Mengele: The Complete Story
A biography of the so-called ""Angel of Death,"" whose grisly medical experiments on Jewish twins at Auschwitz put him high on every Nazi-hunter's list of most wanted men. Posner, a New York lawyer, who is recognized as a leading authority on Mengele, researched this book for five years, long before the discovery last year of Mengele's remains in Broil. In researching it, he was ultimately provided more than 5,000 pages of letters, diaries, and other biographical writings of Mengele by Rolf, Mengele's son. This account, then, will take the title of ""definitive"" over several other books recently or soon-to-be published.
Among the revelations Posner offers is the incredible fact that for a brief time after the war, Mengele was actually incarcerated by American soldiers under his own name, but as a result of ignorance and the disorganization of the Americans, he managed to escape. Mengele seems to have led almost a charmed life in this respect. In 1962, the Israeli Mossad came practically face-to-face with him, before being recalled to Israel because of government priorities. Posner also tells of a plot hatched by the Mengele family to fake Josef's death. (The Mengele family name had been for years--and still is--synonymous with farm machinery in Bavaria.
To this day, they own large property holdings around the world, including farmland in America's Midwest.) Readers can be grateful that Posner does not overdo the grisly details of Mengele's experiments. (Auschwitz accounts only for one-eighth of the book.) What Posner does offer is a cloak-and-dagger account of the attempts to locate Mengele in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, and of Mengele's frantic attempts to stay one step ahead of his would-be captors. A sound, respectable work of research.
Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner
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- Pub Date : 16/06/1986
- ISBN : 0815410069
- Publisher : McGraw-Hill
- Author : Gerald L. & John Ware Posner
Meet the Author : Gerald L. Posner is the bestselling author of Hitler's Children, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He lives in New York City. Producer and author John Ware lives in London.