August Diehl in conversation: The shadow of Josef Mengele in the cinema

August Diehl in conversation: The shadow of Josef Mengele in the cinema

In the shadow of history lies the tragic figure of Josef Mengele, and the new film is currently swirling“The Disappearance of Josef Mengele”all the more dust. Its premiere will be celebrated on October 23rd and the Austrian actor August Diehl, who takes on the lead role, is excited to bring viewers closer to this controversial story.

Diehl, 49 years old and currently involved in a theater production, nevertheless took the time to talk in detail about the film. “I wanted to show Mengele’s long escape,” he explains. The film is based on Olivier Guez's 2018 bestseller, a gripping tale about the SS camp doctor and war criminal's escape after World War II. “Mengele hid in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil for decades,” Diehl continued. The content brings up the depths of self-pity and paranoia of the man known as the “Angel of Death.”

The escape of the “Angel of Death”

What is significant is that Mengele's story continues to touch us today, despite the passing of the years. He was notorious for conducting gruesome experiments on Auschwitz inmates. After the war he found asylum under Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón, who kept Nazi opponents aside and was therefore the idealist of degeneration, like Wikipedia's article describes. Despite his atrocities, Mengele showed no remorse and continued his “research” using samples he brought with him from Auschwitz. He lived like this between 1949 and the mid-1950s, until the hunt for Nazi escapees began. This was the moment when he was on the run again and ultimately died in Brazil in 1979.

An aftertaste remained: In 1985, a hoax trial took place against him in which survivors testified. It is an outstanding example of how the legacy of the Holocaust continues to resonate decades later. The US Math Museum explains that the Holocaust, which marked the systematic extermination of six million European Jews from 1933 to 1945, did not begin immediately with mass murder. Initially, Jews were excluded from society, which resulted in radicalized persecution that escalated to the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

An oppressive post-war society

The film not only addresses Mengele as an individual, but also sheds light on a society that tries to suppress the atrocities of the Holocaust. Many survivors found themselves in displaced persons camps after the war while waiting for a new home, often faced with the loss of their families and the ongoing threat of anti-Semitism.

“It was important to us to look at the complexity of his personality and the trends in society as a whole,” says Diehl about the intention of the film. The viewer is not only confronted with the memory of the past, but also with the question of how far careerist striving and social ignorance can go. What lessons do we learn from this and how do we keep memory alive?