Mengele
Unmasking the "Angel of Death"
by David G. Marwell
Pub Date 28 Jan 2020
I am reviewing a copy of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death through W.W. Norton and Company and Netgalley:
Disclaimer: This book contains extremely sensitive subject matters, and tells of grotesque experiments, this book is not meant for children.
Honestly I struggled through the details of this book as well, but I feel this is an important book in order to better understand the brutality of the Holocaust, and in particular one Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Josef Mengele was born on March.16, 1911 and died on February 1979.
Mengele was possibly the most Notorious war criminal ever. Josef Mengele became was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. He was aided by the Role he thought was at work in popular culture. The grotesque work of Mengele during the Holocaust has made him a twisted symbol of a twisted time. He came to symbolize too the horrific failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether looked at as a demonic doctor who directed mass killings or a fugitive that managed to escape capture that has made Mengele loom so large that some have refused to believe he died even with conclusive proof.
It is unlikely that Mengele’s Childhood would have shown any indicators of the man he was to become, The Angel of Death. There was really no indication of extreme politics, or the brutal Anti-semitism that would lead to him to becoming ”The Angel of Death.”
David G Markell was the chief of investigation research at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s and worked on Mengele’s case. In researching the case he interviewed Mengele’s surviving victims, visited the scenes of the crimes, and held Mengele’s bones in his hands. In this book he examines in great detail Mengele’s life and career including his grotesque, heartbreaking brutality. He tells of Mengele’s university degree that led to two Ph.D’s and could have led to a promising career a a scientist, and Markell goes on to talk of Mengele’s war time service on the frontlines, as well as his brutality at Aushwitz which led to a great deal of deaths, in the name of his so called research.
Mengele tells the international search for Josef Mengele that ended in a cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died—but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead.
I found this book to be one of the most difficult books I’ve read in a long time, with that being said, it was very well written and researched and deserves nothing less than four out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
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