e-mail that he 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
the hand-written 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 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,”
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 he was sickened by the journal, but
it does have historic value. If no money could 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 approximately
Panagopulos said. However, no one bid that high. Before the sale was
completed Tuesday, Panagopulos had said he would accept offers of at
least
Called a “diary” in some news reports, the bound
notebook, Panagopulos said, is mostly Mengele’s philosophical
meanderings about topics such as genetic purity and the staining of
superior bloodlines by “morons” and “idiots.” There is no indication
how long it took Mengele to write.
The SS physician, born in 1911, came to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in
He was among the medical officers who divided arriving inmates into
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
After the war, Mengele spent a few years working on a farm in Bavaria, then fled to
Asked for an opinion on the authenticity of the notebook held by the
museum released a statement Tuesday saying 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 the provenance of the Mengele
journal is solid, and 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.”
—
(c) 2010, The Hartford Courant
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