Lucas Blogs About Mengele
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| I took the dust jacket off while reading this one in the break room at work. |
What in the world possessed me to read a book about Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist known as "the Angel of Death" for his horrific experiments on children at Auschwitz? Well, I was initially drawn to it because the author, David G. Marwell, is a historian who worked with the Justice Department to help track down Mengele (or rather, his remains) in the 1980s, and I felt a morbid curiosity about how exactly Mengele managed to evade capture for nearly forty-four years. Also, I remember I was annoyed with the role he played in Amazon's The Man in the High Castle adaptation, where he's depicted as one of the scientists testing out a machine to travel between worlds. I mean, seriously, Mengele had doctorates in medicine and anthropology. He didn't have the background in theoretical physics that would be necessary to build a portal. That said, he definitely would be interested in performing experiments on the test subjects. I feel like I've lost the thread, let's talk about the actual book.
Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" is divided into four parts, chronicling his early life and eduction, his time in the SS and at Auschwitz, his flight to South America after the war (a surprisingly long time after the war), and the international man-hunt that eventually revealed his fate (and the concerns that kept the case open for years after the discovery of his remains). Marwell doesn't pretend that his subject is particularly interesting in and of himself. Mengele was born into a wealthy family that was able to encourage his interest in science that ultimately lead him to a career in academia which included two (now discredited) doctorates (also, before his research was discredited, his doctorates were revoked in the 1960s when he remained in hiding rather than turn himself in for prosecution). In case you're wondering, his dissertations focused on (no kidding) intricate measurements of the human mandible to determine race and a study to determine whether a cleft palate and other front of mouth deformities have a genetic basis. And yeah, Mengele believed all the Nazi horseshit about scientific racism (which was also mainstream in medicine and anthropology at the time, as evidenced by the fact that his second dissertation was in a field of study called (and again I'm not kidding) Racial Hygiene). At Auschwitz, one of Mengele's duties was selection, where he would divide new arrivals into groups to either be executed immediately, exploited for labor, or experimented upon without consent.
His escape from Europe in 1949 is similarly banal: a bureaucratic SNAFU lead to his release from US custody (it turns out that Josef Mengele was not an uncommon name and after VE Day, new recruits who'd been trained to process POWs were reassigned to the Pacific Theatre, meaning that the soldiers who released Mengele had little to no training) and provided him with release papers to forge. Meanwhile, his wealthy family was able to access a network of people who were more than happy to help a wanted war criminal to escape prosecution. From there Mengele travelled between South American countries that were either friendly to Nazi ex-pats (Argentina and Paraguay) or indifferent to their presence (Brazil) and narrowly escaped being killed or captured by the Mossad because they weren't 100% sure it was him. Then there's the fact that investigators from the US, Germany, and Israel didn't trust each other enough to meaningfully coöperate until the 80s (and even then, establishing a working relationship was rocky). Well, at least he died of drowning after suffering a stroke while swimming instead of peacefully in his sleep, and he was rejected by his son, Rolf (though not enough for Rolf to turn him in), who was so ashamed of his father that he took his wife's name.
A large part of Marwell's project seems to be to demystify Mengele. In the popular consciousness, Mengele is so closely associated with Auschwitz that some survivors remember being processed by him even though they arrived at the camp before he was assigned there. He's also depicted as something of a mad scientist, performing outlandish experiments like trying to forcibly conjoin twins or "Aryanize" Jewish, Roma, or Sinti prisoners. Marwell doesn't dismiss the memories of survivors but he does limit himself to what is actually documented: that Mengele disregarded professional ethics in order to perform research on unwilling subjects, and that far from being kept a secret, his research was well-documented and communicated with the mainstream of German academia at the time. He was certainly a true believer, he grew up in an atmosphere in which anti-Semitism was rampant and studied Anthropology at a time when the field was dominated by eugenicist hogwash; but he wasn't uniquely pathological. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "banality of evil" in connection with the Nazis before.
Another facet of the book that I found particularly interesting were all the near misses that could have lead to Mengele being captured and tried. Like the aforementioned time when the Mossad weren't quite sure if they'd stumbled across him in hiding (they had) while successfully apprehending Adolf Eichmann. Or the fact that interagency squabbling hindered US efforts at locating Mengele. And, of course, the fact that the case was left open for years until DNA testing had advanced sufficiently to determine that the skeletal remains unearthed in Brazil were in fact Mengele's.
As far as the book itself, I'd say that Marwell has a very Joe Friday-esque ("Just the facts") affect as a writer. At least, he does in the biography section. Oh, and I should mention that one of his sources — in addition to the wealth of documentation — was an autobiographical novel that Mengele wrote to try and explain his life experiences to his son (Marwell does discuss some of the historical detective work that went into determining how closely this account matches the truth). In any case, Marwell doesn't try to be nearly as objective when discussing his own role in the investigation, freely giving his opinion of various people he dealt with at the time. I wouldn't say it reads like he's settling scores, more like enough time has passed that he no longer feels the need to be diplomatic about, say, certain law enforcement agencies getting pissy about jurisdiction. In any case, I do think that the back half of the book is somewhat more interesting, partly because the effort to track down Mengele gives it a bit more structure, than the biographical section which is somewhat drier (and admittedly a bit harder to read because it does detail the gruesome conditions both on the Eastern front and at Auschwitz).
The big thing to take away from this book: Mengele was not an interesting man. There's nothing to untangle in his motives. He willingly and enthusiastically took part in a genocide because it aligned with his existing beliefs and because it presented him with the opportunity to conduct research unfettered by ethical concerns. He escaped punishment not by being smart or daring but through bribery, luck, and bureaucratic inefficiency. He apparently wasn't introspective enough to feel remorse and continued to try and justify his war crimes to his son until his death. If there's anything to learn from his life it's that we need to examine our own biases and behaviors and make sure that we aren't contributing to making the world a worse place. Also, there are still goose-stepping morons out there who peddle the same eugenics horse-shit that Mengele wasted his academic career studying. For example: Donald Trump recently stated his belief in "racehorse theory" at a rally in Minnesota. So, you know, vote!
Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" by David G. Marwell, W.W. Norton & Company hardcover edition, 2020, 432 pages, pairs well with a gnawing anxiety about the future
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