Josef Mengele

What does evil look like? In art, literature and the popular creative imagination, Dr. Frankenstein has that mad glint in his eyes, Professor Moriarty’s eyes bulge when he dreams madly of outsmarting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Jekyll’s cool surface submerges his inner monster Mr. Hyde. For the mad doctor, the smooth, even handsome, face is a mask hiding the real self. In some cases it’s the thirst for scientific truth that has corrupted the otherwise decent man or the desire to serve is misdirected into the lust to rule.

In the new Argentine film, The German Doctor, a tall, dapper man played by Alex Brendemuhl pulls into the charming wooded Argentine enclave Bariloche in 1960, the wake of World War II. What a nice looking man! A soft-spoken, handsome man—tall, smooth—and a doctor willing to serve the community. The local historical context of such towns precedes the war, tracing their roots to a time when hundreds of German families migrated into German pockets in Patagonia before Nazism really took off. When the war ended the Argentine government opened its doors and allowed fleeing Nazis to use their real names and populate gated towns like Bariloche, an idyllic place at the end of a long forest road and on the banks of a great lake, where the sea planes could fly in over the mountains from the outer world into havens for the guilty.

This German physician is named Josef Mengele, which was also the name of the real life man on which he is based. He arrives in the small town as an Argentinian family—Eva, the mother, Enzo, the father, and their three children—are starting a new life. They entrust their young daughter, Lilith, small for her age, to the doctor’s care. It gradually emerges that this community supported Nazism as it emerged 20 years before. Even now, in the 1960s, the boys have the collective personalities of a Hitler youth movement. They sing their marching songs in class and they have secretly buried their Nazi propaganda literature in the garden. When one of the new boys discovers this they beat him. Meanwhile there are hints that something else is happening off-stage. Why is a young woman with a camera snapping away here and there and at the visiting doctor?

Meanwhile the doctor sympathizes with Lilith, a pre-adolescent embarrassed by her size, and promises that his treatments will make her taller. He also tends to Eva in childbirth. He spends long hours with these children taking notes and filling bulging notebooks with his measurements and detailed sketches of their bodies.

Argentines in the 1960s, including Lilith’s mother, were slow to come to grips with the crimes of the Nazi era; at least they did not realize that the German death camps were also workshops for the re-conception and creation of the “master race.” Recent historical research, independent of the film, tells the story of an itinerant doctor in the early 1960s who moved through Brazil and Argentina posing as a veterinarian who established relationships by caring for the animals, then turned his attention to families, making repeated visits to pregnant women and giving them medicines and drawing blood. Suddenly one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town resulted in blond-haired and blue-eyed twins. The master race was taking root.

No one knew that in May 1943, Josef Mengele, an experienced medical researcher at Auschwitz, experimented with twins to try to find the secrets of breeding a superior being. Jewish mothers were torn between hiding their twin children and letting them go with the hope that their participation in the experiments would save them from the ovens.

The doctor insinuates himself into a relationship with the father, a toy maker, who makes individual small dolls. He replaces Enzo’s small doll-repair business with the manufacture of hundreds of “perfect” identical dolls, just like the super race his experiments will bring forth.

A turning point in the film comes when the family discovers the new baby has been tattooed—an indication that the child, like other children in this man’s career, has been part of an experiment—and the woman photographer, whom the director uses to symbolize the presence of an outside world, gets into the doctor’s notebooks and phones Israeli agents who the viewers surmise have tailed the war criminal to Latin America and have apprehended Adolph Eichmann. She thinks she has found the other man they are looking for. Lilith has become the protagonist; as her body matures so does her social conscience. She has an instinctive feel for the tension between good and evil and realizes that what is happening between this man and herself is wrong.

Written and directed by the Argentine novelist Lucía Puenzo, and based on her novel Wakola, “The German Doctor” is partFrankenstein and partFaust. The only violence is the beating inflicted by the psueudo-Nazi teen-aged boys. But this echoes the film’s major theme: elitism, racism and evil work silently, relentlessly, abusing friendship, transforming society into a mass movement—and often doing so with a handsome face. 

Son of Raymond A. Schroth, of Trenton, N. J., a World War I hero and editorial writer and reporter for the Trenton Times, Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald Tribune for over 40 years, and of Mildred (Murphy) Schroth, of Bordentown, N. J., a teacher in the Trenton public and Catholic school systems, Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., has spent his life as a Jesuit, journalist, and teacher.

After graduating from Fordham College in 1955--where he majored in American civilization, studied in Paris, and was editorial editor of the Fordham Ram--he served as an antiaircraft artillery officer in Germany for two years and joined the Society of Jesus in 1957. Ordained a priest in 1967, he obtained his PhD in American Thought and Culture at the George Washington University and taught journalism at Fordham until 1979. During that time he was also associate and book editor of Commonweal magazine.

After two years as academic dean of Rockhurst College in Kansas City, he became academic dean of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. In 1985-86 he held the Will and Ariel Durant Chair in the Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City. From 1986 to 1996 he taught journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans and was adviser to the Maroon, its award-winning newspaper. In 1995 the Southeast Journalism Conference named him Journalism Educator of the year. In 1996 he returned to Fordham as assistant dean of Fordham College Rose Hill and director of the Matteo Ricci Society, which prepares students to compete for prestigious fellowships. Meanwhile, from 1967 he served as a resident faculty member in the student residence halls.

He has published eight books, including: The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper (Greenwood); Books for Believers: 35 Books Every Catholic Should Read (Paulist); with Jeff Theilman, Volunteer: with the Poor in Peru (Paulist); and The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth), a biography of the CBS commentator.

In 1999 he moved to Saint Peter's College, where he wrote two books: From Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Person's Journey through Great Religious Literature and Fordham: A History and Memoir, (Loyola Press in 2001-2002). In 2000 Saint Peter's College named him the Jesuit Community Professor in the Humanities. In Spring 2003 he was made editor of the national Jesuit university review, Conversations and will continue to serve in this position until 2013. His The American Jesuits: A History, (New York University Press, 2007), was followed by Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress, (Fordham University Press, 2010). He taught a graduate journalism course at NYU in 2004 and journalism history at Brooklyn College in 2006.

In recent summers he has traveled to Gabon, South Africa, Peru, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, France, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and China to educate himself, write articles, and take pictures. In 2003 his National Catholic Reporter media essays won the Catholic Press Association's best cultural columnist award. His over 300 articles on politics, religion, the media, and literature have appeared in many publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review, Commonweal, America, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, Kansas City Star, Boston Globe and the Newark Star Ledger, where he was a weekly online columnist for several years. From time to time he lectures and appears on radio and TV. He is listed in Who's Who and Contemporary Authors. In his free time he swims, bikes, walks, reads, goes to movies and restaurants, and prays.