Thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's obvious the author did their research as noted through the information and pictures throughout the book and determining what plethora of information to add. The chapters are well laid out and very interesting and informative. I would read something by this author again.

Very well researched but rather stilted in style. I struggled to finish it, and found the writing boring to be honest.

Review for 'Mengele' by David Marwell

Read and review via NetGalley

This book was very well researched and filled will facts about Dr Joseph Mengele, looking at his life and research. However, I didn't think it was very well delivered and I struggled to keep interest in it.

Book Review: Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death



Mengele
Unmasking the "Angel of Death"
by David G. Marwell

W. W. Norton & Company

Biographies & Memoirs , History

Pub Date 28 Jan 2020


I am reviewing a copy of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death through W.W. Norton and Company and Netgalley:


Disclaimer: This book contains extremely sensitive subject matters, and tells of grotesque experiments, this book is not meant for children.


Honestly I struggled through the details of this book as well, but I feel this is an important book in order to better understand the brutality of the Holocaust, and in particular one Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.


Josef Mengele was born on March.16, 1911 and died on February 1979.


Mengele was possibly the most Notorious war criminal ever. Josef Mengele became was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. He was aided by the Role he thought was at work in popular culture. The grotesque work of Mengele during the Holocaust has made him a twisted symbol of a twisted time. He came to symbolize too the horrific failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether looked at as a demonic doctor who directed mass killings or a fugitive that managed to escape capture that has made Mengele loom so large that some have refused to believe he died even with conclusive proof.


It is unlikely that Mengele’s Childhood would have shown any indicators of the man he was to become, The Angel of Death. There was really no indication of extreme politics, or the brutal Anti-semitism that would lead to him to becoming ”The Angel of Death.”




David G Markell was the chief of investigation research at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s and worked on Mengele’s case. In researching the case he interviewed Mengele’s surviving victims, visited the scenes of the crimes, and held Mengele’s bones in his hands. In this book he examines in great detail Mengele’s life and career including his grotesque, heartbreaking brutality. He tells of Mengele’s university degree that led to two Ph.D’s and could have led to a promising career a a scientist, and Markell goes on to talk of Mengele’s war time service on the frontlines, as well as his brutality at Aushwitz which led to a great deal of deaths, in the name of his so called research.



Mengele tells the international search for Josef Mengele that ended in a cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died—but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead.


I found this book to be one of the most difficult books I’ve read in a long time, with that being said, it was very well written and researched and deserves nothing less than four out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

'Mengele' is well-researched and gives an excellent insight into the notorious Josef Megele. I have read several books about the Holocaust recently where Mengele features as a character, and I was interested in reading more about the doctor referred to as the 'Angel of Death'. The author, David G Marwell, was part of the international investigation team from the US Department of Justice tased with locating Mengele. This element adds further interest to this well written, comprehensive historical account.

I thought this was a phenomenal book. Incredibly well-researched, presented in a format that makes it easy to follow and enjoy and by a more than credible source.

If you are looking for the answers to who Mengele was, what his life was like before and after his involvement in WWII and trying to draw a conclusion about what happened to him, this is the book to read. If you are bothered by discussions of the Shoah, you should perhaps be warned that this book does go into detail on some of the atrocities committed, but in a responsible and tolerable way.

I felt the author did a good job representing the facts in this book without making it boring. He brought a feeling of personal passion to this project, which made it feel more human and relatable. Unlike many other books on Mengele, this is not a sensationalist work designed to inflame people. I got the opinion that the author had no personal vendetta, and was more than happy to simply recount the facts.

This is an important book and I encourage others to read it. It will help one understand the man behind the myth much more clearly.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

What can I say about this book? It took me some time to read it due to the context. It was heavy reading. Good reading but dark reading. You will be touched by history. Cry. Feel sad. Yet feel enlightened from survival point of you.
Read it when you feel you can handle this kind of genre.

A well researched and factual book, based on the findings of the Justice Department teams sent to discover notorious Nazi Dr Joseph Mengele's whereabouts in the 1980's. The first half of the books looks at Mengele's life and the second half the search for him, and the forensic proofs that the team found.

My main problem with this book was the delivery. If you want the information on the case, it's all there. If you want the facts presented in an engaging and entertaining way, you wont find that here. If you're looking for the man behind the monster, his motivations and what made him tick, look elsewhere. This is a clinical dissertation, set out fact after fact. Their is no building anticipation in tracking him down, no thrill of the chase. This book is sterile, and while it will appeal to those who like their history set out just so, in this day where entertaining the masses is paramount this book will fall short.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Five, then four, stars.

This is a brilliant biography of Josef Mengele, that proves once and for all that there is too much negative hype about the man. Too many witnesses claim he was doing the selection at Birkenau for the gas chambers for him ever to have taken a loo break; too many people give inaccurate descriptions of the man when they declare he was evil to them personally. Also, the most heinous things he was accused of were likely to be balderdash, considering the real science behind what he was doing, and the real science he was working for. But don't worry, for this is no hagiography. This does point out his untroubled work in the Auschwitz complex, and does show the man so desperate to be a noted geneticist and race scientist ending up importing his father's muck-spreaders to Argentina while in exile.

Unfortunately, the book veers off at the halfway stage. Before then I would have given it an incontestable five stars – the book gives all the narrative and detail a regular reader would need, alongside so much authoritative debate and detail that still would satisfy the expert. But then we hit the 1980s and the search for Mengele that ultimately includes a risible exhumation in Brazil. And for this second half we get too much detail. I'm sure it's the lesser-told of the two stories here, but whether from the self-imposed demand to provide the definitive telling, or the fact the author is too personally involved in his story, it's a little too forensic. So the general reader gets swamped by who was thinking this at this time, and what minutiae were of concern to whom and when and why. Which is a shame – just a slightly different approach would have made this an outstanding book for my tastes. It's still very good and a lot more interesting than the dread about and the perceived dryness of the subject would have you think. It is of course not so much about the man himself, but about the peculiar details of his life (how was he able to be in hiding and at the same time renounce an inheritance for his father's factories; how was his wife able to have services in his memory then pretty soon afterwards file for divorce with nobody smelling a rat?); it is about the international chase for restitution; and is suitably about the victims.

Mengele is a through look into the life of the infamous Nazi doctor. Barely any of this book covers Mengele's actual time at the camps, but instead covers his childhood and family and then the hunt to find him after he fled to South America after WWII. It's not as sensational as the books that cover his atrocities during the war, but it does give a good background of the man behind the infamy.

The life history of Mengele might be a little dry for a lot of readers, but the book picks up some during the second half where they are trying to track Mengele down, and then try to positively identify a body that is assumed to be his. It's a fascinating look into the parts of Mengele's life that are not usually told. History and true crime buffs should love this book.

Mengele by David G. Marwell is the meticulously researched and in-depth story of the life of the "Angel Of Death" ,Josef Mengele , the human embodiment of all that was evil about Auschwitz. Author Marwell was a former American Justice Department official whose part in the hunt for Mengele once the authorities finally got serious about hunting down Nazi war criminals gave him a ringside seat into the search for the Demon doctor and the eventual identification of his body.

Aside from the first hand tale of the search the book traces Mengele's, often quite bizarre, life from birth to death and dispels a few myths that have become "fact" over the years, the sightings all over the world and the common description of him as a tall blonde Aryan stereotype amongst others..
The book goes into great detail and at times it can be hard work but those times are Marwell explaining in layman's terms Mengele's,albeit twisted,motivation and theories and essential to understanding the man and the connivance of the German "scientific community", if they deserve that description. Many incidentally,as the book describes,were stripped of their degrees and doctorates after the war for their part in the the whole disgusting and horrific enterprise.

A fascinating book that might well get a bit too mired in detail occasionally for the casual reader but has to be the definitive book about Mengele.

Big thanks to David G.Marwell ,W W Norton & Company and Netgalley for the ARC.

This book is advertised as a biography of Josef Mengele. However, the book seemed to be 90% about the search for Mengele and identifying Mengele's body than about Mengele himself. It also contained a history of the times, and discussed how Mengele's work was not only accepted but lauded by his co-workers. I probably would not have picked up the book if I knew what it was really about. Overall, this one was a bust.