Other than Adolf Hitler, Josef Mengele may be the only figure from National-Socialist Germany targeted for demonization with an entire major motion-picture while he was still alive and at large. The Boys from Brazil in 1978, based on Ira Levin’s 1976 novel, portrays a “Josef Mengele” that is pure, crude caricature.

Just think of it. You are living in deliberate obscurity in South America, trying to avoid trouble, while a character that is supposed to be you, bearing your real name, is portrayed through the absurd histrionics of Gregory Peck as a vintage 1943 Hollywood-style “Nazi” sadist and diehard Hitler-loyalist who is also the ruthless kingpin of a vast and well funded (and entirely fictitious) criminal conspiracy to take over the world.

To emphasize the sinister character of the chief conspirator, the “Nazi-hunter” played by Laurence Olivier cites as alleged historical fact that you “ … killed 2 ½ million people, experimented on children, Jewish and non-Jewish, using twins mostly, injecting blue dyes into their eyes to make them acceptable Aryans, amputating limbs and organs from
thousands, operating without anaesthetics….”

The average movie-viewer of course will fail to ask whether there is even a shred of physical evidence for any such accusation against you. (There is not.) The average viewer will assume that if it is being cited as history, even in a largely fictitious story, it is probably true.

Meanwhile, in your efforts to avoid attracting attention you have had to relocate from Germany to Argentina to Paraguay to Brazil, have stopped using your real name, and have even given up your life’s work of practicing medicine (the university that issued your M.D. and Ph.D. having revoked them in 1964) to live in near-poverty working as a farmhand.

So who is the persecutor and who is the persecuted in this scenario? To answer this question it helps to examine what is known about Mengele’s life and background.

Josef Mengele (1911-1979) was the oldest of three brothers. Their father built the largest farm-machinery manufacturing company in Germany, Karl Mengele & Sons of Guenzburg, Bavaria. Upon Karl Mengele’s death in 1959 the company had more than 2000 employees worldwide.

The Mengele family was conservative. Karl Mengele had fought in the First World War and was at various times a member of the Stahlhelm, the Bund der Frontsoldaten, and the conservative nationalist party, the DNVP. German Wikipedia says: “He is described as conservative, but is not considered an anti-Semite.”

In 1932 Karl Mengele made his factories available for campaign appearances by Adolf Hitler, but this was in conformity with the requirements of the Harzburg Front, an alliance between the NSDAP, DNVP, and Stahlhelm. Karl Mengele joined the NSDAP only in May 1933, after Hitler had come to power.

Josef Mengele in 1924 joined a Pan-German youth-group, der Grossdeutsche Jugendbund, and in the period 1927-1930 was Ältestenführer of the Guenzburg chapter. The GDJ was not National-Socialist but “revolutionary conservative” in outlook.

The family-background and upbringing of Dr. Josef Mengele is thus considered to be not so much National-Socialist as Catholic conservative, with political leanings toward the Deutschnationale Volkspartei rather than the NSDAP.

This is unlike the “Mengele” portrayed in The Boys from Brazil, who is supposed to have been an early supporter of Adolf Hitler.
It is true that in 1937 Josef Mengele was an assistant to the famous physical anthropologist Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now renamed the Max Planck Institute) but there was nothing disreputable about race-based anthropology at the time; only the propaganda of the Second World War, and the echoes thereof, have made it disreputable. The perfect respectability of this kind of work at that time is evident in the fact (widely publicized by Jewish author Edwin Black) that it received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

When war came and his country needed him, Josef Mengele volunteered for the Waffen-SS, and served as a medical officer in the SS Panzer-Division “Viking.”