Mengele: the Complete Story by Gerald L. Posner & John Ware

 Mengele: the Complete Story by Gerald L. Posner & John Ware

London: Queen Anne Press, 1986                    ISBN 0356125785

I had forgotten just how much of a sensation the final resolution of the fate of Josef Mengele caused when his remains were dug up from a grave in Brazil in 1985. This book, released the year after the find, brings it all back, as well as the speculation in the decades before, while telling the full story of the life of Mengele, from his early years, through his time in Auschwitz, and retelling in full his nearly 40 years of being on the run from the justice he deserved.

I won't in this review go over the grisly facts of Mengele's time at Auschwitz, a time which earned him the moniker "Angel of Death", but Posner and Ware write succinctly and well about his gruesome experimental pseudo-science. In fact reading through this section turned my stomach.

The real fascination in this book is the author's description of how Mengele escaped not only captivity after the War, but Europe in the 50s, Argentina and Paraguay in the 60s, and ended up drowning on a beach in Brazil at the end of the 70s. It is a tale of loyalty, lies, grandstanding, and of the networks of Nazis and fellow-travellers which enabled Mengele (and others) to not only get out of Germany, but to stay hidden for so long.

Mengele used the confusion of the end of the War to his advantage, divesting himself of his SS identity, and emerging as a mere medical orderly. He was actually detained by the US on two occasions in 1945, but slipped through the screening, which was very haphazard. He spent several years working as a farmhand in Germany, all the while hoping that he could eventually be re-united with his wife and son. It was the "Doctor's trial" and its follow-on that convinced Mengele that he needed to leave Europe for the safe haven of Argentina. Through close family friends, he managed to get some forged papers, and when he arrived in South America, he was helped by several committed Nazis.

After a few years he felt so comfortable that he in fact began to not only use his real name, but re-applied for identification documents. Helped by infusions of money from his family (he was the son of a wealthy industrialist) he also - after his first wife divorced him - re-married and began living a relatively normal life.

That all changed on the day Mossad abducted Eichmann. He realised that he could never be safe out in the open, and he quickly moved to Paraguay, where he lived on a farm in a remote area. Thanks to his friendship with Hans-Urich Rudel, and Rudel's friendship with many in the Paraguayan Government, Mengele managed to get citizenship of that country, which importantly didn't have an extradition treaty with Germany.

Meanwhile, Mossad had decided to discontinue its hunt for Mengele, with other priorities closer to home becoming more important. West Germany was hopelessly compromised in its search for Mengele. Any action was sabotaged by the fact that many of the officials who should have pushed the case along were ex-Nazis, and so were not interested in bringing Mengele to justice. The unwillingness of the German government in particular to follow Mengele is impossible to justify, and painful to read about. It is in fact chilling to read the responses of the officials who didn't follow the evidence when they state that they were only following orders....sounds disturbingly familiar....

Meanwhile, Mengele himself had moved to Brazil, again living outside the big cities, and sharing a house with the Stammers family. This "partnership" became over time very strained - Mengele's second wife had long before moved back to Germany, and Mengele became increasingly embittered by his situation. In the end he lived by himself in a bungalow in Sao Paulo, a sad and lonely man. One of the last things he did was to host a visit by his son Rolf. This visit ended up being depressing for both men: Rolf could not come to terms with Josef's lack of remorse for what he'd done, and Josef felt that Rolf had been brainwashed by his schooling and that he was not the true son of a Mengele.

It was not long after Rolf's visit that Mengele drowned. While he didn't face the trial and justice that he should have, his life after the War was full of loneliness and fear, with his last years in particular full of disappointment. He deserved it.

Posner and Ware, as well as taking aim at the lack of governmental action to track down Mengele have very little good to say about the "Nazi hunters" such as Weisenthal and the Klarsfelds, who are mostly portrayed as out to promote themselves, and invariably they were two or three steps behind Mengele. Their tales of a wealthy man surrounded by bodyguards were far from the truth. The one thing their regular "scoops" did do though was to keep Mengele scared and on the run.

Mengele: the Complete Story is a well-told tale of the life of a hideous man - a man who's one dream was to be an academician, who sold his soul to the devil when he used his position to test his theories - theories that were based on flawed thinking, and that have since been shown to be completely baseless.

For myself, I finished this book with mixed feelings - I felt angry that Mengele wasn't brought to trial for his crimes, but I felt glad that his life, although longer than many of those he sent to death, was a life filled with fear and sadness.

Posner and Ware have produced a well-researched and well-written book - worth reading if the subject matter is of interest.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The wages of guilt by Ian Buruma

The wages of guilt : memories of War in Germany and Japan by Ian Buruma

London: Jonathan Cape, 1994                                           ISBN 0224031384


Ian Buruma, born in Holland and spending some of his formative years in Japan, has almost the perfect CV to have written this book. Born into a country that was vicitm of the Nazi terror during World War II, but having an understanding of the language and culture of Germany, he also - through his time in Japan - has a similar understanding of their language and culture.

I feel sure that it his experience of both cultures that led him to write this book - a meditation on the reactions of both nations to their twentieth century history, focused on the War and the years immediately preceding it, and how that history has played out into their modern-day realities. It is a meditation on guilt versus shame, and how different accidents of history can change the way a country looks backwards and forwards.

Buruma tackles the subject by looking at themes that go across both Germany and Japan: remembering, teaching, memorialising. And what he finds is that although there are major differences in the way that Germany and Japan look back on their war years, there are also some similarities.

How to account for the differences? Buruma in not prescriptive, but he does have some theories, which I think make sense. One is the culture of shame versus the culture of guilt. Japan, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, is a country that has a shame culture rather than a guilt culture. The shame culture suggests that (and of course these are generalisations) on the whole Japan wishes to hide the sins of its past, and not bring them up in any forum. This has led to the Japanese having a distorted picture of the war - highlighting the bad that happened to them (atomic bombs, Okinawa), but having no contextual information to place those tragedies within the wider sphere of Japanese aggression, as that story is hidden from view, via selective memorialising, textbooks and a general frowning on openness.

By contrast, Germany's guilt culture, by virtue of its history and religious outlook, predisposes the country to look at past wrongs and try to face them. This may not be done by the perpetrators, and tends to have been begun by the generation born after the War. Buruma charts a history where the perpetrator's generation tried to forget, the children of that generation accused their fathers of all crimes, and the current generation has spent more time trying to find the truth, and is interested in the history of the time in a more holistic manner.

Which is not to say that those people who work to expose the truth in Germany are immune from any backlash. Buruma writes about Anja Rosmus from Passau, who started to look at the Nazi history of her town and to find skeletons in cupboards. She became an outcast for her actions, being shunned by her neighbours, and worse from those who thought the past was best left un-looked at. Buruma speaks to the other side of this debate too, to those who see the likes of Rosmus as people who besmirch the reputation of their town and country by undertaking this research. Of course the truth is the truth, it's what one does with it that matters.

Those that travel down such a path in Japan are liable to suffer worse than their compatriots in Germany. Buruma relates the stories of several Japanese who have tried to expose some of the history of Japan's war years, or to talk openly about the guilt of the Emperor, and while the stories of the Germans involve harassment, those of the Japanese involve gunshots and death threats. The path to truth by those Japanese who have the mind to find these things out (interestingly, many of whom are Christian) is made harder by the way the Americans absolved the Emperor of any blame for the war - his re-creation into a passive observer while the military ran the country has created confusion in the Japanese body politic: whereas in Germany it was clear that Hitler was the source of evil, and Germans can question the way they accommodated or reacted to his rule, Japan found itself after the war with no narrative of loss that they could cling to, and an occupying power that almost wanted them to forget.

Of course this review skates the surface of Buruma's arguments, which are more nuanced than their description here and which are backed up by many examples. However, in some ways what he uncovers fits the standard narrative of both countries since the War - that Germany as a country has accepted its crimes and tried to assimilate and deal with the consequences of that, while individual perpetrators have tried to escape punishment, and that Japan has - for a number of reasons - not yet been able to face its past in a way that assists in helping it move forward.

If you are at all interested in this question, this book is well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Eichmann before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth

Eichmann before Jerusalem : the unexamined life of a mass murderer by Bettina Stangneth, translated from the German by Ruth Martin

Melbourne: Scribe, 2014                                                        ISBN: 9781925106176


When we think of Adolf Eichmann, we think of a small-minded bureaucrat with an endless monotone voice - the picture of Arendt's banality of evil, the pen-pusher who mindlessly facilitated the Final Solution.

With a towering piece of scholarship, Bettina Stangneth shatters that image once and for all in this groundbreaking new book. Drawing on recently discovered material, and a concerted effort on her part through the various archives that hold material related to Eichmann, Stangneth shows that, far from being a bureaucrat, Eichmann saw himself as being on the front line of the extermination of the Jews, revelled in his notoriety, and had no regrets for what he had done. The Eichmann we saw in Jerusalem was an elaborate front, created to minimise the damage to himself and his colleagues in what was a misguided attempt to keep alive the flame of Nazism.

Stangneth starts her investigation by looking at Eichmann's career in the SS, where she shows that the image Eichmann tried to portray in Jerusalem, of being a man behind a desk working with files and signing requisitions, was far from the truth. He was an ambitious and ruthless organiser and perpetrator of the destruction of the Jews: he enjoyed his growing notoriety, and his falsely gained reputation of being a Jewish expert, which Stangneth shows as Eichmann merely being a few steps ahead of the mass of Nazis, rather than having any deep learning. Still, he used this myth to increase fear amongst the Jews, and trick them into negotiating with him in the false sense that they had something to gain from the process.

Of course the Jews couldn't change their fate under Nazi rule, and we know Eichmann joked about this during his sojourn in Argentina - we know because he was taped joking about it. Stangneth has used the taped recollections of Eichmann heavily in this book to reconstruct his thoughts and actions. While these tapes - known as the Sassen Interviews - were known to exist at the time of the trial, they were not known in their entirety, and Eichmann effectively denounced them as his drunken ramblings, egged on by an ambitious reporter. Stangneth shows this to be far from the truth.

Eichmann did not enjoy his slide into the shadows after the war, and his sessions with Willem Sassen were far from drunken ramblings: they were the first part of a bigger project to not only write a life of Eichmann, but to restore the glory of the Third Reich to the wider world. Sassen was not only a journalist, but also part of a small but active group of ex-Nazis and fellow travellers that published books and newspapers extolling the lost Reich and Adolf Hitler.

Sassen was initially drawn to speak to and publish Eichmann because of the latter's knowledge of the Final Solution. By the time the project began, in late 50s, the World was finding out more and more about the horror of the Holocaust, and Sassen and his cronies were determined to deny the so-called "lie of the six million". They thought by getting the information directly from one of the architects of the murder of the Jews they could definitively prove that those who claimed that six million Jews were murdered were lying.

The dreadful irony is that Eichmann agreed to the project for exactly the opposite reasons - he wanted to show that he was indeed the architect of the murder of six million Jews, and that it was ordered by Hitler, and that, far from being remorseful, he "would leap laughing into the pit, because millions of Jews would be lying there with him."

The whole project of the interviews collapsed once the Sassen circle realised that, far from vindicating the Nazis, Eichmann's story would condemn them from their own mouths. Hence everyone, for different reasons, wished to suppress this material once Eichmann was captured and faced trial. The interviews did however, have a big impact on the trial itself, in an unusual way.

When Sassen was interviewing Eichmann, he had copies of all the latest books published on the Holocaust provided for Eichmann to read and comment on. Of course the Israelis had no idea once they had him in custody that Eichmann had already read the works they showed him, and therefore he was one step ahead of them when it came to interrogation (of course his previous career ensured he was well-versed in interrogation techniques, and so had a counter to many of the ruses of the Israeli interrogation team). Eichmann knew exactly what the Israeli's knew about him, and what they didn't know, and used this to his advantage - while it didn't save his life, it did change the perspective of the world toward him and in fact the Holocaust itself - it wasn't a project that had a life of its own owing the efficiency of mindless German bureaucrats as Eichmann tried to portray it, but a murderous policy actively pursued and orchestrated by dedicated Nazis, with the passive collusion of much of the German and European population.

While the Eichmann version of events has slowly been deconstructed over the years by various scholars, Eichmann before Jerusalem now deconstructs Eichmann's trial version of his own life and activities. It is the first of what will no doubt be a revisionist wave of scholarship to do with this most evil of men, and of the milieu that allowed him and those like him to escape and live comfortable lives across the seas after the War.

This is a must read.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Hitler virus by Peter Wyden

The Hitler virus : the insidious legacy of Adolf Hitler by Peter Wyden

New York : Arcade Publishing, 2012                             ISBN 9781611453225


Peter Wyden was a journalist and author, and this book has been released posthumously by Wyden's friend and fellow publisher, Richard Seaver.

Wyden sent this book to Seaver knowing that it was in need of a good editor, and his death surely has had an impact on the book we see. This is a good book, with a lot to say, but suffers from being too episodic, and lacks a structure to hold it together.

Wyden's personal history appears in the book from time-to-time: forced to flee Germany in 1937 because he was Jewish, he returned in 1945 with the US Army as part of a propaganda unit charged with trying to eradicate the Nazi cancer from the surviving population. Wyden has insights not only into the Nazi thuggery before the war, but also  into the reactions of Germans to their defeat.

The Hitler virus is about more than the shock and denial of the German population immediately after the War: it chronicles how Nazism has never been completely crushed, and how, hydra-like, the insidious legacy of the title keeps appearing, sometimes in the strangest places.

Wyden chronicles the way that soon after the war the US rehabilitated many Nazis to help run post-war Germany, and how the "Nazi dust vanished under the rug". The accommodation of the occupying powers with some of the former administration led to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, where the US assumed people were not Nazis, and no German would admit to past dealings with the Party.

He goes on to discuss "The Hitler wave" of the 1970s, when Germany started to talk, write, and make film about Hitler. What Wyden finds troubling about this era is how much of this outpouring minimised Hitler's madness and evil and emphasised his "achievements". His discussion of the television series Heimat is very interesting, showing how, by a change of emphasis, and of what is and isn't shown, a different interpretation of the Nazi era can and has taken hold in a great part of Germany.

The "out and proud" Nazis also get a mention in the book, along with those that profit from the fascination with the Nazi period - there is quite a good short expose on the Hitler diaries fiasco, noting the involvement of several former members of the Nazi hierarchy. The Hitler tourist and memorabilia industry also gets coverage.

The Hitler historians come in for criticism as well - mostly the Germans, such as Fest, Nolte and to a lesser extent Haffner, but David Irving gets his fair share as well. Better material has been written elsewhere on  how history can be distorted by charlatans like Irving , but Wyden gives a good journalistic coverage here. Where Wyden does well is to show the subtlety with which many of these characters belittle the crimes of Hitler and the Nazi regime - insidious indeed.

The final section of the book is "brighter" - some sections on some brave souls who fight for the truth to be exposed, no matter how painful it might be. Wyden briefly discusses the psychological effect of Nazism on Germany and Germans, and how denial is to some extent a natural reaction to such horrors, as indeed is embracing the crimes, which a small minority have done.

There are in reality several books within this title, which is probably why, good as it is, it left me feeling unfulfilled. Many of the chapters are very short, and left me wanting more information. Because Wyden covers so much territory, he skims the surface in many areas, which is a shame.

The one thing that does come out of this book is the re-iteration that we must never never forget.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell