Enough if we do it this way. Let us know in the chat box. A warm hello, happy to see so many of you. I want to start by thanking David Goldman, to switch, for me very new for all of us in the region of live stream. We are presenting that in partnership with our good friends at the public library. We are all gripped by the precarious and frightening reality of this moment. So many books conserve as antidotes and only one of those antidotes and we are sharing the next 45 minutes or our tonight and before introduce speakers in detail, and step aside or minimize or whatever it is we do, i want to say quickly, this fabulous book mengele unmasking the angel of death is available here at labyrinth or whichever is your nearest and dearest local bookstore. All of us in the independent bookselling world are trying to find a way through to the other side of this crisis. If you want to buy this book at labyrinth it will ship for free, place the order over the phone we will post to the chat box that are also on our website. That will be the easiest way to get through that book. We want to ask a question, the best way is to ask a question at the bottom of your screen, better than putting them in the chat box. A cumulative interest in the question and focus on those a little bit. Lets turn to what critics are considering a definitive account. It is a biography and detective story, they are prepared to tell his story. An american historian, and at the document center, and the investigation were together and through the 1980s. For that side of the story, they are friends and deeply shared interests in helping us learn from the past and not repeat the worst atrocities. David goldman is a distinguished lawyer and founder and chairman of the fellowship of auschwitz for the study of potential ethics. This is a special nonprofit organization, and brought to auschwitz. Moral and ethical issues, the fundamental premise is, i will quote some of the materials, and breakdown or with devastating consequences, with this principle and insight we are squarely inside the story of joseph minghella mengele. I will let david and david take it from here. I am disappointed that is impossible to see me. I should say david and i have known each other for many years, one note of warning is if david answers a question i have not yet asked that could happen or i could skip the questions i have in mind but i heard david answer. The q and a session will be important. I want to say by way of preface that i am fascinated by the perpetrators. The organization i work with is an Ethical Leadership program where we begin by studying the perpetrators and nazi germany asking what we can learn from them. Prefacing my question to david that my focus will be on mengele as perpetrator and who he was. I will start in a different place than many would and ask who he was. Who was Joseph Mengele . We could merely say he was born with horns on his head and he was evil incarnate but we know is not what your book is saying. I would like to learn a little bit more about him. What kind of child was he . What was he like as a kid . I dont really know what he was like as a kid. There are not dramatically good sources on that. The best source is his own writings about himself. Mengele wrote an autobiography for his family, written in the 60s and finished in the 1970s, he wrote it as a novel, as a fiction, believing if you were freed from the rigorous telling of facts, something more illustrative and important as a means of teaching an important lesson and when he talks about his childhood, he spends 100 pages which says something about how important he thought he was. There is nothing in his childhood that gives any hint of the murderer mengele was to become, nothing in his childhood fulfills our notion of an incubator for what that future would have been. There are no stories of him murdering pets in the back yard or a bully or unkind. He grew up in a prosperous family, loving family with household help, parents who cared for him and two younger brothers but nothing in his childhood that suggests, points to the politics he was later to adopt. What kind of students, what did he study, what kind of student was he . He went the academic route in germany, he was a middling student. I have his report cards. He was not outstanding in the classroom. Part of that is he had a serious illness as a child which played a role later on. He became a passionate student and he had an elite education, studied that munich bond. He not only had a medical degree but a phd in anthropology, he studied with nobel prize winners, laureates or those who would become prizewinners in the future. He was considered an extremely able student and had extremely he writes in his autobiography about the impact hes quite passionate about how he was moved by not only their skill but their devotion to the science of medicine. Anything political . Anything that gives a hint to his politics when he was in university . His University Career coincided precisely with the nazi party and its ascension to power. He began studies in april of 1930, the summer semester of 1930. He came from a home that was conservative, catholic, probably an element of antisemitism, but not anything that would set him on the course he eventually took. Tell us more about his studying. What was he studying, the medicine he was focused on. Mengeles interest in medicine, racial hygiene and anthropology came at a time when these disciplines took on a new and important meaning for the state. Hitler believed physicians were extremely important in terms of carrying out his worldview and himmler said National Socialism was biology and acted. The fact that mengele began studying these scientists when they take on new status is important. What does the new status mean . These scientists had what one scholar called symbiotic relationship with the state, nazi science provided fundamental support for the nazi worldview and also benefited from the things science benefits from, funding, elevation of its status. That is extremely important and effective mengele was it rogue medicine . The science was mainstream for germany at the time. En garde, but not rogue, not unconventional but he certainly, i describe him as the product and the promise of german science. And to lead to support, for a forced sterilization, anthropology, extremely famous anthropologist, and the head of the, at the university of frankfurt. Promising young scientist, and academic career in front of things. And things happened differently. I want to get to the war in a minute but with him married, children . He married a woman he met in my state right before the beginning of the war. They had no real married life together since the war came and he had other things to do. They had one son who was born on mengeles birthday on march 16th, 1943. Do we know anything about his faith . How religious he was . His mother was a very devout catholic. He writes about that in his memoir. He chose to have a Church Wedding which was unusual for an ss officer. In a nostalgic sense in the Catholic Church but he was not regularly observant although it had an impact, he writes about what when his mother dies, reflects on his catholic upbringing. Let me jump around a little bit, thanks for that background. When did mengele become part of your life . How did you become involved with him . I was with the department of justice in washington as a historian at the office of special investigation and was involved in the normal work of the office which was investigating or identifying or prosecuting nazi war criminals working in the United States but also responsible for special projects in the office. In 1983 when it was alleged house barbie had worked for Us Intelligence and indeed found that was in true that was true and published in summer of 1983. In 1985 for reasons too complicated to go into, mengele became the subject of Public Interest and to investigate certain allegations that mengele had been interned by the americans and used by the americans like barbie had. We were asked to investigate those allegations, that became an International Manhunt when we were joined by another office, the Us Marshals Service and the german prosecuted in frankfurt at the justice ministry. He is Joseph Mengele. How did he get out of germany . How did that happen . Mengele left auschwitz in january of 1945 and was assigned to another camp. When that camp was liberated by the soviets, he came upon a Field Hospital in the area in czechoslovakia, one of the people in the Field Hospital was a former colleague of his, he asked if he could join the Field Hospital. He took of the ss uniform which marked him as someone of intense interest for anyone who captured him, he don the uniform, this human internet being in an area between the advancing red army and western allies in the area in eastern, southern southeastern germany, an arrow that was unoccupied for six weeks between the beginning of may in the middle of june. Unoccupied because the front lines, had frozen. Mangalore mengele had a chance to build a convincing cover story, no longer clad in ss uniform. The steel hospital started wisely, to surrender, they decided not to surrender to the soviets which would have been unwise, and drove to the american lines in bavaria and taken into custody. Mengele was in two different pow camps. Likely under his own name at the end, released under his own name there are three reasons he was released by the americans even though he was on wanted lists created by them. The first were very inefficiently distributed, mengele had not seen the wanted lists. The second, mengele was part of a unit that was well integrated in the unit but the most important reason is mengele didnt have the ss tattoo under his left arm, the blood type a soldiers so if they were wounded, medics would know what kind of blood to use for transmission. Mengele did not have the blood type tattoo which removed the most common mark of someone in the ss. He passed through an extremely effective litmus test which was to have interned soldiers, mengele was released by the us without any further interrogation. He then secured false identity papers under another mans name and live four years on a farm doing manual labor in a small farm outside reagansville in bavaria and made his way with the help of his prosperous family, overland into italy. And to argentina where he arrived in summer of 1949. Is there any evidence of complicity with the americans, any of the allies to get him out . Know. No evidence of any contact with American Forces and the reason for that is the family had choreographed a ruse that mengele had died. If you look at the files, there is a card file and in that cardfile indication that mengele had died and was able to maintain that ruse. With their prosperous with the means they had they were able to help mengele out of germany without any official help. They were able to Purchase Services of experienced guides were very practiced in getting people over the border and were able to purchase effective false identities. The book tells a detective story, thought we had discovered what happened to him, what his life was like in south america. I would like to come back to that and spend time at auschwitz. Your entry into this, we talked as you were writing the book and said to me that you were quite anxious how it might be received and how people might take the book. Tell us why you felt that and that might help us understand how you feel about his work at auschwitz. I should say when i worked in a case in the 80s i believe the common picture of mengele is some kind of Mad Scientist motivated by grotesque interest, sadistic interest, interested in twins and another case where he sent the head of a 12yearold boy to the lab for fixing, having spies made or placed in formaldehyde. I didnt have a great deal of curiosity about exactly what his science was about and a caricature which came along with tremendous support from popular culture. I had seen the boys from brazil, the marathon man, read times arrow, and a number of these films and books that portray him as a prototype of evil. I also know that we didnt know all that much about what he did at auschwitz. There are no records of his, very few that illustrate the exact nature of his experiment. The goals of his experience, the procedures that he used. All we had was the testimony of his victim which by and larger young traumatized children at the time of their encounter with mengele. We also have the testimony of physicians who had been recruited by mengele, recruited making his scientific work. Mengele established at auschwitz the Research Institute in the pattern of those he had been associated with in berlin. Great medical talent from all over europe, he made sure he kept an eye out for talented physicians and pediatricians and medical illustrators and nurses so he could assemble a team that could assist him in his work. We have a testimony of inmate physicians operating with mengele, assisting him not because they were interested in the work he did, and they offered a different future for him. There are testimony by and large, some of the things mengele did did not describe the intent of his experiment with the nature of the experiments with a couple exceptions. We have a few reports on the German Research foundation which funded the research and we have a very careful work of german historians, in the last 10 to 15 years so i sat down and i read all this stuff and a picture emerged that was at odds with the testimony that had become kind of trope about mengeles work, it wasnt clear the testimony that came from survivors which alleged a particular goal for an expanded, they didnt match up with mengeles career, his training and his own personal ambition and goals which was to impress his mentors and pursue his economic work. I was concerned, the testimony of people who had the tragic and traumatic encounter, that i might be apologizing or trying to make less horrific what mengele was involved in but i come up with a different answer which is it is somehow easier to describe mengele as a monster than to recognize the monster us things that people are the product and promise of enshrined institutions. To me it is more unsettling picture than some renegade monster working on his own and fulfilling base and primitive motives. We dont want to paint too pretty of a picture. He was doing experiments. No question about it. The other thing about mengeles work at auschwitz, there is no question of criminality. In terms of the scale and extent of his crimes and these are crimes that although he didnt believe they were crimes that he admitted to in his own discussions, his role in selections at auschwitz, those who were arriving at the camp and those who were called from the camp, where he made this binary decision about whether they should die immediately or be exploited for slave labor. I understand the crimes of selection where he was choosing to murder people, if we go back to the experiment for which he is so known, what was motivating him . What excited him . What got him up every day . Part of it was he found himself in a situation with no moral or ethical boundaries. Lets talk about his twin search. One of the inmate physicians, exception of people who claim to know the purpose of the experiment said that mengele was wanting to discover the secret of twin births so that he could use that knowledge to apply to the german population and secure in rian future by increasing the birth rate. This is not true, the proposition that of mangler was interested in the secret of twin births, he would be interested in the parent says he should be . And he showed no interest, parents were twins, the parents were often sent a just, twins were sent of the balance where they were used as unwilling subjects of the experiment. And ignores the long tradition of twin experiment within germany. There were 200 dissertations based on twin research during the nazi period. Twin research was the Gold Standard of genetic research, has to do with comparing incidence of disease between fraternal twins and identical twins to tease out what was the result of nature and what was the result of nurture and environment. Mengeles work at auschwitz was an extension of the work he was doing in germany before the war. At that time he didnt have the same supply of research material. And they diverge in their lives, most removed to the countryside, the holocaust of the war, and they got auschwitz. And twin subjects. And it was a kind of, to continue his twin research, and any safeguards that were present in germany for research on human beings. It would be a crime against science, to carry on these experiments. I know you cant answer this but if he had been asked, the admonition to do no harm, what do you think he would have said . I talk in the book about how the medical profession, a kind of moral ethical intellectual sleightofhand consistent with their own view and carrying on the kind of racial hygienic work required in nazi germany. They simply substituted the patient. No longer was the individual patient who deserved their care but rather the Racial Community. The Racial Community, the patient, you had to do no harm to the Racial Community so that if theres a cancerous cell in the body destroy the cell to save the body and for mengele, harming jews was not an issue because he didnt consider them to be worthy of consideration. Was he motivated by antisemitism . A kind of racial antisemitism. Some deserve to live in some dont. What comes on screen here. Im keeping an eye on the time, in this particular moment, if you have an important question of that aspect, get to some of these, on the question of selfdeception that you started to talk about. Asking also both before and after 45, the question of his remorseless nests. The epilogue talks about the confrontation mengele had the had not been available to his victims, to prosecute him. It was a competition with his son who was born in 1944. Mengele site once as an infant and once as a toddler or maybe a few times as a toddler but once again when mengele visited switzerland, ross was 12 years old. He only knew mengele as his uncle, mengeles name came to be known during the auschwitz trial being conducted, manglers name and been known in germany, mangalores st