Mengele : unmasking the "Angel of Death" / David G. Marwell.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A gripping biography of the infamous Nazi doctor, from a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate.

Perhaps the most notorious war criminal of all time, Josef Mengele was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. Aided by the role he has assumed in works of popular culture, Mengele has come to symbolize the Holocaust itself as well as the failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether as the demonic doctor who directed mass killings or the elusive fugitive who escaped capture, Mengele has loomed so large that even with conclusive proof, many refused to believe that he had died.

As chief of investigative research at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, David G. Marwell worked on the Mengele case, interviewing his victims, visiting the scenes of his crimes, and ultimately holding his bones in his hands. Drawing on his own experience as well as new scholarship and sources, Marwell examines in scrupulous detail Mengele's life and career. He chronicles Mengele's university studies, which led to two PhDs and a promising career as a scientist; his wartime service both in frontline combat and at Auschwitz, where his "selections" sent innumerable innocents to their deaths and his "scientific" pursuits--including his studies of twins and eye color--traumatized or killed countless more; and his postwar flight from Europe and refuge in South America.

Mengele describes the international search for the Nazi doctor in 1985 that ended in a cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, and the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died--but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead. This is the riveting story of science without limits, escape without freedom, and resolution without justice.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Marwell, former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, worked on the Mengele case at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s. Here, Marwell provides a multilayered study of the notorious physician's career prior to and during his tenure at Auschwitz. Later chapters document his postwar life--often hiding in plain sight in South America--and, finally, investigations into Mengele's death. It is largely assumed that "The Angel of Death's" medical work at Auschwitz lacked any basis in empirical methods. Yet, as Marwell demonstrates, Mengele's scholarship was disturbingly close to mainstream, and what made his activities so frightening was the lack of institutional restraint on human subjects. Although the postscript provides an example of how post-1945 research discredits almost all of Mengele's scientific assumptions, the analysis would have benefitted from additional comparisons to science outside Germany. VERDICT With a distinctive blend of history and political intrigue, Marwell creates a thorough account of one of the most well-known war criminals in history and the efforts to bring him to justice. A worthy addition to Holocaust scholarship.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

Publishers Weekly Review

Historian Marwell, who contributed to the U.S. Justice Department's joint efforts with Israel and Germany to find Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele after WWII, delivers a richly detailed yet ponderous biography of the infamous doctor. Noting that Mengele's role in deciding the fates of new arrivals at the Auschwitz death camp, sadistic experiments on prisoners, and postwar odyssey through Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil have made him an "often-invoked symbol of evil," Marwell details the physician's medical training in Munich, Bonn, and Frankfurt; his early involvement in national socialism; his combat experience as a member of the Waffen-SS Viking Division; and his assignment to Auschwitz as camp doctor. After the war, he escaped to South America through a "ratline" and lived, according to Marwell, as a well-heeled, unrepentant fugitive supported by family money. The author's legalistic prose occasionally obscures the drama of his subject's crimes and exile, but Israeli attempts to flush Mengele out of hiding in the 1960s and 1970s are grippingly related. Meanwhile, accounts of bureaucratic infighting between Brazilian authorities, U.S. investigators, Israeli intelligence agents, and West German police are alternately fascinating and dreary. Despite the anticlimactic ending (Mengele died in 1979, before he could be captured), this harrowing, revelatory account answers nearly every question history buffs will have about WWII's "Angel of Death." (Jan.)

CHOICE Review

Having worked on the Mengele case at the Office of Special Investigation in the 1980s, Marwell, a historian by training, has made an invaluable contribution to the literature surrounding the life and death of one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals. The book is divided into two sections, one dealing with Mengele's monstrous medical experiments on men, women, and children in Auschwitz, the other on the controversial nature of Mengele's death in Brazil in 1979, which presents scientific evidence that the body buried in a Sao Paulo cemetery was indeed Mengele. Marwell argues that, far from being the personification of evil and depravity, Mengele was one of many physicians in the Nazi concentration camp system who viewed the killing of Jews as an effort to protect and preserve the Aryan racial community, and the carrying out of medical experiments as a benefit for the volk. Thus Mengele pursued his tasks as a true believer in Nazi racial science, whose murderous activity was in accord with the Nazi scientific community. Mengele is a work of stupendous scholarship and should find its place among the major works on this subject. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. --Jack Robert Fischel, emeritus, Messiah College

Kirkus Book Review

A chilling biography of the terrifying doctor who led a charmed life through the Nazi ranksand eluded justice for decades."In 1985," writes Marwell, "while working in the Office of Special Investigations at the U.S. Department of Justice, I was assigned to the international investigation to locate Mengele and bring him before a court of law." Though the author, the former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, explores Mengele's life and experiments at Auschwitz, he concentrates on his postwar flight and his ability to resist detection as a war criminal and reinvent himself in South Americaa journey largely funded by his family's manufacturing firm back in Germany. Trained in Germany's finest schools, Mengele became a medical doctor with an intense interest in anthropology and racial science, and he was influenced by the prominent anthropologist Theodor Mollison, who focused on "racial science." At the infamous Frankfurt Institute in the late 1930s, Mengele's dissertation on the heritability of oral clefts "served to underpin" the Nazi legislation enforcing sterilization to prevent "diseased offspring," resulting in 375,000 forced sterilizations. As World War II intensified, Mengele transitioned from scientist to soldier and became a combat physician. After experiencing "extreme brutality" with the SS Viking Division, he was transferred to Auschwitz in May 1943. There, he conducted scientific experiments with "unprecedented resources," which allowed him to "surmount the barriers that traditional medical ethics and basic humanity placed in his way." His heinous experiments are well documented, as are his movements in the final days of the war and afterward. How did it take so long to find such a highly ranked Nazi war criminal who had reestablished his name in 1956 in Argentina and resumed practicing medicine? Marwell engrossingly describes the capture process as highly political, involving American, Israeli, and German government groups. He ends with an account of the unsettling visit (revealed in letters) by Mengele's son to see his unrepentant father in 1977.An eerily engaging life's work by a dogged researcher that adds materially to the Holocaust documentation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

David G. Marwell , former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, is a historian who has served and led a number of government and nonprofit institutions. He lives in University Park, Maryland, with his wife, Judith.