MENGELE The Complete Story

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Preface
Josef Mengele has become the symbol of the Third Reich's perversion
of medicine in pursuit of racist scientific theories. His mocking
smile and soft but deadly touch earned him the title "The Angel
of Death." The barbarity of his crime is not in doubt. What is still
at issue is how he escaped justice.
As a fugitive, Mengele was variously rumored to be involved
in experiments on Indian tribes in South America, to have the ear
of dictators, and to have had numerous brushes with death. He was
portrayed as a ruthless power broker who could call upon the services
of armed guards and killer dogs, and who moved among a
score of impenetrable fortresses deep in the jungle. According to
this legend, the only clue to his whereabouts was a trail of dead
Israeli agents and independent Nazi-hunters whose corpses washed
up on the banks of the Parana River.
These apparently superhuman powers of evasion were based
on myths about Mengele's postwar life and are disproved by more
than 5,000 pages of diaries and letters that he wrote. We have had
unique and unrestricted access CO them as well as to previously
unpublished photographs, some of which appear in this book. The
Mengele papers include a diary that he kept from May 1960 to
within weeks of his death. There are also many extracts from an
autobiography that Mengele started during the 1960s, but which
omits any discussion of both Auschwitz and a ten-year period in
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