Josef Mengele has become the symbol of the Third Reich’s perversion of medicine in pursuit of racist scientific theories. His mocking smile and soft but deadly touch earned him the title “The Angel of Death.” The barbarity of his crime is not in doubt. What is still at issue is how he escaped justice.
As a fugitive, Mengele was variously rumored to be involved in experiments on Indian tribes in South America, to have the ear of dictators, and to have had numerous brushes with death. He was portrayed as a ruthless power broker who could call upon the services of armed guards and killer dogs, and who moved among a score of impenetrable fortresses deep in the jungle. According to this legend, the only clue to his whereabouts was a trail of dead Israeli agents and independent Nazi-hunters whose corpses washed up on the banks of the Parana River.
These apparently superhuman powers of evasion were based on myths about Mengele’s postwar life and are disproved by more than 5,000 pages of diaries and letters that he wrote. We have had unique and unrestricted access to them as well as to previously unpublished photographs, some of which appear in this book. The Mengele papers include a diary that he kept from May 1960 to within weeks of his death. There are also many extracts from an autobiography that Mengele started during the 1960s, but which omits any discussion of both Auschwitz and a ten-year period in Argentina from 1949 to 1959. We believe that Mengele never wrote about Auschwitz, fearing that any record of it might help identify him. We can offer no rational explanation for the absence of any account of the 1950s. His son, Rolf, has never seen any writing by his father about this period and does not believe that any exists. We also have several hundred pages of letters that Mengele sent to his family and friends in Germany, and their replies, from 1973 on. (Letters written before 1973 were destroyed by the Mengele family.)
Our comprehensive study of Mengele’s own thoughts, together with the unique accounts given to us by members of his family and friends, betrays a perverse pride in what he did at Auschwitz. It is the evidence of his unqualified lack of remorse that is so astounding. This is not, however, just a study in the banality of Mengele’s evil. We have focused on Mengele’s charmed escape from the Allies and on how he managed to successfully stay on the run for thirty-five years.
This book is an attempt to separate fantasy from reality. It is a straightforward chronicle of Josef Mengele’s life, from his silver-spoon childhood in Bavaria to his pauper’s grave in Brazil sixty-eight years later. We examine the efforts, and the lack of them, to bring him to trial. We think we have provided many answers to what we regard as the most important question of all: Why was he never caught?
This endeavor is the result of a joint enterprise. John Ware, a television producer, became involved in the Mengele case in 1977 when he prepared a documentary for the “World in Action” program of England’s Granada Television. Gerald Posner, a lawyer, was drawn to the case in 1981 during his pro bono legal effort to obtain compensation for the surviving twins who had been subjects of Mengele’s experiments. Ware and Posner joined forces in 1984, a partnership that flourished despite the transatlantic separation.
Our conclusion is a simple one, written more in despair than in anger. It is not just that Mengele was not punished for his crimes. He did serve a sentence of sorts, biding his time in a succession of seedy South American hideouts—a nasty old man consumed with self-pity, lonely, even bitter with his family who shielded him so effectively. Nor is it just that a chance was missed to confront the powerful Mengele family, living in dynastic isolation from the rest of the civilized world. The real travesty is that by their failure to pursue Mengele when he was alive, the governments of West Germany, Israel, and the United States—as well as those of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil—robbed the world of a chance to explore the mind of a man who was the very personification of evil.