Ep. 26- Josef Mengele with David Marwell

Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, has achieved an almost mythical status as a supervillain.  Yet this stereotype obscures the history of a man who was, in many ways, a product of both pre-war racial pseudoscience and the Nazi state.

I am joined in this episode by David Marwell an historian who remarkably also worked with the US government to track down Dr. Mengele after the war.  We talk about Mengele’s origins, what made him who he was, and the hunt for him after the end of World War II.

David Marwell is an historian and the former director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.  As former Chief of Investigative Research for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, helped to hunt down Nazi war criminals.

Marwell, David. Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" (2021)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.095)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're dealing with a topic that certainly in my teaching experience is fascinating for undergraduates, but I think it also is important for us to understand a little bit about the Holocaust. And that is the life and crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele. And not just from a sort of not from a voyeuristic perspective, but from really trying to understand how he and others like him fit into

the Nazi state, but also I think you're going to see, we're going to have an interesting conversation about his escape from justice and the pursuit of him over the years. And I couldn't think of a better person to bring on the podcast than David Marwell, who actually was one of those in pursuit of him. So David, welcome to the podcast.

David Marwell (00:53.237)
Thanks very much, Whiteman.

Waitman Beorn (00:54.887)
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into this topic and in this area of study?

David Marwell (01:01.806)
Sure. I had a relatively traditional training as a historian, thanks to some wonderful teachers. When I became an ABD and was beginning working on my dissertation, there were really no jobs to be had. I had spent a year in Germany on a fellowship doing research.

And I read in Look Magazine, that's how long ago it was, about a new office that had been established at the Department of Justice in Washington to go after Nazi war criminals living in the United States. And I had a kind of temporary job with the government at that point. And there was a hiring freeze. So I was actually eligible to be hired by the Justice Department and they brought me over.

And I became the third historian in a cadre of what I have coined as forensic historians. We were, I think the first time that professional historians had been hired to work alongside prosecutors in court cases. We started out really as glorified translators, but as soon as the complexity of the cases became known, the center of gravity of the

prosecution team shifted significantly. Instead of criminal prosecutors doing the investigation, they charged us, egghead, historian, graduate students, and new PhDs to actually conduct the investigations. These were complicated cases that had taken place an ocean away, and the history behind it was not really well known, especially among young attorneys.

and even some judges. So that was how I became involved in my first professional job. And along the way, we expanded our role to do some special projects. I worked on the Klaus Barbie case in 1983 when Barbie was alleged to have worked for U .S. intelligence. And I was with a small team within the office that investigated that and published a report.

David Marwell (03:25.774)
And then along came Joseph Mengele in the end of 84, beginning of 85, which began a very long and extremely interesting part of my career, which was to investigate Mengele's movements after the war and to answer certain questions that had been raised about his conduct and the conduct of American personnel and institutions.

specifically that he had been used by the Americans in some intelligence function. But that investigation kind of transmogrified into a manhunt where our office was joined by the US Marshal Service and then by two other countries, Germany and Israel in an international effort to finally find Mengele and bring him to justice.

Waitman Beorn (04:19.591)
And with that introduction, I have nothing to add that I can't even top that. That's amazing. Can you tell us a little about the mangle of the person, like his history maybe before the war to give us a sense of sort of who this person is? Because I think for many people, he's almost a cartoonish character, but he obviously was a human being, you know, a person with a background and that kind of stuff.

David Marwell (04:44.469)
Yeah. So that's, that's an important, point you've made. And it's one that, when I began to write my book at the end of very beginning of 2016, I was really going to write a book about the investigation, which had been taken a kind of important, position in my memory and in my, in my career.

But I thought maybe I should learn a little bit more about Mengele the man. During the investigation, we were looking at where was he, what did he do from 1945 when he left Auschwitz, what was his contact with Americans. And I began a long period of deep and broad reading in new scholarship that had emerged since I'd worked on the case.

And whereas I had very little interest in Mengele, the person in 1985 when I worked on the investigation, what emerged for me from this reading was a real fascination with who Mengele was because I discovered that he had actually taken on a new role in a way, that he had become a vessel for the fantasies, for the attempts at people to

define evil for a whole series of things that had nothing to do with him as a person, but he emerged as a kind of twin symbol. One as a symbol of the Holocaust as the most notorious author of its crimes. And also as a symbol of the escape from justice by Nazi criminals at the end of the war. And so I...

I switched gears and I began to try to deconstruct Mengele, try to forget everything that I had learned about him from popular culture, from plays and books. And I discovered an enormous range of fiction, films, plays, songs that evoked Mengele as a maligned metaphor.

David Marwell (07:05.869)
as someone who represented the most evil that one could imagine. I even began a Google search where every day I'd receive a dozen or so.

references to Mengele, mostly historically inaccurate, but also ones where he was used as this kind of benchmark for evil. And it occurred to me that maybe I should kind of try to strip away this myth from him and try to find out what I could irreducibly say was true about him. And so I worked on

all of the available sources that I had. I also had a really unusual source, which was Mengele's own effort at my own enterprise. That is to tell the story of his life, which he did in South America beginning in the early 60s and extending for a decade or so, where he wrote not a memoir or a autobiography per se,

but a kind of novel, auto fiction, where he freed himself of the confines of the literal truth, but used his life as a way of explaining to his family, this was not meant for publication, it was meant only for his family, to try to explain where he fit in to the world, what he thought about. He sometimes would displace his own motives onto other people or kind of,

distill a number of different things into one character. So it was, as an investigative tool, when we discovered it back in 85, a kind of treacherous document because we couldn't be sure whether he was telling the truth or not. But as a way of getting insight his mind, it was very interesting. So that was a great source. I also had the

David Marwell (09:17.87)
CIA file, which had been declassified in, I think, 2000.

Most of the way through my first draft, the Israelis released a once top secret report based on their entire Mengele file, which turned out to be absolutely essential to understanding the search for Mengele at the end of the war. All in Hebrew, which I had to then translate with the then not as good as now translation apps.

So all of that and all of the new scholarship gave me a significant basis for trying to understand who Mengele was. What did I find? Not so much really about his early life. There's very few sources except some anecdotal ones in his own autobiography and from people who knew him as a kid. But if one were to search for the man that would become the angel of death,

They find very little evidence in Mengele's early life. Born into a prosperous factory -owning family, which dominated the economy of a small town in Bavaria called Gunsburg. A thickly and probably average to below average student in the gymnasium in Gunsburg.

The oldest of three children, a.

David Marwell (10:56.622)
prosperous and loving family, but an uneventful childhood. No suggestion of any of the kinds of things that people fantasized about Mengele. You know, he didn't go out in the backyard and string up the pet cat or didn't exhibit any kind of...

significant anti -Semitism or anti -social behavior. It was really when he left gymnasium, I mentioned before that he was sickly, his childhood was punctuated with a series of illnesses which compromised his kind of robust constitution and made it difficult for him.

least in his mother's view, to take over the family firm. And as the eldest, that would have been his right. His younger brother, who was in a business program, was then slated to take over the firm. Mengele and the middle brother had, could choose their own professions. Mengele left the gymnasium in the spring of 1930 and went to Munich to study. Initially kind of directionless, thought that

beginning that he might want to be a dentist. He was interested in science, but through a series of events, which I described in the book, he is kind of bitten by the bug of interest in medicine and the allied fields of anthropology and genetics. And he is treated at Munich and then

the other universities that he visited to a.

David Marwell (12:49.774)
group of inspired and inspiring professors who essentially changed his intellectual life, captivated his mind, his passion, his interest. And it just so happens that at the time that he began to study anthropology and medicine, it is exactly that time that those sciences emerged as very important

partners to the National Socialists who had gained intellectual strength and had taken power just at the time when Mengele began his serious work in anthropology.

David Marwell (13:37.55)
these sciences, these new sciences became the ideological.

foundation for national socialist thought. And Mengele benefited from that. Not only, you know, the way when a regime is interested in the particular science, they promote it. There's better funding, the curriculum is juiced up, the sense of status is raised. And Mengele benefited from this.

Perhaps I should pause here and say whether you think that's enough of the early...

Waitman Beorn (14:20.775)
No, I mean, it's all fascinating. I mean, because again, it's one of these places where you sort of see the science beginning to be used to justify the racial ideology, right? And so it becomes, as you sort of were suggesting, a growth industry that he's able to then insert himself into. Or maybe he's inserted into it. What do you think in that sense?

David Marwell (14:34.861)
Yeah.

David Marwell (14:39.758)
Yeah.

David Marwell (14:45.582)
I think he, in the example of his teachers, and I think he is absolutely committed intellectually and emotionally to the science itself. The politics I think came along a little bit later for him, but it's not, it's no accident that his abiding passion was also that of

the leader of the state and make a benefit from that. There's no question. The role of racial hygiene, racial science, the role of the physician changed significantly under the Nazis. And a lot of people have difficulty understanding how so many people involved in the medical sciences could have been

could have cooperated and eventually had extremely important roles in the Holocaust. How could they do this after taking a Hippocratic oath and they weren't all status and monsters? And there's a very subtle shift in how the Nazis define the role of the physician. And it had to do with what was the object of care?

physicians nowadays and before were taught that your patient is your sole object of care. There are lots of issues that get in the way like rationing and triaging and making decisions, but your patient is your object of care. For the Nazis, there was a larger patient and that was the racial body, the folks.

this kind of mystical view. And as a physician, you're responsible, as a Nazi physician, you're responsible not for curing an individual patient, although you obviously did that, but it was to make sure that you safeguarded and took care of threats to the racial community, to a much larger picture. In this way,

David Marwell (17:14.83)
And a kind of ideological sleight of hand, people could remain true to their Hippocratic oath. They could be treating their patient. It's just a shift in who the ultimate patient really was. And this was essential for Hitler and for the Nazi party and an entire bureaucracy that extended well beyond a confrontation between a physician and his patient, but extended to...

the courts and even the...

the issues of marriage and births and of definition of citizenship all emerged from these ideas. And Mengele was really at the cutting edge of this new science with its new important political implications.

Waitman Beorn (18:14.183)
And so then how does his political, I guess, I mean, I guess his political slash professional career develop with the Nazis? Like does he join the party and then I know he ends up in the Waffen SS for a period of time.

David Marwell (18:27.534)
Yeah. So he joins the party not early. I can't remember the date now. I can look it up, but it's, I think maybe 38. You know, the party after the, after the Nazis took power, they, they, they stopped allowing people to join the party to differentiate between those who were, John had come lately.

and those who were truly committed, but they allowed under certain circumstances when people came of age or they had these kind of relaxations of this bar to party membership. Mengele had been a member of the Stahlhelm in 1934, which allowed him to be taken into the SS, which he joined in 1938, I think. But this, he was not driven by these politics. They obviously offered

advantages for him. And he certainly agreed with the party program, but I couldn't find a kind of passionate thread that led him to try to excel within the party. And when the war started, he initially had a deferment. He had just gotten married. And he eventually actually joined the

Wehrmacht, he was in one of the mountain units, but he just couldn't stand it. And there was a top sergeant there that was pretty mean to him. And he stopped, he left the Wehrmacht and he joined the Vafaness. His first duties were in Posen, where he worked with the

and Wanderer Zentralstelle, this immigration authority of the Nazi party, where he reviewed some of the decisions made for granting of citizenship to people coming from the Baltic states as a result of the secret annex of the non -aggression pact. But by the end of 1939, I'm sorry, by the...

David Marwell (20:50.446)
by the, let's say, November, December, 1940, he was a commissioned officer, medical officer in the so -called Viking division, the Viking division, or the fifth division, the Fafen SS, on the staff of the engineer's battalion. And he trained with that unit in his...

Waitman Beorn (21:13.287)
you

David Marwell (21:19.31)
kind of a home area around Ulm and that area where they trained on the engineers, the spearhead. They clear obstructions and they build obstructions and they build bridges and tear down bridges. And Mengele was a unit physician. He treated

all the men in his unit. And then was part of Operation Barbarossa. Didn't go over on day one, maybe three or four or five days later in the very southern part of the Ukrainian front.

He and his unit advanced and in the first several weeks of combat, although we don't know whether he was involved or not, but certainly in the area where he was moving, there were a number of significant mass shootings of Jews, some quite horrendous.

And it's clear that he and his unit were aware of all these things. And it raises the issue of his exposure to mass violence in a kind of unrelenting way. He remained with the unit much longer than most biographers have understood. Most say that he, after Barbarossa, that the next summer he left.

and went to Berlin to a reserve unit. He actually remained until January of 1943, where he was helping to cover the retreat from Stalingrad and was then evacuated from the area. Perhaps because of a wound, it's not entirely clear. As a soldier, he was decorated the Iron Cross

David Marwell (23:36.43)
second and first class in the wound, wound medal, received outstanding performance appraisals from his superiors. I discovered in an antiquariat in Germany, a collection of the newsletters of the veterans group from the

engineer battalion and a lot of material about Mengele from the, from their war diary and stuff that wasn't available in the archives, which talked about him really being heroic, courageous. And we have some letters that he wrote to his wife. The challenge of being a unit physician treating lots of people of the same age and basic condition.

was great for him. I mean, he had been a race doctor before, and now he had to treat the normal, everyday aches and pains of soldiers. So he actually asked his wife to send him a kind of medical dictionary or help him cope with those challenges. Anyway, I may be going into too much detail here, but I think his military career, his exposure over

18 months of, with the exception of the winter lulls, relatively active combat against the Soviets, I think must've played some role in the way he looked at the world or the way, or of his emotional makeup. By January of 43, he's back in Berlin. He's able to reconnect with his

mentor, Dr. Atmar von Fischer, and also develop a significant relationship with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin. He got to know the staff there. He got to know what they were working on. He got to understand the research protocols and interests. And by the end of May, he's transferred

David Marwell (26:01.998)
to Auschwitz. He arrives there at the very end of May 1943.

Waitman Beorn (26:06.375)
And so what is his, is he given sort of a brief or does he, because we know that, and we can talk about this, I'm sure, you know, that one of the duties of the SS doctors at Auschwitz is to conduct selections based on who they think are capable of work or not. And that sort of is probably the day to day job along with maybe treating SS men that need it. But is he also told, you know, you should also be working on this other

this other sort of project, which is sort of the racial science experimentation element, or is that something that he sort of sees as an opportunity in Auschwitz and then makes up his own?

David Marwell (26:45.294)
Well, I think there was a symbiotic relationship between him and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was never clearly understood until there was a whole study group that examined this. He was very close to van der Schoor, who was the leading geneticist in Germany, who was his mentor, his Dr. Fatter, and likely would be directing his Habilitation, which he was, in my view, attempting to complete.

while at Auschwitz. When he arrived at Auschwitz...

Waitman Beorn (27:17.767)
And just really quickly for our listeners, in the German postgraduate academic system, you sort of get your PhD. But then in order to sort of be a fully fledged doctor slash professor, whatever, you have to do a habilitation, which is essentially a second PhD. So that's sort of like what we're talking about here. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead.

David Marwell (27:34.67)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. If he had, he wanted to be, for example, to be the head of an institute, he'd have to have been habilleteered. He wanted to be a professor. He wanted to teach. By the way, I glossed over early on that Mengele received a PhD in anthropology from one of the leading rather racist anthropologists named Taylor or Mollison. And then not only his medical degree, but a PhD in medicine.

which allowed him to pursue an academic career. He was a productive scholar. He wrote papers, wrote reviews, filled in for the boss on lectures and things like that. He was a kind of a prize student for Fisher and Fisher was one of the leading scientists in the racial hygiene world.

So Mengele gets to Auschwitz. Now this is a bit complicated, so I have to deconstruct it a little bit. Mengele gets to Auschwitz. He sees in front of him an incredible opportunity to pursue his science. Let's look at number one, twin research. Twin research was the gold standard for genetic research in Germany. It wasn't necessarily grotesque or

somehow weird that people are interested in twins. All over the world, genetic researchers use twins for very good reasons. Twin research in Germany resulted in 200 dissertations that relied on twin research during the Nazi period. Some of it was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. But with the beginning of the war, twin research ground essentially to a halt. Why? Because in order to

David Marwell (29:34.958)
do twin research, you need a twin pair, two people, two twins. Mostly you're dealing with children because adult twins diverge in their lives. It's hard to get them together. They've developed other interests. As the war progressed, twins were moved out of the cities, away from the areas of research. Medical personnel in Germany were being drafted.

It was very difficult. There's correspondence that actually put to a halt the twin research that had been ongoing at the Institute in Berlin. One of the goals of twin research, the first goal was to gather as many twins as you could by making deals with midwives and with hospitals to alert you to twin births. You register them and then you have a relationship with the family to try to convince them to cooperate in what could be sometimes, you know,

uncomfortable and perhaps frightening for a child research. Mengele arrives at Auschwitz and every day these rail cars deliver thousands of individuals. Twins appear in the normal course of things between one and 3 % of live births. So you just do the numbers of the number of people. I think I calculated once that Mengele

While Mengele was at Auschwitz, something like 750 ,000 people were deposited on the ramp at Auschwitz. And just do the numbers and you'll see that there were hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of twins. A rare supply of potential subjects for inquiry. But not only twins,

Waitman Beorn (31:22.215)
And subjects who are not subject to any ethical limitations either.

David Marwell (31:25.998)
Right. So that's, that's the other thing that was a kind of fantasy come true. You're a physician who in Germany before the war, there were lots of very important safeguards on the use of individuals for experiments, which led a lot of physicians to experiment upon themselves. Comes to twins, you had to make sure the parents

were convinced you had to sometimes help them along by giving the kids meals and even had a summer camp for twins, which allowed them to have fun at the same time being observed. So not only do you have this number of twins arriving at a time when they weren't available for research anywhere else, you also had coming out of these rail cars a selection of

Europe's great medical personnel, physicians, pediatricians, all manner of specialty. You had nurses, you had medical drafts people, you had medical technicians. You just had, you know, given the, given the, the role that Jews played in the medical professions. And at the time,

you know, beginning in 1944 with the Hungarian, you had the entire Hungarian countryside emptied of all of its physicians and anthropologists and other kinds of scientists. So Mengele, when he was not selecting incoming prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers immediately or to be

registered in the camp so they could be exploited for their labor first. He carried on another kind of selection on the ramp, which was to call out, first of all, to look for twins and people with growth anomalies, which was another one of his interests. And also to call out for people who could assist assist him. They didn't have much of a choice, but he say, are there any pharmacists here? Are there any

David Marwell (33:54.414)
physicians, are there any nurses, are there any drafts people, are there any photographers, and people would step forward. And he, in a way, creates at Auschwitz a kind of mini Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. You know, the people who registered are registered in the camps. There's a registry of their professions and their

particular talents and capabilities. And Mengele would go to that office all the time and find out if there's someone there who can do something or not. So Mengele's main duties, in addition to selection, which I would suggest was his, in terms of scale and impact on individuals, his major crime. He was also responsible for

inmate health, not that the Nazis cared much about whether the inmates were healthy, but it presented a public health threat to the SS garrison that lived in and among the camp. So issues of epidemics and other things were a major issue and Mengele was responsible for surveillance.

and taking care of them, which he did with great brutality. He was also responsible for certifying the diet given to the inmates and supervising, along with his colleague physician, executions, signing death notices and things like that. On his own, he carried out his so -called scientific work.

Now, experimentation at Auschwitz was, I don't want to say ubiquitous, but many, many people were involved in it. And I would classify the kinds of experiments into two types. One was what one might call practical experiments. The efficacy of certain drugs and how to dose them. So you would give prisoners drugs and if they overdosed, you would note

David Marwell (36:19.534)
note that there were experiments with electrical electric shock therapy, ECT, electric convulsive therapy. At a very early time, there were because they wanted to get patient inmates to get back to work. There were there's a massive series of experiments on how to effectively

sterilize men and women. One of the, one part of genocide is to prevent people from giving birth. And some people were slated not for death, but for sterilization in order to, to end their so -called threat to the Germans. So that kind of work and in other concentration camps, you know, there were lots of military related experiments like the so -called freezing experiments, you know, how do you rewarm pilots who are

who have to go into the North Atlantic when they crash or the high altitude low pressure experiments. In any case, Mengele was part of a group of people who were involved in advancing their own personal science for ambition, for habilitation, for...

for the good of science, kind of more pure. One of the frustrating things about knowing exactly what Mengele did at Auschwitz in terms of his science is that we really don't. There are no real records. There are a few scattered records. We're left with the testimony of those who were subject to his experiments. These, of course, are the people who live to tell the story, so we don't really have the people.

didn't.

Waitman Beorn (38:09.831)
And they may well not have the expertise to even sort of know exactly what was being, except that, you know, this was painful or he made me do this or that, but not like what the goal of it was.

David Marwell (38:14.19)
Yeah.

David Marwell (38:17.582)
Yeah, so I tried to, and this was a delicate part of my effort was to try to discount all the survivor testimony unless people talked about.

what happened to them. They did this. They took my blood. They did this. And I looked at a lot of that stuff. But there's no way a traumatized child could say, well, he was trying to do this. The most accepted explanation for Mengele's interest in twins was that he was trying to discover the secret of twin birds so that he could accelerate a Aryan future.

But the more I thought about that, the more I thought if he was really interested in twin birth, he'd be interested in the parents of twins, at least as much as the twins themselves. And he showed no interest whatsoever in that. The other group of witnesses were those who these so -called inmates, inmate physicians who worked with him. And we have a lot of testimony from, there was a very famous Polish

anthropologist. And her early interrogations by the Germans and by the polls suggested that Mengele's work was rather straightforward and conventional. But in the book, I try to list the six areas of research that Mengele was involved in. And I was aided in this by

Some brilliant historians of science, Benoit Massin, a few other ones who've written really wonderful books. He was interested in gypsies as an anthropologist. To do good gypsy research meant you had to travel before the war. You had to go to where the gypsies were and they moved around. And I use the word gypsy, which is a pejorative term these days, but you understand that I don't mean it in that way.

David Marwell (40:29.134)
In 1942, I believe, the gypsies had been amassed in a large camp in Berlin, and then they were sent to Auschwitz so that one could do two months worth of gypsy research by walking through the gypsy camp and observing. Mengele found a wonderful illustrator named

Dina Gottlieb, whom he liked very much because he thought that she could render color beautifully and color photography was at its kind of infancy at that time. And he preferred the way she rendered color. And she did lots and lots of drawings of gypsies, which have become the object of some legal dispute and very emotional issues.

Waitman Beorn (41:22.119)
Thank you.

David Marwell (41:25.486)
But she believed he was doing this to illustrate a study he was doing for the habitación. He was interested in eyes. This is the other famous thing about Mengele that everyone will tell you that Mengele was trying to find out how do you change.

brown eyes into blue eyes because he wanted people to be more, more, Aryan. It turns out that one of his colleagues at the Kaiser Willem Institute, a woman named Karen Magnuson, an ophthalmologist was very interested in the issue of eye color because it's a complicated one and genetically, very difficult. And she had been following a, a group of,

of gypsies who had this condition of heterochromia where one eye is a different color. That became a wonderful subject for her to study and she begun to interview them. When Mengele gets to Auschwitz, he can connect with this clan of gypsies. And when they die, their eyes are sent to Karamagnus in Berlin.

Waitman Beorn (42:16.743)
Yeah.

David Marwell (42:40.718)
where she's able to do, you know, histological examination. They talk about Mengele injecting dye into kids' eyes. He was actually dropping some kind of hormone, probably adrenaline, because that was one of the feces that Karen Magnuson had was that the impact of adrenaline will, has some impact on the...

changing eye color. Eye color is very complicated. It has to do with lots of structures and pigment production and things like that. So that kind of demythifies this notion of him, you know, injecting dye. The most interesting thing that I had discovered in my work was that there was a disease called Noma, which is a kind of oral cancer that kind of eats away at the soft tissue around the mouth.

It's a disease that had basically disappeared in the developed world. But with the sanitation and nutritional conditions that were rampant at Auschwitz, there was a resurgence of this disease in the gypsy camp. And Mengele decided he wanted to cure this or find a solution, a treatment for it. He found among

the inmate physicians at Auschwitz, someone at Buna at the Auschwitz III, who had been a world famous pediatrician in Czechoslovakia. And he brought him to the gypsy camp and he gave him carte blanche, whatever equipment you need. They improved in some ways the nutrition. And Berk told

Epstein was able to find a meaningful and successful treatment for the disease. I first learned about this when I was a graduate student working actually at Arlesen. And I came across a document, one of these slips from the Auschwitz medical laboratory, which said, I, which accompanied the head of a 12 year old and asked for some slides to be taken. And it seemed to me, this is bizarre. How could, what a

David Marwell (45:04.174)
monster would send the head of a 12 year old. In a sense, this was the research into Noma to be able to do sections and examine the actual lesions from the disease. We know about Bertold Epstein and what he did because there was another inmate physician at Auschwitz named Lucy Adelsberger from Berlin.

who in 1946, while still a displaced person in the Netherlands, she writes an article for The Lancet, the British medical journal, about Epstein's work on Noma at Auschwitz. There are lots of ironies in all of this. The most grotesque one for me is that of all the patients that Epstein cured of Noma, they were all murdered at the camp.

So a couple of other things that he worked with were the interesting growth anomalies and in something called specific proteins, which was funded by the Forshrings Council, the research council. I don't know. That may be too much detail.

Waitman Beorn (46:17.383)
No, I mean, it's interesting because you're mentioning sort of the two general areas of research or types of experiments. And, you know, I'm obviously not an expert, but it always seemed to me that Nazi experimentation did sort of break into, you know, deeply unethical experiments that had an actual sort of usable purpose, you know, like the like the pressure experiments, which actually

in some ways ended up in US Navy dive tables and stuff like that. And then the other side of it is just stuff that was just either pseudoscience or things like vivisection or just or collecting. Right. So it's like someone with a growth of Normandy or deformity and you just, OK, kill them and let's let's use the skeleton for collecting purpose. Is that is that sort of accurate and.

David Marwell (47:04.206)
Yeah. Which he did. Yeah. And which is what he did. I mean, he would notice a hunchback in his child or something. And he would kind of tag them for their remains to be sent to Gratz, where the SS had a kind of museum, medical museum.

If you allow me one more moment about the medical stuff, and this I think is very revealing. And when I finally pieced it together, it was a kind of very satisfying moment for me. It brought things together. In doing twin research, the most important threshold question is, are you dealing with identical or fraternal twins? Now, if they're not the same sex, then obviously they're fraternal twins.

if there's same sex, it was very difficult to determine whether someone was identical or not. And it was very important to do that because the whole basis of twin research is that if identical twins show a concordance in certain pathologies, they both have the same disease, then you can suggest that genetics was at the basis of it. If fraternal twins who have the same kind of genetic makeup as

brothers and sisters, but have the same interuterine environment and they grow up in the same family and have the same nutrition and all of that. If they show a concordance of some kind of pathology, then one could posit that environment was at play and not necessarily genetic. That's a vast oversimplification. But the first thing you do when you start a twin experiment is, are they fraternal or are they...

They're one egg or two egg twins. In the 1920s, the Germans developed a multi -symptomatic comparison test. I think there were 92 different fields and they would systematically compare the two halves of a twin pair and then make a decision.

David Marwell (49:27.502)
Most of the testimony that comes from surviving twins, in my view, is that exact protocol that was practiced on them. It was frightening. They took a lot of blood because they compared blood and blood factors and other things. They took dental impressions, so they filled their mouth with plaster of powers and very frightening. They did lots and lots of kinds of measurements. They did all without

without permission in frightening sterile environments, without their parents, all of that.

David Marwell (50:10.414)
It's because these people, now many of them probably were experimented on later, but if you read, as I have, these testimonies, they track exactly the protocol that was being used at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for twin research. It doesn't mean that something much more ghastly happened to them after they were defined as a, but.

the science required that they'd be identified as a one egg or two egg. Anyway, that to me was a very interesting conclusion.

Waitman Beorn (50:48.007)
Well, and then you have the, I'm imagining you also have, because twins are for everything else in some ways, like they're the perfect control group, right? Because you literally have two people that are genetically identical. And so, you know, I think I've read testimony that, you know, when one, like he would do something to one twin and leave the other twin alone, knowing that that twin is the control. But then when,

one died, then he had the other one killed as well because then he had to sort of stop the experiment for both people at that same time.

David Marwell (51:21.218)
That was the one power that he had that science couldn't reproduce, which was a kind of simultaneous death. The literature is connected with, filled with examples of simultaneous death, either.

both twins in an accident or they both commit suicide at the same time or stuff like that. But to be able to actually be able to control that most essential, in some cases, event was certainly open to him.

Waitman Beorn (51:55.847)
I mean, what was, what was it, what was his feeling about, I mean, this is, this is hard. This is a difficult question, but you know, it seems like that he took a particular sort of relish in his work at Auschwitz that some of the other SS doctors, again, not, not that they are not to be apologetic for them, but that they didn't necessarily always find their job sort of.

fulfilling and they found it unpleasant sometimes to have to do some of these things. But it sounds like he was very much not of that mind and he was very excited about everything.

David Marwell (52:30.254)
He was certainly very excited by the scientific opportunities to him. He confessed to someone it would have been a crime against science not to take advantage of these unique opportunities, which might never, ever come again. So, you know, there's this rather quotidian motive of ambition and advancement.

You know, and if you believe there's lots and lots of testimony of the twin children who have this remarkably ambivalent feelings about Mengele, expressed feelings, because, you know, he certainly, for many of them, did not appear as an imposing figure or threatening figure. He was a kind of calming figure. At least that's what some of the testimony is. So anyway, it's hard. That I can't.

That's the kind of stuff I just don't know because we don't, I don't really have the sources for that stuff.

Waitman Beorn (53:35.239)
Well, then maybe we should move anyway, I guess, into sort of his post -war, right? Because I think that is equally, if not in some ways for me, certainly more interesting. So, you know, he ends up leaving Auschwitz. What happens to him in sort of the immediate post -war and how does he sort of come to terms with that? How does he make the decision to escape? How does he escape?

David Marwell (53:38.606)
Yeah.

David Marwell (53:47.47)
Yeah.

David Marwell (54:04.398)
Yeah. So he leaves Auschwitz, you know, the Soviets are at the doorstep. They actually, I think, officially arrived on the 27th of June. The SS basically takes off between the 17th and 19th, I think. Mengele stays pretty long. And there are witnesses who see him packing up his office crates with notes.

Waitman Beorn (54:05.127)
these kinds of things.

David Marwell (54:32.91)
some say samples, which are all put into a vehicle. One interesting thing I found, and I'm not sure it's true, but it rings true, is that they were having trouble in destroying the crematoria gas chamber complex. And Mengele had some experience of this because of his work with the engineer battalion and actually assisted with one of them. I think it was number three, I think.

In any case, he and his, some of his colleagues get in their automobile and they drive to Berlin. They're going to see Lowling, who is the chief physician of the concentration camps and Gravitz, SS physician. So they go to Berlin. I think he may stop and see, you know, for sure. But then they go up to Aranienburg where the headquarters of concentration camps is located.

And they hang around for a while and Mengele has given a new assignment. He's given the, it becomes the Standort arts. That's the garrison position for the area around Gross Rosen, the Breslau. It's a promotion. By the time he gets to Gross Rosen, it's almost, it's almost ready to be liberated. I don't think he spends much time there at all. He goes to a sub camp.

By May, he's on foot and he's walking toward Germany. And as luck would have it, he's probably carrying a cold down Belize or backpack filled with whatever notes he thought were essential. This is my view. He comes across Wehrmacht Field Hospital and one of the heads of internal medicine for the field hospital is a former

medical school classmate of his. And he says, can I join up with you guys? And the guy asked the commander and they say, okay, so he sheds his SS uniform, puts on a Fafen SS uniform. And this unit drives into what became known as a no man's land. It's the area between the furthest advance of the Soviets in the East and Americans in the West. And they have

David Marwell (57:01.902)
a period of about six weeks from the end of hostilities to the middle of June, where they're encamped in the forest there. Mengele has a chance to develop a relationship with his former friend and also the rest of the unit. So he's pretty much a part of the field hospital. Also gets to know the nurses who were there. And this unit was raised from the area around Jena.

in what became East Germany. At some point they decided it would be much wiser to be taken prisoner by the Americans and not by the Soviets. So they get in their jeeps and their ambulances and their trucks and they drive toward Hof in Bavaria. And the nurses, they just go home. They're not molested. And the men are taken into...

first one POW camp, which I was able to identify, and then a few weeks later they moved to another one.

Mengele, there's some dispute whether he gives his real name or a false name, but I believe he was actually released under his own name. And his medical school friend, for some reason, gets two discharge certificates issued to him. We don't know the circumstances, but we know that he's issued two. He gives one of them to Mengele, who then uses that discharge certificate as the basis for it.

for part of his post -war identity. The people who are being released, they get in a truck. He's driven as far south as Ingolstadt. He gets off the truck. He goes to visit some friends.

David Marwell (58:57.902)
in a place I can't remember now, does not go home. And then makes what is considered a rather

risky trip into the Soviet zone. I believe to go back to pick up the notes that he left with one of the nurses who had gone there, because why else would one take that risk? But in any case, I can't prove that. Eventually, he ends up on a farm outside of Regensburg in Bavaria, gets a job as a farm hand.

very difficult manual labor, makes contact with his family. His wife visits him, his brother visits him. He doesn't believe it's safe for him to go home. Eventually the Fraga Bergen are distributed and he fills one out, which I couldn't find under an assumed name. The doctor's trial begins at Auschwitz at Nuremberg where his name is mentioned. His wife says,

Honey, you can't live here in Europe anymore. There's no life for you here. You have to leave. She refuses to go. With the help of his family, he's able to get to Austria, then through the Brenner Pass to Italy, eventually down to Genoa. We found no evidence that

that he was part of any rat line organized activity, but the family had money and he's able to secure the necessary papers too.

David Marwell (01:00:47.374)
First of all, Red Cross identification papers, papers to allow himself to get out of Italy and papers that allow himself to get into Argentina. And he leaves in May of 1949.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:59.783)
And it's just, it rubbed really quickly. I mean, I think this is an interesting point that his family presumably knew what he had been up to at some level that he'd worked in Auschwitz or whatever, worked in camps, which is one of the reasons why. Yeah. So one of the reasons why they knew he would be, you know, at risk and they still are, you know, deeply involved in helping him, which was sort of makes them complicit in the whole, in the whole affair, you know.

David Marwell (01:01:13.646)
Yeah, his wife was visiting him there, yeah.

David Marwell (01:01:28.75)
Sure. The Americans looked for him. We found lots of evidence of that. There was some ruse that he had died. His wife was wearing black. She went to the priest to have a mass in his memory.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:31.207)
I think that's really interesting.

David Marwell (01:01:48.75)
He leaves, he ends up on the ship, goes to Argentina and is...

comes to a country which is rather a benign place to arrive if you're a German emigre in 1949. There's a large German cultural infrastructure there. There are bookstores. Mengele has been mucking hay for the last four years and now he's got German theater and...

Waitman Beorn (01:02:22.695)
Really quickly, just to interrupt, how soon did people start looking for him? I mean, like, how soon did he become a parent that he was sort of a big fish that they were trying to catch?

David Marwell (01:02:34.254)
He was mentioned early on. He's actually in the first UN war crimes wanted list, which hadn't been distributed to the places where he had been in prison. It actually was a very chaotic kind of distribution of wanted lists. Very little information. They didn't know.

They weren't sure the spelling of his name. They didn't know where he was from. When I first started the investigation, I wondered how uncommon the name Joseph Mengele might be. So I went to the VOST, which is this repository of all records about German armed forces. And I found that there were 17 people by the name of Joseph Mengele serving in the German armed forces, several in the SS, two from Gunzburg.

The challenge for the investigators was not inconsiderable. You just, you have somebody's name. They obviously went to his hometown. I've got all that stuff interviewed, the people who went there. They lied about him having come back. They thought he had died. So I don't think you can fault the Americans necessarily for not having found him. There are lots of intriguing questions. Why wasn't he more aggressively sought?

to be in the doc at the doctor's trial because he would have been really a perfect kind of symbolic defendant. The polls did not aggressively seek him. There were lots of interesting stuff and lots of rumors. But in any case, that's what happened. He got out of there. He's in Argentina. He's there for

Really, no one was looking for him. And the Argentine state was pretty happy to have him there. He became part of this. I think they did. It's a little hard to penetrate that, but I know that he met Eichmann a couple of times. They were of a different social class and they didn't really like each other.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:39.367)
And did they know who he was? And yeah.

David Marwell (01:04:54.158)
He befriended this guy, Hans Rudel, who was kind of the head of the grade community and had right politic connections. There was also this Dutch journalist named Sassen. Mengele tried to build a life for himself there. He established a small business, eventually established an actual pharmaceutical company.

1954, his wife writes and says, I want a divorce. So he hires a lawyer who represents him in Dusseldorf for the divorce proceedings, all on record. No one's looking for him. He's still using his fake name, but by 1956, in 56, he visits Europe under his assumed name. And there he meets up with his younger brother's widow. His younger brother died of a heart attack in 49.

And they kind of make friends and Mengele goes back to Europe and then decides he's just gonna, he's gonna go to the German embassy and say, my name is Joe Mengele. I came under another name, but here I am. There was no arrest warrant out for him. He received a German passport. Mengele's father is concerned, and this is, I constructed this and I believe it to be true.

he's concerned that, Mengele's brother's widow, this Marta, who kind of likes Joe, that she's, he wants to keep her in the family. She's a bit frisky and she's afraid and she has her, her dead husband's, interest in the company. So he thinks, old man Carl Mengele thinks a neat solution would be for Joe and Marta to get together. So he sends Martha and.

her son, Mengele, his nephew, to Argentina. And they lived together. And in the summer of 1958, they get married in Uruguay. I always said, why Uruguay? Why would you get married in Uruguay? Well, they needed the marriage to be unassailable. And they had both, one was a widow, but Mengele had been divorced. Uruguay was much more liberal. And they decide to go there, they get married.

David Marwell (01:07:22.798)
And now begins a very interesting story, which involves kind of the archetypal victim of the Holocaust, Anne Frank. 1958, the summer of 1958, there's a guy named Ernst Schnabel who writes kind of the second, the follow on to Anne Frank's diary, what happened to her after she leaves the secret annex. The book is very popular. Otto Frank has helped to get it published in Germany.

And it's serialized in a local paper in Ulm. And one day a young girl reads this serialization and it says, everybody says, they say in this book that no one knows where Mengele is, but I have a friend who's a maid at the Mengele, at old man Mengele's house. And he says his son's in Argentina.

David Marwell (01:08:16.75)
And Schnabel gets the letter from the newspaper and he looks at it and he doesn't know what to do with it. He's in the middle of a big case, the so -called Ulm -Einsatz -Grüten case. And he's writing his final arguments for that case. And so he dashes off a letter to the prosecutor in Memmingen, I think, which is near Ulm. And he says, I don't know whether this rises to the level of a

Waitman Beorn (01:08:28.199)
And that's ribbon.

David Marwell (01:08:45.166)
criminal complaint, but you know whether it does or not. So the prosecutor starts a file in Mengele and sends police officers to Gunsburg, the company town, and starts asking questions about Joe Mengele. Where is he? Did he come back? Then they find the divorce proceedings. Company town, the people who are asked questions about it, and they go to the Mengele family. The Mengele family contacts Joe in the summer of 58 in

Argentina, who's just gotten back from his wedding, and he understands he's got to go. There is an extradition treaty between Argentina and Germany, and there's judicial interest and police interest in him. And at the same time, there's another effort led by Hermann Langemann. So Joe starts to pull up stakes. He sells his interests in the company. He had always traveled to

Paraguay, but he goes back to Paraguay and establishes a residence there. And actually, he goes first by himself and then then Marta follows. He also then

Waitman Beorn (01:09:45.767)
with his family.

David Marwell (01:09:55.854)
He knows that Paraguayan citizens cannot be extradited. But you need to live in Paraguay for five years to get be naturalized as a citizen. So through fraud, he's able to get witnesses to say that he's been there for five years. And by, I think, November of 59, he's naturalized. I think that's the date. I may be wrong. He's naturalized. So when the Israelis say they they were going to capture Mengele, he was long gone before.

they ever went. And he feels pretty safe. He's Jose Mengele living in Paraguay, and his brother comes to visit him, his younger brother. Martha decides she can't live there. It's just not, it's not Buenos Aires. And she goes back to Switzerland with her son. When the Israelis capture Mengele, I mean Eichmann,

Mengele knows he ain't safe anywhere. Forget extradition. The Israelis can get him anywhere. So at that point, he goes to Brazil, probably in the fall of 1960.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:59.847)
Right.

David Marwell (01:11:10.894)
There is an extradition request. It's very, very slow. There's a new perfected arrest warrant, one in February and one a bit later. So Mengele now is a recognized fugitive from justice with an ongoing open file against him. He goes to Brazil with the help of a group of people, some sponsored by the family and some by this guy, Rudel.

And he's then from 1960 until 1979, he lives there as a farm manager, not very exciting or interesting or glamorous surroundings. Nothing like any of us ever imagined for him. Two families, one a Hungarian family, the other an Austrian family, provide him with kind of mail services and they shop for him.

and provide him with companionship. He carries on a correspondence with his family at home. And in 1979, he goes to the beach, has a stroke while he's swimming and dies. But we don't know that. We don't begin our investigation until six years later when he's long dead. And the Israelis don't know it either.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:41.159)
And so did before we get to the sort of the I guess the denouement, right? You know, he he's writing back and forth to his family. So it's just it's interesting. I guess that the German authorities don't think about intercepting letters or trying to I mean, like.

David Marwell (01:13:00.494)
They do, they do. But the logistics, if you can imagine it, over a great distance of time, every single day, there are also, as you know, significant protections for personal privacy in Germany after the war as a kind of compensatory exaggeration to the Nazi assault on privacy. And also, relatives have some privileges

Waitman Beorn (01:13:15.559)
to our next story.

David Marwell (01:13:30.926)
under German criminal law about testifying against their loved ones.

David Marwell (01:13:40.462)
You could kind of think of in a thought experiment, you know, an elegant way where they could have done it, but there are probably 200 elegant ways that they could have done it. There was a cutout they had in Augsburg where the letters would go double wrapped to this guy in Augsburg who would then drive to the Mengele house and give them the one that was wrapped. When the old man Mengele died, the police staked out the funeral.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:01.575)
Mm.

David Marwell (01:14:10.478)
When Rolf Mengele got married, Mengele's son, metroborn son, got married, they staked out that. Every life cycle event was surveilled.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:23.623)
Do we know what the letters said? But do we know what?

David Marwell (01:14:27.406)
We have a lot, yeah, we have a lot of them. We don't have any really before 1960.

I think 62 were the earliest letters. They were discovered in Brazil, Mengele's copies, and some copies then were discovered in Germany. The people, the procurist of the Mengele firm who was kind of managing all of this, they found some letters in his wife's closet. She saved them and he told her that she should have destroyed them.

Interesting thing happens in 1977. Mengele's son, who was born on his birthday in 1944, who Mengele sees as an infant and then sees again when he's working on the farm as a toddler, and then doesn't see again until he visits Europe in 1956 when the kid's 12 years old. At that time, the kid still believes that this guy from Argentina is his uncle. But once

Once the Auschwitz, Frankfurt Auschwitz trial starts and then Mengele's name was all around, they tell him about his father and they kind of force him to begin a correspondence with him, which the son doesn't want to do. So we have a lot of letters between father and son. And Ralph Mengele is a kind of young guy, a lawyer, trained lawyer, long hair.

progressive politics, young guy, you know, and he's getting more and more frustrated with his father and he sees this kind of tension between this kind of odd connection he has with this man who never lived with, but there's still something there, something. And this guy who intellectually understands was the author of Great Crimes.

David Marwell (01:16:32.846)
He decides he wants to go visit his father. And there's lots of correspondence about this, you know, back and forth. They devise a plan. Rolf is able to swipe a passport from a friend of his who looks sort of like him. He travels to Brazil.

with another friend whom he leaves in Rio and then he goes on to Sao Paulo. He takes two or three cabs and finally ends up at the family of one of the families that's protecting him. And then he finally confronts his father. And the father, it's a very kind of, in a way, if you allow that poignant encounter, the Mengele who's cut off from every single thing that ever mattered to him in terms of culture, life of the mind.

has only known his son through really kind of a tortured correspondence, does not approve of the new Germany and the new Germans. And here's this guy with long hair coming in. And Rolf, who wrote a little paper about this, talks about how he's going to approach all this. How does he pop the question?

He starts out slowly, he has a technique that he wants to use. And finally he says, you know, just by being at Auschwitz you were doing a horrible thing, just by being there. And then Mengele gets mad and says, you can't believe what you read about me in those papers. Don't you understand? When those people arrived at Auschwitz, they were already dead. He said, I helped them.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:11.335)
Yeah.

David Marwell (01:18:13.198)
The twins owe me their lives. If it wasn't for me, they'd go directly to the gas chambers. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just devolves into this kind of, I don't know. Mengele is crying. Rolf is crying. They finally decide this is not productive at all. And they call a truce. And eventually, 10 days later, something

Rolf goes back home. And then there's this extraordinary letter that I found in the correspondence where Mengele writes to Rolf. And he talks about this phenomenon of someone who had his entire life been interested in kind of legacy and offspring and inheritance and to be face to face with him and to see

what kind of man he became and there's discussions about that. And he says, in the end, I've tried to explain myself to you and I will not do that anymore. I don't need to justify myself. My patience has a limit and that limit extends to when there's a threat to my family and to my

and to the Volkskamannschaft. You know, it's just some purely Nazi concept, which he might've uttered back in. He was clearly unrepentant and...

but in a kind of soupy, really interesting, interesting way. And that's really where it ends. That's how I end the book with this encounter with Ralph. And then with a kind of review of the science that had animated him so much, which actually, and I track, you know, with Watson and Crick and what Mengele was doing, and eventually with the decoding of the genome, which in effect gave the lie to everything that Mengele believed in because it,

David Marwell (01:20:23.086)
It indicated that the human family is so recently present upon the earth that there hasn't been enough time for it to differentiate itself into these kinds of fixed races. And all the differences among, there are more differences among so -called racial groups than there are between them. And most of the differences are simply cosmetic involving

where you grew up in the world, how close to the equator, relating to the color of your skin and the nature of your hair. Anyway.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:00.167)
And so I guess the final piece of it then is, and this gets into sort of where you're personally involved too, which is sort of at what point do we hear that he is allegedly dead and then we have sort of the search for confirmation.

David Marwell (01:21:17.422)
Yeah. So we find, so take a very long story short, we get involved, the US government, we're joined by the Germans and the Israelis. So by, by March of 85, we're rare and ago we meet, we have these tripartite meetings in Frankfurt. We're sharing all the information. The Israelis set up a inter -agency task force, which is nominally led by the justice ministry, but it's really the Mossad that is running.

running the effort. The Germans have a combination of the federal police and the local police and the local prosecutor. We agreed to share everything, all information. At the end of May, the Germans get a search warrant for the home of the executive of the Mengele firm.

They don't tell us, I think they tell us they were looking, going to get a search warrant, but they make the search. They don't report on the findings. And when they do the search, they find this letter from one of the families that was helping Mengele really describe his drowning death in 1979. And then the whole thing switches down to Brazil. The Germans go down there without telling us. We hear about it on CNN, my boss, Neil Scherr.

goes right down there. I went down a few days later. We assemble a team of forensic pathologists. The Wiesenthal Center in California assembles another team of forensic pathologists. So there are, I forget how many, 10, 12 American experts there. The Brazilians who have jurisdiction have a whole team of forensic pathologists. The Israelis send

one police officer whom I knew well named Menachem Rusek, who knows nothing about forensics and the Germans sent two capable people and they spent 10 days going over the first examining the bones and then going back and doing another exclamation because the Brazilians had botched the first exclamation and they, this is the days before DNA. There's no

David Marwell (01:23:46.99)
there are no fingerprints. So you have to kind of extrapolate from the evidence in the bones, compare it to what we knew about Mengele in life, which is where I came in because I had, I guess, the best knowledge of his medical files and things like that. The Brazilians, this is the biggest story in the country. And the head of the Sao Paulo Federal Police is a guy named Tuma, who's driving this thing saying, I don't want to push you. I want you to be sure, but he's pushing and he's pushing.

He goes from a meeting with us to a meeting with the press. Eventually, they're, I believe, pressured into a premature decision, likely the right one, but without sufficient evidence. None of the correspondence had been really evaluated. No real search for evidence. Witnesses were left unspoken to. And on the 15th or so of

or the 20th of June, big international press conference where the scientists say, this is Mengele within a reasonable scientific certainty. And that essentially closes down the case. I went back to Washington and said to my boss that this is bad. We know that when famous and infamous people die, there's always questions and speculation.

Jack Kennedy was shot in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people and still can't figure out what happened. Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, there's always speculation. We owe it to everyone, including the survivors, to be absolutely sure. So he allowed us to continue very quietly to continue to research. And I went to Germany, went through Mengele's diaries, his date books, all the medical information.

We had another trip back to Germany in April of 1986, very quiet, just the Germans, myself and the Israelis. We found dental X -rays that had not been found.

David Marwell (01:25:55.022)
and other medical information. And in my view, I was then, you know, I always said the hardest person to convince in any case is yourself. And I was absolutely convinced at that point, but the Israelis wouldn't close the case. And the German prosecutor knew that if the Israelis, if a German prosecutor says Mengele is dead and the Israelis say they're not sure, then no one would believe him. So he just waited for science to catch up.

to the case. And eventually, with PCR, this way of amplifying DNA, infinitesimal amounts of DNA so that it could be analyzed, and with bold and revolutionary ways of extracting DNA from bones, they were able to, finally, by April of 1992, they were able to close the case.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:51.271)
Wow. I mean, just, just an amazing, really amazing story. and it's just a great example of the ways in which history sort of continues to sort of be used to, to solve problems, but also to ask questions. and it's it, I mean, I have so many questions about the Mengele family that are just raised from this conversation and sort of like what

David Marwell (01:27:17.522)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:19.335)
What's going on there? And I mean, I've seen, I think I've seen, you know, the, cause they do farm equipment now, right? And so like the, there are these vehicles with Mengele on the side, like driving around, you know, but, Gosh, well, we've taken up a lot of your time, but it's, it's been a hundred percent worth it because this was just an amazing discussion. No, no, no, this is, I mean, I was, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time because it's just, it's just really interesting hearing, hearing all of this, from.

David Marwell (01:27:25.774)
Yeah, they've been sold. Yeah.

David Marwell (01:27:36.526)
Yeah, I apologize for going on and on.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:49.703)
from the inside. But before I let you go, we always have a question that we ask, which is, if you could recommend one book on the Holocaust, what would it be?

David Marwell (01:28:02.094)
I gave this some thought, and this may be a conventional answer, but I think it's the right one. Raoul Hilberg's destruction of the European Jews, which I read over 50 years ago, his fidelity to the sources is absolute brilliance in terms of interpretation. It meant a lot to me then, and I refer to it often even now. I was going to say something like,

Into That Darkness by Gita Serenny, who was a friend of mine. I loved Lawrence Douglas's The Right Wrong Man, I thought was a great book. And Philippe Sands, East West Street. Devin Pendis's book on the Auschwitz trial is a brilliant one. But I would go with Rao, who became, he was one of our expert witnesses at the Justice Department.

got to sit at his feet, I got to sit at his table and get to know him, which was a rare pleasure and privilege.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:11.175)
And he has one of my favorite quotes and I used it in my book and I'm going to paraphrase it because I'm not going to get it kind of straight. But it was a quote he did for Lanzmann's film Shoah where he says, I never began by asking the big questions because I was afraid that if I did, I would come up with small answers. And then he explains that that's basically why he looks at the details. That was the way he approached the study of the past. And I thought that was just such a great comment.

David Marwell (01:29:31.31)
Yeah, he was.

David Marwell (01:29:37.006)
When he would testify with us, we would do the research and present it to him. When he would speak in court, they came out as full paragraphs, perfectly scanned, just perfect. He was great, wonderful.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:56.455)
Well, gosh, David, thank you so much for everyone else. Once again, I hope you've found the podcast to be engaging, interesting. Please share us on social media. Give us a like and a rating on Apple podcasts. It's really, really helpful for us. David, once again, thank you so much. This was amazing.

David Marwell (01:29:59.662)
My pleasure.

David Marwell (01:30:21.486)
My pleasure. Take care, wait man.