Body parts and BRAINS of Nazi torture doctor Josef Mengele’s victims unearthed during renovations at top German lab
The gruesome remains were discovered at the Max Planck Psychiatric Institute in Munich
BODY parts and brains of victims of horrific experiments by Nazi doctors - including the infamous 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele - have been found at a leading German research institute.
The gruesome remains were discovered during renovations at the Max Planck Psychiatric Institute in Munich last year but reported on by Israeli media only this week.
In the wake of the discovery a committee has been established in order to ascertain just how the victims came to die.
The Max Planck Institute claims the samples were once used by the Nazi brain researcher Julius Hallervorden, who conducted experiments on humans during and after the rule of the Nazis.
He even served as the head of the neuropathology department at the institute, then known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, in 1938.
The research committee has already started to identify some of the victims from whom the samples were taken with the goal of eventually interring them in a mass grave.
The institute published on its website: "We are embarrassed by these findings, and the blemish of their discovery in the archives. We will update the public with any further information that comes to light with complete transparency."
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Israel, had not been aware of the existence of the samples.
Professor Dan Machman, director of the International Centre for Holocaust Research at the museum, told an Israeli radio station: "It's surprising, although not completely. We know that experiments were conducted and that not everything was erased and buried.
"Two years ago, bones of victims on whom experiments were conducted were found in Berlin in the trash. Next year, we're going to organize a convention about this issue.
"This current finding is something new that was previously unknown, and joins other events that are suddenly uncovered after 70 years."
"Whoever thought this chapter was completely finished is mistaken. It's hard to know if these samples are exclusively from 'mercy killings' - the Nazi jargon for the murder of sick people for the purposes of experimentation - or if they also derive from other sources."
It is known that in wartime the institute regularly received human body parts from Josef Mengele, the camp doctor at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Poland where he became infamous for carrying out hideous experiments without anaesthetic.
From 1940 to 1945, hundreds of brains from victims of the mass murder of psychiatric patients and the mentally deficient at that time were examined scientifically at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (KWI) in Berlin.
"Researchers at the KWI for Brain Research like Julius Hallervorden (1882 -1965), who worked at the KWI from 1938, made themselves complicit in the organised murder of patients in an unbelievable manner," said the institute.
"The investigation mandated now should reveal more about the possible victims as well as scientific evaluations which have been performed.
In addition, the brain sections dating from the Nazi era should be buried. It has yet to be decided where the sections which arose after 1945 will remain."
What happened to Hitler's death doc Mengele?
Josef Mengele was a German SS officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
He was a notorious member of the team of docs responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners.
Arrivals deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labour were immediately killed in the gas chambers.
Mengele left Auschwitz on 17 January 1945, shortly before the arrival of the liberating Red Army troops.
Assisted by a network of former SS members, Mengele sailed to Argentina in July 1949.
He initially lived in and around Buenos Aires, then fled to Paraguay in 1959 and Brazil in 1960.
In spite of extradition requests by the German government and clandestine operations by Mossad, Mengele eluded capture.
He drowned while swimming off the Brazilian coast in 1979 and was buried under a false name.
His remains were disinterred and positively identified by forensic examination in 1985.