Customer Reviews

The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele

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Gearld Astor's biography of Dr. Joseph Mengele tells an important story to be sure. The notorious Auschwitz camp doctor who personally comdemmed thousands to their deaths and performed hideous experiements on many others is an important symbol of just how depraved the Nazi regime was. That a man of science, a man sworn to prevent human sufferning, could allow his profession to be so grotesquely perverted clearly demonstrates how fundamentaly evil Nazi ideology was. Mengele is a real life villian for the ages, someone the likes of whom humanity will hopefully not see again.

Unfortunately, Astor's portrait, while compelling and informative, fails to really capture essence of the man. Perhaps becuase the author apparently received little cooperation from Mengele's (prominent!) family, there isn't musch information about Mengele's early childhood or adulthood, nor of the period from the end of World War II to his escape from Europe in 1949. The two periods of Megele's life where Astor's information is most complete is his time at Auschwitz from 1943-44 and the last two decades of his life, when he lived in Brazil before drowning on the beach in 1979.

There's almost nothing in the book about Megele's marriage, nor of his service on the Eastern front with the Waffen SS before a battlefield wound sent him to the death camp and his infamy. Even the Auschwitz period is strangely stilted. There are eyewitness accounts of the atrocities committed by Mengele and of his experiments, but a thorough account of what he thought he was accomplishing is strangely lacking. It must also be said that Astor's prose is at times somewhat stilted, and he occasionally digresses into pop psychology--a dangerous thing to do in a case such as this. Ultimately, Menegele comes off as despicable but still a mysterious figure.

Overall, I would give this book a qualified recommendation only because of the importance of its subject matter.

I work on an ambulance I was in my late 30's to early 40's and came across a woman with numbers written on the inside of her right arm. I believed it was a phone number she was looking for, she explained what it was, her id number for her incarceration inside a concentration camp, she was a lucky survivor. Needless to say I felt terrible for my ignorance and realized that I had ran into a remaining survivor, something not many people encounter every day. Well I began to desire the knowledge of this subject and I read EVERY book I can so I may learn as much as I can about this needless tragedy. It has made me a stronger person reading this and ALL books on this subject. PLEASE READ THIS AND ALL BOOKS... It shocks me people believe it was a hoax. Tell that to the 9,000,000 people suffered death.

Gerald Astor has done an excellent job recounting Joseph Menegele's life both before and after the Nazi regime. He paints a pretty depressing picture of a man with no remorse for his crimes against humanity while hiding from a world that hates him, and rightfully so, and the family that protected him. He also shows the greater impact that the personification of Menegele as Evil Incarnate had on the world and media. However the psychological motives for Menegele the man's actions during the Nazi regime remain a mystery. Perhaps this kind of evil always will.