Those who lived long enough to make it to the camps were either killed outright (if they looked incapable of performing strenous physical labor) or put to work, where they would most likely die from disease, starvation, or exhaustion. Being unable to perform the difficult slave labor meant death by either gassing, cremation, being fired upon by machine guns, or experimented on.
Dr. Josef Mengele, infamously known as 'The angel of death', was a 'medical officer' at Auschwitz, and at Birkenau. He conducted extremely inhumane and often deadly experiments on the unwilling prisoners. Those who survived were then killed in order to be dissected and examined. Some of the known experiments conducted include (but are not limited to): Experiments in which individuals would be exposed to a near lethal lack of Oxygen, experiments in which the individual would be placed naked into either a vat of freezing water, or outside during frigid winter conditions in order to see how long they could survive (although some did survive this, they would later be subject to even more painful experiments trying to restore normal body temperature; then eventually killed.)Experiments where the unwilling subject would be infected with a disease, then dissected, experiments where the subject would be poisoned, wounded and then exposed to gangrene, mustard gas, typhus and jaundice, experiments in which the individual would be starved, then given nothing but sea water (which is undrinkable) experiments in which the subject would have nerves, bones, muscles, and other body parts removed, and infertility experiments, where the subject often was castrated, given silver nitrate, exposed to deadly doses of radaition, or simply left to bleed to death. As usual, survivors were killed in order to be observed.
Other experiments, such as injecting dye into the eye to change eye color, random and unessecary amputations, and trying to change normal, healthly twins into siamese twins were often conducted on children and infants.
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