Nazi war physician Josef Mengele’s last thoughts and views have come to light, including the fact that he did not repent the atrocities he committed, in letters and diary notes recovered from police archives and published on Tuesday in Brazil.
Contents of 85 documents written by the ”Angel of Death” of the Auschwitz extermination camp have been stored since 1985 in the archives of the Brazilian federal police in Sao Paulo. They were translated from German to Portugese and have now been published to a large extent in an exclusive by the Brazilian newspaper Folha.
The authenticity of the documents was confirmed to Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Tuesday by the federal police, who investigated Mengele’s death in a swimming accident in 1979.
In a letter to his Austrian friend Wolfgang Gerhard dated September 3, 1974, he laments that his niece is married to a German Brazilian whose family doesn’t subscribe to the ”Aryan ideology”.
In January 1976, he wrote in his diary, according to Folha, that he was reading the memoirs of Hitler’s arms minister Albert Speer (1905-1981) who regrets his actions, to which Mengele writes: ”He diminishes himself, showing repentance, that is lamentable.”
In one of the letters dated from 1972, which the newspaper published a photo of the original, Mengele defends the ”heterogeneity of the Nordic races” by saying that ”not all races or peoples attain the same cultural level, which forces us to conclude that not all people have the same creative capacity”.
Outside Europe, he wrote, above-average cultural achievements came ”almost exclusively from European immigrants”. He praised the apartheid system in South Africa as an ”efficient way to discontinue interbreeding”.
However, in a 1969 comment, Mengele criticises ”Israeli assaults on Palestinians” and calls the German youth at that time ”degenerate”.
From other letters printed by Folha on Tuesday it was revealed that Mengele spent his last days at the end of the 1970s lonely and in a dire financial situation. He was going through depression when he received an invitation from a married couple, the Bosserts, to vacation at Beritoga Beach in Sao Paulo. He drowned there on February 7, 1979.
The papers, and other articles, were recovered in 1985 from the homes of friends, including the Bosserts, to assist in the DNA identification of Mengele, who was buried in the Embu cemetery in Sao Paulo under a false name. Tests confirmed it was his body in 1992.
The documents were then rediscovered during a routine inventory of the police archives and made accessible exclusively to Folha.
Some of the confiscated items, such as eyeglasses and two typewriters, have disappeared. Other articles, including a Seiko wristwatch and a thermometer, and the documents are to be relocated to the Museum of the National Academy of the Police in Brasilia.
”Angel of Death” Mengele worked after World War II anonymously on a farm in Bavaria and fled to Argentina in 1949. Only in 1985, under international pressure from Nazi victims to find Mengele’s whereabouts, were leads found pointing to the grave in Embu.
The son of an industrialist, Mengele, born in 1911 in the Bavarian town of Guenzburg, is allegedly responsible for the deaths of 40 000 people and performed grotesque experiments on twins without anaesthetic. — Sapa-dpa