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Josef Mengele was an assistant to a well-known researcher who studied twins at the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt - he started working at Auschwitz in May 1943.
There he had an unlimited supply of twins to study, and he wouldn't get in trouble if they died.
According to Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, author of Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments, hundreds of children were used in Mengele's experiments.
"I found a record of a prisoner doctor and bacteriologist who was forced to work for Mengele that there were 732 pairs of twins," he says, and suggests the doctor was interested in genetics. "I think Mengele might have been interested in the inheritance of the propensity to having twins."
He believes many of the twins survived Auschwitz, although he thinks Roma twins were almost certainly killed.
