Photography
I feel very strongly that even though there is a number of photographs of Josef Mengele elsewhere on this website, I did not wish to feature him in such a prominent way for my design assignment. Instead, I decided to feature those who suffered his pseudoscientific medical experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Mengele's Experiments
Under the supervision and direction of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin, Josef Mengele performed experiments on twins and people with genetic mutations. Twins were of special interest because one twin could act as a "control" while the other was experimented upon. Mengele injected the twins with various substances, amputated and reattached limbs, and, when they were killed, performed autopsies on them. He also experimented upon people with dwarfism, those with heterochromia (two different eye colors), and those with a rare gangrenous skin condition called "noma", which became prevalent among the Roma (gypsy) prisoners suffering from malnutrition in Auschwitz.
Rene and Renata Guttmann
Renata and Rene Guttmann were fraternal twins born in December 1937 in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia. Their parents, Herbert and Ida Guttmann, moved the family to Prague when the twins were young. Herbert 
was arrested by the Germans in 1941, when the twins were three years old. This is a picture of the twins with their mother, Ida, sometime in 1940 or 1941. Rene is on the left, and Renata, obviously, on the right. I didn't do much to this picture, just adjusted the coloring and shading a bit, since the sepia color was overwhelming.
Ida and the twins were deported, first to Theresienstadt (Terezin), and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Auschwitz, the twins were not only separated from their mother, who perished in the camp, but from each other. They were both experimented upon by Josef Mengele, and were subjected to injections and X-rays.
This is another photograph of the twins, taken in 1940 or 1941, while the family was still in Prague. I adjusted coloring and removed a few marks, and did my best, believe it or not, to make Rene's face more visible. The twins were not reunited immediately after the war. Rene was taken to a Catholic hospital in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, and one of the hospital administrators, Dr. Kalina took him home, and then to his sister's house. Renata was taken in by a Polish woman, and then placed in an orphanage in France. In 1947, Renata was chosen to travel to the United States to raise money for Jewish children's homes in Europe. She garnered a great deal of media attention, and was on the cover of "Life" magazine. Dr. Kalina saw her on the cover, and contacted the orphanage to let them know that Renata's twin, Rene, was still alive and in Europe. At this point, Renata (who now goes by Irene) was in the process of being adopted by an American family, the Slotkins. The Slotkins agreed to adopt Rene as well, and the twins were once again reunited in 1950.
Yehudit and Lea Csengeri
I cleaned up this photograph quite a bit, as you cannot make out the details of the sweaters in the original and the background behind the twins was uneven. That is most likely due to the fact that the photograph was hidden in an attic during World War II and retrieved only afterward. After I cleaned up the image, I vignetted it.
Yehudit and Lea Csengeri were born in June 1937 in Simleu Silvaniei, Transylvania, to Zvi and Rosalia Csengeri, who had married just nine months before. The twins were raised in Budapest, and the family was both religious and Zionist. In 1942, Zvi was arrested and forced to work in a Hungarian labor battalion which was sent to the Ukraine. Initially told that he would be gone for one month, Zvi did not return to Hungary until 1945. As the Hungarian government collaborated with the Nazis, the Jews of Hungary were largely untouched until the spring of 1944. Then all the anti-Semitic decrees and deportations that had taken years in the rest of Europe, happened quickly in Hungary.
I didn't do much to this picture except crop and resize it from the original. This is a picture of Yehudit and Lea with their grandmother and their uncles in Transylvania in 1943. I love the expression on their grandmother's face and how she is linking arms with her granddaughters.
On May 4, 1944 Yehudit, Lea and their mother Rosie were deported to Auschwitz, but not before Rosie was able to send Zvi a postcard letting him know that they were being deported. As Mengele was well-known at Auschwitz for his experiments on twins, Yehudit, Lea, and the sixteen other pairs of twins were separated from the transport upon arrival. They refused to let go of Rosie, and she was allowed to accompany her daughters to a special part of Birkenau, where they were tattooed and their hair was shorn. Mengele and some of the other Nazi physicians took blood samples of the girls and injected them with various diseases. At one point, Rosie, who had arranged to work disposing bodies in the infirmary to be close to her daughters, attempted to stop Mengele from hurting them. As punishment, he injected her with meningitis. After a second injection, she lost her hearing, which also affected her speech.
I lightened and cleaned up the scratches from this picture, of Yehudit and Lea sometime in 1943, when the twins were about six years old. I had a hard time fixing the face of the twin on the right, as any lightening attempt I made to define her hair from the background did not work. I think you might be able to see it a little better.
After the Nazis evacuated and abandoned Auschwitz in mid-January 1945, Rosie and her daughters were left behind, along with many of the Mengele twins. After the Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, the family settled temporarily in nearby Katowice, where Rosie also took care of eleven-year-old Mengele twins Eva and Miriam Mozes. After six months, the Csengaris (along with the Mozes twins) traveled to Simleu Silvaniei, where they reunited with Zvi. Rosie gave birth to a son, Michael, nine months later. The family moved to Israel in 1960, and Zvi and Rosie lived to see the births of nine great-grandchildren.
The Aftermath
Though the Guttmann twins and the Csengari twins both survived the war (and, in the case of the Csengaris, both parents survived as well), this was far from common with Mengele twins. Due to the nature of his experiments, one twin would often die as a result, leaving behind a twin, who was either also killed, or who continued to undergo painful and invasive experimentation alone. Perhaps the most famous set of Mengele twins are the Mozes girls (the same sisters who were cared for by Rosie Csengari). Eva Mozes Kor has written several books about her experiences in Auschwitz, and is the subject of the recent documentary "Forgiving Dr. Mengele."
I hand-colored this final photograph. I had a hard time getting the skin color the way I liked it, even though I used the lightest numbers in the Eismann book (figuring that it was winter in Poland, they would be pretty pale). I reinforced the barbed wire in front of the children, and tried to get the stripes on their uniforms to be the right color. I actually think there is probably too much color in this image, that in reality, things actually were quite gray there, but for the purposes of this assignment, I made their clothing a little brighter. This image is a still from footage taken by a cameraman in the Red Army on liberation day, January 27, 1945.
I obviously had a hard time finding engravings that related to Mengele or any of the subjects of his medical experimentation. I even had a hard time finding any engravings related to the war, so I just picked a simple image and re-matted the background by following Dr. Petrik's instructions (3 layers, blending layers).
