Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death"
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A "gripping…sober and meticulous" (David Margolick, Wall Street Journal) biography of the infamous Nazi doctor, from a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate.
Perhaps the most notorious war criminal of all time, Josef Mengele was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. Aided by the role he has assumed in works of popular culture, Mengele has come to symbolize the Holocaust itself as well as the failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether as the demonic doctor who directed mass killings or the elusive fugitive who escaped capture, Mengele has loomed so large that even with conclusive proof, many refused to believe that he had died.
As chief of investigative research at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, David G. Marwell worked on the Mengele case, interviewing his victims, visiting the scenes of his crimes, and ultimately holding his bones in his hands. Drawing on his own experience as well as new scholarship and sources, Marwell examines in scrupulous detail Mengele’s life and career. He chronicles Mengele’s university studies, which led to two PhDs and a promising career as a scientist; his wartime service both in frontline combat and at Auschwitz, where his “selections” sent innumerable innocents to their deaths and his “scientific” pursuits—including his studies of twins and eye color—traumatized or killed countless more; and his postwar flight from Europe and refuge in South America.
Mengele describes the international search for the Nazi doctor in 1985 that ended in a cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died—but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead. This is the riveting story of science without limits, escape without freedom, and resolution without justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Marwell, who contributed to the U.S. Justice Department's joint efforts with Israel and Germany to find Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele after WWII, delivers a richly detailed yet ponderous biography of the infamous doctor. Noting that Mengele's role in deciding the fates of new arrivals at the Auschwitz death camp, sadistic experiments on prisoners, and postwar odyssey through Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil have made him an "often-invoked symbol of evil," Marwell details the physician's medical training in Munich, Bonn, and Frankfurt; his early involvement in national socialism; his combat experience as a member of the Waffen-SS Viking Division; and his assignment to Auschwitz as camp doctor. After the war, he escaped to South America through a "ratline" and lived, according to Marwell, as a well-heeled, unrepentant fugitive supported by family money. The author's legalistic prose occasionally obscures the drama of his subject's crimes and exile, but Israeli attempts to flush Mengele out of hiding in the 1960s and 1970s are grippingly related. Meanwhile, accounts of bureaucratic infighting between Brazilian authorities, U.S. investigators, Israeli intelligence agents, and West German police are alternately fascinating and dreary. Despite the anticlimactic ending (Mengele died in 1979, before he could be captured), this harrowing, revelatory account answers nearly every question history buffs will have about WWII's "Angel of Death."