Feature Stories

CT auction house sells Mengele’s journals

A page from Mengele’s journals.

A Stamford auction house has sold the journals of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi death camp doctor known as the “Angel of Death,” to a private Jewish collector.
The 3,400 pages of journal entries were sold on Thursday, July 21 by Alexander Autographs for $245,000. According to the company’s president, Bill Panagopulos, the journals were acquired by an American consignor directly from Mengele’s family.  The buyer, an Orthodox Jew who wished to remain anonymous, has plans to create a museum to house the journals, as well as other Holocaust-related documents in his collection.
Covering a period of time from 1960 through 1975, when Mengele was hiding in South America, the journals detail the Nazi doctor’s escape from Germany and his arrival in Argentina.  They reveal an Angel of Death who, though in constant mortal fear of being captured, remained an unrepentant Nazi to the end, racist views and all. The manuscript includes stories, poems, philosophical reflections, and drawings.
Not everyone was pleased with the sale.
“I am outraged that Mr. Panagopulos and his outfit have profiteered off a sale of materials by one of history’s greatest mass murderers designed to enrich his heirs,” said Menachem Rosensaft, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, Rosensaft, whose aunt was sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers by Mengele in 1944. He expressed concern that neo-Nazis would find the journals of interest.
Panagopulos, who is aware of the criticism often directed at those who profit from selling Nazi-related items, first offered them for sale to museums and other institutions involved in Holocaust research, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s renowned Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.  None were interested in purchasing the journals.
“Though public sentiment has changed a great deal in the past 20 years, the subject is still considered ‘tainted or dirty,” Panagopulos told Ha’aretz.  “What people fail to realize is that history is not just Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, or our American revoution … It’s also the Holocaust, the massacres of American Indians … Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao’s purges … We also must learn from the ugly episodes in history, not just from the ‘pretty’ ones.”
In fact, noted Panagopulos, “The Simon Wiesenthal Center just paid $150,000 for a Hitler letter discussing reasons for his anti-Semitism.”
The anonymous buyer, who is also the son of a Holocaust survivor and has thus far collected 5,000 Holocaust-related documents, agreed.  The documents, he said can be used as a tool to counter Holocaust deniers and as a cautionary tale warning against philosophies that lead to discrimination.
“I feel a great obligation this should be shown to the public,” he said.

SHARE
RELATED POSTS
Simsbury synagogue victim of hacking
Bob Dylan awarded 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature
On PBS: The Virus of Antisemitism

Leave Your Reply