Mengele Book Launch with David Marwell

david has has has strongly supported me in depleting my cellar and I want to thank you David for all your noble efforts in doing them I also want to welcome it was lovely wife Judy here it's great to have you here so it is an honor to welcome you back David to celebrate the publication of your book which expands our understanding of Holocaust history I'd like to thank the co-sponsor of tonight's event the fellowship had asked afterwards to the study of professional ethics it's also called fast B for nearly 20 years vas B which started at this museum has challenged graduate students and future leaders to confront their ethical responsibilities as professionals by analyzing the decisions and actions of Nazi criminal era Nazi here professionals in 2019 fast be awarded fellowships to over 60 people across the fields of business journalism law medicine and the seminary in a moment I'll introduce David Goldman chairman of the board of that fast be who will then introduce David Marlin tonight's moderator an executive director of fast B Thorsten with Agner David Goldman asked me to go through a list of all of his achievements and so here we are but before David comes to the podium I need to make a very special announcement to everybody please silence their phones just stop anybody from disturbing everybody else thank you Thorsten that'll you that would be most embarrassing anyway thank you now please join me in welcoming David go do you want me to read all of your achievements job okay we're done with that part of the entertainment first of all I'd like to welcome and thank David Gill for being here David is the Consul General from Germany David and the consulate in Germany has been a great friend to the museum and to fast me thank you for being here tonight I'd like to make three introductions if I could and I'm not really good at introducing because my theory of introducing is that you can read the facts and so if I'm introducing I just want to give impressions not facts and there unfortunately my impressions so bear with me um first I do want I wanted to introduce Fafi jack has done it a Blee and as well as I could I only would like to note that what fast B does is very much connected to what David and Torsten will be talking about tonight we focus on the responsibilities of professionals but we begin by focusing on the actions of the professionals in Nazi Germany so we asked the question of who they were why did they behave the way they did what can we learn from their behavior David explores that beautifully in his book talking about Mengele so we feel a deep connection to what we're doing tonight so let me introduce the two people who will be on stage first of all Torsten Wagner Torsten is a brilliant historian but I like to this is my impression I like to think of Torsen as an applied historian I don't know if that's actually a term that's used Torsen treats history as more than just an academic pursuit but as a lens looking at history as a lens into the current and the future Torsten is a gifted educator in berlin in krakow he taught in copenhagen but but mostly he's he's gifted on the streets he's a public educator he's a public historian so walking with him through berlin through kak krakow thorough Sofia Chavez is special and lastly for the thousands of people whom fast-speed touches every year directly or indirectly the best description of Torsen his that he's the executive director of fast feet so we're happy to have Torsten here tonight no that was so a few people here no David Marr well so I probably don't have to anything I want to correct one thing that that Jack said tonight Jack said that David's greatest achievement was the construction of this place may I note that David and Judy have two new grandchildren my expectation is that at least in the year 2019 David and Judy's greatest accomplishments were their grandchildren David is as you know has all of you know David but David has held literally a hundred jobs many of them have interesting titles though it makes one wonder why there were so many but David is a he's a colleague David is respected by all of us who work with him and we are honored to work with him he is a colleague more than that and all of you in the audience know this he is a wonderful friend he's a special friend to all of us lastly and maybe I'm jumping the gun a little bit but I would like to introduce David as an award-winning author I think we're here tonight to talk about what will be the definitive work of josef mengele Torsten David [Applause] Don it is this one on yeah okay great hello everybody good evening thank you to Jack thank you to David for the warm welcome and thank you for all of you coming out tonight and joining us here for this conversation for this discussion tonight and thank you David for allowing me to be the one who can ask you a few questions so that we get to know the book even better you have asked just to get an opportunity to start with a few thoughts at the beginning of just being on the stage here I'll give you a try thank you very much anyone who knows me knows that I like to be prepared so I actually have written a few things down because I didn't want to forget anything first I want to thank Jack my friend Jack for his gracious introduction in for having this evening here at the museum and thank David for his impressions and and for his kind words and for helping to organize this evening and to thank Torsten I'm more than honored that he will be asking some questions tonight I'm extremely pleased to be here in a place that it's very familiar to me but in a role that is absolutely new and a bit surreal during my time at the museum I must have introduced hundreds of programs from that podium and interviewed scores of authors and I never imagined that I would be sitting here in the other chair and it feels pretty good I left the museum almost exactly four years ago and started this book the very next day to be here on the day after its release closes a tidy circle for me in this regard I'm reminded of a book a wonderful book that I read this summer Lawrence Wechsler 'he's memoir slash biography of Oliver Sacks in which he describes how he had written a fan letter to Sachs in the early 1980s describing the impact that saxs awakenings had on him and he quotes from a letter that he received in return from sacks and sacks wrote one always has the fear that one lives works writes in a vacuum and letters like yours are very precious as evidence to the contrary indeed I never regard the writing of anything as completing it the circle of completion must be made by the reader in the individual responses of his heart and mind then and only then is the circle of graces of giving receiving and returning complete so it is extremely gratifying for me to return to the museum this evening and to close the circle of completion here in a place that I helped to build and to which I devoted so much of my energy in care thank you [Applause] thank you David just in terms of the general framework what we have planned is to have a conversation with each other here perhaps for 4550 minutes and then we'd like to open the floor for short questions so that David gets a chance to explore further themes and issues that you would like to have clarified and there will be one of the microphones that we have here will then be provided to you it's up obviously not completely coincidental that we're sitting here today and then this week and this book in many ways fits into the moment not only that we're close to another day commemorating the duration of Auschwitz but even the 75th and probably most of us have at least seen a photo in a newspaper or perhaps even some coverage of the ceremony marking the 75th liberation of Auschwitz a few days ago and you will all remember how the Polish museum had covered the whole area around the entrance gate charge it's back now and the ramp and it's kind of red yellow somber light for the occasion and what was basically what had become a stage and the most literal sense was the ramp the gate and the ramp and it made me think of to what degree that ramp symbolizes something it does not only symbolize what we think of very often if you think of men what Mengele stands for which is something we will discuss and some of his murderous simple gestures as far as we can tell but for me it also symbolizes that we're talking about a crime that is so massive and that has meant the murder of so many millions of European Jews of other victim groups that stretched over so much time with so many people being complicit with so few people who felt responsible afterwards that so many societies and some individuals have perhaps the urge to try to condense this crime into a place a symbol and perhaps even a person and I wonder whether that's part of the story where we could start tonight and to think about how mingle oh of course in many ways has become that and body is something that is almost too complex too stretched in space and time to actually get a hold off you've dealt with this person for at least seven years of your life in different ways as you described in the book and now we've presented this riveting account which I'm admiring extremely about you have put on the table here both of the life and the death of Mengele for me it's very much at the intersection of history of science a perpetrator history of the Holocaust and of course also in many ways of memory studies how we remember this Holocaust I would love if you could start telling us how did you get to this project how did you end up to the point of deciding to work on this project to return to the topic of Mengele and then do the research present the book I as Jack I think said or someone in the introduction said that I had had it started my career after graduate school at the Department of Justice in the Office of Special Investigations which was charged with identifying locating and prosecuting Nazi war criminals who had come to the United States and this was extremely interesting and for me rewarding employment I learned a great deal my graduate studies were in really studying the the political history of Nazi Germany and the rise of National Socialism and but I hadn't really focused on the Holocaust so I dove into that and learned a great deal about it at some point in 1985 the the subject of josef mengele and the focus on this individual became so intense that public opinion had moved the levers of government so that public opinion and the ambition of certain politicians kind of coincided to drive the Attorney General to to ask my office to investigate some allegations that had emerged about Mengele and his connection with the United States institutions and personnel so we were charged with determining whether these allegations were true and pretty soon that investigation became a manhunt we were joined by another office at the Department of Justice and we set out not only to clarify Mengele smoove manure and his possible association with the US but also with trying to find him and so I won't go into the details of how we did that it's pretty well documented in the book but when we finished the investigation Mengele kind of remained with me in my mind I I didn't really know too much about the man but I I was interested in in him and I thought about him and I read kind of I would say superficially about him until the opportunity arose at the end of 2015 to to really have the opportunity to do something else with my life and I remember as if it were yesterday I got a call from James Baron of the New York Times and he has heard that I was leaving the museum and said what are you gonna do next and I said I'm gonna write a book and once it's written in the New York Times you know that it it's not fake news and he wanted to make sure that I lived up to that so I started writing it and if I just give a little bit more detailing I I began not the book was initially just going to be a kind of memoir --is-- account of my involvement in the investigation in 1985 but the more that I read and the more that I discovered the new scholarship about Mengele and it emerged since I had worked on the case in 1985 the it became clear to me that I simply couldn't like that book I had to write a larger book that talked about who Mengele was and also tried to demystify him in a sense as as Torsen suggests Mengele had come to represent for many through the testimony of his victims and through the artful writings and and other creative efforts of popular culture that made him into a figure of intense interest to the public and as a result he came in some way to symbolize not only the Holocaust itself the Auschwitz death camp but also the escape from justice of so many Nazi war criminals and when I began to sit down and and really focus on who this man was and read all of the great new scholarship that had emerged and new primary sources it seemed to me that I had to try to separate the man from the reputation and try to figure out in some ways who he was and what he actually did and I was surprised by what I found I would love to delve a little bit deeper into exactly what you just raised some of you will have had a chance to look into the book everybody will read it starting tomorrow and you will see how in many ways to make a long story short you present a narrative the verified narrative in the first half and then you take us basically through the detective story that gave you the possibility to write the first part which I really like us as a structure we know from many survivors descriptions how there was this imposing tall blonde person embodying the supposed Aryan race in other words an image that we know as well it would be far from the historical Mengele he became already in the moment and definitely in the in the afterlife of at the moment larger than life in many ways which we just talked about already and there's obviously this contrast between as you explained in the book the degree of what people actually knew about him and what we knew knew and so now and then the course of the research has happened and that symbolic significance in many ways I wonder whether we could spend a few minutes on just diving into or you giving us a peek into your workshop the process of actually working through the sources he's depicted always as the the monster of malpractice as the angel of death is a term that comes up relatively early could you share with us what some of the larger challenges of writing of researching of writing were dealing with him so that the the major challenge actually is that there that we know very little about what Mengele actually did at Auschwitz in terms of his science that there's very little documentary evidence of the experiments and the science that mangal are conducted in Auschwitz there's a great deal of testimony about it testimony from individuals who when you think about it and this is a difficult issue in a way because it's difficult to doubt what survivors testify about but if you think about the position that the people who are making statements about what menglers goals of his research were you realize that they were in no position to understand the goals they knew what happened to them they understood the impact of his actions on them but they had no way of knowing what he was actually trying to do and the picture that emerges from testimony and from again the these images that emerge in popular culture is of a person who's gone way off the track who's who's guided by pathology by sadism by some kind of grotesque interest in odd things and the fact is that he that's not the case he was and he was both the the product and the promise of a system of scientific research that was esteemed and enshrined in in Germany and in some ways if you think about it that image of of the of the vanguard of someone who represented the best of what German science and sermon research produced is a much more frightening picture than someone who was out on their own with blood dripping from their fangs and wanting Lee you know making their way through hosts of innocent victims so that's that's really what I confronted and I was aided I must say I mean I I say there's not much evidence documentary evidence but there is a great deal of very serious work done mostly by German scholars in the last 20 years or so historians of science who have taken the very limited evidence that there is and have been able to reconstruct the at least I think a pretty good theory of at least some of the activities that Mengele was involved in it's as if the there is an inverse proportion of between what we know about him and what we believe he and the immensity of what we believe he did there are two small episodes that only aside almost side remarks in the book but that for me started to constitute a light motif almost in the book one is where I believe Rolf his son if I remember correctly I apologize this to some friends and says well he just has my father just has such a hard time to just simply to be a human being before remember that base load and a little later in the book there's the the reference where for details I'm not going to go into now some hair has to be investigated and the the scholar who investigates the hair says in the first moment well this is probably not the hair of a human being and I'm obviously bringing up these two quotes because I'd like to hear from you if it was a you already raised that a moment ago was it an issue to quote unquote humanize yeah yes I mean you imagine how difficult it is to even think about trying to present a picture of Mengele that makes him into a human being it's it's so contrary to the popular imagination and it also goes against much of what we have learned about him from people who either had some connection to him or or fantasize that they had a connection with him I say in the book and it was picked up by a couple of reviewers where what we know about Mengele is is more trope than truth and and it I thought it might be an unwelcome role to play to be the person who tries to present that in an effective way and be taken seriously by by the public I would love for us actually to follow your example and also to talk a little bit about the person and then about hunting him right the whole investigation so if we start with the Mengele and the biography for a moment one way of course summarizing and I've heard you say that in other context is of course it's almost scarier to think of that Mengele symbolizes what human beings are capable of I think that was the way you put it which is a very powerful thought it provokes from either question though whether it's that level and there are another level to what degree Mengele also can be seen as the representative of a generation or a part of a specific middle-class German culture not necessarily that war youth concept is about too young for that but still part of a culture and of course he's also very much and that's just what you refer to a representative of medical professionals or in a scholar of a certain time and I wonder whether you against those kinds of questions could take us into a limit what you could find out and I know it's not unlimited about his background and his way into medicine and science so we don't know I should say as it stopped for one more minute on sources because yes when and I have to jump forward just slightly to put this in context when when we found the body of Mengele which we'll talk about probably later in Brazil in 1985 we also found a number of notebooks and a stack of correspondence and we found resources that were extremely helpful in our investigation to determine what his movements were after the war and it turns out we found a letter that he wrote to his son in 1972 I think and he writes to his son and says I've just begun a project to tell the history of my life so he talks about writing a kind of autobiography and that would have been great if that's exactly what he did but he goes further in their letter and says however I decided that instead of making it an autobiography I would write it as a novel kind of the French have this term Auto fiction it's an autobiography but it's fictionalized and why did he do this he did it he claims because with the ability to use literary techniques and the power of literature and also not to be bound by the literal facts of his life he was able to define certain larger issues and he could for instance displace his own motives on to other people or he could collectivize things he could have a more in an easier way in making significant points about his own life so that was that source is one of the important ones about his early life and about his studies in the course of the investigation I was able to take this fiction that he wrote and figure out who the real people were what the real names were and and was able to interview some of these people so it was not completely useless as a source but it had to be treated very carefully so that's one source and then we have university records and we have the the recollections of some of his colleagues so it's not a great deal of material and you have to be kind of careful about drawing conclusions but he grew up in a middle-class family his parents his father owned a factory that produced farm equipment when Mengele was a boy it was rather small workshop they made wagons and and other things it really got a boost during the First World War because it was a had contracts with the German Army and Navy and produced munitions carriers and plummets for naval mines and and other things and became an important economic force in the town so they lived in a big house they were well respected Mengele had two brothers and Mengele also suffered from a childhood illness and was considered not to be robust enough to take over the family firms so he and his and the middle brother really were able to choose their own professions you would normally as the oldest son Mengele would have likely taken over the firm the younger son was destined to take over the firm so Mengele decided that he would go to university got his Abitur he passed he went through the gymnasium system as a kind of middling student without much passion or interest in any particular subject but by the time it gets to the University he becomes absolutely engaged in the study of medicine and allied fields genetics and anthropology and he does very well he has two or three Nobel Prize winners as his professors he excels in the classroom he studies not only in Munich but also in Frankfurt and in Leipzig and in Vienna and in Bonn and which was common for German students at the time to go to different universities and and his he starts his first semester the summer semester in April of 1930 by the time he actually gets really involved in his medical studies the Nazi Party has ascended to power in Germany and this coincidence between his study of medicine and the emergence of the of National Socialism as the ruling ideology and party in Germany is very important because there's a kind of symbiotic role between his interest in this science and the role this science played as a supporter and as a partner if you will in in Nazi politics I think it was a Malheur who said that National Socialism is applied biology in a sense that's how it was seen by the leaders of of the Third Reich and so Mengele zone interest coinciding with the the elevation of the status of this science within Germany and how does a science get elevated in terms of status well funding by research foundations and institutions by curriculum development and things like that so you have to see Mangala in a way as a product of both politics and his own passion for a subject that that intrigued him intellectually this wasn't something that he did because he thought it was a ticket to becoming prominent somewhere it was a a real interest and you can tell in his autobiography when he writes about his studies the and of course he's writing 50 35 years later looking back but there's a kind of residual passion and intensity about what he was learning and how it affected him one thought still in these early years there is one episode towards the end of the vomer period I believe where you describe how mingle and his friend observes a communist demonstration reacts almost viscerally against it so I wonder whether we also need to put Mengele into that broader context because his families felt very conservative and nobody is kind of gung-ho not see necessarily whether both Mengele his parents their position in goons Bork when he grows up or is unfortunately a very good example of that unholy alliance between traditional conservatives the Finnish movement that he identifies with and the rising Nazi movement and that he brings it together yes I mean he did Mengele is he joins a kind of conservative youth movement and his father is part of the kind of a conservative Catholic a political movement and the father is not a Nazi he doesn't join he joins the party but later is mostly a kind of pro forma Nazi I would say without a great deal of significant attachment to the party or its goals and Mengele himself when he decides at the University that when he really makes a decision to become more political in it and he claims in his autobiography that it's this he sees a communist March Iran on a on a hill in Bonn overlooking part of the city and he sees a communist parade and he decides that he has to now become engaged he doesn't join the party he he joins the stall helm which later becomes brought is brought into as a party Aslam but so he's not someone who from from his childhood han is a committed anti-semite committed Nazi he's much more connected connected with his with his family's kind of conservative values his father's kind of flirtation with the Nazi Party early on is more a business decision than an real commitment but I think it's his I say somewhere or maybe it's something that got cut from the book but if you if you're looking for where this where he be the the tipping point where he becomes a passionate believer it's really through his science and that his connection at the University I think that's without question I did that would have been my next question so that's really that's his access into the ideology and into these and its benefit to him obviously will and this is a fast beat concept professionals want to advance their career and of course it wasn't it wasn't bad for his career to be studying these particular sciences although he he certainly brought to them a particular interest in passion that was beyond politics so he's not an ideological fanatic he is an ambitious student scholar and wants to promote his career and then in that field that he believes in but at the same time of course also fully identifies with the new ideals and the new worldview that racial hygiene was to symbolize yes I mean he completely buys into the notion of racial hygiene which is the basic tenets of which are that that a person's value comes from their their racial identity and that it's the job of the state to protect and to nourish the the good races and to to close off and eventually to kill off those races which pose a threat and that's something that Mengele believed and and that was the basis of his of his science I should say that in his studies he takes a kind of pause from his medical studies and gets a PhD in anthropology from a a real racist but very at the time considered very fine physical anthropologists named Tatum Olson and he becomes his his Molson becomes his mentor and he writes a dissertation which is considered to be pretty good I mean it's not not as good as this next dissertation but it's pretty good so we have Mengele part of that conservative right-wing Alliance familywize we have mangled the the young scholar we have a period where he ends up also being a soldier warrior but eventually of course and I'm jumping now forward we have Mengele the camp doctor the concentration camp doctor who when I get this right from your book has these two three different tasks the one to protect these SS troops against epidemics etc being part of the selection process in all those different forms that of course means murder of four to nine thousands of people and he fits in in his spare time the research right my question there what makes me curious is the small tidbits that you could pull out of the sources what do they tell us about his self perception and his understanding in these roles as a professional yeah I wish I I wish I could give a more satisfying answer to this but we don't really have he doesn't talk about this period believe it or not in his autobiography he doesn't talk about the period at Auschwitz he refers to it kind of retrospectively when he talks about the Nuremberg trials and he there's some references to it but he doesn't give you a narrative of what he did in Auschwitz we know from other people that he there one of his colleague physicians there were they were probably I don't know the number I mean I once know the number but I'm I can't remember let's say twenty to thirty physicians in similar positions as Mengele at at Auschwitz and as you say his his duties included what kind of public health duties the prevention of epidemics which not because they threatened the camp population so much as they threatened the SS guard so they wanted to make sure that they would they would quickly respond to any epidemics his role on the ramp which really is although most people who talk about Mengele talk about his his experiments his sadistic experiments as being his his crime but his major crime and a crime that he that he didn't that he completely admitted was his duty on the ramp the so-called ramp which is where the trains would dislodge their passengers and he would then along with his colleagues who did it on a rotating basis would identify those incoming prisoners which ones could be exploited for their labor first before being killed or could be killed through their labor and those who should be sent immediately to the gas chambers and this is the this is the is horrendous massive crime that he that he perpetrated on at least a weekly basis we don't know well there was it wasn't clearly every day and I think I may have lost track of the question but I was it I get going well it you I think you covered it because but I'll help you with another I talk about the self-perception anyway what the reason why I'm asking him perhaps that gets us one step further is for me there were and a lot of extremely important aspects of it but somehow it's the last two pages that really drive it home for me when you describe the father-son relationship which is interesting for all kinds of reasons but then you describe how he ends up having obviously extremely awkward yeah letter exchange and then they even meet right so I have yeah if I can yeah the reason why I bring it up is because he ends up in a situation where I could easily imagine him trying to mitigate the perception of his son and win him and he wanted it to connect to him so I can imagine all kinds of strategies but what he chooses is still to say well but in the end I had to follow orders and I'm not a guy who just runs away in jerks away I had to fulfill my duties and in the end of the day and that's for me perhaps the three most important sentences in your book is well but when it is about the real traditional important values there's no tolerance it when my foolish communities under threat I'll defend it more less at any cost and that whole sentence from me and correct me here goes for me as well drives home that he even in 77 877 77 77 still seems to see himself as the morally intact good person so let me let me set the scene for for that so that that are the audience will understand the importance of that Mengele had a son who was born in 1944 whom he saw a couple of times in his life once as an infant once as a toddler once as a 12 year old and and this from the son who believed that this meant when he was able to make conscious decisions and know things he was told and thought that this man whom he had met was his uncle and he thought his father had died in the war the son is a grows up in in West Germany he's kind of a lefty long hair progressive in his politics and in nine men after eyes Moniz is captured the name Mengele becomes a much more current and he starts getting kidded as in school and his mother and stepfather decide to tell him who his real father is and then his mother imposes on him a responsibility to engage in a correspondence with the father which for the father is whose in Argentina and then in in Paraguay and then in Brazil the father is this is the father's lifeline in a sense cut off from his family in his home and everything that was important to him this connection with this son whom who doesn't really know him he's very important so but from the sons point of view it's an awkward correspondence and it's kind of forced he said it was like writing to a prisoner were you doing him a service but you're not really getting much out of it and at some point in 1977 the father is now not in very good health he's living in Brazil under an assumed name the son decides that he can't continue what has become a kind of difficult correspondence with the father justifying himself with long kind of discussions into history trying to explain just explain himself so the son decides he's gonna go to Brazil and confront his father and he plans it very well we have a lot of sources on this he he decides how he's going to structure the questions how he's going to lead up to the ultimate kind of confrontation he swipes a passport from a friend of his who looks sort of like him he goes down to to Brazil the father is warning him that you've got to make sure you've takes several taxis security is very important he ends up meeting the father and they have a couple of very intense sessions and the son starts off carefully and he says you know how can you say that that that Jews and other people whom you believe to be inferior sometimes or end and people who are have disabilities sometimes they're the most brilliant people how do you how can you justify your belief and and the father gives an answer and the son is not convinced and finally the father decide to kind of break sounds as well you you don't really believe everything that you've read about me how could you believe that stuff I was I was it was my duty I'm not a shirker in any way the people who arrived on the ramp they were already dead when they got there the decision was made by others I was simply indicating who could live a bit longer and that sense I did a service and the the twins I saved so many of them and the son gets very upset with all this and then they decide to have a kind of truce because it's not a productive conversation and they just stop it but and the father gets very emotional he begins to cry and he he can't believe that his son would would believe those things of him so then the son goes back to Germany and the father writes the letter that Torsten was describing and it's an extraordinary document he writes now that I've seen you I can die more easily I feel that an important part of my life has been satisfying and to the extent that I've done anything that has has compromised your ability to live your life well I I it gives me great pain you you say that we are alike in that we are stubborn and represent our points of view with with with great stubbornness and that is true and if that's the only thing that that makes us alike I guess it has to be the case unfortunately you don't understand the accomplishments that I've had in my life and you're unable to do so because of your upbringing and the political environment in which you grew up but that's okay and then he says but I won't justify myself to you I've already explained what I did to you in in basic terms and I have a limit and that limit is when I perceive a threat to my family or to the focus should demand shaft which is a real Nazi term my meaning when my race my racial community is threatened so I say in the book that this is the same thing that he was thinking and saying in 1944 on the ramp at Auschwitz so there's absolutely no kind of remorse or understanding of how the world had changed David it's thanks to you that we now know what happens in the weeks months after Auschwitz is liberated we know that he and other colleagues of his eventually end up in a situation similar to being American POWs in American control how he ends up being able to use the release document of another one to change his identity goes under underground works hard manual labor for a while etcetera and eventually gets out right and you describe so excited in an exciting way in the book how after a couple of years of anxiety already in the 50s both he and his wife and soon divorced wife already dare again to be in touch and to file for divorce which seems to indicate that already in the 50s they feel so safe that they can do this which seems to be an amazing and also sad mirror into the failures for many sides of the prosecution in the 60s you described how particularly Israelis come very close to finding him but eventually and this is where I'm taking us now with your permission the big year is 1985 and I want to share that my reading experience here for me it was the perfect anticlimax yeah I mean you and I probably I wonder whether that is one of the problems with the story in a moment I would love you to explain to us what that year meant and what had built up to that moment in May when you end up having German West Germans Israelis and Americans meeting up in May of all dates and talk about this but just to explain what I mean with anticlimax so you have this build up of the decision to hunt him in the course of the late winter and spring months and then in early June a body is exhumed right yeah I tried to find I tried to explain how how this happened what what series of events or what what the the cause was for this interest in Mengele that started to emerge in after lull right of a decade yeah I mean he was the West Germans had been doing some work with him in the 70s but there was you know he was as I been saying more and more this figure in popular culture Marathon Man the deputy times arrow there's all kinds of things that you may have forgotten about where Mengele becomes the key figure the key character the benchmark for evil and he's taken on a kind of life of his own in as a symbol I think I was able in the book at least I date the the this resurgence and interest in him from an article that my now sadly late friend Lou said lonardo wrote as a cover story for Parade magazine where she is able to locate and interview a number of the twin victims or survivors of Man killer's experiments and you know Parade magazine is is has a wide distribution and was picked up by foreign newspapers so this really set the stage for a kind of interest the the survivor community became and this is not just in the case of Mengele but overall much more in a way self-confident more willing to publicly talk about their their past the twins who had been involved in manglers experiments decided to organize themselves as a group which had the the the wonderful acronym but terrible name of of candles candles is a nice name but then what it stands for is a bit awkward they make a very emotional trip to to Auschwitz in January of 1985 for the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz so 35 years ago now at Yad Vashem there is a an inquest or a trial where Mengele is placed in on is in the doc in absentia where and there's testimony from people who suffered under him and then it might surprise you but politics also played a role with as especially two US senators who had won their their seats in the Reagan landslide and who were up for re-election in 1986 who became attached to this topic of Mengele al D'Amato who was the senator here in New York in our inspector the once and future Republic Democrat and they decided they were going to hold hearings in Congress in the Judiciary Committee the the juvenile justice subcommittee why the juvenile justice up company because menglers victims were children some of them and this all kind of pushed together the Germans decided to [Music] offer an unprecedented reward from Inglis capture a million Deutschmarks which was 50 times what it had been up to then and the the largest reward ever offered and I detail in the book the kind of political decision about that reward and and the dispute between the professionals and the politicians about whether it should be should be offered or not and then the Israelis decided to to move forward and they created an interagency group led by the Mossad but also members of the police and the Justice Ministry so we all got together we decided that we would join forces in this investigation so we had the West German government led by the prosecutor in Frankfurt who had jurisdiction over the case and the both the land espelette side the provincial police in hessen which is the state land in which Frankfurt is located and also the the German FBI the Bundys criminal homes so we all joined together and in May we had this this now-famous at least famous in my mind meeting in Frankfurt of the the three partners in the investigation at which time the Germans announced that they were going to move the investigation forward by invent by searching the home of someone in the Mengele family firm believing that he might be a key to finding out what Mengele was and that search took place at the end of the very end of May and which resulted in finding documents which suggested and later proved that Mengele had had drowned in in some Paulo in several years earlier hence the the anticlimax but the story of course is in 85 you think started things started and they're over before they really started over before they started they're over on the other hand it's the starting moment for a couple of years of extremely successful to take work from from your side before we get there one question about this confluence of interests which i think is so fascinating I'm tempted to see this also as an outcome of course of what some people have called the rise of the Holocaust paradigm because we all know that when we go back to the 70s or 60s or 50s we talked about people talked about World War two in all kinds of directions but it was not Auschwitz and not Holocaust that was meant for for the broad public and for many scholars it was not a lens through which we looked at World War two and Nazism but it became the lens and our shits particularly and that shift I mean you can debate when exactly starts whatever but definitely mid 80s was a very crucial push for that development so in the one hand there is something broad but on the other hand and would left a bit for you to address it even more depending on who of these three are even more players if we take the different survivor groups in there were very specific interests and to perhaps even also instrumentalization of that whole Thea so I've touched a bit on on the the politics in the American context I the the hearings that that senator d'amato senators D'Amato and Inspector held they had three three hearings in 1985 and these are I don't want to question their motives because they were probably pure but there certainly was a political element to what they were doing this was a subject that would be attractive for their constituents and and they went forward big time tomorrow made it a significant issue for him his Nuala news letters to his constituents his speeches at dinners at jewish fundraisers and and and everything else the Germans of course is complicated in in what in some ways it was a kind of compensatory reaction to a lack of successful effort in the past indeed a lack of a kind of meaningful effort although I hasten to say that I think it's too easy to dismiss what the Germans had done over the years as being completely without pure motivation and without energy it was a difficult task as although in retrospect it seems quite simple that they could have easily found out where Mengele was but given a lot of factors it was not easy and certainly individuals on the German side who were involved were committed and and energetic but in toto the effort was lackluster and ineffective and given the the kind of focus on this subject in early 1985 there was clearly a compensation and a devotion of resources to this effort when we got involved that that was unusual and the Israelis is much more complicated case I had trouble understanding I didn't have on trouble understanding why they were got involved in the investigation but I got had trouble understanding their resistance in closing it which I was able to resolve only in the September of 2017 the Mossad published a very thick report that was basically a summary of their investigations since 1960 and their I I think I found at least one answer and that is again a kind of compensation they had been so close to finding Mengele and so successful and kind of brilliant in in how they'd gone about doing it but had failed and so they didn't want to close the case unless they were absolutely 150 percent certain and then it became a political issue once the the professionals believe the case should be closed it became a political there was a political reason not to close it just adding a thought here it doesn't seem confidential that 1985 looking at it from the German perpetrated 1985 is the year that I hit from bites gives his 40-year speech for the end of the war more less the days when you're in Frankfort were bit basically in Hedberg and it's Bitburg it's also the moment when you have the first half legal digging action that ends up to the established Apocrypha of terror as memorial site is also in maine 85 so there are things happening yes in different social yes areas of German society as well just as an aside at the same time the last question that I have about this complex here is give us a bit of an idea of what your role was it sounds fascinating how sometimes it seems as if if they wouldn't have had to you they would have had a hard time talking with each other sometimes and so I do there's there's a an event that I described in the book which for me was the most dramatic thing in the world it turns out it's not so dramatic the chorionic context of the book but it was a the bodies found in June of 85 the the forensic teams make a determination that the bodies Mangal is however in the opinion of many of us they the forensic scientists may have been right but they were right for it for incomplete reasons and we believed that we owed it to the survivors and to future generations to make sure we got this right because we knew that when famous and infamous people die there's always tremendous speculation about the manner and even some cases the fact of their deaths if you consider John F Kennedy who was shot in broad daylight before crowds of people or Marilyn Monroe or other people you know that a great deal of mystery surrounds the deaths of individuals so we believe that there was an added special responsibility to make sure that the determination that Mengele was in fact dead was done with greatest care and so the Germans given the fact that the Israelis were suspicious about whether the body was menglers and the Germans were unwilling to make a decision if the Israelis weren't ready to make a decision and I was able to convince my boss along with my colleagues to let us continue to work on the case so in April of 1986 the three governments involved the investigation went back to Brazil to look for additional evidence there were two people from Israel someone from the Mossad who had a fake name and said he was from the Prime Minister's office and someone from the Justice Ministry and then two police officers two relatively high level priests officers one from the hessin State Police and one from the Federal Police and I represented the US team and the the tension was pretty obvious to me between the Israeli team and the German team partially because the Israelis were older men who who had a different they weren't police officers they were lawyers and and spokes and the German the Germans were quite efficient and cool and for a very skilled policeman and here I was so I I'd have coffee with the Israelis and beer with the Germans and was able to keep peace Shalom bias in and we in fact discovered what for me was the crucial Evans in in closing the case I have used up our time ha I mean I used up art and in a moment we would like to take some questions from the audience so you can slowly kind of think about what questions you would like to bring up we have another 20 30 minutes for that and as you think about the questions that you'd like to ask I will have one last one for you okay good and that it's something that historians are not supposed to do and that's to ask counterfactual yeah question what if Mengele would have been caught in the 70s what are what is your imagination of a court case and how would that court case have unfolded and what we have been extremely frustrated would have had a different impact well you know he was on he was on the list of people of interest to the prosecutors in Frankfort for the for the Frankfort outfits trial which began in 1963 I think between 63 and 65 had he been let's say he had sat in the dock at the Auschwitz trial Wow I hadn't thought of that but he certainly would have been convicted for his work on the on the the ramp probably would have gotten a relatively modest sentence I would think you know given given German legal strictures yeah so with the german german crypt Nazi war criminals were tried under the German Criminal Code which is not a terribly effective tool for people who were committed crimes within a state structure so that if if the state tells you to kill someone are and in German law personal motivation is complicated and if the state tells you if you're if you're carrying out a state program are you really guilty of murder and the courts in Germany found that and it's very complicated but that for the most part people could only be accused of and tried for accessory to murder and that really lowers the possible sanctions that could be applied to them so we take some questions just raise your hand I was I was very surprised to learn from your work that Mengele was more scientists than ideologue and I was wondering what your thoughts are what the the takeaway could be for our time where a lot of people are hiding behind science and politics and economy when nationalism is raising its head again yeah I wouldn't say that he was certainly an ideologue there's no question about it but I mean he believed in Nazi ideology and that you you get that not only from his that final line in the letter to his son but also from the testimony of colleagues other physicians and other people in the in the SS in Auschwitz who look to him as being a kind of someone who was a model of an ideologically engaged person there what lessons can we learn today that's I had let me think about that for a minute I'm not sure I'm not sure I can give you a second yeah well you have a responsibility clearly and there are ethical implications for the work you do but I was thinking about I'm not sure I can can't give you a good answer at the moment sorry I just wait for them no actually two questions one one very short what was the crucial evidence that proved that the body was Mengele and the second thing I want to raise is in the beginning of your talk you said he didn't go off the rails of scientific investigation as it was and that there or in German scientific history nonetheless though the evidence seems to show that the way he conducted those experiments were extremely cruel an extremely sadistic and that may have been what that was what was off the rails in terms of legitimate scientific inquiry I didn't it wasn't suggesting that he that what he did was was proper or ethical or anything else I should caution though that we that the the the best evidence the best testimony for what he did is impossible to get because the the people who suffered from it are no longer living and you'll have to read the book or I can it was let me give me about 20 minutes to explain but we have a pretty good idea of what a lot of people were talking about in terms of the twins in terms of what what they experienced at menglers hands and much of it was a kind of protocol to determine whether twins were identical or fraternal which was a threshold question for twin research and twin research was considered to be a quite I mean was the gold standard for genetic research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation clearly the the what made it different in Auschwitz among other things was that the people who did not give their consent and that was under German law for citizens required so the evidence for Mengele x' death in the end and this is a bit of an irony that the science that so captivated him developed to the point where he could be identified through his DNA and the the forensic use of DNA was just being developed if you remember back in the late 80s and early 90s the FBI was developing protocols for for DNA identification and the an in men glass case it was the development of this technique called a PCR polymerase chain reaction which allowed one to find very small amounts of DNA and replicated to the point where it could be a could be measured and and typed and in the end in 1992 a guy named Alec Jeffrey's at Oxford University and his colleagues were able to extract enough DNA from Mengele z-bone's which was also first replicated through PCR and then compare it to the DNA from Mengele 's wife and the mother of Mengele son and the son so and that that that closed the case I mean that the degree of certainty was 99.94% of course there is some people who still questioned it but I think for every reasonable person that was the final piece of evidence who's got the mic okay David Torsten thank you so much for this presentation and also thank you for your work both with the museum and with fast B which is certainly something that's had a great impact on my life from what little I understand of this there's there was some cross talk between us views on eugenics eugenic laws in the u.s. the Nuremberg Laws and also aspects of Nazi ideology do we know anything more about Mengele x' intellectual development as a physician was it and as an anthropologist was it influenced by a broader understanding or view of social Darwinism or was this something that was more as it was put earlier off the rails you know he his by the time that he became started studying anthropology Physical Anthropology in Germany really became racial science and it was it was that was its emphasis and his mentor Mollison was was a proponent of that in terms of his training as a physician he never you know he got his he got his medical license and then he went on and did a dissertation in medicine so he which was a prerequisite for an academic career so he had both a PhD in anthropology and a PhD and MD and there his dissertation was also on a study of the influence of genetics on cleft palate and cleft lip and which became in some ways in undergirding for the sterilization laws where people could be sterilized for having because he found that this would in fact was the cleft lip was a condition that could be corrected surgically and which in the eyes of the Nazis could hide cosmetically a racial flaw so that it was important to determine whether there was a genetic basis for that and whether you how you could identify it and so that was clearly purely in concert with with what had become a Nazi science we have time for two more questions I want to leave some time for book signing in the lobby a following yes sorry you'll have to pass this down David to what degree do we remember Mengele today because of the cinematic trope you mentioned voice from Brazil and Marathon Man the deputy and how accurate is that depiction well I think it's accurate in the sense that it that it I mean the facts are not accurate I mean the the marathon man and and boys at Brazil and all that are obviously pure fantasy but it does capture in some ways and illustrates the power of menglers kind of symbolic role my wife reminded me that and then the night before my doctoral laurels the university my mentor advised me that I should really relax and go to the movies he said when when I told me when I was going to take my orals the night before I saw Breakfast at Tiffany's and I said well that's a great idea so Trudy and I went to see the Marathon Man which I will remind you is about a history graduate student as being tortured by the Mengele figure so that maybe set me right on my career yes hi I'm just wondering if he has any living descendants they're still around you know have they accepted him as a criminal or are they willing to defend him and say what you know he in do any sure so I've already talked about his son Ralph whom I met in 1986 who was quite helpful actually in the investigation he at that time we were looking for evidence of medical issues that Mengele may have suffered from as a child and Ralph agreed to call the family physician to determine whether he had any records left and he was quite quite helpful if he were had been a little bit more thoughtful he could have really made something of this difficult position that he found himself where he had a a clear emotional let's say biological connection to his father which he recognized and understood at the same time he had a kind of dissonant intellectual view of him and abhorred what he had learned about his father's actions so but at the same time in under German law as a relative as a son he was could not be compelled to to to help in the investigation and he could not be prosecuted for having failed to reveal his father's location so he was he was a bit of a in a complicated situation and I felt sorry for him I must say because obviously you don't choose your father's and but he if he as I say if he had been a bit more thoughtful and been able to express that or a bit more articulate maybe he might have really been could have had a real voice on an important subject thank you so much David please allow me just to finish on a quick personal note I went to study history political science in Berlin in 93 and as I had been there for a few weeks I realized that the Institute where I studied political science was the Otto zu Institute which happens also to be oversee different doors I which is the building the Kaiser Villa Institute that was megaliths link between ours and that research world so that was the moment for me really to realize how it kind of connects with even people in the 90s who are confronted with these buildings and the other remark that I wanted to have to close with it with your permission is to just remind everybody that David has so many achievements one of them is not only to be a david marvel to be a friend of David Goldman but also to be one of the inspiring forces that have made fastly possible and has been in many ways a birth help in that whole process to get us started and to get us to to walk and one of the first things that I remember from you talking about fans be is so we can study this history but at some point of time we need to ask ourselves so when we know this history now what do we do with it and that's of course where we together have tried to build up a program where we can ask professionals in the different disciplines medicine law journalism etc what kind of professionals do you want to be and to confront them with the history of the doctors and to think about their professional ethics their values in the historical context and then also to ask what kind of doctors do you want to be what kind of lawyers do you want to be and I think that's one way that you also have contributed to that heritage as well thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Jewish Heritage

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Id: Fla5WzRIU7o

Length: 81min 33sec (4893 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020