Oxford Index Search Results

Mengele, Josef (1911–79)   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to World War II

..., Josef ( 1911–79 ), German doctor who, from May 1943 , was chief medical officer at Auschwitz . The most notorious of the medical experiments he carried out on the inmates were those on twins—allegedly to find a means of multiplying the German nation—and on one occasion he supervised the sewing together of two gypsy children to create Siamese twins. But he also killed thousands with lethal injections. Because he always took part in deciding who should live and who should die while dressed in an immaculate white medical coat he was known by the inmates...

Herriot, James (1916–95) [People]   Quick reference

The Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion (3 ed.)

...with a love of animals; a vet How much fun can that be? Driving up hill and down dale, hitting much loved hamsters and guinea pigs over the head. Dealing with a child's hysteria as you kill its dog. Everyone is expecting James Herriot to turn up, but instead they get Dr Mengele. The Angel of Death. The Sunday Times ...

Chapultepec, Act of   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to World War II

...was never held to. ‘Under the resolutions adopted here,’ Stettinius stated, ‘no Axis leader, official, or agent who is guilty of crimes against law and civilization in this war will be able to escape punishment by finding refuge in this hemisphere.’ ( see Barbie , Eichmann , Mengele ). The Act, which was signed at the end of the conference, stated that any act of aggression on any American state, from without or within, would be considered an act of aggression on all. The conference also recommended an Inter-American Defence Treaty and one was eventually...

Holocaust   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to Medicine (3 ed.)

...chief scientist of the Aerospace Medical Division of the United States Air Force. The principal investigator for Dr Josef Mengele 's infamous Auschwitz research was the distinguished professor and world authority on genetics and twin studies, Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer saw Auschwitz as an opportunity to fulfill his research postulate that genetic research required studies on human twins selected at random. In Auschwitz, Mengele functioned as Verschuer's research assistant. Specimens from twin victims murdered in Auschwitz were sent to the Kaiser-Wilhelm...

children — experimentation on   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to Medicine (3 ed.)

...new medical treatments and scientific experiments on man ( 1931 ), including special protections for children under the age of 18. After 1933 , when the National Socialists came to power, children were not exempted from concentration camp experiments. Physician Josef Mengele conducted extensive experiments on twin children at Auschwitz, and large numbers of mentally and physically disabled children were killed in the Nazi euthanasia programs. During the Second World War, researchers in the United States and Britain used children in the development...

concentration camps   Reference library

Johannes Tuchel

The Oxford Companion to World War II

...Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg , Hitler's would-be assassin Georg Elser, and some prominent Allied POW in Dachau. In a few camps, especially in Auschwitz and Dachau, the SS and the Luftwaffe conducted medical experiments on inmates which were generally fatal ( see Mengele and medicine ). The SS also selected sick inmates in all camps under the codename ‘Aktion 14 f 13’ who where then killed with poison gas as part of the euthanasia programme . In 1942–3 other camps were taken over by the SS as concentration camps. These included ones at Riga,...

perspectives on medicine and society   Reference library

Science, Technology, and Society

...features of medicine and medical and surgical innovations, the social meanings of medicine change readily. Physicians have been seen as selfless missionaries on behalf of health in the model of Albert Schweitzer and as evil experimentalists such as the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele . Medicine has also been decried for the way in which it uses concepts like “normal” and “pathological” to describe a range of cultural practices. Globally, communities are divided by the ways in which certain diseases are seen as more worthy of attention and resources than...

World War II   Reference library

Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World

...were the massacre in Nanjing in December 1937 , in which an estimated 300,000 civilians were killed; the activities of the biological-warfare research program Unit 731, which conducted experiments on live subjects comparable in their inhumanity to those of the Nazi Josef Mengele at Auschwitz; and the fate of the 200,000 so-called comfort women, mostly Korean and Chinese, who were abducted into sexual slavery in the Imperial Japanese Army's mobile brothels. In political terms, the war saw an end to imperial Japan's militaristic ambitions. The country was...

Slayer - Reign In Blood   Reference library

Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4 ed.)

...eye for an angle. Their brutal explosion of sound and bloody lyrics were complemented by artwork depicting a particularly gruesome hell, and there was a running controversy over the topic of ‘Angel Of Death’, as to whether the song celebrated or berated the figure of Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz surgeon. It was, however, their taut musicianship and sense of the absurd that made the record so great, with ‘Necrophobic’ summing up its splendid lunacy: ‘Limb dissection, amputation, from a mind deranged.’ One to embalm and keep. See also Slayer...

heaved   Reference library

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4 ed.)

...1987 . In nautical language the dominant past form is hove ( the cable can be hove in; the ship hove to; the boat remained hove-to; the anchor was hove up ). In a moment of aberration, the Independent ( 22 Aug. 1991 ) treated hove as an infinitive: * You never feel that Dr Mengele might suddenly hove into view . Similar confusion about what part of speech hove is seems a particularly journalistic malaise, and leads to sentences like these: * He had seen 60 hove into sight, and assumed that must mean he was no longer up to it—Scotland on Sunday , 2002 ;...

Slayer   Reference library

Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4 ed.)

... Def Jam Records label, Rick Rubin , teamed up with the band in 1986 for the recording of Reign In Blood . Featuring 10 tracks in just 28 minutes, it took the concept of thrash to its ultimate conclusion. The song ‘Angel Of Death’ became notorious for its references to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor who committed atrocities against humanity (ironic, given that Araya has non-Aryan origins). They themselves admitted to a right-wing stance on matters of society and justice, despite being the subject of virulent attacks from that quarter over the years. Reign...

Angel of Death   Reference library

Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable (2 ed.)

.... (German, Todesengel .) The nickname of Joseph Mengele ( 1911–79 ), the Nazi doctor who worked at Auschwitz between 1943 and 1945 . His ‘racial experiments’, especially on twins, involved the most hideous cruelty. After the war he lived in hiding and then escaped to South America around 1949 , living in Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil under assumed identities. In 1985 an international team of forensic experts determined that the body of a man who had drowned in Brazil in 1979 was in fact Mengele...

Slayer   Reference library

Glenn T. Pillsbury

The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2 ed.)

...of the melodic precision of other metal soloists. Later albums have continued along the same lines, though with an increased antireligious tenor to the lyrics (e.g., God Hates Us All [ 2001 ] and Christ Illusion [ 2006 ]). Songs like “Angel of Death,” a reference to Josef Mengele, and Hanneman's interest in collecting Wehrmacht memorabilia have provided fodder for occasional controversy. Following a series of illnesses beginning in early 2011 , Hanneman died in May 2013 and was replaced by Gary Holt ( b 4 May 1964). Though never attaining the...

Auschwitz   Reference library

Norman Davies

The Oxford Companion to World War II

...for OPERATION REINHARD . By 1944 , according to some sources over 6,000 a day were being murdered and 250,000 Jews from Hungary were exterminated in six weeks. Elsewhere in the complex hundreds were dying daily from maltreatment, from the pseudo-medical experiments of Dr Mengele , or from execution. A resistance network operated within Auschwitz from the start, organized by a Polish officer, Witold Pilecki . Then in April 1944 two escapers from Auschwitz II, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, reached Slovakia and brought the first detailed news of...

Boys from Brazil   Reference library

Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable (2 ed.)

...from Brazil . A film ( 1978 ) based on a novel by Ira Levin . Although the title suggests a light-hearted musical about samba players, the ‘boys from Brazil’ are in fact clones of Adolf Hitler prepared by Dr Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck ), a real-life Nazi doctor known as the ‘ Angel of Death ’, who escaped to South America after the Second World War. In the film he is pursued by Ezra Lieberman (played by Laurence Olivier ), a character reminiscent of the real-life Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal...

genocide   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to the Body

...one of the most primitive races. Physiological sciences assisted in racial classification, for example with the use of blood groups, which were linked to racial types. This reached a culmination with the Nazi measures of racial screening and genocide in the occupied East. Josef Mengele had doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and other racial experts attempted to identify residual Germanic elements among the Slavs. Not only Jews, but also gypsies were defined by the Nazis as meriting total eradiction, and numerous other ‘races’, such as the Slavs, were...

Richler, Mordecai (1931–2001)   Reference library

The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2 ed.)

...of Richler's misunderstood men. Where Jake was unjustly put on trial for sexual perversion, Joshua is mistakenly identified as a secret homosexual and transvestite. Where Jake wishes he could set right the wrongs of the past (his persistent fantasy is the pursuit of Joseph Mengele , then the most wanted of Nazi war criminals), Joshua avoids his present crisis by turning back to a past that haunts him because he feels he has earlier failed to show adequate moral commitment. Like Jake, Joshua must confront questions of personal responsibility and the taking...

medicine   Reference library

Mark Harrison

The Oxford Companion to World War II

...diseases such as typhus, which had claimed more than 10,000 German lives on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1941–2 ( see German–Soviet war ). Nazi doctors also found time to pursue research aimed at ‘proving’ Aryan racial superiority. At Auschwitz , the ambitious Josef Mengele embarked on a study to find evidence for the supposed ‘physical degeneracy’ of Jews, and there he conducted his infamous experiments on twins and the causes of dual births. Other doctors took advantage of ‘human guinea-pigs’ among the inmates to complete university doctorates in...

Disability Rights   Reference library

Encyclopedia of Human Rights

...sizable group whose rights and dignity were systematically violated during this era. The Nazi euthanasia and sterilization programs are notorious in this respect. In addition, Nazi medical scientists and concentration camp doctors, including the notorious “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele ( 1911–1979 ), had a keen interest in conducting medical experiments on disabled persons. These experiments were performed without informed consent and absent compliance with other basic human rights and bioethical standards. These programs and practices typically reflect the...