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 - Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano, translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss

New York: Penguin, 2015                          ISBN 9781594205507

I have previously reviewed Gomorrah, the book that made Saviano's name as a writer. That polemic against the Camorra, written with the heart-felt rage of a local who saw its effects on the city and the people he knew, was a deserved best-seller.

Zero Zero Zero takes a wider view, at the World-wide epidemic of cocaine. Starting where else but in Colombia, Saviano shows us how the big cartels were created, and then overtaken by their Mexican middle-men. As always the Italian connection is not too far away, with the 'Ndrangheta most involved in the trade in Europe. However, Saviano shows us that everyone's involved in the trade in cocaine, from El-Salvador to Spain, Russia to Australia.

The trade is a river of gold to those who can manage it and who are ruthless enough to corrupt and kill. Saviano is adept at providing a list of murders, kingpins (and queens), stings and prison sentences. He also shows the reader how money and drugs eats its own, with cartels, mini-cartels and micro-cartels being created, warring and being destroyed all the time, either through the work of law enforcement agencies or other drug groups.

The reader of Zero Zero Zero is at turns horrified, disgusted, and lost in the minutiae of this history. The one theme that comes through is just how enormous the trade is, driven by an insatiable demand on the streets for Cocaine.

There is no doubt that Saviano is driven by a need to uncover this criminal activity - to his own detriment - and after more than three hundred pages of exposition  the reader comes to the same conclusion as Saviano: the only solution is legalisation, but that is the wrong solution.

A powerful book, and worth reading.



Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Colonel Fawcett and South American Exploration Special

The lost city of Z : a legendary British explorer's deadly quest to uncover the secrets of the Amazon by David Grann

London : Pocket Books, 2010     ISBN 9781847394439

Exploration Fawcett by P.H. Fawcett, arranged from his manuscripts, letters, log-books, and records by Brian Fawcett.

London : Hutchinson, 1953

You may not have heard of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, but you know him - his story forms the basis of so much of the popular culture of explorers that we have today - Indiana Jones, Charles F. Muntz (the explorer in the animated film Up); Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was said to be based on Fawcett's explorations in the wilds of South America.

So who was the real Fawcett? An English soldier, with service throughout the Empire, he wanted to escape the army life, and a request from the Bolivian government to the Royal Geographical Society for a man to lead an expedition to fix the border (which was in then unexplored country), gave him the excuse he needed to leave the army and start his new life.

Fawcett was a man of his time - he had strong views on the hierarchy of races (he barely mentions the native bearers that died on his expeditions), he was an ascetic, and a hard driver of men - he was frequently disappointed in the calibre of his companions.

Most of his initial expeditions were to survey as yet unfixed points on the map, especially the border areas delimiting Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. In doing so he went places no white man had been before, and soon realised that the indigenous population of South America was once much larger than that which existed in his time - he was an observant chronicler of the outrages committed against the local Indians by the Rubber tappers and other "civilized" people of the area - while at the same time dismissing most Indians as inferior beings to whites.

Then WWI intervened, a hiatus of over five years where Fawcett was in Europe fighting for King and Country. Soon after the war, out of the army for good, he began a process of finding supporters for further ventures into the forests of South America. His early explorations and discoveries led him to believe that the remains of a very ancient and wealthy civilization lay lost somewhere in the wilds of Brazil's great jungles. This lost city (which he called "Z"), became the object of his later ventures - his treasure hoard. He was seeking it not so much for gold and silver, but for the validation it would give him as a "worthy" explorer, and the confirmation of his theories.

IN 1925 he set off on the expedition during which he hoped to find "Z", taking along his eldest son and his son's best friend. They headed into the jungle, and were never seen again.

The mystery surrounding their disappearance has fascinated many - both armchair theorists, and adventurers who have themselves tried to follow in his footsteps to discover Fawcett, the lost city, or both. Many of them too, never returned. The fascination with the story of Fawcett, and the unexplored jungles of South America continue to this day. The fascination has spawned a mini-industry of publishing.

Ironically, the words of the man himself, P.H. Fawcett, were by no means the first to be heard - Exploration Fawcett did not appear until 1953, well after many books about the search for him had been published. Exploration Fawcett is the unfinished work of Percy, a work that he no doubt hoped to complete with the triumphal discovery of "Z". The manuscript has been edited by his younger son Brian, who provides a postscript with some of the rumours of the continued survival of Percy, which Brian tries to treat objectively. Given the nature of the work, the quality varies - the description of his early journeys being the highlight, and his ethnographic musings being fairly crudely thought out.

Brian Fawcett himself wrote a book about a search for his father - Ruins in the sky - where, by means of flying over areas his father was to explore, definitively killed of the theory of a large ruined city...but more of that later on.

Several expeditions to search for Fawcett occurred in the late 20s and early 30s. George Dyott, already an experienced South America hand, went looking for him and produced Man hunting in the jungle. Peter Fleming (brother of James Bond creator Ian), wrote in 1933 what has become the best known of the Fawcett literature, Brazilian Adventure, a rather light-hearted account of what he saw as a half-hearted attempt to find out what had happened to Fawcett and his party, to which Robert Churchwood responded with Wilderness of Fools.....and so on up to the 21st century.

David Grann is a journalist who is the latest to see that the hidden treasure of Fawcett is in fact the story of his life, and The Lost City of Z is the result. This is an engaging read, and runs over the life of Fawcett quite well. In the nature of the current age of "me too", we get accounts of David (who is a middle-aged New Yorker, bald and overweight) re-tracing Fawcett's last steps as best he could, which don't really add anything to the telling, in my view. He makes it to the last Indian village that Fawcett was known to have reached, and breathlessly relates how the Indians saw Fawcett's campfires for five nights after he left them, only for them to stop thereafter - the Indians in no doubt the party had been killed by other tribes known to be hostile. The only issue I have with this is that it doesn't add anything to what we already know, and in fact seems remarkably similar to the account Brian Fawcett writes in his Epilogue to Exploration Fawcett. What would have "added value" to this account would have been a trip to the area of the last known campfire to try and find any remains or clues as to what happened.

Grann does bring something new to the story in his relation of the latest archaeological research being undertaken in the area in which Fawcett disappeared. It seems he is vindicated after all - there were great cities in the jungle, in fact possibly even an empire, with settlements connected by good roads and widespread farming undertaken to feed the populace. Unfortunately for Fawcett, this empire was constructed of wood, and so there were never going to be the huge stone ruins that Fawcett was sure he would find.

If you love a good exploration story, I can highly recommend both Exploration Fawcett and The Lost City of Z, good books to read by the fire and think of far horizons.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell