DAVID G. MARVELL
Mengele – The true face of the “Angel of Death”
translation by Theodora Darviri
Ed. Gutenberg, 2022, p. 491.

How is it possible that a person who reads late into the night “by the light of a car battery” (p. 78) is responsible for some of the worst crimes of the last century? David Marvell, historian and former director of the Jewish Heritage Museum in Manhattan, highlights many of the similarities in the life of Josef Mengele, thus highlighting the contradictions of a demonic personality that still haunts us.

Arguably the most infamous Nazi official, Mengele was decorated for bravery and self-sacrifice on the battlefield, had a passion for science, and was highly respected in the academic community of the time. Marvell’s work (published by Gutenberg, translated by Theodora Darviri) begins with a bold admission that we actually know less about Mengele than we would like. Most of those who encountered him were exterminated, and the dark legend of the camp doctor darkens the memory of the survivors. As for his life after Auschwitz, Mengele was forced to live most of it on the run.

He killed twins in order to carry out a parallel histological study of their organs, injected prisoners’ eyes, trying to change their color.

All that survives with absolute clarity is the image of Mengele saluting the train of Jewish prisoners at the docks of Auschwitz, in order to indicate with sharp, almost choreographic gestures which of them will be performed directly in the gas chambers and which will enter the concentration camp. .

Mengele’s life is divided with almost perfect symmetry between two continents, Europe and Latin America. Years before he attempted to piece together the pieces of the puzzle as a biographer, Marvell was placed in charge of the American search for Mengele. His determined involvement in these studies explains the wealth of documentation he can provide for every aspect of Mengele’s life, as well as the dual purpose of his writing project. Marvell’s work reads like a thorough academic study of Mengele’s deeds and a near-detective chronicle of the investigations to find and capture him. Marvel will finally be able to hold the bones of the long-dead Mengele in his hands.

The controversies and crimes of the infamous Josef Mengele

Armed with his former authority as a physician and researcher, Mengele, as a “racial hygienist”, oversaw the resettlement of ethnic East European Germans in order to create a “new racial order” in the Reich. Before going to Auschwitz, Mengele served as an army doctor in the vanguard of the SS on the Russian front and repeatedly witnessed, if not participated in, atrocities. In Auschwitz he would find what he considered “a unique opportunity that will never come again” (p. 122).

He will be given the opportunity to conduct research in the field of genetics, without any restrictions and with access to a large, constantly updated pool of human samples, including the extremely rare category of twins.

Mengele uses the prisoners of the camps as laboratory animals: he kills twins in order to conduct a parallel histological study of their organs, introduces the eyes of the prisoners, trying to change their color, collects the mutilated heads of children as samples. From his own point of view, it would be “a sin, a crime and an irresponsible attitude” (p. 122) towards science to leave unused the material so generously offered by Auschwitz …

If Mengele’s criminal activities in Auschwitz epitomize the Holocaust, then his flight to Argentina is a symbolic example of the failure of many post-war efforts to bring Nazi officials to justice. Mengele took the same escape route as thousands of other war criminals. With a little luck, with the help of forged documents and taking advantage of the oligarchy of the authorities, Mengele escapes to Argentina in 1949.

He chose the same escape route to Latin America as thousands of other war criminals and was never punished.

The care of the German community and his powerful friends provide Mengele with a smooth transition to a new life. The delay in issuing arrest warrants will force him to seek asylum again, this time in Paraguay and then in Brazil.

Studying the biography of Mengele, it is difficult to resist the temptation to look for complex psychosocial motives behind his heinous deeds. Are we correct in interpreting his sadistic actions in Auschwitz as the result of post-traumatic stress caused by what he witnessed as an SS member on the eastern front? Is his distorted view of medical research an extreme manifestation of the practices followed by the scientific establishment of the time? And what can we do to counter Mengele’s cynical claim that his actions were impeccable because “the irreversible decision to neutralize the Jews had already been made” (p. 109)? Mengele’s last letter to his son, thirty years after Auschwitz, defies any complex attempts at interpretation: “I have not the slightest intention of justifying or even apologizing for my decisions, actions or behavior” (p. 393).

Mengele acted with firm conviction and never admitted “guilt and responsibility” (p. 391). The biography, written by Marvel in 2016, is part of a wider upsurge of speculative interest in Mengele since the middle of the last decade. After the film The German Doctor (Lucia Puenzo, 2013), the novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez (Kritiki Publishing, 2018, translated by Eugenia Grammatikopoulou) and the play Mengele by Thanassis Triaridis, the Marvel biography comes to remind us that we have not yet closed our accounts with the Angel of Death.

Mr. Thodoris Tsomidis teaches human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He translated books from German and English. The latest of these are Against the Heart of Darkness by Edmund Morel (Patakis, 2022) and The Hungry Artist by Franz Kafka (Gutenberg, 2022).