Mengele:Non Requiescat in Pace

What a strange and ugly fate to be the most hated man in the world. To be wanted for prosecution by the governments of the U.S., Israel and West Germany. To be a hunted fugitive for 40 years. To have a price on one's head of $3.4 million. That was the harsh destiny of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor at Auschwitz. And then to be found dead, as Mengele was reported found on June 6, dead and buried in a small hillside cemetery in Brazil. To be dug up, bone by moldering bone, and carted away for scientific examination. And argued about. Was this really Mengele? Or was the whole discovery an elaborate conspiracy to escape justice?

Maybe it is hyperbole to call Mengele the most hated man in the world. There are certainly other candidates for that lamentable title. Pol Pot, for example, who directed the terrible massacres in Kampuchea in the 1970s. Or the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who has led Iran back into the darkness. Or the director of the Soviet KGB, who has to be a leading candidate, ex officio, no matter who he is. But none of these political killers seems so utterly diabolical as Josef Mengele. The Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 3 million Jews and other victims were slaughtered, was probably the most concentrated expression of human evil in all of history, and Mengele was the emblem and embodiment of Auschwitz.

He was also the perverted emblem of his origins. He came from a wealthy commercial family in Bavaria. He studied Kant, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Munich and his medical degree at the University of Frankfurt. An early convert to Nazism, he volunteered for the Waffen SS. On the railroad ramp at Auschwitz, where Mengele presided over the selection process, deciding which of the terrified prisoners were fit for slave labor and which were fit only for the gas chambers, he wore white gloves and highly polished boots, and occasionally whistled fragments of Wagner. In doing so, he defiled music, just as his cruel "medical experiments" defiled science and his whole life defiled philosophy. He defiled Germany.

Second only to the Nazis' crimes against their victims was their crime against the country they governed. Even though four decades have passed, and even though more than half of all Germans were not born until after 1945, the divided nation is still stained and still haunted by the monstrosities committed by Mengele and his kind. There were no redeeming qualities in the man, no extenuating circumstances. If ever anyone deserved to be hanged -- or worse -- it was Josef Mengele.

The New Testament condemns such a view as sinful. "Judge not that ye be not judged," Jesus said. "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." St. Paul decried the hunger for revenge as a blasphemy. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him." One can admire these teachings, and yet sometimes find them impossible to accept, or act upon. Must one not make an exception in the case of someone as vile as Mengele? Would mercy toward him not mock his victims?