

In the first phase of experimentation, the designated medical and nursing personnel consisting of incarcerated physicians representing various fields of medicine, subjected victims to an array of specialist physical examinations that could be conducted on living bodies: anthropometric, radiological, morphological, dental, laryngological, surgical, and ophthalmological. The victims were also photographed, and the results of the examinations were entered into their individual files. The scientific conclusions from the tests and studies conducted by Mengele were carried out by personnel that included an incarcerated Czech Jew, Professor Bertold Epstein, MD, a world-class paediatrician from the University of Prague and head of Mengele’s laboratory.

After completion of tests on a living organism, individual pairs of twins were killed, and their bodies were subjected to a scientific autopsy. Internal organs were compared. The autopsies were performed by a French Jew, Dr Jancu Vexler, and from July 1944, by the aforementioned Dr Miklós Nyiszli. Anatomical specimens that were interesting from a scientific point of view were conserved and sent to the institutes in Berlin and Graz (Austria). Doctor Mengele left KL Auschwitz on 17 January, taking with him nearly all the documentation of the experiments he conducted.

Beside Mengele, criminal experiments on children were also conducted at KL Auschwitz by other German physicians. Both Professor of gynaecology Carl Clauberg, and Horst Schumann MD, subjected Jewish women aged from 14 to 16 to sterilisation procedures. In turn, Jewish boys were castrated, a practice that also applied to adult inmates. One of few surviving inmates of the Sonderkommando, employed among others for incineration of the corpses in Crematorium No. I (camp Auschwitz I) testified:

Experiments using children from KL Auschwitz were also conducted after they had been transferred to other camps. In September 1943, 11 boys, Polish Jews brought from the ghettos in Sosnowiec and Będzin, were selected at Birkenau and taken to Sachsenhausen to be at the disposal of the German general practitioner and bacteriologist, Dr Arnold Dohmen. There he researched jaundice, injecting the boys to produce artificial inflammation of the liver.

The case of 20 Jewish children, boys and girls aged from 5 to 12, sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp from Auschwitz II–Birkenau on 27 November 1944 is also known. They served as the “guinea pigs” for SS physician, Dr Kurt Heissmeyer in his studies on tuberculosis. These experiments were top-secret, which is why during the final stages of the war, on 20 April 1945, the children, together with the incarcerated medical personnel who were familiar with the experiments, were deported to a branch of the Neuengamme camp situated in a school building at Bullenhuser-Damm in Hamburg where they were murdered by hanging on central heating pipes in the basement.