Body parts and brains of victims of horrific experiments by Nazi doctors - including the infamous 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele of Auschwitz - have been found at a leading German research institute.

The gruesome remains were discovered in jars 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.

It is known that in wartime the institute regularly received human body parts from Josef Mengele, the doctor at the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland where he became infamous for carrying out horrific experiments without anaesthetic.

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Body parts and brains of victims of horrific experiments by Nazi doctors - including the infamous 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele (pictured) of Auschwitz - have been found at a leading German research institute

It is known that in wartime the institute regularly received human body parts from Josef Mengele, the doctor Auschwitz (pictured) in occupied Poland where he became infamous for carrying out hideous experiments without anaesthetic

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.

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. Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele is pictured

'Two years ago, bones of victims on whom experiments were conducted were found in Berlin in the trash. Next year, we're going to organise 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.'

HORRIFIC EXPERIMENTS OF THE NAZI'S 'ANGEL OF DEATH' Josef Mengele (pictured) greeted doomed arrivals at Auschwitz Immaculately dressed, it was Josef Mengele who greeted doomed arrivals at the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, in occupied Poland. With a flick of his gloved hands, the supreme arbiter of life and death would consign terrified prisoners either to work or to death in the gas chambers. But many, especially twins, were condemned to an altogether more diabolical fate; they became guinea pigs upon his operating table as he pursued his berserk quest to clone blue-eyed Aryan supermen. Most of his victims died in terrible pain without anaesthetic. Mengele had a doctorate in medicine from Frankfurt University, but used his knowledge in a sickening manner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed experiments as an SS physician from 1943 to 1945. Although prisoners transferred to his wing to be studied escaped the gas chambers and were well fed, they often ultimately met an even more painful death. Mengele regularly performed surgery without anaesthetic and would obtain bodies to work on simply by injecting chloroform into inmates' hearts while they slept, which would kill them in seconds. He was most interested in heredity and once tried to change the colour of children’s eyes by injecting chemicals directly into them. Twins held a particular fascination for him and it's estimated that he examined around 3,000 - but only 100 pairs survived. Pregnant women were also singled out. He was known to have performed vivisections on them before consigning them to the death chambers. The so-called Angel of Death was on the Allied commanders' most-wanted list from 1944, but he escaped to South America and was never found, despite the best efforts of private investigators and the Israeli secret service, Mossad. He died in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming and thirteen years later, DNA tests proved his identity beyond doubt. Advertisement

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.