The Boys From Brazil--Too Close For Comfort

Have you read the Ira Levin book, The Boys From Brazil? It's a creepy story, and the article mentioned in the above link--Nazi Angel Of Death Josef Mengele 'Created Twin Town In Brazil'--makes it feel like fiction come true. An excerpt from the article:

The steely hearted "Angel of Death", whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945.

His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a historian claims, Mengele's notorious experiments may have borne fruit.

For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years.

After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins – with startling results.

Click here to read the whole piece.

And now, here's part of the Wikipedia entry of The Boys From Brazil by Ira Levin:

Yakov Liebermann is an elderly gentleman who is known as a Nazi hunter: he runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust. The waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals has forced him to move the center to his lodgings.

Then, in September 1974, Liebermann receives a disturbing phone call from a young man who claims he has just finished eavesdropping on the so-called "Angel of Death," Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrible experiments on camp victims during World War II. According to the young man, Mengele is activating the Kameradenwerk for a strange assignment: he is sending out six Nazis to kill 94 men, who share a few common traits. All men are civil servants, and all of them have to be killed on or about a certain date.

Before the young man can finish the conversation, there is a muffled sound of sudden action, followed by silence, and then the telephone line goes dead.

Liebermann hesitates about what to do: he gets so many prank calls. But what if what the young man said is true? He decides to try to investigate. It eventually transpires each of the 94 targets has a son aged 13, a clone of Adolf Hitler planted by Mengele. The assassination of the civil servant father is an attempt to mimic the death of Hitler's own father, with the hope of creating a new Führer for the Nazi movement. This suggests that the Third Reich can develop again into a new superpower.

Levin's story hits awfully close!

I've always been interested in World War II stories, both the Asia-Pacific side of it as well as what happened in Europe. My wife is a world history buff, too; this may sound pretty off-beat, but on our honeymoon, when we stopped in Washington D.C., we ended up spending a day at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. How romantic.

I've read/watched several times Schindler's Ark/List, by Thomas Keneally and Steven Spielberg, respectively. The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck is a novella that I first enjoyed as a high schooler, and it was around that time that I also first read Without Seeing The Dawn by Steven Javellana. I've gone through several books on the Nanking Massacre as well as The Holocaust, and some of the young-adult books I chose to read were about the war: The Upstairs Room, Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl, Under The Blood Red Sun, The Endless Steppe.

The effects of World War II linger up to the present. You can see it in the way how couples who name their child Adolf Hitler still make it to the news; or in the rise of neo-Nazism; or in the outbursts that follow whenever Japan denies wartime atrocities or comfort women; or in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki never fail to be brought up whenever the threat of nuclear war is discussed.

And now we've got The Boys From Brazil come close to being true! Good grief!

Try and get your hands on the book, if you can. And while you're at it, try and get copies of three of his other books too: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Sliver.

I first saw the Josef Mengele article over at Jessica Rules The Universe: The Boys From Brazil, For Real?