Josef Men­gele

COMMENT: With the recent pub­li­ca­tion by Peter Lev­enda of a book about Hitler’s appar­ent escape from Ger­many at the end of World War II, it is use­ful to con­tem­plate the huge gap in schol­ar­ship and under­stand­ing between the mass-mediated “pop” ver­sion of Nazism and the real, insti­tu­tional con­text of the ter­ri­ble events of the World War II period and their aftermath.

With the dis­cov­ery of his pur­ported “grave” in 1985, the file on Josef Men­gele–the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz was  offi­cially closed, with sev­eral vol­umes writ­ten to seal the offi­cial record, includ­ing one by Ger­ald Pos­ner, whose efforts include mud­dy­ing the inves­tiga­tive waters with regard to the assas­si­na­tions of Pres­i­dent Kennedy, Mar­tin Luther King and Mar­tin Bor­mann.

Mengele’s infa­mous career existed in a social and his­tor­i­cal con­text that has more than a lit­tle rel­e­vance for us today. His pres­ence at the Auschwitz con­cen­tra­tion camp and his grue­some exper­i­ments on twins stemmed from the eugen­ics research that inspired the Nazi hor­rors and that occu­pied a promi­nent place in West­ern social sci­en­tific theory.

His work on twins was car­ried out in tan­dem with the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute.

There is evi­dence that he may well have con­tin­ued his work on twins after his flight to Latin America.

In fact, Mengele’s rel­a­tive secu­rity in Latin Amer­ica stemmed from his pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships with the Paraguayan gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary and, through them, with ele­ments of the Amer­i­can national secu­rity establishment.

By the same token, the pres­ence and pros­per­ity of fig­ures like Mar­tin Bor­mann and other, lesser Nazis can only be under­stood by ana­lyz­ing the pow­er­ful corporate/economic and polit­i­cal forces that gave rise to Nazism and fas­cism and that have per­pet­u­ated it in the post­war period.

It is inter­est­ing to note that Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner gives the pros­per­ous careers of 1,500 Jews liv­ing in Paraguay as an excuse for not extra­dit­ing Men­gele. (The Jews, of course, were not wanted for war crimes.) Might some or all of them have been in the employ of the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work–“Bor­mann Jews”?

EXCERPT: . . . . An atti­tude of benev­o­lence toward Bor­mann, the Ger­man who cre­ated so much com­mer­cial activ­ity for them, is main­tained by Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguyay and Paraguay.

In the last named coun­try, the son of a Bavar­ian cav­alry offi­cer, Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner, coop­er­ates with the United States mil­i­tary author­i­ties and the CIA, as he does with Bor­mann and his rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Dur­ing the Viet­nam war, Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner per­mit­ted the U.S. Army Chem­i­cal Corps and the CIA to send in teams of 2,500 men to carry out field tests, in the Matto Grosso jun­gle, of chem­i­cals for use in Vietnam.

In one instance, sev­eral Amer­i­can sol­diers became casu­al­ties when they acci­den­tally were sprayed with the gas. They were taken to a Paraguayan mil­i­tary field hos­pi­tal; the doc­tor who treated them was Josef Men­gele, now a Paraguayan cit­i­zen and an offi­cer in the Paraguayan Army Med­ical Corps. Under Mengele’s treat­ment, all sol­diers recov­ered. None, of course, knew the true iden­tity of their med­ical benefactor.

The Israelis have tried repeat­edly to extra­dite Men­gele, who was the noto­ri­ous doc­tor of the Auschwitz con­cen­tra­tion camp. But when Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner is approached through diplo­matic chan­nels for such a pur­pose, he responds: “Shall I also extra­dite the 1,500 Jews who have made a good life for them­selves and who have con­tributed so much to our eco­nomic growth?”

Despite the assis­tance Mar­tin Bor­mann has received from var­i­ous lead­ers in Latin Amer­ica since his arrival, includ­ing help from mem­bers of U.S. embassies and con­sulates and sev­eral CIA sta­tion chiefs, Hein­rich Mueller con­tin­ues to exer­cise extreme cau­tion in pro­tect­ing Bormann. . . .

(Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Lyle Stu­art [HC]; Copy­right 1981 by Paul Man­ning; p. 213.)