Stamford, CT – An auctioneer of historic documents said Tuesday that he had sold a journal written by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi Holocaust’s “Angel of Death,” to the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor.
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Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Autographs wrote in an e-mail that he had sold the 180-page journal for an undisclosed sum Tuesday “to an East Coast Jewish philanthropist who wishes to remain anonymous.”
“He is the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor who personally encountered Mengele at Auschwitz,” Panagopulos wrote. “He intends to donate the manuscript to a museum devoted to the Holocaust.”
Dated June 1960, when the death camp doctor was in South America, the handwritten entries range from descriptions of native animals and plants to blunt statements on the need to sterilize people with “deficient genes.”
“The real problem is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated,” Mengele reportedly wrote.
Some Jewish and Holocaust survivor groups called the sale of such a document shameful.
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants labeled the auction house offering “a cynical act of exploitation aimed at profiting from the writings of one of the most heinous Nazi criminals.”
“I personally believe that these things should not be sold or publicized,” Betty Ehrenberg, executive director of the New York City-based World Jewish Congress, said Tuesday. “It unfortunately adds a glory or a glamour to these people and encourages people with right-wing sympathies to admire them.”
Panagopulos said that he was sickened by the journal, but that it has historic value. If no money can be made from such documents, he said, many would be lost. “If it has no value, people throw it in the garbage,” he said.
Alexander Autographs tried to auction the journal in January with a “reserve,” or bottom, price of about $60,000, Panagopulos said. But no one bid that high. Before the sale was completed Tuesday, Panagopulos had said he would accept offers of at least $35,000.
Called a “diary” in some news reports, the bound notebook is mostly Mengele’s philosophical meanderings about topics such as genetic purity and the staining of superior bloodlines by “morons” and “idiots,” Panagopulos said. There is no indication how long it took Mengele to write.
The SS physician, born in 1911, went to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in April 1943. He was among the medical officers who divided arriving inmates into two groups: slave laborers and those immediately sent to the gas chambers.
Mengele also experimented with human subjects at the camp. He was particularly interested in twins, and “with full license to maim or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma (‘Gypsy’) twins, most of them children,” according to a biography on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, www.ushmm.org.
After the war, Mengele spent a few years working on a farm in Bavaria, then fled to South America, where he lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. He died in 1979.
Asked for an opinion on the authenticity of the notebook held by the Stamford auction house, the Washington, D.C., Holocaust museum released a statement Tuesday saying that the institution “does not know if the diary, purportedly a post-war work, is authentic. There is a history of forgeries and alleged ‘diaries’ by Nazis.”
“Whatever its origins,” the statement continues, “nothing can hide Mengele’s real legacy as a perpetrator in the brutal murder of more than one million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the unspeakable cruelty he inflicted upon the victims of his ‘medical experiments.'”
Panagopulos said that the provenance of the Mengele journal is solid, and that the handwriting matches the Nazi doctor’s known writing. He would not name the owner. He said he has pledged a portion of the sale proceeds to the museum.
“I am overjoyed,” Panagopulos said, “that the manuscript is going where it belongs, where it will be available to historians and scholars.”
•To read excerpts from the Mengele journal, visit the Alexander Autographs website at www.alexautographs.com and under “auctions” click on “archives,” which brings up a search page.
“I personally believe that these things should not be sold or publicized,” Betty Ehrenberg, executive director of the New York City-based World Jewish Congress, said Tuesday. “It unfortunately adds a glory or a glamour to these people and encourages people with right-wing sympathies to admire them.”
No. “These things” should– indeed, must– be publicized. In order to be defeated, evil must be confronted, not forgotten.
Mengele’s family knew where he lived and so did the Church and probably the German Government. He should have been brought to justice long ago. May his memory be blotted out. This diary reveals the sickness of his philosophy. He clearly was the moral defective.
Thank god is was bought and will be donated to a Jewish institution where it belongs to counter the Holocaust deniers…Money well spent !
If the seller is so glad it is going where it belongs, he could have donated it himself.