The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez

Expand

'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' by Olivier Guez

For anyone interested in the Holocaust and the theory behind the Nazi campaign of racially driven mass murder, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is a book impossible to put down. Mengele was the SS physician at Auschwitz, the scientist of death who stood on the train platform as Jewish (and other) prisoners arrived, sorting and choosing those he deemed fit for his experiments. Auschwitz was Mengele’s laboratory and thousands of human guinea pigs passed through his hands, testing his theories. He was a cold, cerebral man with ambition and bad ideas but no heart.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is a novel at the edge of fiction, drawn from careful research, including Mengele’s diaries. “Only the genre of narrative nonfiction has allowed me to get close to the macabre journey of the Nazi doctor,” author Olivier Guez explains.

During many chapters, The Disappearance reads a bit like a thriller as Mengele, a fugitive after World War II, moves from place in Latin America, especially after Israeli agents seized fellow SS officer Adolf Eichmann on the streets of Buenos Aires. But in his early years of exile in Juan and Evita Peron’s Argentina, Mengele led a fairly open life among a bustling community of refugees from Nazi Germany, Fascist Croatia and other fallen Axis regimes. Guez is politically astute, always drawing distinctions. To Mengele, Peron’s Argentina, for all its fascistic bombast, remained “mired in all that Judeo-Christian nonsense such as compassion and pity—all those forms of sentimentalism—which Nazism had eliminated.” In short: the Perons were insufficiently brutal and, worse still, not particularly racist.

Racism was the driving force of Nazi ideology, and the notion of superior and inferior races was taken for granted by biologists and anthropologists in much of the world. Mengele wasn’t a mad scientist working alone but part of a prestigious network dedicated to eugenics, the proposition that human stock could be improved by breeding. He earned doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology from respected universities, published his findings in scholarly journals and sent specimens collected from his Auschwitz victims to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Mengele saw himself as “the great hope of genetic research.”

What’s most disturbing about The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is how his life makes hash of commonplace pieties on the redemptive value of science, art and education. He was a scientist with a cultivated interest in the humanities—opera, literature, philosophy—but a limited view on what constitutes humanity. His education taught him nothing of the true value of human life; the butterflies in the Brazilian tropics where he took refuge interested him more than the people who lived there. He was an unshaken idealist whose ideals were morbid. Mengele was plagued by nightmares but had no remorse, no regret, only self-pity.