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In “Mischling,” her harrowing debut novel, Affinity Konar recounts this darkest of fairy tales — not collected by the Brothers Grimm, but with a different German pedigree. It is an infamous but little-discussed chapter from the annals of Auschwitz: Josef Mengele’s experiments on children with genetic idiosyncrasies, identical twins especially. Apparently seeking a way to genetically engineer perfect Aryan babies, he tried to change the color of their eyes, injected them with painful and incapacitating drugs, infected them with diseases and performed surgery on them — including amputations — without anesthesia. Few survived Mengele’s “zoo,” as his dominion was known, but several who did have published memoirs, from which Konar drew in creating her novel (along with “Children of the Flames,” a seminal historical study by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, which Konar credits as her initial inspiration).