Life
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, review: ‘long and necessarily sombre’
This portrait of the Angel of Death played by German actor August Diehl cuts very deep
May 25, 2025 22:04
This portrait of the Angel of Death played by German actor August Diehl cuts very deep
May 25, 2025 22:04A sprawling postwar investigation into the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is exactly what it should be: a troubling portrait of evil.
The film proper begins in 1956 in Buenos Aires, when the Nazi, then the world’s most wanted war criminal, is hiding out under the name of Greggor. His life is already in the shadows, the man left to stew on the failures of the Third Reich, as he watches others denounce fellow Germans to save their own necks.
“You did your duty…you did nothing wrong,” he is told, while others around him refute the truths of the Shoah about the Holocaust, among the lies that only 65,000 people were murdered.
This portrait, largely filmed in black-and-white, cuts very deep. Played by German actor August Diehl, who has accumulated an impressive career working with the likes of Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) and Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life) the actor gives a startling performance as Mengele, especially in the film’s later scenes where he is confronted by his son, who asks him frankly: “What did you do at Auschwitz?”
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