Dr. Josef Mengele and Dr. Shiro Ishii

Who exactly were Dr. Josef Mengele and Dr. Shiro Ishii? Why aren’t their names heard of all that much? Why is it that these men almost go unknown in some textbooks that we learn from this day and age? Well, let me tell you this, these men may be the most sadistic people during World War II. Let’s start with probably the more well known of the two, Dr. Joseph Mengele.

                Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as “the angel of death”, was a German Schutzstaffel guard and doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He entered the Nazi Party in 1937 and went to the SS in 1938. In 1942 he was wounded in battle and was said to be unfit for war. So he then volunteered to be sent to a concentration camp in Auschwitz Germany. Here he became the last surviving symbol of Adolph Hitler’s “Final Solution”. Dr. Mengele was fascinated with his experiments that he performed on identical twins. When the trains would unload, the prisoners would be forced to stand in line and Dr. Josef would walk the lines looking for twins or any other people with hereditary disfigurements. When a pair of twins was found, he’d take them to be processed. They would be led to a shower room and were given special care and treated better than others because Mengele considered them to be his “children” from that moment on. After they would shower, they were then given a special number to be tattooed on them, and then sent to the twin’s barracks. Each morning Mengele would come in and inspect the children, but to the children, Mengele was a good man. He would come in with his pockets full of candy; he would talk to them, and even sometimes play with them. Almost every day, they would have blood drawn, often in large quantities. They would then be taken to laboratories and have things injected into them, or would have their bodies experimented on. They would have chemicals injected into their eyes to change the eye color, would have mass blood transfusions between twins, they would have organs switched, and body parts amputated. If one twin were to die, the other would be killed shortly after.

Surgeon General Dr. Shiro Ishii was a Japanese medical officer during WWII and was involved in Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Japanese army. He was also known for his frequent lethal human experiments. When countries would start experimenting with biological weapons, they would try to be somewhat ethical about it and test these things out on animals.  But not, Shiro Ishii; this man had no cares about the humans that he tested on. He would unleash some of the deadliest pathogens in history on humans, and study the results of what was left of the people. He would forcibly make people become his little guinea pigs. He would make then breathe, eat, and take injections of deadly diseases and pathogens. He would often have the people killed before the disease would take its effect on the humans so that he could examine their body’s reaction to it. In 1945, Unit 731 was forced to be shut down, and because of it being shut down, the Japanese destroyed many of the records so that no one could know much of what happened.

So as you can tell, these men were horrible people.  But you tell me why we don’t hear as much about these two men as we should. I feel that these two men did worse things than that of what Hitler did. I also feel that the reason why more Germans were sentenced to jail or death than that of Japanese is because I feel that the Japanese did everything in their power to cover their tracks, and destroy any evidence that they could. I also feel that the Japanese worked behind the scenes. While the Germans attracted all the attention, the Japanese felt that they could get away with just about anything they wanted.

I believe that what both the Germans and Japanese did during the holocaust were wrong. But I feel that what the Japanese were doing almost goes un-noticed.  Things such as the Rape of Nanking, need to be brought out more in textbooks and in history lessons. And I would like to know why is it that things like that isn’t taught or learned as often as they should be. These tragic events are major parts of our world’s history, and they need to be more commonly well known.