Mengele:

By Otto Friedrich

What a strange and ugly fate to be the most hated man in the world. To be wanted for prosecution by the governments of the U.S., Israel and West Germany. To be a hunted fugitive for 40 years. To have a price on one's head of $3.4 million. That was the harsh destiny of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor at Auschwitz. And then to be found dead, as Mengele was reported found on June 6, dead and buried in a small hillside cemetery in Brazil. To be dug up, bone by moldering bone, and carted away for scientific examination. And argued about. Was this really Mengele? Or was the whole discovery an elaborate conspiracy to escape justice?

Maybe it is hyperbole to call Mengele the most hated man in the world. There are certainly other candidates for that lamentable title. Pol Pot, for example, who directed the terrible massacres in Kampuchea in the 1970s. Or the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who has led Iran back into the darkness. Or the director of the Soviet KGB, who has to be a leading candidate, ex officio, no matter who he is. But none of these political killers seems so utterly diabolical as Josef Mengele. The Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 3 million Jews and other victims were slaughtered, was probably the most concentrated expression of human evil in all of history, and Mengele was the emblem and embodiment of Auschwitz.

He was also the perverted emblem of his origins. He came from a wealthy commercial family in Bavaria. He studied Kant, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Munich and his medical degree at the University of Frankfurt. An early convert to Nazism, he volunteered for the Waffen SS. On the railroad ramp at Auschwitz, where Mengele presided over the selection process, deciding which of the terrified prisoners were fit for slave labor and which were fit only for the gas chambers, he wore white gloves and highly polished boots, and occasionally whistled fragments of Wagner. In doing so, he defiled music, just as his cruel "medical experiments" defiled science and his whole life defiled philosophy. He defiled Germany.

Second only to the Nazis' crimes against their victims was their crime against the country they governed. Even though four decades have passed, and even though more than half of all Germans were not born until after 1945, the divided nation is still stained and still haunted by the monstrosities committed by Mengele and his kind. There were no redeeming qualities in the man, no extenuating circumstances. If ever anyone deserved to be hanged -- or worse -- it was Josef Mengele.

The New Testament condemns such a view as sinful. "Judge not that ye be not judged," Jesus said. "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." St. Paul decried the hunger for revenge as a blasphemy. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him." One can admire these teachings, and yet sometimes find them impossible to accept, or act upon. Must one not make an exception in the case of someone as vile as Mengele? Would mercy toward him not mock his victims?

In these secular times, it is the state that claims, "Vengeance is mine," and insists on the sole right to decide what is just and to impose punishment. Any personal attempt at retribution is dismissed as vengeance, and vengeance is dismissed as psychotic, almost taboo. Yet as Susan Jacoby points out in her interesting book Wild Justice, vengeance comes to appear necessary when the state (or the gods) fails to provide justice.

This need is at the heart of tragedy. Orestes had to avenge the otherwise unpunished murder of his father, King Agamemnon. So did Hamlet, who could have killed Claudius at his prayers but then decided not to risk the possibility that the wicked uncle's soul might thus reach heaven. "No./ Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent;/ When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage . . . / Then trip him, that . . . / his soul may be as damn'd and black/ As hell, whereto it goes."

The cruelest imagined torments of hell once seemed not only very real but a perfectly legitimate form of punishment, since God himself had permitted and even approved the eternal fires. And with what a hunger for retribution did Dante identify each king or warrior he reported seeing in the Inferno, buried up to the eyes in rivers of blood. With what zeal did Bosch and Bruegel similarly portray malefactors being torn at by giant birds or skeletons. Yet the avenger himself was traditionally punished too. Orestes goes mad; Hamlet dies of poison; Captain Ahab ends in a tangle of rope dragged by Moby Dick. Revenge is both necessary and forbidden.

In the case of Mengele, the social contract that promises justice did seem to have failed. The manhunt had not been sufficiently intense; the secrets of Mengele's native town had not been probed; requests for extradition had been ignored. One can say of Mengele, "Good riddance," and yet still believe that an accidental drowning was too good for him.

It was perhaps this bitter sense of justice denied that inspired the widespread doubts about whether the corpse exhumed in Brazil was really that of Mengele. Granted that the fugitive and his friends were quite capable of faking the whole episode, the doubts nonetheless seemed to border on wishful thinking. Those who should most have wished Mengele dead were those who most stoutly believed him still alive. Theirs was the logic by which a prisoner who attempts suicide on the way to the gallows is carefully nursed back to health so that he can be properly executed.

In arousing such feelings of hatred, in making us want to inflict pain on him, and then making us feel cheated for being unable to inflict it -- in making us less humane than we know we should be -- Mengele, dead or alive, provided a final touch of evil. And yet, although verification of his accidental death would deprive his pursuers of the chance to prosecute him, Mengele did not entirely escape punishment. According to one of the Austrian immigrants who helped him in Brazil, the aging fugitive "avoided talking about the Second World War and lived apprehensive and afraid, fearful of being found by Jews." Others reported that he suffered migraine headaches and slept with a Mauser pistol by his bed. Physical pain is terrible, but perhaps continuous fear is almost equally so. Though there never was a punishment that would fit the dimensions of Mengele's crimes, is it not peculiarly appropriate that he was condemned to a lifetime of fearing his own victims, and that his punishment should be inflicted by himself, and that it should take place inside his head?