Latest news with #Mengele
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
How an Auschwitz Prisoner Saved the Lives of Twins Targeted for Nazi Medical Experiments
Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's biggest killing center, a new documentary screening on June 6 focuses on a 29-year-old prisoner who cared for young twins who were subjected to Nazi medical experiments—giving them hope in a situation that seemed completely hopeless. Narrated by Liev Schrieber, The Last Twins starts screening on June 6 at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The documentary marking a grim milestone in World War II history happens to be on the 81st anniversary of D-Day, a turning point in the Allied forces' road to victory. The documentary features survivors who sing the praises of their guardian angel Erno 'Zvi' Spiegel, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner ordered to look after them. Spiegel's daughter, Judith Richter, also speaks in the film about the present-day lessons from her father's courageous acts. Here's what we know about the medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz and how The Last Twins tells Zvi's story. Why did Auschwitz conduct experiments on twins? Nicknamed 'the angel of death,' Josef Mengele was 'the most notorious of the Nazi doctors,' as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it. Mengele sought out twins who arrived at Auschwitz in order to subject them to medical experiments. Spiegel, a twin, was separated from his twin sister Magda, and at Auschwitz, Mengele tasked him with looking after a group of male twins and escorting them to Mengele's office for experiments. It's unclear exactly what kinds of medical experiments were performed on these boys. 'There's very little evidence of exactly what was done,' says David Marwell, author of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, who did not work on the documentary. The survivors in The Last Twins are among the few left. Many of the twins who were subjected to the experiments did not live to talk about it. The twin prisoners in Auschwitz did not give their consent, and the experiments were not conducted by scientific research standards. If a twin died during one of the experiments, Mengele ordered the surviving twin be executed so their bodies could be autopsied and compared. Twins may have been saved from death by the gas chamber, but many who survived the experiments ended up permanently maimed. One survivor, Ephraim Reichenberg, who appears in the doc describes how he and his brother were subjected to injections in the neck. His brother was discovered to have a beautiful singing voice, but he did not have one, and the Nazis focused experiments on their necks. A year after the war, his brother died a painful death, and in 1967, Ephraim's throat and gullet were removed. He speaks in the documentary with a voice amplifier. Spiegel, he says, 'gathered all of the young children around him and took care of them, taught them, and watched over them.' How Spiegel helped the twins While Spiegel couldn't stop the experiments, he did his best to keep the boys alive. In a place where prisoners were known by numbers tattooed to their arms, he made sure the boys called each other by their real names. If one boy found a piece of food, then he had the youngster share it with the rest of his peers so everyone could enjoy some of it. He even taught them math, history, and geography in the barracks. 'He was a father figure to us,' says survivor Tom Simon. 'We had no father there.' The documentary also features a man that Spiegel snuck in as a twin to save their lives. Gyorgy Kun says he and his brother were directed to the twin medical experiments, even though they weren't actually twins. Instead of turning them away, Spiegel changed the birthdates for the Kun brothers so that, on paper, it looked like they were born on the same day, and therefore they wouldn't be sent to the gas chambers. Mengele was never prosecuted for his crimes and lived in fear that authorities would come after him. Marwell says he didn't find 'any specific evidence that he was in any way remorseful.' Mengele fled to Brazil after the war. TIME's 1985 obituary called him "the most hated man in the world." After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel moved to the Czech city of Karlovy Vary and lived near his twin sister Magda, who also survived Auschwitz. He got married, had a child, and immigrated to Israel in 1949. LIFE magazine featured him in a 1981 article about Mengele, and surviving twins started to reach out to him. He always took their calls. He died in 1993 at the age of 78. Richter says her father used to tell his children that Nazis 'could take away your family, your house, everything, but they would never be able to take what you have learned and your knowledge.' She cites Spiegel as a reason why she pursued a career in academia and set up a program that schools young people in the basics of medicine. Now she is the co-founder and active chairperson of Medinol, a medical device company, focusing on ethical forms of medical treatment, in stark contrast to the unethical medical treatments that her father saw in Auschwitz. She hopes viewers will inspire them to act and help others. 'One person matters,' she says, explaining that she hopes that her father's story will empower people to be courageous in dark times. 'This film is not just a Holocaust film. It's a universal story about the human spirit triumphing over evil. It's a story of resilience…not just of surviving, but protecting others.'
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: An Artfully Directed, Intellectually Vacuous Holocaust-Ploitation Flick
Throughout the impressively crafted and increasingly exasperating 135 minutes that make up Kirill Serebrennikov's postwar Nazi-in-hiding chronicle, The Disappearance of Josef Menegele, the same question keeps coming to mind: Why am I watching this? Certainly, for those curious to know how the notorious Auschwitz doctor, aka the 'Angel of Death,' eked out the final decades of his life in various South American countries, changing homes and identities, farming, scheming and, yes, getting the occasional handjob, the film answers that question many times over. But for those who aren't Third Reich completists, nor have any interest in historical fantasy that does little beyond embellishing Mengele's ignoble reputation, this intellectually vacuous exercise can be tough to stomach — despite how well put together the whole thing is. More from The Hollywood Reporter Feinberg on Cannes: Oscar Contenders Emerging From First Half Include 'Nouvelle Vague' and Jennifer Lawrence for 'Die, My Love' 'A Magnificent Life' Review: Sylvain Chomet's Beautifully Animated but Clumsily Scripted Love Letter to Marcel Pagnol 'Peak Everything' Review: Piper Perabo Headlines a Cute Canadian Rom-Com Imbued With Very Timely Anxieties The Russian-born Serebrennikov is a talented auteur with plenty of style to boot, showcasing his directorial chops in six eclectic features made since 2016. He jumps easily between genres, from a scruffy rock 'n' roll flick (Leto) to a post-Soviet mindfuck (Petrov's Flu), from a brooding period piece (Tchaikovsky's Wife) to a continent-hopping tale of a political mystery man (Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie). A feted cinematic chameleon who was controversially put on trial in Russia, Serebrennikov can be hard to pin down. It's perhaps the latter quality that attracted him to French writer Olivier Guez's 2017 fictional biography imagining Mengele's life after World War II, when he was constantly evading arrest by local authorities or possible kidnapping by Mossad. Like its unwholesome protagonist, the film — and the roving camera of Vladislav Opelyants, shooting in gorgeously high-contrast black-and-white — is forever on the move, creating an immersive aesthetic experience that amounts to a big pile of nothing. To his credit, Serebrennikov never attempts to turn Mengele, played by August Diehl (A Hidden Life) in a committed performance that borders at times on caricature, into a likeable protagonist. There are no save-the-cat redemptions for a man who became famous for torturing, murdering and performing hideous experiments on countless Jews as part of a team of doctors overseeing medical services at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We never have an ounce of sympathy for the loathsome fugitive, whether he's trying — though barely — to reconcile with his son, Rolf (Max Bretschneider), who pays him a visit in Sao Paulo in 1977, hoping to finally get to know his long-lost dad. Nor do we shed a tear when he's forced to flee the farm where he's being protected — though barely — by a Hungarian couple (Annamaria Lang, Tilo Werner) who openly despise him. And we certainly don't get upset when, during his dying days, Mengele is unable to get it up while his Brazilian housekeeper offers him a massage with a happy ending. Watching The Disappearance of Josef Mengele leaves one without any real feeling beyond indifference or deep disgust. The one sequence capable of provoking some other kind of emotion is also the film's most problematic: Midway through the narrative, the screen suddenly shifts to color and we flash back to Auschwitz to watch some of the doctor's dirty deeds. Set to lush classical music serving as a counterpoint for all the atrocities we're witnessing, it's a moment of pure Holocaust-ploitation, pulling on our heartstrings while offering up snippets of unspeakable evil and squeamish gore. Unlike Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, which kept such scenes forever out of the frame, Serebrennikov's decision to show us Mengele at his absolute worst feels both morally suspect and cinematically vulgar. At best, it makes us hate the Nazi even more. Slightly more successful are the postwar thriller aspects of the story, which shift between time periods (from the mid-1950s to the late-1970s, with a prologue set in 2023) and countries (Germany, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil) as Mengele keeps outsmarting those trying to bring him to justice, aided and abetted by a network of exiled Hitler sympathizers. He was also supported by his wealthy German family, who are as unapologetic as he is about what happened during the war and refuse to acknowledge his crimes. 'You did your duty, you didn't do anything wrong,' they keep reminding him. It's a motto Mengele lives by till the bitter end, dying the kind of natural death that his countless victims were never afforded. And he seems to have lived quite well for the most part, marrying his second wife (Friederike Becht) in a beautiful private ceremony captured by the director in a single take, the camera honing in at one point on a wedding cake capped by a cute little Nazi flag. Or else frolicking with his first wife (Dana Herfurth) along the Rhine, then having rough sex with her until he violently orgasms and nearly breaks the bed they're doing it on. Good for the doctor, bad for us. If there's perhaps anything Serebrennikov is trying to say in this noirish Nazi fantasy, it's that men like Mengele ultimately managed to escape retribution through the help of other people, who were either seduced by his commanding virility or remained loyal to the Third Reich long after the war ended. At a time when fascism is on the rise throughout the world, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele maintains that evil persists because some of us let it happen. It's the only possible takeaway from a movie that gives little justification for immortalizing such a vile life on screen. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' ‘Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension
With 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,' Russian dissident Kirill Serebrennikov trains his lens once more on the fault-lines of democracy, and the ease with which fascism takes hold and cross-pollinates. However, the black-and-white-shot post-World War II biopic contains more ideas than it can handle, between a central character study — led by an impeccable August Diehl — mixed with a globe-trotting tale of evasion, along with numerous hints towards turning political wheels. The combination proves too unwieldy, at least in Serebrennikov's scattered execution. The movie's prologue, set in the 21st century, establishes what would become of the Nazi war criminal, as his remains are examined by medical students in Brazil. Among the group is a pair of Black twins, whose professor mentions Mengele's fixation with identical siblings, which both portends fleeting dramatic moments in the rest of the film, and also steeps this post-mortem study in dramatic irony. Mengele would've detested what became of his bones; there's a sense of catharsis to the mad doctor being reduced to parts on a slab. Unfortunately, what follows is seldom retro-fitted with enough dramatic power to earn this preemptive closure. More from Variety 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Kevin Spacey Tears Up, Quotes 'Friend' Elton John in Fiery Speech at Cannes: 'I'm Still Standing' At Cannes, Politics, Penny-Pinching and Strict Red Carpet Rules Overshadow the Glitz, Good Times and Glamour Adapted from Olivier Guez's more straightforward non-fiction novel, Serebrennikov's screenplay jumps around in time, albeit with little purpose. It introduces us to Mengele (Diehl), the Third Reich's 'angel of death,' living in secret and looking over his shoulder in 1950s Argentina. The camera follows Mengele — at times literally, from behind — during his attempts to travel back to Europe, inducing a sense of paranoia in the process, while embodying a phantomic righteousness as it gives chase. However, these alluring flourishes quickly fade, as the movie settles into rote rhythms reminiscent of Serebrennikov's most recent effort (the agitator biopic 'Limonov: The Ballad'), in which the political is but window dressing to the personal, rather than part-and-parcel of it. For the most part, 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' hobbles between Mengele's stints in various South American countries — primarily, a Nazi-friendly Argentina under Juan Perón, and eventually a military-controlled Brazil — from the '50s through to the '70s. The film, in this way, offers hints at the perpetuation of fascist thought during the 20th century, coming achingly close to making a point as norms seem to shatter far in background (usually, over radio broadcasts). Instead, its constant back-and-forth functions as a highlight reel, denoting Mengele's marriage to his widowed sister-in-law, his relationship with his domineering father and, eventually, the efforts by his adult son Rolf (Max Bretschneider) to connect with his estranged father. Rather than these factual bullet-points serving as a backdrop to explore Mengele, they become foregrounded to the point of subsuming any sense of overarching theme, let alone a cinematic fluidity between eras. The film is at its most potent during its brief foray into Mengele's Nazi past — about halfway through the runtime — taking the form of rare color scenes presented as grainy, celluloid footage shot by the Nazis themselves. The gleeful cruelty contained in these images is downright gut-churning, and makes for a necessary foundation to later moments of the elderly, fugitive Mengele being forced to confront his torturous wrongdoings. Diehl, despite being caked in old-man make up, digs deep into Mengele's chilling contradictions and compartmentalizations, which arrive with a nearly comedic form of self-awareness (Mengele detests the idea that he may one day be fictionalized on film), making the character seem even more pathetic. However, these moments can't help but feel too little, too late. Take, for example, a kind of scene that has become practically expected of modern films on human atrocities — from the 2013 Indonesian genocide documentary 'The Act of Killing,' to the recent World War II dramas 'Oppenheimer' and 'The Zone of Interest' — in which a figure confronted with the reality of their mass murders keels over and vomits, as if in pithy attempt to expel their guilt. Such an instance arrives here as well, albeit without the requisite buildup that might make Mengele's inescapable nausea meaningful. It's a beat that feels mostly self-contained, rather than emanating from a combination of all the preceding drama. Similarly, Mengele's twisted fixations are but details casually shaded into Serebrennikov's sketch, appearing in isolated moments rather than existing as defining characteristics, baked into the character's gaze. His persecution, presented in spurts across the various timelines, seldom leads to a coherent story of a man being chased by demons of his own making (despite frequent allusions to Mossad catching up to other Nazi leaders). Diehl goes to great lengths to embody a figure noxious to the eyes and ears — in the most subtle, skin-crawling ways — with the crouched body language of a man resultant to be seen. However, the film as a whole rarely pierces this veil. 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' never builds a complete and detestable human being. Its concerns, ironically, feel far too logistical for a figure whose cold calculations disguised a more vivid and monstrously human collage. The result is a film that gestures towards some novel complexity, but elicits only a shrug. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Argentina lifts the veil on its past as a refuge for Nazis
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. "I thought all the Nazis ran away to Argentina." That line in the 2024 film "The Holdovers" got "a big laugh in cinemas in Buenos Aires", said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. Audiences recognised the uneasy truth: the flight of thousands of Nazi party members to Argentina after the Second World War remains "an extremely uncomfortable period" in the country's history. Argentina has not been good at "reckoning with its past as a haven for war criminals". President Javier Milei, however, "appears to have changed tack". On 29 April, he released 1,850 documents from the national archives containing details, said the Buenos Aires Herald, of "prominent Nazi criminals who escaped to Argentina" – including Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death". Most of the documents, a mix of police and intelligence agency files, were declassified in 1992 but "remained almost impossible to access", said The Times. They were only viewable "by appointment, in a single designated room". Milei pledged to "lift the shroud with which Argentinian governments have long concealed the level of assistance that their predecessors provided to war criminals". And the documents, now viewable online, confirm "a long-known dirty secret": the "ease" with which senior Nazis lived in Argentina. "At one point," said defence minister Luis Petri, "Argentina became a haven for Nazis". Mengele, "notorious" for his inhumane experiments on prisoners, arrived in 1949 and lived under "various aliases", said The Times of Israel. The documents include "nearly 100 pages detailing his time in Argentina" and show, for the first time, that he filed a request to travel from Argentina to West Germany in 1959, using his real name, according to German public broadcaster MDR. This means "several countries likely had more accurate information on Mengele than previously thought," said historian and Nazi expert Bogdan Musial. There are also several files on Adolf Eichmann, another SS officer and one of the principal architects of the "Final Solution". He arrived in Argentina in 1950 under an alias. The Supreme Court in Buenos Aires has also discovered Nazi material among its archives, reported The Associated Press on Sunday. An anonymous judicial authority said the court had come across boxes of photos, postcards and propaganda "intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler's ideology" in Argentina during the Second World War. The court's president, Horacio Rosatti, has ordered "a thorough analysis". The Nazi officials who fled to Argentina may be "long dead" but "their hunters insist their work is not done", said The Times. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a US-based human rights organisation, wants to "expose" the so-called "ratlines" – the networks, individuals and institutions that helped Nazis flee Europe and start new lives in South America. For nearly 20 years, the NGO has petitioned successive Argentine governments to release the files. In January, the US Senate Judiciary Committee released two reports into Swiss bank Credit Suisse, concluding that "70 Argentine accounts with plausible links to Argentina-based Nazis" were opened with the bank after 1945. And, the report claimed, one of these accounts was still active as recently as 2022. A previous investigation had found also "significant connection" between Credit Suisse and individuals who ran the ratlines, said Le Monde. "Money is not innocent," Ariel Gelblung, the Latin America director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the paper. Credit Suisse, which was taken over by the UBS Group in 2023, has pledged to provide "all necessary assistance". And after meeting with representatives from the Simon Wiesenthal Center earlier this year, Milei ordered the release of the documents. In a 1999 report by the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina, historian Holger M. Meding "identified the facilitators of Nazi exfiltration to Argentina" as the Catholic Church and the Red Cross, said Le Monde. But the role of then-President Juan Perón was "decisive". Perón had "a preference for all things German", wrote Meding. It might have been this that spurred Milei's decision to release the files, said The Spectator's Meadows. The president has "made no secret of his hatred of Peronism", and these documents could lead to "further scrutiny" of Peron's role.
Russia Today
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
Argentina publishes files on notorious Nazi fugitives
The Argentinean government has made public almost 2,000 declassified secret service files on hundreds of Nazi war criminals who fled to the Latin American country after the Third Reich's defeat in the Second World War. According to estimates, as many as 10,000 Nazis utilized so-called 'ratlines' to escape as the Axis powers collapsed. Infamously, around half of them are believed to have chosen Argentina –known for its reluctance to grant extradition requests — as their refuge. The 1,850 files uploaded online by the Argentinian National Archives (AGN) on Monday included intelligence reports, photographs, and police records. The documents on 'Nazi activities in Argentina' are now available to all 'thanks to extensive restoration and digitization work,' the AGN said in a statement. Among other things, the papers depict how the likes of Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke and Adolf Eichmann were able to make it to Argentina and what they did in the country. Mengele was a physician and Nazi SS officer, nicknamed the 'Angel of Death' for his inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The published records show he entered Argentina in 1949 under the name of Gregor Helmut and then openly lived in the country. 'References obtained from different sectors of the German community allowed us to learn that he was commander of the Assault Guards and, at the same time, doctor in the German extermination camp of Auschwitz,' one of the files on Mengele read. The newly-published papers also included the 1995 extradition documents for Priebke, a mid-level SS commander, who had been in charge of a unit responsible for the massacre of 335 Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944. They also shed light on the time that Eichmann, a high-ranking SS official often described as the logistics chief of the Holocaust, spent in Argentina. He was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1960 by Mossad agents and hanged for his crimes by Israel two years later. The files in question were declassified in 1992 under a decree from then-Argentine President Carlos Menem, but they could only be viewed in a specially designated room at the AGN. The country's current leader Javier Milei ordered that the Nazi papers be released to the general public in March on a request from the US Jewish human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is currently investigating links between Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, and Nazi Germany.
