EVIL Nazi doctor Josef Mengele saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers – only to subject them to gruesome torture in the form of twisted experiments.
The physician – dubbed the Angel of Death – once sewed two identical siblings back to back and stitched their organs together to create Frankenstein "Siamese twins" in his terrifying lab at Auschwitz-Berkenau.
Yet despite his sickening crimes against humanity, Mengele managed to dodge justice at the Nuremberg trials which ended 75 years ago today.
He fled to South America – dying of natural causes decades after the horrors he inflicted at the death camps in Poland.
Some victims of his experiments also survived the war and have been able to tell of the depravity they endured.
One was Eva Mozes Kor, who was used as a human guinea pig along with her twin Miriam.
They were both injected with diseases and chemicals and left to die, but miraculously survived.
In a book recalling her ordeal, Eva revealed even more horrifying tests performed on other twins.
She wrote: "A set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele’s lab after they were sewn back to back.
"Mengele had attempted to create Siamese twins by connecting blood vessels and organs.
"The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days they died.
"Mengele also attempted to connect the urinary tract of a seven-year-old girl to her own colon.
"Many experiments were performed on the male and female genitals."
Eva also told of experiments on teenagers in which Mengele tried to “make boys into girls and girls into boys” by transfusing blood from one to the other.
The boys were also castrated as part of the Frankenstein tests.
In all, Mengele is thought to have experimented on more than 700 pairs of twins.
Many like Eva were infected with deadly diseases, with one twin kept alive only to be killed and dissected for comparison after the other's death.
The trained geneticist was also obsessed with dwarves, giants, hunchbacks and others with abnormal growth, who he gathered in his lab "like a collector".
He believed his experiments on Jews and gypsies would "prove" Hitler's demented notion of the purity of the Aryan race.
The chief Auschwitz medic was known for putting in long shifts on the "ramp" from the cattle trucks that brought new arrivals to the death camps.
He and his assistants barked "left" and "right" – choosing stronger people for for hard labour while weaker ones were gassed immediately.
But he was always on the lookout for twins and others who he would reserve for his own special terror.
FATE IN HIS HANDS
Vera Kriegel, who was sent to Auschwitz with twin sister Olga aged just five,said Mengele killed victims with an injection to the heart, and then dissected them.
She remembers being ushered into his laboratory, telling the BBC: "I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes.
"These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor."
She and her sister were kept in a small wooden cage and given painful injections in her back – which she thinks may have been an attempt to change the colour of her eyes.
In another experiment, they and more than 100 other twins were dosed with bacteria that cause Noma disease – an infection of the mouth or genitals which causes boils and often turns gangrenous.
Another twin, Jona Laks, recalled being sent to the gas chamber then saved at the last minute when guards realised she had an identical sister and was wanted by Mengele.
She said the evil doctor removed organs from his victims without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered.
Other survivors recall watching a dwarf being forced to have sex withRoma woman.
Many subjects were made pregnant as part of the twisted genetic tests.
Among the most famous of Mengele's victims were a whole family of dwarves, who were made to dance and sing for Mengele and his laughing lieutenants at a "social club".
He also ripped out their teeth and extracted their bone marrow, among other tortures.
They and other victims were rescued when US troops liberated the camps in January 1945.
Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death
Josef Mengele was a German SS officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.
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.
He was obsessed with twins and other genetic traits and murdered children to conduct autopsies.
Mengele would infect one twin with a fatal disease, then kill the other to compare the bodies. 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.
Panicking guards torched the lab with petrol in a bid to disguise the horrific truth, but some records survived.
However the chief torturer was never made to pay for his unimaginable evil.
Other architects of the Holocaust were sentenced to hang at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the first of which ended on September 30, 1946.
But Mengele dodged arrest by posing as a farm labourer, and later fled to South America – escaping several reputed assassination attempts by Israeli spy agency Mossad.
He became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959 and later moved to Brazil where he met up with other Nazi war criminals.
On a visit to friends in 1979, he had a stroke while swimming and drowned – although his death was not verified for another six years.
His body – buried under a false name – was exhumed and proved to be him by DNA testing in 1985.
Mengele's skeleton is now used to teach forensic science students in Brazil.
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