The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
by Olivier Guez
Verso, £11.99


The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez has sold more than 300,000 copies since it was first published in France in 2017.

It is not hard to explain its huge success. The central character, Josef Mengele, was notorious for his horrific medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. The novel follows his escape from Europe to Buenos Aires after the war and how he evaded capture for 30 years.

The novel is superbly researched, tracing the infamous “rat lines” which allowed leading Nazis such as Eichmann and Mengele to seek refuge in the Argentina of Juan and Eva Peron.

After the war Peron welcomed thousands of Nazis, fascists and collaborators to Argentina, writes Guez, “complex chains of diplomats and corrupt officials, spooks and clergymen who offer absolution to war criminals,” all part of the war against communist atheism.

Guez painstakingly recreates a “melting pot of Nazis, Ustashe Croatian counter-revolutionaries, Serbian ultra-nationalists, Italian Fascists, … a ghastly Fourth Reich”.
Mengele (disguised as Helmut Gregor) quickly found himself at home in this Fascist demi-monde.

There was only one person he failed to get along with, Adolf Eichmann, hiding under the name of Ricardo Klement. Eichmann considered himself a far bigger fish than the SS doctor from Auschwitz and the two never got along.

After the fall of Peron in 1955, the noose begins to tighten as Mengele is pursued by tabloid journalists from all over the world, increasingly bold West German prosecutors, Mossad and Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal.

His wealthy family back in Germany and his Nazi cronies in South America can no longer guarantee his safety. Eichmann, Franz Stangl and Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”, are the first big names to be caught. The novel follows Mengele into hiding in the borderlands of Paraguay and then Brazil.

He is constantly on the move; he no longer feels safe anywhere. The West German government puts a large price on his head. Mengele burns his notes and his German passport and finally destroys his Auschwitz specimens that he has carried with him everywhere in a small briefcase.

Finally, Guez does an excellent job of depicting Mengele. At no point does he try and redeem him or make him sympathetic nor does he make him into a one-dimensional grotesque, like some of the other minor characters.

It is a dark and disgusting story, superbly told by Guez, of how Germans, Catholics and Americans helped countless Nazis find refuge during the Cold War, including some of the most infamous figures from the Holocaust.

The novel reaches a powerful climax with a mock war crimes trial in Jerusalem in 1985. The anguished testimony of survivors tells us all we need to know about the Angel of Death and his protectors.