HIDING MENGELE

A Brazilian journalist investigates the network that sheltered Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” until his death in 1979.

Anton opens with Mengele’s last day in 1979, a trip to the Brazilian seaside with the Austrian family that harbored his secret. It ended in his drowning and subsequent burial under the name Wolfgang Gerhard, one of the multiple false names he used after leaving postwar Germany for sanctuary in South America. Before this, he was a doctor at Auschwitz who oversaw the “selection” of prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers and who performed bizarre experiments, many on twins. Writes Anton: “For Mengele, Auschwitz was a great deposit of human material to be used in his private research.” The author was haunted by his total amorality, “even more so knowing that, when hiding from justice, he received protection from my childhood teacher,” who abruptly vanished from Anton’s primary school in 1985 when her complicity was uncovered. Years later, Anton began to investigate how Mengele could have stayed hidden for so long. Her survey of his Auschwitz career is valuable for keeping fresh the collective Holocaust memory but breaks no new ground. The contrast of these activities with his postwar life recalls Hannah Arendt; it’s hard to imagine anything much more banal (albeit creepy) than the image of a cranky old man who watches the Brazilian soap opera The Slave Isaura “for the pleasure of seeing enslaved people mistreated.” Some of the abettors who took considerable risks to hide him were motivated by ideology, others by money; the Mengele family owned a successful business in Bavaria and supported him for decades. Anton’s disgust at the relative comfort Mengele enjoyed while his surviving victims suffered is plain. To construct her picture of his years in hiding, she draws on personal interviews, police records, and Mengele’s copious letters. The last reveal no sense of unease or remorse, perhaps the most unsettling element of all.

A provocative contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.